Front cover by Callie Wohlgemuth Inside front cover: Femme Dom by Mavis Moon
MISSION STATEMENT Our aim is to collectivize and distribute the voices and creations of a diverse and progressive community – helping to curate and share the work of young, local artists, and cultivate a thriving Five College arts community. We mean specifically to uplift and promote the voices of BIPOC and QTPOC in the Five College community, but any and all submissions are welcome.
Editors
Zoe Fieldman
Managing Editor
Lila Goldstein
Arts Editors
Anais Quiles-Lewis & Callie Wohlgemuth
Writing Editor Layout Designers
Kate Turner Kate Turner & Callie Wohlgemuth
Social Media Director
Ayu Suryawan
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Note from the Editors..... We would like to acknowledge the land that we inhabit and on which this magazine was produced. Mount Holyoke College stands on stolen Nonotuck land bordered by neighboring indigenous nations, including the Nipmuc and the Wampanoag to the East, the Mohegan and Pequot to the South, the Mohican to the West, and the Abenaki to the North. For us, this felt like a transformative summer. As we put together this issue, we saw many of our contributors grappling not only with the pandemic, but the way it has exposed and worsened systems of injustice. In our issue, you will see how artists have been processing and responding to these new realities. We hope this work helps you, our readers, to feel and navigate the tensions that come as we try to contextualize our individual selves within these global narratives. We believe in the power of art to heal and to provide hope and connection in times of distance. Putting together this issue made us feel closer to each other, and we hope it can do the same for you. Thank you for reading! OC
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Table of Contents
2 4 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 14 15 16 17 18 20
Long Distance Megan Hill The Last Sprout on Earth Ella Giordano an ode to “i know the end” by phoebe bridgers Lucy James-Olson up in the air Margaret Wiss the grail Zora Duncan
denial Izzy Kalodner
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golden Callie Wohlgemuth rooted in my hands Wolfe Shen bittersweet Avery Martin jul 24 - billboards jul 24 - puddle Clara Callahan reflections Callie Wohlgemuth and Zoe Fieldman
I Hope This Email Finds You Well Lily Reavis untitled Azelia Assin Excerpt (Tattoo) Sophia Hess heavy thoughts Zora Duncan lightning and phlox Ishan Summer THE SUN Maren McKenna angels Zora Duncan Photos by: Callie Wohlgemuth
[“Dock boy: A gender neutral term”] Mira Rosenkotz
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Scheherazade Kate Turner up in the air Margaret Wiss Visiting Dublin Izzy Kalodner
ARTIST SPOTLIGHT The Childlike Empress Higher Power Mavis Moon STEALING SWORDS, WHY? Callie Wohlgemuth Structural Clara Callahan inside outside early summer Lila Goldstein AIR AND SPACE Callie Wohlgemuth and Zoe Fieldman song for homecoming Lucy James-Olson
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56 57 58 59 60 62 63 64 66 68 70 71 81 82 83 84 86
PDA Megan Hill [running almost empty off I-90 us] Maren McKenna untitled Jeno Zhou BigSqueeze Dewa Ayu Photos by: Sikkiim Purple Bow Juliette Harrison viole(n)t Callie Wohlgemuth and Zoe Fieldman stream of consciousness Zora Duncan little giant Zoe Fieldman Art by: Claire Weber Sculptures by: Jordan Ballard selfie Dewa Ayu Miss Domestic, U.S.A. Casey Roepke From the series “End of Summer Circus” Jillian Benham The Word On Cheese Reese Hirota An Unrealistic Future Tense Izzy Kalodner Summer Songs Playlist Annalee and Reese Artist Statements vii
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Long Distance Megan Hill 3
The Last Sprout on Earth First came floods and forest fires, then five years of drought Morale was running low, and the food was running out The only rations that remained were jars of sauerkraut When sandstorms finally settled all that stood was a small sprout I gently scooped the soil that surrounded its short roots Then I placed the plant down carefully inside my hiking boot And I hobbled home so I could build the sprout a robot suit That could nurture and protect the plant from pillage and pollutants But weather’s getting worse, and they predict that by July The earth will be too toxic for us humans to survive One day I will come back for you, it’s not our last goodbye Farewell my friend! So long sweet sprout! I’m taking to the sky!
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Ella Giordano 5
an ode to “i know the end” by phoebe bridgers this particular apocalypse is a delight: a praise song of the fact that the end is near; an exclamation of joy amid the ruins; a teethwide tonguelight shout into the approaching void a chorus of trumpets announcing our collapse into nothingness; a dissertation on the dissolve; a seeing, a knowing and a transformation of individual fear into collective exuberance the voices call out: we know we know we know the end is near the voices answer: we’ll see you on the other side
Lucy James-Olson 6
up in the air Margaret Wiss 7
the grail Zora Duncan
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denial It’s just going to go on like this, says the prophet, hands held skywards in the universal shrug of dismay, and that is when I begin to wish for a flood. Instead of mourning Pompeii I start to romanticize it and study the active volcanos. I contemplate building fires along the icebergs. I refuse plagues but I crave peaceful endings, slipping into continuous sleep. People speak of space and I imagine paralysis, drowning. I drop ice cubes into my cup and think of freezing as they melt. What is worse than dying early? Forever lasting, in quiet, unified disaster.
Izzy Kalodner 9
I Hope This Email Finds You Well I woke up this morning and the sky was woollen and I watched the wall of rain roll over the mountains in the distance and I wondered if I had not wiped my glasses off well enough -- after several more attempts to get rid of the cloudiness I realized it was much bigger than my own perception. My feet felt cold in an adult way when I turned off my 6:30 alarm and went to the kitchen for coffee. My mother had set the pot to brew at 6am but it didn’t listen and when I pressed the button and laid my sleepiness and coldness on the counter it tells me it is too full. The counter looks like the sidewalk beside my mother’s garden after a rainstorm. I drink a cup anyway as I clean up the mess and dump the grounds that settled into an abstract painting at the bottom of my mug down the sink. I seem to remember my dad telling me as a child to never dump coffee grounds down the sink but now I do not know why he would have said that or if that is something adults think about and I do not want to look it up but I think about it every time I clean out the filter. I wonder if I am causing mass destruction in every water line I visit. I take the trash out while the new coffee brews for my mother and when I return it is very easy to slip into the shower and to wash my hair and to shave my legs and to continue these motions without sound or thought until I find myself dressed and clean in front of my computer at 7:15am. The sky is murmuring now. I wonder if it is trying to talk to me in particular. Maybe it heard me thinking about silence and decided to interject itself. Maybe the sky likes to play Devil’s Advocate. These are not very adult things to think. My shirt feels wrong and improper and my walls feel too bright and the little patch of yard outside my window feels like it does not really exist as I start work for the day.
Lily Reavis 10
untitled Azelia Assin 11
Excerpt (Tattoo) Sophia Hess
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heavy thoughts Zora Duncan 14
lightning and phlox I spent the whole day in obscurity this Sunday was over before it began, but now it smells like lightning and phlox as the the sound of the rain floated eastward and the petrichor wafted from the grass as the sturgeon moon began to outshine the distant lightning so brilliant it seemed to burn through the clouds like sun or perhaps they just parted in recognition of her the full moon of august barley, green corn, and sturgeon accompanied by a metallic yet spectral baying as if a lightning-struck tower were howling in agony I get the urge to call you every single night except for the moons. on the moons I just look up at my long suffering companion, pockmarked and scarred with craters and here I am reusing the same vocabulary to write to you again, but, that’s okay, because I get like this every moon and she’s the only one who really gets me.
