Marginalia Vol 2 No 2

volume

2

issue

2

spring

‘17

MARGINALIA

volume

2

issue

2

spring

‘17

MARGINALIA

editorial board

J. Gabriel Gonzalez ‘17 Editor-in-Chief

Rachel Whalen ‘19 Chief of Staff

Stephen Meisel ‘18 Managing Editor

Amy Wood ‘18 Design Editor

Sana Gupta ‘17 Copy Editor

Tina He ‘19

Communications

Ishion Hutchinson Faculty Advisor

Haruka Kido ‘17 Cover Art “Luna”

Oil on acrylic paint, colored oil pastel, linseed oil, on stretched cotton canvas, 50” x 50”

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general staff

Jessica Brofsky ‘18 Madeline Day ‘18 Kristina Nemeth ‘19 Peter Szilagyi ‘20

table of contents

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ix Letter from the Editor 3 My Father Hands Me a Leaf 4 Windowsill, March 5 Belonging 6 Two Studies of a Pond 8 Something Like a Circle 9 Gordita 10 M Train 11 “The Conclusions of Exhuasted Surf�

12 Night In 13 Baseline 14 (almost) 15 Nightjars 16 no proof of residence 18 Ritual 19 Trafalgar Square 20 fugit 21 Hasina and the Kak 22 Contributors 23 Acknowledgements

letter from the editor

Dearest readers, We have, it seems, come to the end of our time together, you and I. After two years, it’s time for me to wave goodbye, but to be honest, I’m not entirely sure how. I could sit here and recount for the hundredth time our origin story; I could “marvel at how far we’ve come” since then; I’m even tempted to quote George Washington and beg you, faithful readers, to indulge any and all of my missteps, but I find myself unable to settle down in this fuzzy nostalgia.

I think, for me, this stems from having already made peace with the past, at least when it comes to this little book. At the end of the day, I am the last member of the original editorial board still standing, and with each successive graduation, each successive goodbye, I have been forced further and further from the comforting mythos of that founding semester.

In looking towards the future, though, I have been able to look back on what we’ve been able to accomplish at Marginalia. What I am and always will be most proud of is how you, our community, responded to the magazine. You did not spring up in reaction to the magazine so much as with the magazine, pushing and shaping us in more ways that you could know. It has been my distinct pleasure to learn and grow alongside of you all — your words have, in turns, helped me find my own, left me speechless, and on at least one occasion elicited a barbaric yop. Whether or not we have ever met, I feel we share a certain friendship since, like me, you find your lives better off with poetry than without it.

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Yours sincerely, one last time, J. Gabriel Gonzalez

So, it is with pride, joy, and a hint of sadness that I wave goodbye to the Marginalia community. While you were not my first love here on the Hill, you will certainly be remembered as my greatest.

In that vein, while I am unsettled by my own departure, I have immense confidence in the future of the review. The next editorial board is unwaveringly committed to this foundational ideal of community, which, in my mind, is the only way to keep us as publishers honest. While we never intended to become the literary gatekeepers at Cornell, we cannot be of and for the poets without, well, the poets! The success of this magazine has up until now been entirely contingent on the involvement of community members, and for that I both thank you and charge you to continue forward, lending this new board the same verve and tenacity you were gracious enough to extend to me. Trust in them as I do; they are the future.

spring ‘17

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My Father Hands Me A Leaf Elizabeth Gonzalez ‘18

Green blades armed toward the sidewalk. Flowers drowned in sunlight over the rail. My father hands me a leaf. “This is lamb’s ear. Feel it.” I rub the leaf between my thumb and pointer finger. It’s quite soft.

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I haven’t seen this before.

Windowsill, March Clare Boland ‘17

In those months, I used the space between the windowsill and the pane as an icebox; the flesh of fruit caught between days of freezing and thawing, swelling with the sweat of the city.

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I became aware of the eyes on produce, gazes transfixed the same as my morning stare at the old man who tends to his window box, hands in gloves, as I wait for the tram.

There is a life constructed around the eggplant, the onions, the avocados that come back midday in halves.

When at first I glanced at each book title on the metro, put feelings into furrowed brows accompanying, soon I was overwhelmed with the way my skin folded underneath my sweater; started pulling on my eye bags to create the illusion of awakening; picked my nail beds into half moons.

