food for worm - Marginalia Spring 2023

Contributors Aidan Goldberg Amy Wang Annie Zhou Anonymous Ashley Kim C. Walker Daniel Dixon Elliot Walsh Fabio Cabrera Gabriel Ewig Hannah Feyen Hannah Devine-Rader Isabel Macedo Jared Klein Justin Samovar Kacey Lee

Kyra Husen Lila Frost Maggie Hamilton Miriam Alex Nolan Harrington Noor Jehan Ahmad Sadie Wang-Kaufman Sarah Stephenson Skylar Xu Susan Hickey Tay Brown Triff H'Doubler Vincent Eynon Willa Gagnon Xinyuan Lyu Zada Stuart

Special Thanks To Ishion Hutchinson Student Activities Funding Commission Cornell Print Services Durland Alternatives Library Marginalia E-board

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Exquisite Corpse from the Editors we’ve been walking along the rocks hesitating at the diving, looking out at poetry’s possibility, facing each other with broken pencils, hair whipping against the wind: the future is out there whipping against the wind: the future is out there aspirational soil, the growth of words connected through affect, of images dancing in the imagination. we concoct a ritual, a primal mixture of the energies that bind our words.

La mezcla divina, la energía roja y negra. if we write on this page and we claim ‘We’ if we aspire together. We come together and form a unison of stories.

If we aspire together. We come together and form a unison of stories.

Fungi clutching the side of a tree, railroads stretching across the navel of the countryside – almost unnoticeable until proclaimed. These are the clothespins that tether us to being here, to the fullness of living. Poems, then, are religious.

We confess belief in our own existences, our movement through the world through them.

We confess belief in our own existences, our movement through the world through them Each step forward is a step to the side, not a step back Travel forward and sideways with us in an exploration of existence in e/Earth Engage in the words gathered here Poetry is a paper thread that traces from person to person, from page to page from feeling to being Breathe it – Marginalia

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Marginalia Review presents

food for worm Order of Works 4 .................................................................... "To The Sun" by C. Walker 5 ................................................................ "Life Tracks" by Gabriel Ewig 6 ...................................................... "You Can Fix Him" by Miriam Alex 7 ............................................................................ "smells" by Jared Klein 8 ......................................................... "Airplane" by Noor Jehan Ahmad 9 ........................................................................ "Dead End" by Skylar Xu 10 ................................................................ "visceral" by Aidan Goldberg 11 ........................................................... "amor mineralis" by Amy Wang 12 .................................. "Untitled, for a million times" by Xinyuan Lyu 13 .................................... "to the parts of you i buried" by Susan Hickey 14 .............................. "Scene on Wanting or Waiting" by Hannah Feyen 15 ..................................................... "Moving Towards" by Anonymous 16 ........................................................ "Whose Serenity?" by Kyra Husen 17 ................................................................. "Second Date" by Kacey Lee 18 ........................................................................ "aseptic" by Ashley Kim 19 .. "Existentialist Establishment Nursery Rhyme" by Triff H'Doubler 20 .................................... "mount pleasant observatory" by Annie Zhou 21 ............................................................ "Ark" by Sadie Wang-Kaufman 22 ....................................................... "Paper Towels" by Justin Samovar 23 .... "That time we stick and poked ourselves... " by Nolan Harrington 24 ............................................................. "For Helena" by Isabel Macedo

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To The Sun

by C. Walker '25

Once, I sat upon my chair My trusting, wooden chair And I sat in thought of air The rustic, tussling air How it rolled, and lulled, and mulled Oh, the way it rolled!

It swam across the swarm of trees The heavy, greening trees And arrived above my head My thoughtful, thinking head And picked me up off of my feet My grounded, groping feet And carried me up to the sun The caring, glaring sun Who spoke to me about the birds Oh, what graceful, wise-old words!

And we finished, I departed Where I had left off, I started Thinking of the air again And of its pleasantries About the time it whisked me To the sun, above the trees

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Life Tracks

by Gabriel Ewig '24

Routine

Weekend

Adventure

Photography by Maggie Hamilton '23

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You Can Fix Him

By Miriam Alex '26

On long mornings, the potatoes beach at the surface of the pot, our pale, ancient whales. A slice of toast, a recession of light.

Touching him is holding a penumbra.

Finding the edge of the light, folding it for form. For months, you tell yourself you are a mass extinction gone unnamed, an Ice Age sweeping across his swelling rainforests.

Friends quarrel, and stories of how you met shift every lunch.

A baboon named for his first love watches a hot afternoon thicken with smoke. In the ocean, a reef of letters vanishes, replaced with a single pair of white sneakers.

Sometimes, you reach for him and can't remember his name.