Ishan Summer 15
THE SUN at the end of the road there is a patch of nasturtiums overflowing peach dream creamsicle eyes peering at our hands while we pick, pick, pick. everything is more or less sunny side up, isn’t it -pennies all heads when you ask, robins egg cracking and look: the robin inside. the carolina wren is taking apart an olive branch, red house small spiny bits poking, the sparrows didn’t find her out yet. I don’t think they will now. at the end of the road the nasturtiums greet us, wishing well of blooms, sweet punks singing stevie to the sun, the blues means we cried and lived to toss all our tails over our shoulders. look down. at the bottom, there’s a road, and a pickup truck, and at least five tomato plants, bursting. Maren McKenna
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angels Zora Duncan
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Photos by Callie Wohlgemuth Model: Olivia Lowe
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[“Dock boy: A gender neutral term”] “Dock Boy: A gender neutral term” you tell me on the phone I am by the water refilling beach magic lungs full of dirt from earlier, “please calm down” dirt, too many cherry pits inside, girls and red, neither of which I am today, not by choice but rather by pounding; t-posts again and again the woman has been buried, where, only by the pigs working past 9pm, it will be uncovered spewing pronouns from [ ] mouth, eyes dirt wild there is some magic in driving the tractor down the Real Road some beauty in stuck slowness, some peace in the lowered head nod, the salutatory wave to everyone who is not carrying two hundred old eggs and a dead rat in the tractor bucket in front of them, egg, rat,
road, magic, sucks me from the slope I see, how easily my body could be crushed under this Kubota, how fast I could have the grass smeared across my face forever, stains et mortem, pathway to elysium lined with lawn mower cuttings, perfect red circles on the new white counter-tops its beet magic this time, wrings me from cheesecloth whispers sshhhpsshhpshhh to wrap my fingers, tie them to each opposite bicep, forearms in an X across my chest the only red in the food processor tonight is vegetables, the only one bleeding is the earth, who, mouth still full of dirt, eyebrows the most verdant and wild grasses you have ever seen, is still not ready to share [ ] pronouns with you. Mira Rosenkotz
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golden Photo by Callie Wohlgemuth Model: Lucy James-Olson
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rooted in my hands Wolfe Shen
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bittersweet I am becoming intimately acquainted with the powdery smell of bittersweet vines unwound, delicately, from evergreen branches and of rain-dampened cedar mulch heaped on concrete. Of ferns broken at the root, mossy and damp. With a dandelion digger pressed into the palm of my work glove. Some weeds are more fun to remove than others. The grasses are boring, with frustrating underground networks. Dandelions, not exciting- but at least they have a substantial root for me to pull. The triumphant symbol of a job well done. Then my favorites. Tall stalks, oblong leaves. Long roots, but shallow. One after another, then five strung together underground like a zipper. My mother taught me to garden. Summers as a child, most of our vegetables came from the backyard. Cherry tomatoes, red and warm. Zucchini picked with long sleeves on to avoid the scratchy stems. Lettuce. Cucumbers. But as the cucumbers grew taller and I grew with them my roots shriveled in sandy soil, until I carried myself up the rickety stairs on the side of the house in a bucket of stalks uprooted. Sam Sanders speaks in my earbuds about prayer and about faith and a spider runs across my gloved hand because I have razed the forest around her and demolished her home. A bird leaves the birdbath and we are back to the tedious grasses. As I sift my fingers through the soil to collect any stubborn stems, I am untethered. I ignore a text message from my mother and move on to the dandelions. I would like to plant myself, again. Gently gather my roots into a ball pulled from the compost bin and pat the soil down around my torso. Spread fertilizer. Water. But all I seem to do right now is unwind bittersweet vines and dig up dandelions. Avery Martin 23
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jul 24 - billboards (left) jul 24 - puddle (right) Clara Callahan
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reflections Edited by Callie Wohlgemuth Photos by Zoe Fieldman
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Scheherazade
Remember the day we pulled the bodies out of the lake? It was a warm, sticky-green summer’s day, and the water was deathly still the way it only gets in late August, the air so hot you could feel it brush against your skin like a living thing. Clouds of mosquitoes hung over the water, buzzing, and the trees dripped in their leaves like green tendrils. The church steeple stuck up from the lake’s center, the deepest part of itself, like a white woman’s hand extended, holding out a sword. Or perhaps it was a dream. It’s a dream I’ve had many times before, so many times it’s warped past memory, if it was ever a memory to begin with. It was not the kind of lake filled with secret monsters or fairy queens. It was the kind of lake that was only full of water: unrelenting, uncaring, unfeeling. The kind of lake that was a Biblical flood. When the waters came, the horses ran and did not stop running, until night fell and they forgot they were horses and still they kept running, just legs and the memory of legs and the feeling of moving with the wind until they were becoming it. It’s not like trees, where the roots dig into the ground and draw up water and the water turns into life. It’s the opposite of that. The town is on the ground and the water is on top of it, crushing it down, and its naked roots are stretching up into the air and drawing in nothing, nothing at all. The story was this: there was a town, once, which was near a river, which was near a smaller lake, which was damm(n)ed. And one day the stones of the dam were removed one by one, on purpose, and then the water — which was the strongest thing in the world, and already straining at its boundaries to burst free — swallowed it all up, the entire thing. We pulled the bodies out of the blue-brown still water and they were not people any longer but lake-things. And their eyes were open and staring, but it wasn’t frightening, only horribly, horribly sad. Then we rolled up the rug so they wouldn’t drip onto it and dressed them in warm clothes again, dried them lovingly and brushed back their hair until it shone. The song on the radio was tinny and bright and we sliced up apples and fed them to each other, bright red slice by bright red slice. The people stayed dead, though. Now when the tide sinks low, you can see the tops of the houses emerge like ruined skeletons, dripping green and crusted with algae, full of smooth dark stones. Fish swim through them like ghosts. They have no use for walls and ceilings, or jewelry, or window frames. Meanwhile, the light breaks against our window, so brightly it hurts. Meanwhile, the song on the radio spins on but we have stopped dancing. That means it’s noon, that means we’re inconsolable. Tell me how this and love, too, will ruin us. And the lake with the town as its bones turns silver when the light hits it, arcs up, becomes a mirror for the grieving sky. After “Scheherazade,” by Richard Siken
Kate Turner 27
up in the air Margaret Wiss
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Visiting Dublin
Visiting Dublin Death is on everybody’s minds here. It is on mine too. Yesterday the bus driver spoke of his 52-year-old sister, succumbed to cancer, buried two weeks ago, old as bones, strong as walls, his Dublin-city accent thick in his mouth. Sara (who I don’t know) said her grandmother died three years ago and left her the house. Shrugged her shoulders. They keep digging up bodies from the bog, immortalized things. Didn’t ask for preservation. In my room with the window closed, I smell peat. the soft scent of it. The streetlamp I can’t block out. On the backs of my eyelids I see us all walking a trail with tear strewn cheeks, hearts in our throats, feet in the dirt. I bury my dead here. In the soft swamp of my chest. I bury them deep.
Izzy Kalodner 29
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A R T I S T
S P O T L I G H T :
THE CHILDLIKE EMPRESS
The Childlike Empress is a multidimensional artist creating dynamic work focusing on mental health, sexuality, fluidity and healing from trauma. They grew up in NYC, but currently reside in Pittsburgh where they have been working on their music, visual art and many other projects. They released their debut album “Take Care of Yourself” last year on their birthday. The album can be found on all streaming services. This informal interview with Pittsburgh-based musician, The Childlike Empress, was conducted by Zoë Fieldman, Ayu Suryawan, and Callie Wohlgemuth on June 27th, 2020. This text is adapted from the full conversation, which is available at opencallmag.weebly.com.
