marg vol3 iss2

Marginalia spring 2018 vol 3 | issue 2

Marginalia spring 2018 vol 3 | issue 2

Rachel Whalen ‘19 editor-in-chief Madeline Day ‘18 managing editor Peter Szilagyi ‘20 copy editor Stephen Meisel ‘18 associate editor Amy Wood ‘18 design editor Jessica Brofsky ‘18 communications director Katha Sikka ‘20 outreach coordinator Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon faculty advisor Rebecca Jackson ‘18 cover art “Thoughtless” and “Silenced”

Editorial Board

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Shaloni Pinto ‘20 Jesse Smith ‘21 Alex Verdan ‘18 Yongyu Chen ‘20 Lilian Hawkes ‘20 Ramya Yandava ‘21 Leo Levy ‘20

General Staff

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Letter from the Editors insomnia spider Tragedia Guys, for this one you really have to feel the line breaks; I’m serious; close your barbaric eyes; loosen the seatbelts; go before you’re ready; 10 9 8 7 6 4 1 go go go go — Cornell Cinema presents “Emergency Transmissions” 7 What Dana Slipped into My Pocket While He Knocked Me Unconscious with a Bowl 8 en-route 9 milkweed 10 Lights Off 11 Single Parent Threads 12 Involution: Prelude 13 The Dried Gourd at the End, Which Is Fibrous 14 Variation and Theme 16 77 17 COLD, CLEAN, COAL & CHICAGO 18 GKC//DG Luxurious Fully-Automated Space-Age Poetry Corporation Mission STATEMENT 20 Idols and Thieves 22 Comorbid 23 Last Will and Testament 24 The Red Heart Under Your Neck (Is Flying) 26 Climate//Mai 27 Mia 28 Waiting for Blind Faith to Save Me from Memory

Table of Contents

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Dear Readers, It’s been exactly two years since the two of us began with Marginalia. One of us is the last remaining founding member of the magazine itself. We’ve seen this publication evolve over the years from completely different perspectives, one as a poet and the other as a designer. This semester, our last at Cornell, has been a busy time for us as seniors. We have had responsibilities that conflicted with our in-depth involvement in the magazine, but it has also made room for others who are talented and passionate to take over and make Marginalia much, much better.

The future of Marginalia is beyond promising. A small number of founding members began with a vision for a community of poetry at Cornell, and it has turned into a collective of engaging, electric poets, writers, and artists. The fact that this magazine will continue to run signifies that the dream of a haven for Cornell literature-lovers has been recognized and nourished, not only in Marginalia but in the community at large (although Marginalia certainly had a strong hand in it, in our opinion). In the meantime, the new editorial board and general body are brighter and more talented than we ever could have predicted. And although this edition marks a transition for the publication, we are far from worried. It is in good hands with editor-in-chief Rachel Whalen (one of the original contributors to Marginalia’s first issue).

In that vein, we’d like to mention a few people and memories we’ve said goodbye to over the last two years, just as we are about to say goodbye ourselves: Ale Alvarez, whose calm and comforting demeanor made every stressful print deadline easy, even at midnight, fueled by chocolate chip cookies; submission reading days with Mary Jarvis, who was both hilarious and savage, often at the same time; meetings on the lawn of the Arts Quad, in the nice weather and beautiful breeze; Rachel bringing munchkins and coffee to Saturday morning meetings with a kind smile that could cure any hangover; and Jesse Gonzalez, whose determination, pickiness, and persistence has made the magazine what it is today.

The rest is up to you.

Your Editors, Amy Wood and Stephen Meisel

Letter from the Editors

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insomnia Kristi Lim ‘21 we were all equally wrought by that tsetse fly, by the most visceral blooming of carmine clod cotton and soliloquized forgiveness. because before we were human, our sisters were protists, but from underneath our glass windows and their mosquito nets it’s hard to tell. and while famines erupt and Permian’s power pales, the rest of the world sleeps.