By the time his flowers bloomed, my fruit withered too fast. I wrapped halves in saran, placing them in the plastic pull out in the fridge, deconstructing a story.

Belonging

Lay down your name and say I love you to its rhythm its shape on the paper lasting longer than you thought the light that goes out can stand.

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Stephen Meisel ‘18

Two Studies of a Pond Stephen Meisel ‘18

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I. As if spelling to the pond, you brush your finger through the water in motions that appear almost driftless if it weren’t for the anger your head.

Who doesn’t get tired of the lilies?

Don’t they remind you of former lovers siphoning off what life you have left in your body?

Your frame relaxes to the sounds of a day fading minute by minute to the hoary groans of frogs and crickets with no flower to float on.

Long in the light, your left ear warms to the touch of a deadly heat and the hour of a broken sundial.

Who doesn’t grow bored with the lilies?

Am I not wrong when I say your lover shook you and then walked out on you?

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II. The dragonfly’s path lilts a little to the right and then curves away from us. It knows us.

It does not want a reminder.

Something like a Circle

Kirchner, Page from Sketchbook 140, probably 1927 Jessica Brofsky ‘18

spring ‘17

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My grandparents are uncomfortable with modern expression, how we hold negative space with two hands, wear our bodies like they’re ours. He speaks for both of them, her ears reduce to question marks, her laugh is a sigh, a past that seeks to merge. They reach to close a circle, a beginning losing itself in the idea of an end, the way fear can shape a shadow; they claim something that’s not there.

Desire and pursuit of the whole is called love. Plato, you say love is a fucking promise for never. We bathe in dissolution, dance in the shallows, make a joke of romance. I bend truth in dreams, tell myself over the things I want to hear. There’s a soul at the bottom.

I’m going to write until I can’t remember.

Gordita Julia Rosana Montejo Mendoza ‘17

When I learned that my childhood nickname was also the name of a Taco Bell menu item, I wanted to become a delightful sliver of avocado toast, barely taking up space in the 2,000 calorie suggested daily value.

Until one day, my thighs started to look like tamales, my hips started to swell like overstuffed pastelitos.

Gordita sounded less like it emanated from a fluorescent menu and became more like the familiar memory of flavors bold enough to stop apologizing for being ever present.

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No nalgas, no pansa, just an itty bitty excuse for substance.

M Train

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Xi Chen ‘18

I walked down, looking for the M train

but heard the

scratching of a Chinese violin.

“Do you play?”

No, but my father did.

“The Conclusions of Exhausted Surf” for Derek Walcott

Here, the wind will shock you out of it.

By the bathroom sink, a sinking feeling, another inarticulate washing of these same articulated members I have kept on hand for years. The hand soap sows no germ in January furrows, is not the plow of spring, but wreaks (expected) havoc, writes wrinkles, and reeks, not of industry and that plow’s crop of bustling connotations held in hands willed by unwilled torpor to rest, but of the industrial, of cold gels dispensed with life. Suds coalesces and suddenly the hand-dryer ticks on.

The hands stumble in, and one finds itself a plank, like those one lays at a slant to coax some creature from a window-well, and that’s enough; the rush of rancid air surges down, gasping over gasping flesh, strikes the bowl, and urges effervescence to climb the other side in iambic waves, whose rarefactions seek proverbial shores but, finding linoleum, lodge no complaint.

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Peter Szilagyi ‘20

Night In

spring ‘17

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Anita Alur ‘17

As amber morphs your face into a semblance I kiss your eyelids in my mind fills with sapphire blues and groove you move me with the click of your wrist I look ahead and wonder when and if you’re seeing dust descend from the lamplight.

Julia M. Allen ‘19

You can’t substitute kisses for conversation, unbuckle my mouth from Alice’s ventricle, or restitch the anatomy of attraction.

Baseline

(almost) Alexandra Burton ‘17

In anticipation of the quiet we are set edge-like on an argument.

An old woman holds out her hand as if to catch something falling before it hits the ground, yet there is hardly any rain, and the trees are already bare.

In the space between seasons you say “peace,” hoping the November cold will muffle the dense oxygen of our uncertainty.

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I stumble through semantics, as the old woman closes her hand, slowly opens it, walks on.

We speak to the abstraction of disaster— our conversation sounds like static, like a rush of blood.

Nightjars

Through shadowed leaves, ebony nightstars flit.