Re: your spotify bio talking about how this album deals with a situation that caused you to have to leave your home, where do you look for home now and what does it mean to you? Yeah, I love that question. I think home for me is myself… home for a lot of my life, I felt like I was always trying to escape what was home, so it never felt like home because it was unstable, it was toxic, it was unhealthy. I never referred to myself as being homeless because I always had a place to lay my head, but it was very chaotic. I feel like that phase really made me make a home out of myself. Home is wherever you feel most loved and where you feel comfortable being vulnerable and where you feel comfortable resting your head and not feeling scared of someone stealing your shit or harming you. And where you feel like you can truly be yourself without filter. That feeling of love and acceptance and and safety is a big thing for me because I feel like so many of us, especially young queer people and a lot of young people in general, grow up with their house not feeling like home to them. It’s really beautiful to be able to grow up a little bit and find that. Based on your social media presence, it appears like you have a very strong sense of identity, what has your journey looked and felt like to get you to this place? Are you your final form or are you still evolving? I feel like so much of my identity has always been there. However, I definitely have changed a lot in my life. But I really only found Self love once I hit my rock bottom at the hands of somebody else. 33
What do you do to take care of yourself in order to facilitate healthy growth? What prevents you from self care or do you have any advice for people who may feel guilty for participating in acts of self care? Be mindful of energy suckers, I call them vampires. Be mindful of energy vampires, because there are people who suck you dry of all your goodness until you have nothing left but bitterness because you gave everything to everyone. I’m still working through it, it’s a fine balance between giving and helping others, and just being really into yourself. Like really seeing yourself as a romantic partner. Get to know yourself and make sure you like yourself. This is especially something that quarantine is bringing up for a lot of people, like people can’t sit with themselves. They can’t stand themselves. If you can’t stand yourself then how are you moving in your relationships? There’s no shame in loving yourself. There’s no shame in being good to yourself at all. Talk to us a little bit more about your spirituality and your witchcraft. I feel like so many young people, especially afab people, were little witches from the start, like making potions in the yard and just doing weird little things. I look back, and I was totally fucking casting spells. I’ve always known that witchcraft was in my blood. I’m a second generation immigrant and there’s absolutely witchcraft on both sides of my family, but through colonialism, both sides of
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my family were heavily assimilated so I don’t have a direct tie with my family’s witchcraft. Magic is literally energy. We all believe in energy. We’re all little vibrating particles of energy that we can see. We all believe in Newton’s laws and things like that, it’s really the same thing, because word is vibration. It’s a vibration of energy, so there’s so much power and strength in word. I do a lot of kitchen magic and a lot of sex magic. I think witchcraft is more accessible than people realize. Some people claim it a little too hard, without doing the work. But I do believe anyone can do it, and I don’t think it needs to always be some big dramatic thing. I think, by default, people are magic. And I think we owe it to ourselves to really embrace that fact. One of the biggest things wrong with society is that not enough people like to believe that they’re powerful. But also, there are people who are in power like the government, politicians, and all that. Those people have power in a capitalist society and the patriarchy, but that to me is false power. My witchcraft is very personal, it’s a combination of my cultures. As I’m trying to learn more about my cultures, it’s just what sits right in my spirit at the moment. Witchcraft is working towards a goal, but also it’s a balance between striving towards something and letting go. Have your spiritual practices influenced your art and music? In what ways? Oh, for sure. I feel like all of my songs are spells. My album was my healing process for sure. That was my way of getting over what happened to me in that relationship. And it’s weird because I’ve been having a hard time writing music and I feel like it’s because I’m in a good place right now. I have no heartbreak. Speaking more on your influences, what are your musical inspirations? How do they manifest in this album? My friend gave me my banjo and I wrote the album, like I wrote the album very quickly. I’m constantly learning. I do want to know more about all of my instruments. The music really just came from a place of sitting with my instruments and finding something that felt good in my spirit and the words started coming out. There’s absolutely artists that influence me, I can barely even begin to name them, especially because I want to make so many different kinds of music. But, I really feel like this album specifically came from myself. When you envision someone listening to your music, what do you see? It came out on my birthday, which is in late October; I’m a Scorpio. And then a lot of people were like, ‘I am so happy!’ This album is like the perfect spooky season 35
album, especially somewhere north east, where it gets very gray and cold and kind of melancholy. I feel like a lot of the album is about transitioning and things like that. I envision somebody smoking a J on their porch and the rain falling. It’s definitely an album for solitude, for sure. An album for sitting and introversion and probably smoking some weed. While this album came out last fall, the song ACAB clearly is in direct conversation with issues that are just now starting to get a new wave of attention. Both then and now how has such movements like BLM influenced your relationship with your art. The way that things are moving right now it’s like, I’m not gonna say it stunted my art because it almost places blame, but it almost makes me feel selfish creating any art that isn’t directly tied to this. I’m not gonna say it’s our duty, but I think that Black art will always be important. It will always be up to us to continue making art because I don’t believe that this is the end of the world. I think this is the end of a world that never served really anyone except for mainly white men. It’s a war on all sides, and I really feel like the only people that can guarantee that this world gets to keep going is definitely Black and Indigenous people. It’s up to white people to be ending racism. So I think that Black people should continue to be joyous and continue to find solace in things like art and music. I think that we need to keep being storytellers. I think we need to keep capturing our greatness. I feel blessed to feel safe and to feel healthy, but I’d be lying if I wasn’t still nervous, like every single fucking day. I do want to keep making art that makes me feel safe and, you know, perhaps, does the same thing as the album and can make other people feel held in some way. What is your relationship with the word community? Community such a big word. It gets thrown around so much, but I feel like strong communities with open communication are really important. We should be looking out for our physical neighbors, especially if you’re living in a gentrified neighborhood and you’re contributing to gentrification. What you really see is just so much transphobia and homophobia in the Black community, even Black people being like, ‘why are you destroying businesses?’ I’m just like, you clearly don’t get it. It’s a very long line of brainwashing and assimilation that people do to fit into this world. I almost don’t even blame them. That transphobia and homophobia… and like assimilation to whiteness is all a product of colonialism. Before we were ever invaded by European people, trans people were held in super high regard, they were seen as holy. And the violence against trans people, especially Black trans women. It’s a really dark thing. It’s 36
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hard to know that the future is in community, when I feel like my own community can’t even get it together. It’s hard, but it makes me that much more thankful for community to see sex workers, to see queer people, to see trans people taking care of each other and showing up for each other, but we need more people to show up. When you picture the future, what do you see as your utopia? Can you picture one? We’re all so accepting of this nihilistic standpoint that the world is going to end in some disgusting fiery apocalypse versus Zombies or like the Ice Age. We’re so willing to accept that extreme of doom and chaos and death and never being able to rebuild. We put so much energy into that. But why can’t we put that energy into projecting joyful images of ourselves into the future? For me, utopia… And it’s hard to not see it as a super cyber like Cyborg thing, but, I want to have a homestead, I want to have a sizable chunk of land that is, yes, for me, but I would also like to be able to house not only my friends and my family, but to create a large network and village of mainly Black and Indigenous POC. Mostly queer people and mostly femmes. We would just practice radical caretaking and protection. Only taking what is appropriate from hens and from bees and from the earth because when I’m working with nature and witchcraft, I always ask for permission. I want to have a fucking queer Black farm. I want to raise my babies with my friends, I want to raise animals, not for slaughter and like grow all of my own food and make and have a whole apothecary, and on my land. To know that my deepest desire for myself and my future’s so many other people’s goals as well, that’s what’s keeping me going right now. Because I want to just fucking tuck my head into the sand, just like wait until the world is burning. But as long as we’re focusing energy into the negative outcomes, that’s where we’re going to go. Our thoughts are power, the things that we choose to believe in are powerful, so I think we need to be thinking about utopia. For some people utopia is heaven and getting to the afterlife. But I’m like, no, I want that now. I deserve that in this lifetime.