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smells

By Jared Klein '25

sometimes piss smells like a bottle of alcohol a friend passing you a shot glass or a lifeline on a day when you’re falling but you continue tying rocks to your legs and goodness smells like smoke your head is a flame consuming a pink purple rainbow metallic burning hit the ground with the force of a ceiling a bathroom smells like a coma your body an anvil crashing floor by floor pipes and water pressure and teenagers carefully stepping on the wreckage and the past smells like a construction site embers fly out of the drain a breeze carries my memories pummeling down from above burning my nose hairs with pity but, sometimes, you smell like forgiveness and all of your uses and all of mine grow together as an apricot and together we bite around the pit

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There will always be an airplane to fool you when you see the stars still It wades - mechanical - to make you guess.

And all a star can do is flicker in place.

It can blow smoke in circles around these little bright burning suns.

It will try to make you think you are following something.

Like a shooting star, like a rarity caught in sight.

But it is just an engine body.

Just another you too far away for the stars.

When its color flickers from red to white, white to red you will know, You were after something that can land.

That can be touched and forgotten.

Too technical.

Too similar to you, And our bodies.

Tangible, fallible.

Not like the stars.

There is some meaning lost in what you can hold.

A want withered in something made mechanically.

You wanted to see a star moving.

You wanted to mimic it.

You wished to resemble a star as you moved across this tiny world.

But now you sit, a fool, neck up, hopes down, wondering when and how you can possibly find something transcendental in you.

by Noor Jehan Ahmad '26

Airplane 8

Dead End

By Skylar Xu '24

my lover is the wind whose softness brushes against my skin. my lover is polished wood, carved and creaking under my weight. my lover is curiosity, gnawing, painful, acidic and all-encompassing. my lover is patterned ceramic, clay, stone, jade, cold rough-smooth warming up in my hands. my lover is history, the kind I would want to enter. my lover is the gothic marble face of death, and I must gaze upwards. my lover is everchanginglight, kaleidoscopically harsh, unfavorable, moving through colors of Catholic glass. my lover is exhaustion, the traces of sweat collected in collars, falling asleep while reading. my lover is summer, my lover is the dryness of my eyes, my lover is the childish defiance of domesticity. my lover is "I won't speak" and "I don't know,” forgetting that who doesn't speak will never know. my lover is spending the night with too little sleep and getting up gingerly in the morning. my lover is leaving the door open and eggs on the table without saying goodbye. my lover is heartache in private, in public, and then by the ocean. my lover is a large and rebellious horse. my lover is a work unwritten or rather, unfinished. my lover is nothing but para-text. my lover is the pang of a newly opened wound, newly healed. my lover is an apocalyptic bird whose song begins at midnight and ends before dawn.

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visceral by aidang '25 my buttocks bare knew— cold metal and my mom said it was okay. the office smelled like unused garbage bags, or the toilet bathroom cleaner. cleaning me, i walked on my tippy toes and my heely heels and quacked for him. mom said i was brave because i was so still. just a pinch, just a second, a tiny movement, you don’t want STDs, meningococcal when you’re 13 what are measles, mom told me about chicken pox. protect yourself protect those around you, just stab, sterile, don’t look, just stab me with it get it over so i can unclench my fists put the image out of my head take the hands out from under the thighs the needles in my head up my nose in my retina. in middle school between periods, cool kids injecting, pressing the frail gray directly into the bloodstream. lead into arms. pervading dreams, deliberate sharp pricks plunge deep: strange juice, my friends try to protect me but i only want my mom said it was going to be alright. movies styled with a spoon and needle to feel alright, hair splits back on sweaty scalps, coke dissolved in water and injected. my skin screams. —no fucking heroin for me. my mom. said i was so good. while brother and sister kicked, screamed, “cried bloody murder” and the sterile offices felt their own wrath, i sat a still good boy. so still that my blood stopped running, just for a second, as the cold chemical brew enters my lifestream

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amor mineralis

by Amy Wang '24

One day, milling among my stone flowers that dwell with stone leaves and stone stems and mineral grace in their stone garden, visitors will inquire how they grow so well.

In voices that thrum through crystalline structures they will ask of the jade-green petals retreating into a violet with the pallor of quartz, and the wine-stained, sculpted rosettes on their frail stems arcing over spikes that burn, tip-down in the precise shade of cinnabar— how it is that they sustain.

Fed by my hope, that is: Pale and luminous green, fatal a wound that bleeds as the fungal interior of a cavern and bleeds fed by groundwater veins: diorama and never bleeds out. of the nameless, atavistic, hominid organ Fossilized in semantic leaching: that nests in each of us. Dawn-awaiting violet, mere drainage, slow as paralysis. and cinnabar of a hole where the sun should be— a cavity in the sky at sundown.

Unerased the world and all its words.

On what have you been fed Everything hardens. Everything calcifies. and fossilized?