By dusk’s light, pupils widen from coal slits.

My ears flick from trees to her golden hymns; In younger days I hid beneath that silk trim!

My gentlelady watches from afar— Awaits twelve songs from her foolish nightjars.

These dark feathers at my feet, see them drift.

Always to my lady, I take my gifts.

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Matti Yarn ‘18

no proof of residence Matti Yarn ‘18

I know not where my depression digs its den— I cannot ignore the ringing doorbell, or shove it off my welcome mat; it could be sleeping in gutters. and my heart is not cruel—I can never turn it away.

It steps across the threshold invited, enamored. I watch my depression drink in the TV, watching from inches away. It does not help with the dishes, does not put dinner in smooth clear tupperwares for later, does not make lunches for the future or reach out to help me clean the cutting boards. My depression

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sits silently on the tiles of the kitchen, black and white squares cold under its soft haunches; it looks on. It watches me do my homework, but does not keep the silence at bay.

It squats on the toilet while I shower and does not help me wash my hair.

My depression does not flinch when I shake off the cold droplets clinging to my curls. It watches. It does not take its own shower. and lock my own.

I watch my depression pad softly into the guest room and perch on the bed.

I close its door and lock my own.

My depression leaves the guest room, slinks under my door, then slips in with me under the sheets, curls its cold scales around my waist melds itself with skin, with sheets, with darkness.

My depression cuddles clings caresses loves me and it would be impolite to leave.

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I spin my blankets into a fresh cocoon. My breathing slows, deepens, digs into the rhythm of my dreams.

Ritual

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Anita Kottapalli ‘19

blue Nalgene she never fills less than halfway her coat half hugs the chair where she sits and doesn’t until she is back, her hand reaching over for a sip of water

Trafalgar Square Ally Findley ‘17

London rang from me my change under a giant clock face my pockets inside out I am looking for where the circles of our Venn Diagram bump and brush my steps matching Pound on the pavement.

In front of the National Gallery the Jedi-wise will try to rob you in gold paint, guarding crypts casing Magpie spoils militant-wrought from foreign shores

Under the grey jaws of bank-buildings, twisted in Gothic on the mouths of grated sewer gurgles, I stood on the bones of the old Empire which stood on the bones of so many others.

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I roved among black beetle cabs in this steel and concrete ant-pile city-distance with its intimacy of over-shared air, watched petals of suit and pastel skin-tone swish and disappear.

fugit Sylvia Dever Onorato ‘19

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ten minutes’ oblivion complete with ants crawling across boot toe and folded knee, watch ticks relegated to preconscious distaste like a burned meal of white asparagus (delicacy in rural Spain, in my great grandmother’s time) and caviar too—why not wonder the length of a moment

Hasina and the Kak Nuha Fariha ‘17

In the doorstep a small black kak Scratched its head against the hard ground Letting out ugly cries like the colicky baby She buried last week in the village well Its beady eyes poached her.

Outside her brothers in white thobes Crushed frail bones beneath their teeth Calculating the daily number of deaths Arguing the best way to be freemen As Hasina served them from the shadows

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Inside a dusty, hot kitchen, Hasina Quietly strangled the baby quail Naked and massaged with masala Frying in a vat of bubbling oil Splattered on four tan walls

contributors

Julia M. Allen ‘19 Anita Alur ‘17 Clare Boland ‘17 Jessica Brofsky ‘18 Alexandra Burton ‘17 Xi Chen ‘18 Nuha Fariha ‘17 Ally Findley ‘17 Elizabeth Gonzalez ‘18 Anita Kottapalli ‘19 Stephen Meisel ‘18 Julia Rosana Montejo Mendoza ‘17 Sylvia Dever Onorato ‘19 Peter Szilagyi ‘20 Matti Yarn ‘18

thanks, fam

Marginalia would like to extend special thanks to the following people: Ishion Hutchinson, for his continued presence as our advisor.

Corinne Bruno, for her unending patience and support.

The poets of the class of 2017, who have been with us from the start.

Haruka, for sharing her art with us.

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

Mary Jarvis, whose wit and demand for punctuation has been missed during our readings.

Alejandra Alvarez, whose absence this semester has been sorely felt by all members of the editorial board and general staff.

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Cornell Printing Services, for their patience and timely publishing of all our issues.

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spring ‘17

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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