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Higher Power Mavis Moon 42
Callie Wohlgemuth 43
Structural Clara Callahan
inside outside early summer
Lila Goldstein 44
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AIR AND SPACE Edited by Callie Wohlgemuth Photos by Zoe Fieldman 46
song for homecoming After spending a long time looking for a home outside my body, here are a few options I have found: 1. An interest in bird watching that compels me to stand quietly whenever I hear the punctuated calls that birds cry out in motion. At home in Delaware this early in the spring, these calls are made mostly by robins, cardinals, and small finches and sparrows (house and song, respectively). My mother taught me a ritual for the first time I see a robin every year, one that she learned from her mother who probably learned it from her mother, too. A ritual passed from mother to daughter who became mother and passed it to daughter who became mother and passed it to me (non-daughter / child / (???), still in the process of becoming). A ritual that involves licking the tip of your thumb, pressing it firmly and gently into the center of your palm, and then making a fist and using its outer edge to stamp the place where you pressed your thumb down. This spring, when I saw my first robin in Massachusetts, I did it wrong. I remembered the lick and the thumbprint but not the stamp. I harbor a secret fear that this small mistake of letting the spit linger in my palm, un-stamped triggered the outbreak of a global pandemic that forced my friends and me off campus for the best season of the year, when everything blooms 47
bright after a long winter of graybrown and coldblue. The robins see the coming of this season before any of us, I think— they recognize its imminence as the ground begins to thaw enough for them to dig into it with their beaks and pull out limp, pink-bellied worms. This is a sign that’s easy to miss through layers of socks and boots and dry grass. Maybe spring would seem to come sooner if we spent more time digging. This way our luck wouldn’t hinge on a small ritual based on the coming of a small bird. Although, isn’t it nice that it does? It is a small delight to be attentive to little flighty things who know better than us that spring is coming. It is a kindness to listen well. It is magical to build a ritual from the non-human. * 2. More than one shelter of unknown origin made of branches and fallen logs, happened upon in pursuit of an unexpectedly bold pileated woodpecker. I put the cheap binoculars I bought as a gift to myself back into the pocket of my denim jacket and step inside the lean-to I’ve found. From far off it looked like a group of young trees, fallen together into an auspicious structure, by chance — as I come closer I realize that someone has made it, dragged branches to this place and nestled them into the notch of a standing tree, their bases splayed out to cover more ground. I imagine that when it was first built, a roof of leaves covered the gaps between the branches to make a tidy little fort. I start to think about the implications of the military word fort and their effects on how children play, but decide instead to step inside the shelter and let myself be delighted by it. Inside, it feels like a memory. My childhood best friend and her family lived in a house that backed up into dense woods. 48
The house was pink, the woods brown. My friend and I were both tomboys— we don’t keep in touch but I wonder if she is gay now, too. Much of our play consisted of climbing the trees in front of her family home, and exploring the woods behind it. Sometimes we joined with her other friends from the neighborhood, but mostly we were alone. The woods behind her house opened up onto a creek, which in childhood seemed impossibly wide as we hopped from rock to rock to reach an island in the center, from which we would throw goldfish crackers to the fish below (a harmless cannibalism). We played house, we played adventurers, we played archeologists, we tried to start fires, we caught fish in the mouths of gatorade bottles, and we built forts. I went to sleepaway camp as a kid, and I fancied myself a survivalist. I knew the difference between a lean-to and a wickiup and a spider shelter and I was happy to offer directions on how to construct each. We shimmied into small openings, huddled together on top of damp leaves with muddy knees and gritty fingernails, alone together inside our small makeshift house for some time, before by some magic we found ourselves crossing back over the creek and traversing the woods back to her house, just in time for her mother’s rice cooker to click off, and her younger sister to have finished setting the table. My friend never fell into the creek, but on more than one occasion I slipped into the shallow water, and had to walk in through the back door of her family home, sopping wet, to borrow her older brother’s clothes for dinner while mine dried over the railing of the back deck. I doubt any of the forts we built have held up well enough to be encountered by birdwatchers, but I hold out some kind of romantic hope that a squirrel or a bird or a fairy found shelter in one of them, or that another pair of young tomboys cozied up inside. * 3. A stand of scrub pines huddled together on a cliff face, hardened by the wind but forever opening themselves to the sea. My partner is from Rhode Island, the smallest state in the U.S. (a fact I mercilessly tease her about since Delaware is only the second smallest state). Rhode 49
Island’s nickname is “the Ocean State.” I visited her in her parents’ house over winter break. I rode on a train for five hours from Wilmington to Providence, and she picked me up in her mother’s car, wearing a white sweater. I only stayed there for a few days before we rode back to campus together, but while I was there we drove to Newport, RI to walk along the cliffs there. It was January, and the colors of the ocean were muted; they faded into the sand and the sky, blue and gray and brown and green all at once, broken up by the gulls dotting the beach and the sky, crying out relentlessly. We kissed next to a stand of scrub pines, whose hard beauty we share a love for. It was cold and windy in a way that only got more biting as we ventured further from the shore along the cliff walk. We held hands the whole way anyway and by the end my knuckles were white and raw, opened by being in love in the face of the biting ocean gale. We stopped holding hands for a moment because we found a folded slip of unlined stark white paper on the ground as we walked and I insisted on picking it up. It wasn’t creased, or well-worn, or secreted away — it looked as if someone must have just gently laid it on the ground with the intention of us finding it. It had a string of numbers written on it in blue ink. I thought it might be a code, a first clue of some kind of mission or mystery we were meant to embark on right away. I envisioned us in a crime procedural show, hunkered in front of an array of bright screens, typing the numbers into some database to trace them; maybe it was an IP address, a password to some secret site for spies, the phone number of a mafia boss who wanted us to a run a heist. I wondered why it had been left just for us. I imagined it being dropped by some carrier pigeon or, more likely in the seaside town, a carrier gull. She thought it was just a slip of paper that had drifted out of someone’s pocket. The cliff ran right into a college campus, maybe it was a library call number, drawn out of someone’s pocket by the wind or dropped like litter. She is sensible that way. I thought this was much less exciting, but folded up the piece of paper anyway and secreted it away in my pocket to be happened upon on some later date — a reminder of this hour we spent together, narrowly avoiding certain death or imprisonment during a heist gone awry because of her sensibility, watching the waves crash onto the rocks, eroding them right in front of our eyes at an imperceptible pace, wondering about whether or not anyone did or had ever lived in the lighthouse barely visible on the horizon, watching the scrub pines open themselves to the seas, opening ourselves in the same way. I texted Kate to ask what she remembers of that day, the scrub pines and the slip of paper stand out in my mind, mundane objects as representations of a tender love beside the ocean. 50
She told me about memory— “how strange and nice it is to take someone new and loved to somewhere you have memories of people who you’ve known for a long time and loved.” She told me about a bridge on that walk, one where she has taken a lot of photos of friends and family, one where she now has a memory of me. I texted her because I read somewhere that a good way to practice writing an essay like this is to think of three words or objects and write from them. I asked her for three words about the cliff walk to write a poem from, but she said that was too hard. I planned to restate what she said in my own words but she is a writer and she said it better than I could have and now I am writing this on my back porch, 308 miles away from Rhode Island, and thinking about how hard and how nice it is to be in love right now. I wonder if the scrub pines feel that way about standing forever against the sea. * 3. A fantasy of myself embodied in older butches. My aunt is the first butch I ever met. She is the one who texted me first when I came out as queer, a quiet offering of support that felt like a welcome. She is the one who googled “gender neutral term for niece” when I told my family that I’m nonbinary and has called me her nibling ever since. She is the one who offers me the tee shirts she has outgrown— the latest offering is a bright red, well worn tee shirt with “This shirt is written in Braille. Please read carefully!” emblazoned above a series of raised dots across the chest, an invitation for someone to run their hand across it. I recognize that it is in poor taste to mobilize casual ableism as a pickup line, but I still ask for it when my aunt texts me “Looking at my T-Shirts. Thinking i gots too many. Got yer eyeballs on any that you’re hoping I Outgrow?” because it feels like an offering. We repeat this ritual every few months— the stack of thin t-shirts in her closet seemingly inexhaustible, constantly diminishing while my stack grows taller. When I wear one of them, I feel strong and well rooted, like I have been projected into my very near dyke future somehow when I shrug it on over my binder. I hear my aunt in the jokes I tell, in the way I talk to my dogs, in how I show affection for my partner. I see her in how I imagine my life at age 37. Except I don’t like football. The first person my aunt dated 51
has since transitioned. He was one of the first lesbians I ever knew and now he is the closest to being a trans family member that I have— in classic queer fashion he and my aunt have remained close friends since their breakup. I texted him when I was first thinking about top surgery, he texted me to ask what kind of tattoo he should get to cover his scars (I said he should get a tree). When I get top surgery I will want a chest tattoo, too, but I don’t want mine to be a cover up. I want it to draw people’s eyes to the scars emblazoned across my chest in angry red, then smooth pink, then white. I know what my scars will look like because I already have three scars on my chest from heart surgery as an infant. When I think about my eventual voluntary double mastectomy I think about the place where all of my scars will meet. I hope whoever I love then will kiss that spot: the point where the past and future of my body meet. * 4. The belief that revolution is an act of love. Good friends and a lover with a dimpled smile who share the same conviction.