Everything gray but the colors you pressed into my soil like stones.

Embedded within, the shells of our predecessors lay sedately in strata. The earth devours. Dissolving they whisper of digital time, a digital age, chronology of rarefied pebbles running sterile and eternal as my mineral love to water your blooms with liquid salt.

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Untitled, for a million times

by Xinyuan Liu '23

(I) I wanted to become an artist for you so that I could create you, (III) so that you survive, get reiterated out of me, (such helpless toil) live a full life, vicariously. so excessively in vain But the moment I sculptured you But you are my masterpiece, to a halt, putting the chisels already, before the hues down (a multitude of chisels, layers) and everything else colorful You already câme out alive. like a peacock.

I didn't even have the chance to breathe upon you, for the sake of my ego, (II) 'Put her on display de profundis. in the museum,' they say, with their eyelids shockingly blue.

(IV) You came out alive, I am at a loss, for they Monstrosity - what am I left me in disarray, in a swarm to do with you, pure creatureliness? of stars, of confusion so sparkling For you are not capable of standing, lying, being (V) On the mountain overturned (overtuned?) in my (overtones, what a fine mistake) running in vain, tor in pieces, is that me or you?

Snow befalls me, I can hardly see but buried, museum, so desolate, an island with my only art, so alone, so full of surrounded by dry lands. limb-dissolving slumber my masterpiece You are my Museum already, my Muse-um And I thought that I would break you one day For X. Feb Ithaca Summer night, almost always

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I am so sorry that we happened. Most days now I wish I had never met you the home cooked smell I am sorry for that too sorry I was caught choking in the snare and my

of your house

ravaged ankle was shimmering and

you had to lick up the blood Or maybe it was flipped I know one of us was bleeding and

but I know I was caught and

I was withering from the first like kissing melting candle wax like dipping my whole body into our hissing fireplace.

I was in love with something wretched sickly fused my ear to your hand you bashing your fists against the wall I remember spitting up my innards leaving them on the hardwood floor I can still see the crimson tinted stain at dusk I'm sorry I did that I'm sorry you acted like I'm so sorry that you didn't mean it. Some days I still grind my teeth into the backyard and ask for forgiveness because you were sixteenth chances soft as the toe pads on a foxes foot.

Our backs stuck to prickled lichen I am sorry I didn't stand up sooner Some days I couldn't tell if my fingerprints were my own or if I even had any at all I was absorbed in rubbing my hands into your cheeks to make sure you were still there.

Know that I still ache for you Love, the parts of me that still scream

or from you, it's beginning to feel the same.

to the parts of you i buried,

by Susan Hickey '26

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Scene on Wanting or Waiting

by Hannah Feyen '23

[eyes squinting] narrator: thank you for the orange [the peel crawls across his palm, stretching and yawing, he closes his fist] narrator: do you mistake me? do you miss me, will you take me with you [they fold into the warmth like something alive] narrator: do you remember tomorrow? [she begins to draw an orange] narrator: undress me, would you? orange spelled backwards is orange it's not but it could be make a compelling argument compel me, come, actually, just come hold me [compulsion] TRUTH: iwanttoknitmyskeletonintoyourskin that's awfully permanent, isn't it? halfTRUTH: onlysometimes nottruthatall: tomorrow was raining but your hands still smell like oranges 14

Moving Towards

by Anonymous

Who we are is on both of us but you can't do anything about it now.

You wanted a body worthy of protection even after detonating.

I want to be evil enough to blow smoke on everyone who's ever loved me because I want to love in solitude as I watch them all from a self-driving airplane window. But we were always louder than we wanted to be, it's just who we are.

Photography by Skylar Xu '24

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Whose Serenity?

by Kyra Husen '26 In early June of 2022, I visited Tanjung Puting National Park, home to the critically endangered great apes, Orangutans. Traveling upstream to the base camp, the trees rustled as langurs spanned across them, while the nearly black, mineral-tainted water lapped against the boat. I was immersed in nature. It was serene just like this photo... but also not quite.

This photo is poetic to me, because it is deceiving.

The tour guide explained that many riverboats sank over the course of the pandemic as there were no tourists, and therefore no funds to maintain them. This photo reminds me of the peace in the rainforest, but also symbolizes the toll the pandemic has taken on the local community.

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Second Date

by Kacey Lee '25

I had a good time, except for dinner and what happened afterwards.

When you texted me to "do this again" and I, unwillfully, say yes because I forgot that I could say no.

Next time we won't get sushi, I won't throw up on you, and I'll drink less than I did before.

You won't tell me what you do for work and ask me if I'm getting bored.

