2024-2025 Milkweed Literary Magazine

Milkweed is Haverford College's student-run literary magazine.

Editor-in-Chief

Ivy Xie

Junior Editor and Secretary

Alan Ramírez and Ben Gevirtz

Not a Resting Place

If you allow me to spill your drink over these unbeaten blues, I will admit that the hole that I came from is creeping back and it feels unbearable.

I will admit that I am doughy on the inside; that I miss the afternoon you held me damply in the bath until my lungs were filled with bubbles.

I will admit that when I am older and my face wrinkles like a doily, and all I am left with is a dusty mind, you may think of me differently.

I will admit that I want to go to the sea right before dying, to take in the ocean’s sulking seaweed charms; to feel its green rinse and find out if I still hate the clinging of saltwater—

and I will admit that my tendrils will move against the seaside breeze as I soften my passing with the hum of a folk song, and it may be beautifully pathetic.

Listen to me now:

I know that when I wobble back to shore to be held in the stillness of the cold sand, the police will come by and say

“this is not a resting place”—

they will recommend the cemetery just a few miles away,

and as I creep back into the hole from which I came, the flies will buzz.

Julia D'Amato '27

Tonic

Bring me a dove from the wind and one hundred expired pies; pray to a mantis, then take it for a spin; find a storm and borrow its eyes.

Hold a volcano until it bursts, and plant two grasshoppers over its ashes; they will multiply, but first, grow a garden and lend it to a fascist.

Take a baby from its crib and bring it to a violet sunrise; place an apple to your lips and watch it shrink to a smaller size.

Pretend to love a movie you hate until the dialogue endears you; go to a circus, and then wait for the trapeze artist to hear you.

Listen to an unfinished opera and think of the lives you could have led; shake off your dream of a candy shop— let it drift above your head.

A potion for the forgotten, a potion to forget, a potion to remember why you shouldn’t.

Bring me a hand, bring me a head, bring me your heart, I already know it is wooden.

Julia D'Amato '27

Bird on a Wire

A sparrow sits on an electrical wire in a storm. Need I spell it out for you?

Something ghostly and bright lights the dark sky to a broken, hollow gray & the sparrow takes to the air. I cannot hear his chirp of panic, but I see his beak open & close as his wings flutter desperately in the wind.

It’s funny, wind. You only know it’s there because of how it moves the things around it & how it calls like a wolf & a whistle toy & television static; Maybe that’s poetry, or maybe I’m just looking for meaning where there’s none. Where there’s only God, or His absence.

I don’t think there’s a God anymore. Do you?

Maybe there was one, once upon a time. Back when there was no cost of living crisis and the wheel was invented for the first time.

If there is still a God, And God is what landed that sparrow, broken winged & bleeding on my windowsill while the basement flooded quietly below, Then I do not like God.

More likely I think it was whatever sick & starving television writer spends his time trying to pull the Lord’s attention back to Earth.

That this is a rerun of a million other birds who died by flood and glass back when Gabriel first invented “Civilization” and “Windows”

I think God’s long moved on from humanity’s mess

That we are only one in a series of worlds God’s still creating Frenzied

Careful hands shaking when we inevitably fail to perform His own perfection back at Him. & I think He’ll go on creating

until He learns what it is to exist without proof Of His own worth & He’ll go on creating unable to resist his nature just like the sparrow that jumped off the wire & into my window & that was swept, finally, into the night.

Gabriella Lipsitch '28

In Postage

Meanwhile, Mother, I miss you: the joy of your soapy curls fresh from the bath and the wild scent of the delicate lavender that you gathered into bunches so my nose was never bored, but I ask you, please, don’t hold me anymore.

Meanwhile, Sister has gone off to boarding school: peep-jousting, that eager girl, so out of practice with being practical, but they will teach her, yes, with their sandpaper words.

Meanwhile, Boyfriend sends me milk in a postcard because he knows how much I like it— still, my body is dry everywhere his is wet, parched from the stories I never tire of telling.

He says to swear less to mean more, but here is what I say of his tweed importance: metaphors of museums and histories bore me and

I have never liked loafers. What’s that?

Yes, Mother, I know that I am funny, but I ask you, please, don’t laugh at me anymore.

Julia D'Amato '27

Storybook

Ivy Xie '25

Suburbia

Warm light escapes the barely closed shutter; I look in but only find a faint reflection of mine or your’s in the company of the iridescent moon: perfectly bitten in half as printed only in storybooks.

Shared laughter on a warm summer night; back then I licked the remnants of crystallized sugar off my lips and stuck my tongue out, up and up, expecting to catch tufts of the rolling pink clouds. 6pm on the dot, I would hear my mother’s call, Come back for dinner!