I am queer and I am in love. I am in love in many ways, and many things. I am 52
in love with the downy woodpecker clinging to a branch of the newly budding tree in my backyard. I am in love with each and every one of my friends. This love powers infinite dance parties and leads me to ask very big questions. I am in love with my partner and the ways she talks about the future. I am in love with the infinite and infinitesimal delights that draw my eye within any given day (a house with a yellow door, a flower bush with enormous flowers that I cannot name, the smell of rain, the buds of honeysuckles that are waiting to open and be eaten, etc.). I am in love with a world that doesn’t exist because we haven’t built it yet. I am in love with these words from my favorite book, Confessions of the Fox by Jordy Rosenberg: “There is no utopia of the Damned save the one we will make ourselves, and we will make it.” I am in love with an uncountable number of other words. And all of this, taken in its component parts or as a collection, is revolutionary. It is revolutionary because of the ways capitalism has taught us to restrict our love to our (white) parents, our (white) spouses, and our two (white) children. Being in love in an infinity of ways makes me want to be a better person working to build a better world; a world beyond the walls of prisons and detention centers, beyond borders, beyond policing, and beyond capitalism. All of this love is what teaches me that revolution is necessary, and that this revolution must be built by and for our collective liberation — a liberation through love and struggle. We have to be in love with the world because we have been taught to do the opposite. Doing the opposite is revolutionary. There is something to be said, I think, about using plural pronouns and being a radical; my faith in and love for the collective must necessarily extend to myself. “They are striving for liberation” means me as much as it means all of my friends and comrades. I wonder what it would be like to think in terms of “we”— not in Genesis P-Orridge’s pandrogyne sense of two becoming one, but in the revolutionary sense of all of us as entangled, bound up in each other’s liberation and joy. We will dig down into the soil and feel its coolness and warmth, alternately. We will hold seeds in the palms of our hands, letting them drop in divots We have dug into the dark earth. We will reluctantly go to our jobs but when our paychecks come We will use them to buy more seeds and to donate to our bail funds. We will work, but not tirelessly. We will feed ourselves from the garden around the back of the house. 53
We will go to bed whenever We want, with whoever we want. If We decide to, We will have a dance party. We will listen to shitty pop or bright folk. If We don’t want to dance We will listen to tracy chapman or We will listen to gil scott heron. We will spend a lot of time imagining our utopia and thinking about how it is already entangled with our reality. When We awake in the morning We will rise and make us breakfast. If there are leftovers, We will write a note to us that says “please eat me!” and when We come home we will see a note next to the empty skillet that says “We did! it was delicious! were these potatoes from the garden?” We will smile. We will go to the garden and dig up some more potatoes to make dinner for us. We will admire the dirt under our fingernails. We care about us. We care about everyone else just as much. Come take from the garden! Come dream with us! Come build something new! * 5. My own body In all of its faults and discontinuities it makes for a lovely house 54
with a warm kitchen in which the ones I love can gather and an open window through which the setting sun shines and we hear the dusksong of birds; sparrows, finches, jays and others alighting from feeder to sky to fencepost to windowsill to sky. All this while soup simmers on the stove and our winebright laughter mingles in the air with cuminthymerosemary and lemon zest and the tang of yeast from bread rising in the oven. All of this announcing our arrival on the threshold of a meal eaten together— bread broken stories sung hands held love lipped into being by all of us together. My body as home. My body as (y)ours. My body as belonging to all of us.
Lucy James-Olson 55
PDA Megan Hill
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[running almost empty off I-90 us] running almost empty off I-90 us and the motorcycles getting full here all old leather boots white shirts denim us too but just a little odd out the man behind the counter eyes us putting 20 on 3 eyes us buying dollar coffee eyes us changing the oil man at the next pump calls me baby sweater stars & stripes you need a hand with that baby? means you can’t do that yourself can you hot gasoline slick baby queer here means cliff dwelling sheer & jagged queer here means spit n sin queer means nothing unless you say it out loud they get an eyeful still call us baby dragonfly hovering by the touchscreen & next door someone’s grandma’s hydrangeas eyeing us too all beauty like them all full Maren McKenna
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untitled fountain pens a mental list a crying whale at a desert heart ghost feelings hammering down collective dreams in a dying flesh cheesy drool an incredulous gasp formed in abandonment; misfiled the soft parts of all of us close their eyes; melody arise wishing only misunderstandings die
Jeno Zhou 58
BigSqueeze Dewa Ayu 59
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Photos by Sikkiim 61
Purple Bow
A store with tags too much for me leafing through tags too much for me I go to the little things for me The accessories. my eye casts its anchor on the bow Holding down the bow for me Bringing it to the surface and placing it nearer for me she tells me its me Its for me the purple stripes paint my mind-walls the lavender color of my childhood room For me? Yes it is me. I am this bow. But the bow was only once for me though Only once for the past the little girl Who talked to stuffed animals in her purple room, danced in her purple room, smoked in her purple room and then fucked in her purple room. But Oh the Bow for me i shove that anchor in my dark pocket and snap off the hook i stroll out with its weight bearing on my stride and the anchor bows to me As the purple bow Is for me but not anymore mine.
Juliette Harrison 62
viole(n)t Edited by Callie Wohlgemuth Photos by Zoe Fieldman 63
stream of consciousness Zora Duncan
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from the charcoal night. She sets fire to the sky so I may watch my hope burn, and then when the ashes settle the night befalls me once again.
little giant little giant I wish I could lay on my side like a little giantess offering up her body as a mountain With steep inclines stretching up to a supple peak A climb whose completion marks an accomplishment Not Shame I do not wish to be these rolling hills With hand holds And foot holes A climb whose completion marks Shame Not Accomplishment I want you to carve me valleys Yes with your fingertips but also with your river Coursing through my veins as your fingertips rain down on me Eroding away my rough patches Until all that is left Are the pure minerals underneath The mineable Valuable Material Hiding underneath my landscape
Carve your name into my skin This time with scorching flames from your mouth Letting my hills roll away Revealing the little giantess still fast asleep underneath
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Art by Claire Weber
Zoe Fieldman 67
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Sculptures by Jordan Ballard 69
selfie Dewa Ayu
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Miss Domestic, U.S.A.