I had a good a time, until You won't tell me you opened your mouth to speak. to tell you Perhaps I'll be less honest, what your name is in Korean because you know it's the same I won't tell you that you're uninteresting or that my ex is funnier. as it is I won't expect you to be remotely like him at all, in English. but I'll still be disappointed that you're not.

You won't flatter me, I won't lie to you.

I had a good time, before I got to your apartment and you suggested that we watched a movie.

I said all of the things a movie-goer would say, which was nothing at all.

You ate popcorn.

I had a good time?

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aseptic by ashley kim '26

one day soon: the gates'll fling open. water'll rush itself in with vigor and grace: roaring like a yawn, waves'll woosh the wide words: i am here i am here to clean this all up, i am here to sweep up the powdery must with just my body-my shifting form. it'll be kind-aseptic oh, it'll be kind-aseptic.

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Existentialist Establishment Nursery Rhyme

by Triff H’Doubler

Let's stay up all night convinced that more is more and obsession serves and convinced that now is real and then was realer, convinced of It. It, now, inimitable, like Inny Wimmy day, silly songs, or a specific kind of crazy, convinced of confusion, confused of convention, all courses full full of courses, the table: happy in a great room where fussian fairy tales tall with curly keys sleep safely next to thyme, songs who cry Sparkling, you, me, drunkenly at dinner or high tea. Dry the mangoes and dust the mahogany, decant the wine in your mind's eye Pray there is meat so we can confuse the prey is not our fist, or lover, or life.

Cut to the center first, and reassure of fullness. Inhale old rhymes: Inny wimmy strong and able, bring everything to the table, set it well and do not speak, taste it all but do not eat, live the room no breath consume, be the vessel be the spoon, and maybe what is real desserts sometimes, and health in passing tensed bitter logic tried to thaw a rhyme.

Do not feel guilty to indulge in obsession if obvious sessions obviate confections!

Let's stay up all night and sweeten the day with sleep and slurs and Hotelie blurs, confused, obsessed with work and play.

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mount pleasant observatory

By Annie Zhou '23

we wade through darkness, you & i, on a nighttime hunt for a comet. february's chill inches behind us, hungry for exposed skin to sink its teeth into-i pull the twilight tighter like a cloak. alabaster carpet cracks beneath me, shattered glass whose edges i cannot feel, but are doomed to endure the weight of my nike soles. distant jewels peek at us from above; they chuckle, their gleam pulsating out and in like the belly of a bemused father who knows something we don't. that's orion's belt, you tell me, leaking with the human tendency to squeeze mythic meaning into this arbitrary hourglass shape. in this end credits scene all i hear is me & you--there is no orchestra, no crescendo, no blockbuster outro, just our uneven breaths that escape with every step. molten-gold trophies lose their luster under my prolonged gaze. the overcast sky catches up & closes in on us: a reminder of years of light pollution we cannot wash away. the scene fades to black & all that's left is no stars, no comet, just you & i.

Photography by Maggie Hamilton '23

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Ark

Sadie Wang-Kaufman '25

Forget the pairs forget the animals forget the ship Will you drown with me?

Who will stay, with everything and everyone they have ever loved? How selfish it is to leave it behind.

I spoke to God once, in my head. I asked them to retrieve my lost hair tie for me, and when I looked down there it was.

But I don't believe in god.

I haven't since mother had the cancer in her lungs. haven't since daddy was a disappointment time and time again until he just became Sam. If there is a God, why should we drown? Why should we be punished? How futile it is! To wash away their creation. To wash away creation's creation.

As for me? I will stay. I will stay and drown.

We do not need saving. I will remain.

From dust...

...to water.

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Paper Towels

by Justin Samovar '24 Paper towels Once a loaf Now a role?

It is brown.

Bread?

It is a cylinder.

The trunk of a tree?

It is tall, The highest peak of the Himalayas.

Once whole. Broken apart. Scattered. The ocean. The landfill. The compost—food for worm.

Paper towels.

Photography by Maggie Hamilton '23

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That time we stick and poked ourselves in the woods

By Nolan Harrington '23

Glowing embers spread and sting as the cheap needle pierces my skin.

Blood drawn, ink left, ties formed, lives pressing forward.

These memories run through me, they break me open, they break me up.

My cells separate and are left open to accept the permanence of someone else.

I wonder how it will feel, to look back and know you’ve taken part of me and I, you.

I wonder if those macrophages remember the times we laughed, cried, and slept together.

I wonder if the bones will remember what the skin forgets when the mind is gone.

Questions permeate around us, but I’m left knowing with certainty that the needles of that night pierced down deeper than my welcoming flesh.

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For Helena

by Isabel Macedo '26

In Brooklyn, the rain reigns supreme And the roof sings its chorus.

You, happy go lucky, and I, shrouded in grey, Cheers to the warm red wine, And clink! our mugs to the pebble choir.

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