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spider Kristi Lim ‘21 hubris taught you cataloging beyond your divine appointment: abies (the fir) is a “christmas” tree once its leaf is classified: tinsel; canis lupis familiaris (the poodle) is a “toy” dog once its fur is forcefully: rainbow; ali (the neighbor) is a “somewhat” human once his faith is decidedly: not yours; proud human you are blind as desk cactus emasculated amidst fluorescent stones; belittling yourself when the glory of your climb is the flag you stabbed into Creation. in the tirade of your colonization I am God’s comma, pausing you to have your confidence falter your breath stolen.

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Tragedia Yongyu Chen ‘20 In the middle of my life, my life ended. The road I was on was on the wrong surface of the earth and I kept falling from both sides of it but not towards myself. Far away something was burning but got colder. The emergency exit turned into itself but locked and sideways.

Later, years later, there were so many years, but all I could see were the thunderstorms. The clouds as they crushed through my head, the rain as it rose through my teeth, looking for the world. And I was sad as hell at first but then I realized that, maybe, you were the clouds and the rain but not the crushing and perhaps no longer the rising. That’s fine. Beatrice — what the fuck happened haha. Where are you. Why am I still vomiting out bad poems in this ditch with a broken back in my chest instead of being dead or alive. (Let the light beneath the shore go out — it isn’t a home. Take my heart.)

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Guys, for this one you really have to feel the line breaks; I’m serious; close your barbaric eyes; loosen the seatbelts; go before you’re ready; 10 9 8 7 6 4 1 go go go go — Cornell Cinema presents “Emergency Transmissions” Yongyu Chen ‘20 With my head or your head on the floor With my neck against the door in the hole in the wall For eightyfive minutes For exactly eightyfive minutes but also maybe forever Maybe everywhere And while green rain falls through the windows to become the snow in the childhoods of the dead Well why not?

Why not why not And meanwhile over and under Meanwhile over me and under me Meanwhile spinning and waiting It’s Dziga Vertov and it’s even his hands as they slip air into my mouth Transparent beautiful hands “Cut” A Man with a Movie Camera Absolute separation of beginning and end Moscow Odessa Kharkov A montage of Kiev haunted by the future ghosts of all those tanks that will never feel the ground or believe in anything with a name I’m alright When tonight ends I’ll try to break something in two so that you don’t have to While the doctor keeps starting to say nothing All over again In the last room on earth And while the nurse still exists Thank you March 13 Polar hours I’ll try to fall asleep soon Because who knows how far I’ll fall

BRUTALLY YOURS SINCERELY YOURS HARMLESSLY HARMLESSLY YOURS

While watching films in all the waiting

rooms of all the hospitals in North America

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YC

Annus 2018

Annus -2018

THE EIGHTEENTH BRUMAIRE OF LOUIS BONAPARTE

KARL MARX

MANIFESTOS FOR OUR INSTEAD The social revolution of theYOUTH: nineteenth// century cannot take its OF SPENDING MONEY WHY NOT ALSO poetry from the past but only from the future. It cannot begin with SPEND DEATHS. INSTEAD itself before it// hasYOUR strippedBRILLIANT away all superstition about the past. The OF PUBLISHING POEMS WHY NOT SELL THEMin former revolutions required recollections of past world history FOR FIVE // THOUSAND EACH ON order to smother their own content. DOLLARS The revolution of the nineteenth THE BLACK // MARKETS OF BERLIN WHILE century must let the dead bury their dead in order to arrive at its own // AROUND YOUwent // THIS CITY TURNS– here AND content.

There the phrase beyond the content the content BREAKS // OVER AND OVER // LIKE GABRIELE goes beyond the phrase.