The wedding itself had been inconsequential, full as it was with people she didn’t know. Joey’s dress was foamy, fizzing down her arms with spiraling sequins, and it itched at the elbows. The reception, too, was unmemorable, except when Silvie, the maid of honor, drunkenly broke down in tears while giving her speech, going on and on about how Joey and Douglas were made for each other. Joey had never done well being the center of attention, so it worked that she kept deflecting to Douglas. Well-meaning relatives on both sides approached them at dinner, congratulating them on a beautiful ceremony and their compatibility, and Douglas was mercifully graceful, shaking hands and offering gratitudes. If there had been babies at the wedding, Douglas would have kissed them. It was times like these that Joey wondered if she had stumbled into playing the role of a politician’s wife instead of a lawyer’s. The word wife, still tangy, reverberated around her skull. Who was this man? He looked so different when he was sleeping, not as handsome. She had met Douglas less than a year ago and now, naked under the sheets, she felt more clothed than in any other relationship, more walls up thanks to a signature on a marriage certificate. He was a midwestern-raised lawyer who made her stomach do, if not somersaults, then at least log rolls. Perhaps the more incisive question would be relative to herself: who will she be in this marriage? And, with Douglas, who has she become? Partially to pee, partially to fend off an anxiety attack, Joey slid out from under the 71
cream-colored sheets and began the day. It started with a plate of rubbery eggs, Joey’s attempt at roleplaying breakfast-in-bed. She had never really made food for Douglas before — their early courtship was full of takeout and fancy restaurants. He paid for everything. But this was their honeymoon, and if Joey had to reinvent her wheel to fit the mold of a wife, then she would reinvent it. “Something burning?” asked Douglas, rubbing sleep from his eyes as he joined her in the kitchen. Joey, in an embarrassing show of reflex, flung the eggs into the garbage can and burst into tears. Douglas, making his classic face of confusion, opened his arms and she stepped into them, letting herself be wrapped by his arms. “I don’t know how to cook,” she mumbled into his shoulder. “That can’t be true,” he said, smiling at her. “You’re perfect. You can do anything.” “No,” she said, pushing out of his embrace with reticent frustration. “I really don’t. I refused to learn from my mom, and college was full of dining halls and restaurant take-out, and after graduation I ate grilled cheeses every day.” “It’s no problem, baby,” he said, turning his head down towards hers. “It’s not an issue. I can figure it out.” “Okay,” Joey said, putting her tears aside for now and kissing him. “Now, can we have sex again?” “Again?” he laughed. “Again,” she said, and so they did. Joey had assumed his solution would be delegational, hiring a chef or one of those monthly meal passes. But it turned out she had been enrolled in cooking classes offered at Draeger’s Grocery by the wife of Alan Hill, a partner at Douglas’ firm. Daily cooking classes seemed a big leap from Joey’s hands-off expectations. She was beyond nervous for the first class, but Douglas hadn’t given her another option, and so she took the bus downtown at 5:30pm on a Tuesday. Douglas’s boss’s wife turned out to be a 28 year old bleach-blonde named Marguerite Suzanne Laderoute-Hill. She was obnoxiously pretty, a kind of luxuriant overseas-er. She spoke in un accent charmant, wore floral jumpsuits under gingham aprons, and needled Joey steadily about the air bubbles in her pastry dough or burnt edges on her Julienne-cut zucchini slices. 72
Naturally, Joey hated her. It was partially her jealous nature, sure, but Marguerite didn’t make it any easier on herself, dancing from table to table and laughing with her high-register, chirpy giggle. She was over-the-top frills and annoyance. The others in the class weren’t as bad. They were mostly couples, cashing in on anniversary present gift cards to feed each other mushroom crostinis or scoops of butternut hummus. Even though she was the same age as many of the others, she found herself — as the lone individual — being adopted by kind pairs. Gloria and Fern Boh-Kippens were especially sweet, telling Joey when to turn the oven temperature down if Marguerite was helping someone else. And Joey felt she was picking the lessons up fairly well — sure, she wasn’t a culinary genius like Martha Daughtry, but at least she didn’t catch her salmon on fire like dorky Eoin Cone. “You know, this isn’t bad,” Marguerite had fluttered, tasting Joey’s freshly-made tortilla one Thursday night after class had ended and the others had left. “If you had taken it off the heat just a minute earlier, I think it would’ve been quite good.” “I know,” Joey grumbled reluctantly, wrapping the rest of the scorched tortillas in tinfoil to bring home to Douglas. “I just don’t know how to know when it’s ready. I follow the same instructions you give everyone else, but they seem to have a knack for knowing when to bend the rules.” “It just comes from practice,” Marguerite said, her voice lilting at the edges. “Have you been retrying any of the recipes at home?” The truth was, Joey found the daily classes exhausting enough. Cooking required so much energy and detailed attention. She needed to separate egg yolks from whites while checking the chicken broth, or open the oven, slide the potatoes out, whisk the cream to stiff peaks, all while keeping her elbows in and apron clean. At the end of each class, they all gathered around and tasted each other’s results. A naturally withdrawn, introverted sort, Joey wasn’t used to the level of social intensity, and Joey started having nightmares of her classmates pulling acidic, Edvard Munchian faces at her failures. And after the classes, Joey would drag herself home on the bus, feeding Douglas her lesson leftovers from decorated tupperwares or saran-wrapped bowls. She hardly ever ate the results herself. She found herself emotional watching her husband eat — the meals she spent hours toiling over — while scrolling on his phone or eating four, five bites at a time. “Not really,” Joey answered. 73
“Well,” Marguerite said, patting Joey’s hand and getting her keys out of her plum-colored purse, “Practice makes perfect, as they say.” “I didn’t know you assigned homework,” Joey replied, sounding snarkier than she wanted to. Marguerite took her hand off Joey’s, stood up to leave. “Only for my favorite pupils,” Marguerite said, then nodded towards the exit. “Want me to drive you to the bus stop?” Marguerite seemed okay, Joey thought. Not as conceited as her accent preluded. And so, on Marguerite’s recommendation, Joey began cooking constantly. She kept going to classes, learning sauces and stews and tiered cakes. A new recipe every day was unsustainable for her memory, so she was returning to her favorites, or the challenges, and cooking them midday — zesting lemons, baking vegetables, and sauteing steak. The meat was the hardest to practice. Raised vegetarian, she was squeamish at first, prodding raw poultry and inadvertently letting the red meats go too long on the stovetop. “I like ’em a little bloodier,” Douglas said to her one day, after cutting through a uniformly brown piece of beef. “A good medium-rare.” The practice helped, and Joey started feeling a sense of lightness, almost elation, when tying her apron on and looking at the day’s recipe. She was still tired nearly all the time, but didn’t feel quite so crumpled when her dish needed more salt or less vinegar. “Alan asked who I drive to the bus stop every day,” Marguerite said some Friday evening as the two of them walked onto the second level of the parking garage. She had already pulled her keys out, clicked them to hear a faint beep as the doors unlocked from 30 feet away. “Why?” Joey asked. “He’s very stingy about paying for gas. But anyway, it almost seemed like he was worried I was cheating on him.” “The hypocrite,” Joey said without pause. When Marguerite frowned at her, asked if Joey knew anything Marguerite didn’t, Joey realized she had been putting Douglas’ bland face to Alan’s name, the two of them equal in their distance from her, their inextricably detached workaholic natures. Douglas wasn’t cheating on her, as far as she knew, but he possessed that certain hypocrisy nevertheless, of expecting things 74
of her that Joey would never dare expect of him, like unqualified affection and cooking. “What?” Marguerite prompted again, and Joey shrugged, choosing her words carefully. “Just that, I know you are always so diplomatic with him. We never ask them where they are when they’re working late. I don’t know, I spoke without thinking.” They had reached the car, and Marguerite unlocked the doors again, a nervous tic. They ducked their heads and slid into their seats. “Douglas wouldn’t know I was still taking cooking classes if I didn’t remind him every night,” Joey admitted, fumbling with her seatbelt. “That can’t be true. You’ve gotten so much better at cooking, he must notice that!” “Maybe. Or maybe he thinks it just comes with the territory.” “What territory?” “Being a wife, I guess. I don’t know. I still feel like I’m putting on a costume every morning.” Marguerite patted Joey’s thigh, a vaguely paternalistic gesture, as she looked out the rear window and pulled out of the parking spot. “Your marriage is still so young. Besides, I know that you are a good wife.” “You don’t know that,” Joey said. Marguerite’s hand was still on her leg, and Joey found herself holding her breath the way teenage girls do when someone sits on their lap. An attempt at taking less space, maybe, or an exercise in laser focus. “I may not know the nuances of your marriage,” said Marguerite, pronouncing nuance with French-accented zeal, “but I do know you. And you are everything a man would want in a wife.” One weekend, Douglas was away for a legal conference in Christmas, Florida. He promised to be back by lunchtime on their 6 month anniversary. Joey had decided to make macaroni and cheese. Discounted as simple and childish by other home cooks (an identifier she had recently started calling herself in a rare show of private indulgence), she found joy in making the cheese roux, letting her spoon linger in the pan as it paved canals in the thickening sauce. To dress up the dish, she usually 75