5 more minutes! I would yell.

I let my eyelids drop and time loiters— but it begins again when we open the curtains and tumble across the streets.

Yesterday, she told me, I work in a comedy club now to make money of course, to stay away from home, in a voice as clear as the aquamarine skies down 53 chestnut lane.

I hear a faint whisper cut in the middle, come back—.

I see the white birch door and white birch shutters slightly ajar, and I wonder for how long I can / I may/ I will close my eyes and turn around.

100GBs of Memory

Your Google One storage is almost full. Free up storage or change your plan here.

Open Google Photos. Scroll to a random year. 2016, maybe? Long press a photo and drag your finger down to multiselect. Multiselect the duplicates, the accidental screenshots, the finger-covering-the-camera shots, and maybe some of those awkward middle-school-era photos of yourself while you’re at it. Think about your grandma showing you photo albums of your parents. Think about what your grandchildren will see of you. They don’t need to see photos of a 12-year-old with crooked teeth, do they? It’s only taking up storage space, so just delete it.

You started recording your life when you were 12, on your first iPhone. Before that, from maybe the age of 2, your grandchildren won’t have much to look at besides a photo album of your early months, compiled by your mother and older sister a year after you were born. Besides the occasional school picture day photos, what memories can you show your grandchildren from that time? Do you even remember those times, with no pictures to show for it?

Your Google One storage is almost full. Free up storage or change your plan here.

Guess that wasn’t enough.

Open Google Photos. Scroll to 2017. The year you got Snapchat. Long press the dog filter photos, then stop to think. It’s cringey, but it’s a relic of the times, isn’t it? You’re going to want to remember these days, the days of the unicorn-barfing filter and the daily streaks. Find somewhere else to clear up your storage.

Scroll up, past the Tiktok videos and Instagram drafts, to March 2020. March 12, 2020, to be specific. The last photo of you and your friends at school before the world shut down. It’s just a

photo of your friend, who you never stopped talking to, outside your high school at sunrise during a fire drill, your classmates standing behind her rank-and-file. This photo, you’ll keep forever.

Maybe you should just print these photos and delete them from the cloud. The cloud won’t always exist, after all, will it? Look up at the collage on your wall. The polaroids captioned Halloween 2022, Valentines 2023. Perhaps because of this collective consciousness that the cloud will cease to exist in the future, polaroids became a thing again. So did disposable cameras. You developed a film roll from your ‘dispo’ and hung it up on your wall. You admire the ‘eighties’ that exudes from the photos, with its almost-sepia filter and vignette.

Your brother sends you a text. “Come to the basement. We have a surprise for you.” Go downstairs. He has his laptop open. “Dad found a bunch of old VHS tapes and got them processed into a flash drive,” He says, “Look at these videos.”

It’s of you. As a baby. You’ve been alive 21 years, but you’ve never seen a video of yourself as a baby. You’re sitting by the old TV, grabbing VHS tapes and spinning the little circles back and forth. Your brother, suddenly 9 years old, is messing with you. Your sister, only 12, is scolding him. The camcorder is hooked up to the TV, airing everything being filmed in real time. In the background, you hear your dad, 20 years younger, yelling, “What are you doing, connecting the camcorder to the TV? The audio’s gonna get all messed—” ZZZT. First the audio cuts, then the video.

Upload the videos to the cloud, then save them to your phones.

Your Google One storage is almost full. Free up storage or change your plan here.

Fatema Mun '25

Ode to Eating Raspberries Off Fingers

I am a clown. I am your clown.

Look at my clown-nose fingers and my clown-red face.

Now, watch me eat each seed until I am bursting through my circus shoes; until they put me in their international freak-show; until I am on tour in every country that harbors raspberries.

Observe me use simile, metaphor, and personification— A raspberry on my finger rests like a condom on a prick.

The berry’s sweet dew is a flood. Raspberries beg me to eat them.

Let me bite and write until my teeth decay.

Julia D'Amato '27

Gabriella Lipsitch '28

Shut up ⋅ this noise ⋅ i grate it like parmesan ⋅ garnish for the ⋅ oiled body ⋅ i claustrophobe ⋅ your claustrophobia ⋅ til both of us can’t ⋅ breathe ⋅ in and out ⋅ i have heard ⋅ physics is interesting to physicists ⋅ i write an ode to gravity ⋅ submit my contribution to the group project ⋅ clock out at 5 ⋅ knowledge is power is war is misery ⋅ and what i know is ⋅ i know you like ⋅ feeling small enough that you ⋅ aren’t living ⋅ i know we look for quiet in loud places ⋅ city dwellers dream of countryside blues ⋅ (and greens) ⋅ tractors and shovels ⋅ bears and solitude ⋅ loneliness of a different kind ⋅ a kind you can predict ⋅ & our bodies are intertwined in sick guillotine frames so we cannot see past the soggy