D’ANNUNZIO AT 55 // YEARS OLD. WITHOUT A FUTURE. LIKE A SLEEPWALKER // MILES The February Revolution was a surprise55 attack, a seizingIN of THE AIR. THE UNBREATHABLE AIR. the old society unaware, and the people proclaimed this unexpected stroke a deed of world importance, ushering in a new epoch. On December 2 the February Revolution is conjured away as a cardsharp’s trick, and what seems overthrown is no longer the monarchy but the liberal concessions that had been wrung from it through centuries of struggle. Instead of society having conquered a new content for itself, it seems that the state has only returned to its oldest form, to a INSTEAD OF FALLING ASLEEP WHY NOT WORK shamelessly simple rule by the sword and the monk’s cowl. This is the // FOR THE SECRET POLICE. WHY NOT REPORT answer to the coup de main [unexpected stroke] of February, 1848, // YOUR POET FRIENDS TO THE SECRET POLICE given by the coup de tête [rash act] of December, 1851. Easy come, // TO THE BEAUTIFUL YOUNG RECEPTIONISTS easy go. Meantime, the interval did not pass unused. During 1848OF THE SECRET POLICE. // IF YOU CAN’T FIND 51 French society, by an abbreviated revolutionary method, caught THE the POETS DON’T // WORRY. PLEASE up with studiesTHEN and experiences which in a regular, so to speak, DON’T WORRY. THEY’RE PROBABLY JUST HIDtextbook course of development would have preceded the February ING // UNDER THE DOORS AGAIN, BEFORE Revolution, if the latter were to be more than a mere ruffling of the ANDSociety BEHIND THE BEDS AGAIN ANDitsALL surface. seems// now to have retreated to behind starting YOU’LL HAVE TO DO IS TO RE// DEFINE LOVE point; in truth, it has first to create for itself the revolutionary point of WITH –YOUR EYESthe // relations, WIDE OPEN WHILEunder YOUwhich departure the situation, the conditions KICK // THEIR HANDS YES THEIR HANDS // alone modern revolution becomes//serious.

UNTIL THE EARTH TURNS INTO STEAM AND ICE AND OUR WATER IS like REPLACED

BY THIRST // Bourgeois revolutions, those of the// eighteenth century, UNTIL THAT SHOULD BE THERE storm moreSOMETHING swiftly from success to success, their// dramatic effects JUST ISN’T THERE ANYMORE. // AND IF THE outdo each other, men and things seem set in sparkling diamonds, DOG SCREAMS PUT GLOVES ecstasy is the order of theIN dayTHE – butCORNER, they are short-lived, soon they // IN ITS MOUTH. have reached their zenith, and a long Katzenjammer [cat’s winge] POETRY MATTERS.[4]CALL ME SOON. LOVE, D. GIOIA HEAVY INDUSTRIES — (212) 911 9112 What Dana Slipped into My Pocket While He Knocked Me Unconscious with a Bowl Yongyu Chen ‘20

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en-route Senna Phillips ‘20 Start at the Salt City and roam to the birth place of cheese factories.

Maybe you’d want to see Dick Clark, or we could all go to ALCO. Sit at the split and glance at the Albany Plan.

I don’t know much about The Wonder Years or bluestone or cough drops or GE executives or 24-hour subway systems, but I might know Moby Dick, basketball, Valentine’s cards, Crispus Attucks, and the T. How many lakes do you pass on the lake shore limited?

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milkweed Senna Phillips ‘20 So what I make houses from architect bones and plaster them in space dust?

Maybe your dances are just so ballistic missiles, and mine are so suburban sprawl.

Hit with moonstone, so I drove to the quarry.

Don’t want to bulldoze your mind, so I hit the cruise ships.

So what I kiss mirrors with snake tongues and clean them with fur coats?

Maybe your hands are so broken ice, and mine are so unstitched newspapers.

So what I hate lattes.

So what I bleed yellow and saw light bulbs.

So what I eat tissues.

So what you sow water.

Handfuls of drowning, so notebook. I held you so.

Armfuls of scribbles, so ocean. Isn’t that so?

So it is. You look so sunshine. I think so.

So, how are you? So that’s that.

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(+) Aelya Ehtasham ‘19 It was mostly a run with the wolves scheme of teeth, fur, and the curve of a back leg.