added breadcrumbs to the top and baked the whole bowl for a crispy finish. Today, though, she was running late, as Douglas had already landed, and she still needed to add more cheese. Shredding cheddar into the saucepan as fast as could, she hazarded a glance at the pasta water, which was boiling bubbles up over the side of the pot. She nudged the heat down with her socked foot, turned her head back towards the task at hand, and thwick — grated her knuckles along the sharp edge of the grater blade. Joey made a sound between an “ow” and an “oh” and an “ah,” then a sort of wounded hiss, and let the cheese grater clatter to the ground. She checked her hand. Blood scissored across three fingers, with flaps of skin covering the cuts. “Ouch,” she said firmly, like a community theater actor hitting the consonants at the end of a monologue, then took her hand over to the sink and ran it under cold water. After she patted her hands dry with a towel, she turned back to the stove to find, in her bubbling cheese, visible streaks of red. “Oh my god,” she found herself saying aloud. She grabbed a spoon and tried to scoop the blood out, but the wooden curve was thick and hard to wield delicately, so the most she did was spiral the red to fade into the rest of the sauce. Joey could hear the sizzle of the stovetop as she took the pan off the heat. Hands steady despite her scrambled thoughts, she strained the pasta and poured it into the cheese sauce, transferred it to a glass dish. She added the bread crumbs on top as planned and slid the dish into the oven. It felt almost normal, her heart beating against her ribs. Douglas was starving when the taxi dropped him off at their apartment. He told Joey this the second she greeted him at the door. He said it exactly that succinctly, too: “I’m starving.” The macaroni and cheese was already out of the oven, sending curls of steam to the ceiling. They ate lunch quietly, Douglas responding to emails, Joey picking at her salad. Douglas didn’t acknowledge their anniversary. Even after the long flight and airplane aroma, Joey could smell another woman’s perfume on his body. That evening, Joey initiated sex. This was rare; it was nearly always Douglas’s lowbrow attempts at flirty conversation that led to bed. But tonight, when she kissed him, she pretended she could taste her blood in him, and she let herself unspool. Joey had practice in fixation, leaning into boys until they became boyfriends, calling them late into the night until they shoved her away with pleads of needing space. The words were unspoken in her presence, but they followed her: ‘clingy,’ and, worse, ‘obsessive.’ Joey had often found herself playing the role of wife, even before Douglas. In the traditional plight of young womanhood, she mothered her high school boyfriends — or maybe therapized was more apt. But college had found her 76
in characteristic disillusionment with herself, zeugmatically dropped off at orientation with a shoddy sense of identity and a bright red comforter. Never one to think of herself as obsessed, Joey recognized her actions for what they were: study. Sure enough, she tracked her boyfriends’ habits (7:30am showers, science fiction by Aldous Huxley, coffee with two sugars), their quirks, likes and dislikes, how they wanted her to act. She would fall into putty, let them mold her one way or the other, for she loathed nothing more than needing to make decisions for herself. With the man secured and a permanent Mrs. modifier to her tax forms, she had been free to learn from Marguerite. These cooking classes were a study in culinary academia, an experiment in domesticity. Sneaking her own blood into her husband’s food, on the other hand, was more of an observatory science, and like a clinical researcher, her trials started small. Tiny, negligible operations, limiting her sample size to exactly 1 subject: Douglas. After the control experiment, which she called the Mac & Cheese Incident in her own mind, she remained cautious, letting a knife catch a tip of a finger or an apple peeler snag her palm. In such small quantities, it was easy for her to ignore what she was doing. But like so many other human things — alcohol, adultery — her tolerance quickly built up, and what had initially given her a thrill no longer did the job. Intrepidly forging her own path of inquiry, she felt a bit like a mad scientist sticking forks into sockets. More!!!! MORE!!!!! cried her personal Dr. Frankenstein, and she started aiming for veins. While she was becoming exceedingly successful in cooking class — (several times winning the hard-earned second bite of the teacher) — she was emboldened by her extracurricular elective. Douglas remained blissfully unaware of what he was consuming, and for some reason Joey didn’t find it surprising that the only person who noticed she was acting differently was Marguerite. “You’re peppy today,” said Marguerite, once again driving Joey to the bus station. The low summer sun filtered through the clouds as they zoomed out of the Draeger’s parking structure. Marguerite slid on sunglasses. “I’m proud of my risotto,” said Joey, when in reality she had been mulling over the lamb she had waiting in the fridge, which she planned on spicing up with thyme and red blood cells from her fleshy left index finger. “It was quite good,” Marguerite granted, “Eons better than your first attempt months ago. You’ve made great strides.” 77
“I feel like a different person.” “No, this was always there,” said Marguerite, taking her eyes off the road and looking directly into Joey’s for a moment. “It just needed to be pulled out by a masterful teacher comme moi.” “Don’t congratulate yourself too much,” Joey said through a smile. “I’m not wrong.” “You’re not wrong.” They were silent as Marguerite pulled over to the bus stop, where a man in a vile jacket stood under the peeling shelter. Joey unclicked her seatbelt but stayed sitting in Marguerite’s car for a moment longer. “What are you going to do when the class is over?” Marguerite asked. Joey didn’t like thinking about two weeks from then, when her evenings would be spent home alone waiting for Douglas to text her saying he was working late that night. “I think I’m going to have a dinner party,” she said, choosing her words carefully. “Douglas will want to invite you and Alan, of course.” “Oh, that’s wonderful! What’s on the menu?” Joey looked at Marguerite, young and beautiful and utterly trapped in a loveless green card marriage with a man twice her age. How could she be so happy in a life as dull and draining as hers must be? Then again, who was Joey to judge? “I haven’t decided yet,” Joey admitted. “And my bus is about to arrive. I’ll see you tomorrow.” Marguerite stayed parked illegally at the curb until Joey was securely on the bus, as she always did. The dinner party came faster than Joey had hoped. Marguerite’s final class was a celebration, and Joey was surprised that there were more tears than just her own. At first an attempt at caged domestic care for her husband, the cooking classes had been a welcome escape from the rest of her life. Douglas mistook her empty gaze 78
at dinner as reactionary loneliness, withdrawal from the acquaintance of adults her age, and so he had invited more of his coworkers — strangers — to their apartment for the party, and Joey had to expand the menu greatly. When Marguerite and her husband arrived early for Douglas and Alan to talk shop, Joey barely said hello before moving to the kitchen. She didn’t look behind her. She knew that Marguerite would follow. “Here, let me help.” Marguerite slid neatly into the space between Joey and the cabinet and started dicing raw tomatoes for the open-faced caprese sandwich on ciabatta, Joey’s selection for an appetizer. “Thanks,” said Joey, moving over to give her more room. They stood there in silence, sneaking glances at each other’s technique every once in a while. Eventually, Marguerite swept the tomatoes into a pile on the side of her cutting board and assessed the rest of the food preparation. “You’re going to need more butter,” she said, raising an eyebrow. “And some heavy cream, if you have any.” “Back of the fridge,” Joey said, seeing an opening and seizing it. Her heart beating wildly, Joey grabbed the knife. Marguerite was still chatting away, her head in the refrigerator, and Joey slid the blade across her thumb, dissecting through the skin and sending blossoms of blood onto the turkey. Quick now, Joey drip-dropped bloodlets into the pomegranate vinaigrette, into the red potatoes. “Joey!” came a voice from behind her, and Marguerite dropped the stick of butter she was holding. She advanced on Joey, her eyes wide. “Marguerite, I—” Joey started, with no intention of finishing. She couldn’t explain, couldn’t explain, couldn’t explain… Marguerite’s breathing got very loud. Even from across the kitchen Joey could hear her exhales as clearly as if she was right next to her, breathing on her neck. Marguerite’s pupils were so dilated it looked like her eyes were black discs. She stepped forward and took Joey’s hand. Joey glanced down, tried to tuck her thumb into the center of her palm, a futile evasion technique. She could feel her heart beating in her finger, pulsing small blood bubbles onto the flesh of her hand. Nervously, she tried her best to avoid smearing any blood or sweat on Marguerite’s hand, which was just as cool and dainty as the rest of her. Joey’s eyes cut sideways, to the food. She still needed to stick the turkey in the oven; it was that psychedelic raw pink. 79
Marguerite brought Joey’s hand close to her face and pulled Joey’s thumb out from hiding. And then, tremblingly, Marguerite took Joey’s thumb into her own mouth. Her tongue lightly palpitated Joey’s cut. This was done without breaking eye contact, and so Joey felt not only entirely unclothed, but stripped to the bone. In preparing a salmon dish, Joey sometimes went the extra mile and deboned the fish, grabbing kitchen pliers and pulling the brittle bones out through the body. She felt like this was happening to her here, like Marguerite was pulling Joey’s bones out from under the sinew and muscles and skin that defined her, like without those meaty bits Joey could be who she was meant to be: a mass of mostly blood and brain tissue and hair follicles. There is an art to brining a turkey. First, you put your store-bought pre-decapitated raw poultry into a pot. Add aromatics — rosemary, garlic, onions, carrots, a splash of lemon juice. Heat your water to just under a boil, add salt and stir until it dissolves. Pour the salty water into the pot, taking great care to douse the turkey evenly. Add 3 times as much cold, unsalted water. This will dilute the brine solution to the proper proportions, and the turkey should be fully submerged — drowned — in the water. If needed, take both hands and hold the turkey underwater. Don’t let it come up for air, no matter how much it squawks. Brine for 15 hours in the refrigerator, or until your husband gets home from sleeping with his secretary. Take the turkey out of the fridge, wash the brine off the bird. Smell the saltflakeseawater of oceanic passages. Remember the summer romances of your youth. Stare into space for so long that you forget where you are or what you are supposed to be doing and most importantly why you do it why you live your life according to someone else’s rules and why you find waking up in the morning worthwhile at all. Roast your turkey according to typical procedure.
