"BINDINGS" — Palatine Hill Review, Edition 51 by Palatine Hill Review

edition51

edition 50 honors

Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP)

2024 AWP Prize for Undergrad Lit Mags — First Place

National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE)

2023 Recognizing Excellence in Art and Literary Magazines (REALM) Award — REALM First Class

Palatine Hill Review 2023-24, Edition 51

Title OF PIECE HERE

Byline (Author Name)

The Palatine Hill Review, formerly known as the Lewis & Clark Literary Review, is the annual student-run literary and arts magazine at Lewis & Clark College, located in Portland, Oregon. In changing our name with our 50th edition, we have joined an ongoing, campus-wide shift away from upholding the colonial legacies of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark.

Our 51st edition, BINDINGS, is printed by Morel Ink (also) in Portland, Oregon. This edition’s typefaces are Marker Aid (titles), BN Cringe Sans (subtitles, bylines, and pull quotes), and Atkinson Hyperlegible (body text, page numbers, and folio). This edition was created with Adobe InDesign and Photoshop CC 2024 and many Google Docs and Sheets.

Today we received an email amassing the simple steps of how not to mildew. This place and its climate mean that I soak up each and every thing outside myself

colophon

masthead

Editors-in-Chief

AJ Di Nicola

Elizabeth Huntley

Copy Chief

Max Allen

Design Editors

Burton Scheer

Editorial Board

Zoe Berger

Meghan Blandon

Shelby Platt

J Frank

Associate Editors

Ryan Marshall

Zoe Bockoven

Noah Contreras

Alina Cruz

Kohana Mehl-Mckee

Anna Milman

Winslow Morgan

Daniel Neshyba-Rowe

Maren Ostrem

Corryn Pettingill

Erin Seaver

Carmen Silver

For now the thimbleberry and red currant and the flourishing shield bugs who venture like vagabonds across mirrors, lampshades, the frayed red carpet. For now it all blooms with no mind for beauty

Josie Alberts

Title OF PIECE HERE

letter from the editors

Byline (Author Name)

To bind: to fasten tight, to draw together, to bring close and not let go.

To bind: to stick with twine, glue, staples, tape; with expectations, obligations, love, sweat, death.

Today we received an email amassing the simple steps of how not to mildew. This place and its climate mean that I soak up each and every thing outside myself and every word I speak is heavy with a bone-cold humidity, and it is difficult not to let yourself turn rancid.

A “bind”: a bruise on a horse’s hoof, a quantity in salmon and eels, a certain climbing plant, a complaint, a predicament, or a bore… or, in its plural gerund, the 51st edition of the Palatine Hill Review. The processes of writing, art-making, and putting together a literary & arts magazine are exercises in complaints, predicaments, and bores, but they are also acts of joy, devotion, and human expression — no matter the medium. BINDINGS, our second-largest edition ever, intertwines poetry, prose, photography, paintings, pen drawings, and hours in Photoshop. Behind the scenes, it splays wildly across spreadsheets, documents, folders, files, and 4 a.m. text messages. The creative process takes unexpected forms: indeed, when somebody is creative, is a “creator,” they are able to bind together unexpected things into a cohesive whole.

Crack your windows, even in the cold. Be wary of the breath of your kettles and scrape the mold off your butter pats and don’t leave your sweaters out to dry.

v / miscellany

and the flourishing shield bugs who venture like vagabonds many engaged and talented people working on this book. If you wanted to be a little overbearing about it, you could say we’re bound by a common goal.

And, you could say this: to bind is to put a book together.

palatine hill review \ vi

Halcyon Orvendal

floor Caravaggio

Bride 89 95 vii / miscellany

Sam Mosher Brittle

the

C.R.

Children of the Bang Mercury The Present Willow ReuckertGardner Lighting Candles Josie Alberts Phantom Lights Shelby Platt To Help Me Fall Asleep Indira Lore Heller Dream Skin Mamie Hogan 1 4 5 7 10 11 Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of Being Together Ryan Marshall Like Sand Piper McCoy Harmon August Piper Clark-White This is about playing golf

Ertel Elegy For Your Body, or, i body your body very much Scarlet Rice You, I, Mountains, and Valleys Jamie Kushnick Because Mamie Hogan DayQuil and Steel Magnolias Shelby Platt 13 15 17 22 23 26 27 31 palatine hill review \ viii

Tiani

ode to the bathroom

Emma Krall

Ote(a)ra(i)

Elliott Leor Negrín

do i know?

Soleina Robinson

The Lord of Shalott

Percival Eleanor

Ambrose Charles

St. Joan Walter

Being Frank

Christian Larson

amassing the simple steps of how not to mildew. This place and its climate mean that I soak up each and every thing outside myself and every word I speak is heavy with a bone-cold humidity, and it is difficult not to let yourself turn rancid.

Izzy Runi

Ode to the Hyphen in Post-Grad

Crack your windows, even in the cold.

Jillian Jackson

The First Months After Sheppard Braddy

Saturday Night’s Alright (For Crying)

Piper McCoy Harmon

You Shed No Tears Tonight

Be wary of the breath of your kettles and scrape the mold off your butter pats and don’t leave your sweaters out to dry.

Green, Mitchell S. The Philosophy of Language. Oxford University Press, 2021.