In falling for deep paths and sheltering trees I found, slowing down, whole packs —children and families, and lovers: the only two physical forms of some initials carved in dirt, in sand, in woods.

How many times can I breathe without this silence giving me away? Only the scrape of leaves against leaves, the loud space between my hand and my mouth because I can see just these four trees ahead before the dark swallows everything whole. The quiet is sacred. I feel the woods are not finished with the initials left trapped within them.

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Single Parent Threads Aelya Ehtasham ‘19 single parent threads look like striped red leggings under a striped red dress that a ladybug sat on once when it thought you were home. look like darkened skin because there was a playground out back that you drove a car through once in a dream. look like a hall closet with extra bedding and bare walls and bare rooms and unbearable distance between the bed and the light. feel like coarse curls from not brushing your hair until they cut it all off laid strands on a bedsheet that doesn’t go back in the hall closet. hurt like a question that sits behind your teeth pressed together in a smile and the six-person dining room set rotates and the fish in the kitchen dies and everywhere is flooded.

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Involution: Prelude I once read an essay by a writer who was asked to imagine an ideal career, and he replied that he would like to be responsible for just a brief stretch, perhaps two hundred yards or so, of a river. —Michael Ondaatje, Divisadero Lilian Hawkes ‘20 Please: I am a delicate animal, I need music.

The bruise-bright morning’s hold of sight alone is not enough to drown this heaving flesh, or calm its thin-veined crucible.

If it’s a choice, we’re wrong —in sand a calf, its fetlock fractured, kneels to earth. It is not even bleeding. From above, its ant-swarmed mass appears a single deranged pupil, at first terrified & bleating but —small mercy —mute by dawn.

(The mother’s harrowed cry continues, ceaseless long after the herd has moved on.)

I pray: May something spiral from the sky, and leave its appetite a hollow humming canvas torn where once was heart.

(Tear out the systolediastole of speech that heats the blood, then gutters in the senseless dark.)

Please, if you can, sing me a song that is not just the blue of the body’s crumpled prism folding daybreak into warning.

Show me a pietà that is more than just memento mori —take me to a stretch of river I can care for as more than just the place where every anadromous ichthus throws itself back to the natal stream to die.

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The Dried Gourd at the End, Which Is Fibrous Peter Szilagyi ‘20 Returned again, the base, the fundamental strangeness. A guitar, dressing in the corner.

Mouthwash in its plastic gut and sealed.

Not too odd, so you fill the guitar with mouthwash.

Funny that it made no difference. Close the door.

There’s a shape, a door, leave. Where are you going? Look through the window. There’s a courtyard but not outside this window, another.

You can’t see it, you’re looking out this window.

Flakes and flakes of mouthwash itching from the sky. Quit it. Tell me something proven.

Here’s a shape but not a door or shaped like a door.

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Variation and Theme Peter Szilagyi ‘20 I. The thing is green, and that is all there is to it.

Green to its gums or the gummy bones the former no doubt conceal, which conceal nothing, and sizzling, oh sure, the green object is sizzling, but in and to a different sense, for no, I can’t see it sizzle, assuming this crackling is the right pitch to be called sizzling, the sound of crackling pitch, which sometimes is green and blooms and blooms with connotation.

No odor, gummy to the touch, eyed at green, and sizzling, I can tell you, with all the certainty in the green world (the world is green, and that is) that the thing is at least not the Coca-Colabranded glass that sits very greenly but never gums or sizzles in my sight, whose green glass gums (as pond scum) anything inside with all its greenness. There is, relieved, the little circled R; the glass is ours.

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II. I would renounce some of that. Indeed, there is a Coca-Cola glass, dyed green, that bears both logo and registered trademark symbol, and it is indeed my family’s, silently inhabiting a cabinet at least a decade now. In fact, it has a twin, nearly alike but colorless, and scratched in different places. At the moment, the two stand by each other on the kitchen table.