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From the series “End of Summer Circus” Photo by Jillian Benham Model: Ayu Suryawan 81
The Word On Cheese Reese Hirota 82
In Unrealistic In Unrealistic Future Tense Future Tense This is the work, my dear. This is the bit we do wrong, every year. Guessing incorrectly again. My turn to cook. Your turn to light the fire. We are making for ourselves a cult of suffering and barring the door. Then we are remaking the cabin with windows. With hinges this time. I consider your application to replace the floorboards. You clean the bathroom sink. I knew I loved you when you loaded the dishwasher wrong and I told you so. I had never done that before. You knew you loved me when. I am emptying our bowl of sorrow. I am filling it up again. You are living for tomorrow as well as today. And for this moment where you stroke the back of your hand across my cheek. I am living for that too. I am waiting for the moment you turn to tell me what color we’re staining the wood. Isn’t that lovely. Isn’t that something else. You have not reloaded the dishwasher so I am doing it. I have not gone to the grocery store so you have taken our car to do the shopping. You are gone. I am not waiting for you to return. I am telling you to come back anyway. Izzy Kalodner
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Summer Songs Playlist Annalee and Reese
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Artist Statements Annalee and Reese Appleton, Maine / Long Beach, California We make playlists and post them on @reallygoodideaforapodcast on Instagram. “Summer Songs” features some great music we’ve been listening to lately! Azelia Assin Brooklyn, New York Hello! I’m Azelia and I do be making art sometimes I guess! Dewa Ayu Portland, Maine Dewa Ayu, who in real life goes by Ayu, is a multimedia artist. Their submissions for this issue take a focus on just ink on white paper and were produced in vulnerable states of mind. Jordan Ballard Hampshire College Jillian Benham Clara Callahan Boston, Massachusetts Zoe Fieldman Brooklyn, New York Zoe (they/them) writes one poem every five years, so please enjoy this one. Ella Giordano Northampton, Massachusetts Lila Goldstein Mount Holyoke College Juliette Harrison New York
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Sophia Hess Los Angeles, California My name is Sophia Hess (she/her). I’m primarily a visual artist currently studying Studio Art & Environmental Studies at Mount Holyoke College, and I center my artwork around themes of identity, nature, migration, while critiquing settler-colonialism as I try to untangle my own participation within these systems. Megan Hill Fayetteville, New York Megan, like many others, can currently be found in limbo. Megan occasionally writes and creates art and it seems that everything that Megan creates is a self-portrait of sorts. Reese Hirota Long Beach, California Reese (she/her) is a passing cloud in the shape of a college student studying statistics and computer science. As an artist she paints colorful gouache still lives and landscapes which reveal the plain magic in daily life. lucy james-olson Western Massachusetts lucy james-olson is a poet in western massachusetts. common themes of their poetry include: creeks, birds, and boyhood. Izzy Kalodner South Orange, New Jersey Izzy Kalodner writes with half an eye for optimism, and half an eye for the understandable absence of it. Poems draw her in due to just a simple line, and she endeavors to write her poetry in a similar fashion. Avery Martin Mount Holyoke College Maren McKenna Southern Maine Maren is a poet, gardener, bird enthusiast, and Libra from Southern Maine. When not reading or writing poetry, you can find them making wildly specific Spotify playlists, dreaming about queer discos, and driving across the country.
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Mavis Moon San Marcos, Texas I love you. Lily Reavis Colorado / Mount Holyoke College Casey Roepke San Francisco, California Casey Roepke continues to miss the queer comfort of Mount Holyoke College. She is interested in writing about women, domesticity, and bad husbands. She would recommend the song “Split for the City” by Peter and Kerry and a bowl of homemade mac and cheese. This is the first time that she is sharing a short story publicly and she is very nervous. Mira Rosenkotz Bainbridge Island, Washington Wolf Shen Sikkiim Los Angeles, California Ishan Summer Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts I’m a climber, chef, and poet with a fairly understated personality. More important to me than intelligence, talent, or any identifier is one’s capacity for kindness, as a theme in my creative endeavors and in my mundane life. Empathy and understanding have always been my biggest inspiration and continue to be something I strive for. Kate Turner Amherst, Massachusetts Kate is a student and writer from Rhode Island. She studies English Literature and Critical Social Thought at Mount Holyoke College, and is passionate about cooking, chocolate, and the transformative power of stories. Her writing often explores family, queerness, and magic of all kinds. Claire Weber Los Angeles, California
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Margaret Wiss Boston, Massachusetts / New York, New York Margaret Wiss (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist and scholar. Her work seeks to be shaped by each environment and the individuals who contribute to its development. She values the vitality of collaboration. She has an MFA in Dance from New York University’s Tisch School for the Arts and a BA in Dance Kinesiology from Mount Holyoke College. She believes dance is a reflection of the fluid collaboration of interpersonal and site-specific dynamics; these interfaces can be shaped, transformed, and taught in many different ways. Technology’s role in dance education and choreographic documentation excites her; it has allowed for expansion and transdisciplinary integration of the field. These photographs are from the series up in the air. It is a document of a daily movement exploration and meditation in the Time of Corona. Capturing the essential moment, the series highlights the tender absence of others but also the expansion and abundance of the natural world. Callie Wohlgemuth Northern New Jersey / Western Massachusetts Callie is a multimedia artist that aims to explore relationships between human and the natural or built environment through a variety of mediums like film, photography, dance and drawing. They wrote their first poem since seventh grade, which they are proud to have included in this magazine. Jeno Zhuo
Zora Duncan Amherst, Massachusetts / Atlanta, Georgia
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Inside back cover: Dripping Free by Mavis Moon Back cover by Callie Wohlgemuth 90
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