Makeshift love ⋅ (sex) ⋅ carbon fiber ⋅ i ask you to come over and fuck the air out of my arms ⋅ borrow my little problems ⋅ keep me bored until ⋅ perhaps a hummingbird ⋅ a stupid pigeon ⋅ will drain the holes in my twisted spine ⋅ ejaculate into my bullet ⋅ point ⋅ crevices ⋅ and turn me into silver ⋅ yes, true silver, not metaphor ⋅ meanwhile Spirit Says i am the brook and the lake ⋅ the forest and the rain ⋅ the swirl in the bark of the birch tree ⋅ the bud of the morning glory’s flower ⋅ Science Says I am made of water but ⋅ the water is dying and so am i ⋅ i shout ⋅ i’m not the earth, i’m not the earth ⋅ i’m on fire shrinky dink ⋅ a child tries to eat this ⋅ wielding his disgusting parachute ⋅ with lagging hands ⋅ screaming i’m just a kid ⋅ we fucking know ⋅ what he makes of this monologue ⋅ i want to convince him of goodness ⋅ and tell him the golden truth but it’s just ⋅ fabric ⋅ ated ⋅ so I ask that you keep spinning silk ⋅ spinning cloth ⋅ cover my mouth with your textiles ⋅ and maybe i will be brave ⋅ enough to bite ⋅ the edges of your gloves ⋅ so that i may speak.

Julia D'Amato '27

the girl who cried MAN

he asks me: in the forest who would I rather find man or dangerous creature (if those two things are not necessarily the same) and balks when I say the latter how can I be so scared of his kind? listening over.

instead, he says the former but who would come to help me when I was crying BEAR for I am a girl and he doesn’t care for my screams too loud!

my reasoning, if you’d like to hear it: my soul, I can hide from an animal but not the cruel ingenuity of man his dirty fingernails and oh look! he brought friends now I think about how as children we are warned of the boy who cried WOLF it turns out half of us need not be listening. I don't know about you but I've never had this problem;

to call for help too much would require help coming too much (it never does)

there is no trust to lose I never had it, really so I’ll keep screaming because mine OURS are gaining strength while his decompose into the dirt and fertilize our protection

if you wonder why I speak only to you consider who do I really expect to show up when I cry MAN?

you just did.

do you have a map?

I think the only way out of the forest is up through the trees

Eva Fostovsky-Geckeler '28

if Arachne birthed a lineage of women this is what they’d have to say:

1. the daughter my mother lived and died at her loom spoke in hushed tones to the shushing of the shuttle in the weft before she passed she told me this: to remember her lifelike with pockmarks and radiant smile and moods and all or let her tale be buried with her for (she said) in death we have no voice and all our strong fiber melts into clay for men’s hands to shape into pedestals carved deep and bleeding with inscriptions if we let them remember (she said) a hundred years from now we’ll live in certain stories fantastical myth drama and moral and heavy-veiled truth where cruelty is perfectly pleasant and honor is nothing but anger unashamed

2. thousands of years later in my time, women lived and died at the loom lives in fiber the record of our existence only sheets and shrouds weave me a story now please of what will happen when i’m gone

3. present day i will not leave a paper trail no brittle sheets crafted from the lungs of the earth will mark my existence rather i will stain my writing onto every wall use arsenic and indigo and chemical dyes knit my words into smooth polyester slip my story among the warp of my funeral shroud so when you try your best to preserve my tongueless body as a relic of your mythos you will find that i persist

Gabriella Lipsitch '28

Rainbow Over Barclay

they will call it fairytale

i was walking through the sky when she found me. she was dancing: a rhythm of air. the clouds were thin because they were not clouds they were kingdoms. i climbed the peak of a castle, bird’s-eye view, still i could not see its monarch. dancing, prancing silicone people waved, chanting welcome Home god. i admit i threw my head back and laughed oh they had gotten it all wrong, for there she was: dancing up a storm, a hurricane for the little creatures’ necks, drowning their smoke, their tears, yes, she touched their heads, cloaking earth’s chimneys with sleek dew, and they thought she was lovely, yes. some say they still do.

Julia D'Amato '27

Piano

“Play me a piece, please…” (pleads the prisoner), “...a piece that promises pleasure, and I’ll pray for your peace.

Find me a purpose beyond the plaster, past the pain of patience and the patience of this pen. Play me a piece, please: Play me a piece.”

Julia D'Amato '27

Phillip Chin '25