A small bulb above casts the shadow of translucent things from each. They rise above aluminum, the pebbles of boredom formed from foil by absentminded hands.

A shaker, pink-tinged, glass, and filled with an opacity of salt lies past these on the table. The bulb strikes this more harshly.

Its metal top flings, from one sun, the kitchen light. A candle burns behind all this, out of sight (that is, not farther back on the table but on a counter-top to which a diner’s curled back might turn), and feeds the scent of almonds to the air.

The candle’s wax is red, or would be red.

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77 Alex Verdan ‘18 + Two Fearless Anonymous Collaborators (Antipoets) How did we miss it The dead mutt — that had taken the place of the other dead mutt while we were trying to stuff it with love letters and lighthouses The light poured but our eyes were glued shut, our shoes peeling (as one peels an orange) off Our feet, exposed, fell in love with the first dead mutt The second — the second’s where all the problems began It swallowed the first and our love

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COLD, CLEAN, COAL & CHICAGO GKC//DG Luxurious Fully-Automated Space-Age Poetry Corporation Desperation does not exist for our generation.

Like tangerines in the nighttime, stealthily Becoming blood oranges, ungrown, salty, flowing, Grown larger than can reasonably be sustained By my mechanized Koi pond in the black plastic liner in the Ford F-150s With unbreakable titanium chasses — we know, we Shouldn’t have sold the low quality steel to low quality Industrial spies. Fine. Blueprints and Liszt. Mechanical Klavier tones in an auburn jacket, all poly(vinyl acetate); But remember this — the message on the screen is not the screen.

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GKC//DG Luxurious Fully-Automated Space-Age Poetry Corporation Mission STATEMENT: for Jesse Gonzalez and all the clones of Jesse Gonzalez yet to come GKC//DG Luxurious Fully-Automated Space-Age Poetry Corporation

//To KILL poetry and replace with a FULLY AUTOMATED revolutionary genuinely fascist 1080p POETICS //mediated by //outright THEFT //and chopping DOWN beautiful young trees and a fresh take on male ENTITLEMENT . //and to COLONIZE MARS with fully functional luxurious ROBOTIC SELF-ACTUALIZED .

workers

//AND MAYBE COLONIZE OTHER rational scientific SOLAR SYSTEMS . //IN OTHER WORDS: //TO BUILD A ROCKET LAUNCHER THAT LAUNCHES ROCKET LAUNCHERS, TO WRITE A POEM THAT WRITES ITS OWN POEMS, TO WRITE POEMS THAT CAN ALSO BE USED AS ROCKET LAUNCHERS . //EXAMPLE:

I was worried one morning about the future of poetry so I started reading the communist manifesto like I always do when the apricot machine in my kitchen works backwards & I get WORRIED but this time I realized that this wasn’t even good poetry & so I put it into google translate over & over & ... & this came out:

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It’s forced to fight I love you, tell me, agreement Traditional, cultural, and cultural change. The idea of the game is small Airplanes during the year Variable or problem There is a large room Cape Town is the capital city in the United States She lives with her father. School Buildings Sales, Marketing and Marketing Yes, in America. More innovators You have to close the sun: This means changing the general culture. The sea and the American cottages are American writers

//GOOD, CLEAN POETRY. COURAGEOUS POETRY. ENLIGHTENMENT MECHANIZED POETRY. SELF-ACTUALIZED ROBOTIC POETRY. //YOU CANNOT SPELL POVERTY WITH POETRY. YOU CANNOT SPELL PLAGIARISM WITH POETRY. YOU CANNOT PREVENT REGRESSION INTO THE DARK AGES WITHOUT POETRY.

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Idols and Thieves Zachary Aleksandur de Stefan ‘18 These things I want to forget but can’t: Your cottonmouthed smirk, the way blood Froths in the sink and stains the basin so many Shades of murder —that girl who has been missing For something like three weeks now.

Last seen in a dimly lit commuter lot; or, China Pavilion on Prospect and Crane; no, It was definitely the 7/11 off The Plaza. You Shrug —say, it’s better not to think about These things. Flip to Ch. 302. Lena —dimples Deep as lunar craters; all frumpy sundress Turned chic by virtue of her curves —Lena Will make everything OK. And besides, girls On TV are so much more real.

Winter has a way of burying those of us too Tired to stand up. I want to claw, want to Scream, can’t you see what’s happening here?

—but Lena is on the screen now, and she Is laughing, soft and pink against the snow, So I join her because I’m told this is a comedy.

I think, teach me, Lena, how to love men who Want to hurt me. How to wear all this fucking Weight. How to hold fragile things and people Close, but not too close. Firm, but not too firm.

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I don’t think I like this episode, or maybe I’ve Seen it before. Last week, we ditched the guide And surfed instead. Last month, we kept our love Brownbagged on the counter as festered fruit — Its sun-sweet juice running rivers onto the floor.

Nosebleed; purge. Lena is crying now, and I Want to tell her to cut it out with a scalpel.

So much space still between us: Your knife-blade mouth, my lips, The point of impact, and in these Ways, we are both still there, knocking Our ribcages against the concrete and Praying we recognize whatever falls out — That missing girl, or otherwise.

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Comorbid Zachary Aleksandur de Stefan ‘18 These things are guaranteed. No one will believe you When you tell them you’re fine. Re covered. Which is to say, Pulled back, bearing teeth. Does that make sense?

In either case. A prognosis selected from a drop-down Menu; and mgmt.’s latest recommendation, parsed Beyond meaning: that double-down of first-line stimulant: With any luck: a new language for new feelings felt on new Drugs. No longer conscientious: now dependent-avoidant.

Which doesn’t make sense. Just —don’t call it a relapse.

Please.

Once, I delayed gratification and missed the big picture.

Didn’t really look for it, maybe. Once, all the gone girls Hiding behind my brain crawled out and complained Of hunger. Told me I was beautiful; not crazy; but Please, could I just eat something?

Hm. Better to ask tomorrow. Or whenever deliberate Death feels less ego-syntonic: a concept: a choice.

It won’t. It never was; coming after: the binge: and me — Eating disorder for breakfastlunch&dinner: three meals In none; once purged; a sequence of last suppers, Rewound and played back: The deficit accumulates.

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Last Will and Testament Scott Shull Partington ‘20 Dear Mom and Dad, When I die, please turn my urn into an hourglass.

Don’t fuss over burial clothes or headstone poems.

Cremate me quickly. Pour me into a delicate mausoleum, Turn me over, and watch the hour pass. Gravity Pulling your daughter, particle-by-particle, into The bottom bulb. Like broken-winged doves who descend In a spiral, nauseous and weary, together we’ll share Our sorrows all the way down. While I’m stretching out Seconds, examine your grief. Get to know it like waves Know shores, learn to love this perdition like the Titanic Loves the ocean floor. Swallow your bitterness, While you’re alive, please submit that acrid sensation To gastric acid, gallbladder bile, gut microbiota — Because where else can bitterness go? Although, I know, Easier said than told. So, should you ever feel that Swelling of fury, the urge to dynamite this glacial world — Flip me over, and I’ll stretch out the seconds again.

All my love, Claire

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The Red Heart Under Your Neck (Is Flying) (song for a lover, to Paul Gauguin’s Vision After the Sermon) Jesse Smith ‘21 When you’re here, lass, it’s with you, the ‘ol carpenter’s issue of how to nail your breast to mine — The girl worshipped and burned, and the russet all turned, it takes more than an angel, a thigh — Babe, we’re transparent tonight, if Gauguin paints the fight then I’m in.

When your breath sings, it’s with you, bluebells and hazels that I move through, past the Marys that you have designed — Cornflowers woke up and dressed, the teal couldn’t have blessed what it desperately wanted and why — Babe, we’re transparent tonight, if Gauguin paints the fight, then I’m red as the dust in the wine.

So it’s true then, so it’s true, vision after the sermon, and now there wasn’t even a symbol for you — Honey, I shall.

So when the rose glass reflects you, the mint, meadow, and sinew, all pour charcoal to caress the line — You’re spread sweet on the primrose, and wings tumble through yarrow, the prayer strips her clothes down to rhyme — Babe, we’re transparent tonight, if Gauguin paints the fight then I’m in.

Babe, you’re all sepals tonight, if the moon was as bright, I’d be poppies and tender and blind.

So it’s true then, so it’s you, vision after the sermon, and now there wasn’t even anything that blooms.

Honey, I shall.

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art piece by Rebecca Jackson ‘21

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Climate//Mai Shaloni Pinto ‘20 I lift my mother’s face with my smile. Her head is held under with the sanitized stench.

She carried me through our market when my leg hung limp. Paralyzed. Her face is mine, my face is my grandmother’s. I can hear her head hit the door. I used to hold their hand. The frame shudders.

Their calluses held our field. My mother cowers close to the edge. “The pepper vines died this year.” I like to think that we are the color of tea, the kind we used to sip, facing the hibiscus on a marble floor. My mother’s face crumples over the phone. Four months of distance, “Everytime I see her she looks older.” Did Atlas have to hold the world up with corners of his lips? They don’t know how far away I am, with plastic roads as my language. I like to think that my legs hold their histories. They let me climb the hills to hear peacocks sing in the morning.

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Mia Shaloni Pinto ‘20 You kept smiling because you couldn’t think. Did we know what it was like?

To be born between tribes? Your face feels it still. Maybe, your mother was going to be around to make you feel better, like when we had wandered to the fifth floor of a grocery store and giggled over Bukowski. You’re trying to breathe. The morning was bright, and we are licking the juice dribbling out of an orange, finding its insides are a sunworld with pulp yellow ocean tendrils.

We don’t want to think about god anymore.

Le Corbusier was laying out the pink floors to let the air in on Sunday morning.

You try and talk to me. You’re too used to your blanket.

We’ll air it out with an uncomfortable silence.

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Waiting for Blind Faith to Save Me from Memory Shaloni Pinto ‘20 There’s a crack in the wall, paint peeling like a white scab, we couldn’t be anymore different.

I keep thinking about Faith.

Wondering if it’s like watching, cross-eyed, the constant whirr of a fan, going around a ventilator that held her afloat and round the house built during Independence and round the anticipation-held breath when we heard the drone of an airplane and I’m waiting, for it to drop like a revelation.

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creative destruction Laura Barrera ‘20

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multitude//solitude Laura Barrera ‘20

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Kristi Lim ‘21 Yongyu Chen ‘20 Senna Phillips ‘20 Aelya Ehtasham ‘19 Lilian Hawkes ‘20 Peter Szilagyi ‘20 Alex Verdan ‘18 + Two Fearless Anonymous Collaborators (Antipoets) GKC//DG Luxurious Fully-Automated Space-Age Poetry Corporation Zachary Aleksandur de Stefan ‘18 Scott Shull Partington ‘20 Jesse Smith ‘21 Shaloni Pinto ‘20

Contributors

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Marginalia would like to extend special thanks to the following people: Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, for her continuous inspiration as a poet and advisor; Ishion Hutchinson, for his support during our founding years and continued support from abroad; Corinne Bruno, for her unending patience and support; Karen Kudej, for putting up with our constant room reservations; Rebecca Jackson and Laura Barrera, for sharing their art with us; Cornell Printing Services, for their patience and timely publishing of all our issues;

and every poet who submitted, for allowing us the honor of reading your work.

Acknowledgements

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Marginalia is an independent publication and is not affiliated with any other publication, on or off Cornell’s campus. It is funded by the SAFC. Any and all views expressed in these poems are of the poets themselves, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Editorial Board, the magazine itself, or Cornell University.

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