Scarlet Rice

Ode to Library Desk Graffiti

Elliot McNicholas

Your grace is utterly intact

Alex Chew

My Room

Jamie Kushnick

Innocents

Axel Jurgens

Elegy for a Native Tongue

Alina Cruz

47 53 54 55 57 59 61 63

64 69 71 87 88 91 94 110 ix / miscellany

The Cost of Fruit

Burton Scheer five days after twenty-three

AJ Di Nicola on hellfire

Emma Krall

Between Two Oaks C.Avery

Love Notes

Eli Dell’Osso

At the Ambar Lucid Concert, I See God

The Dacryology of Crabs Eli Dell’Osso

Sam Mosher

When Did I Realize I Was Drowning? Ronen

The Past Can Only Follow They Who Remember Mercury Shadows Ryan Marshall

with no mind for beauty

need for forgiveness.

For now it all blooms

and lives without

133 136 151 152 154

Of the Flesh & Of the Father Cleo Lockhart

Jillian Jackson I called home from the ferry

Kit Graf Belladonna / The Prodigal Son Meets a Girl in Barcelona / Atropa and Apathy

111 114 115 117 119 123 125 131 palatine hill review \ x

Title OF PIECE HERE

visual art

Byline (Author Name)

An Inner Light

Anna Littlejohn

Nutria, Left

Binocular Lens

Elizabeth Huntley

Canopy Walker

Zach Reinker

O sweet bird lady

Sienna Morell-Grant

Evening Post

Zach Reinker

The

Julia

Café des

Deux Moulins

Burton Scheer

North Elizabeth Huntley

Fairy Rings

Tiani Ertel

Utrecht

Conservatory

Burton Scheer

circa spring 2018

AJ Di Nicola

Crack your windows, even in the cold. Be wary of the breath of your kettles and scrape the mold off your butter pats

Aussie Dragon

Julia Maushardt

49 56 58 67 72 93 109

Welder

Maushardt The View Ella Neff Mojave Alina Cruz 2 3 9 19 21 25 30 xi / miscellany

Bugging Out!

Zoë Steele

She Can Do Evil; She Can Do Evil

Corryn Pettingill

No nuns, no nuns, none!

Zoë Steele

Hot Water, 8 hours in water from Green Lake near Fayetteville NY Renz Johnson

The Lost Cavern Mary Hatten

Hecate Rising You From the Grave

Corryn Pettingill

Renz Johnson

Emergent

Old Enough

113 116 118 122 126

Ella Neff

135 141 153 palatine hill review \ xii

Children of the Bang

We are old stardust. Born of recent love, permeated by song, with one permanent purpose. To give sight to the boundless Soul of the Universe.

Mercury

1 / poetry

AN inner light visual art \ 2

Anna Littlejohn Digital photography

Elizabeth Huntley Digital photography

3 / visual art

Nutria, Left Binocular Lens

The Present

Willow Rueckert-Gardner

I want to give you a gift today —

of how I met Natalie for breakfast and I ate too many donut holes while she made a playground of her gravied biscuits and offered me fruit;

how I saw Rye skating near the bridge at dusk with wheels roaring on the concrete, a half-darkened mimic beneath his board; how I sat with Mateo at a covered table in the rain, ignoring the graying faces that resented our laughter, and I chugged Sunkist to avoid wasting a drop;

how later, Home Alone played huge on the conference screen and I laughed harder at our jokes than at the movie budgeting glances at Teagan and Chance between the slapstick;

how last night at 11:11 I wished to never be anxious again, and today my heart is made of stillest wings, like a falcon on a sodium light near its end.

This is the gift I want to give but I know, I know, for Me and You

LIghting candles

Josie Alberts

These are excerpts from the poems that stay in my back pocket

and reminding everything—tree root and infection, aster and infestation— how to grow again.

There’s no in-between little girl and grown woman. You’re either one or the other, and if you’re both then you’ll never survive.

My brother hums a song I loved before I knew what music was.

Water cascades through her skull, between her ribs, it pours out violently

Vertigo, vertigo, head spun like sap round your pinky finger.

To hope, to veil a coffin like it is a bride.

Crack your windows, even in the cold. Be wary of the breath of your kettles and scrape the mold off your butter pats and don’t leave your sweaters out to dry.

The silence I felt reverberated through me like a warning call.

I coveted and claimed the right to silence.

I used to watch from behind the sun-warmed metal gates and I don’t know why we couldn’t have gone together.

I couldn’t feel my hunger until I bit the apple

5 / poetry

Air cascades like an avalanche into the lungs and love sucks it back out with a violence, tearing into the nerves.

And maybe it feels good to feel weak sometimes.

My 20th birthday is coming up, and this year I don’t want to feel sad when I blow out the candles. This year I want to make a wish in the darkness.

Is hope a confession?

and lives without need for forgiveness.

When she looks at me we love each other like I loved the body of my dead dog.

I am still surprised at each ending

People don’t have to be dead to deserve remembering.

palatine hill review \ 6

Title OF PIECE HERE

Phantom Lights

Under an indigo sky, I arrive early To hear the orchestra warming up.

I find my seat and promise myself Not to finish my candy before intermission, Scanning the expectant venue, and shuffling Through my phone to appear occupied.

Then, the first tuning notes ripple Across Her Majesty’s Theatre.

Drafts of magic swirl through the air In swaths of navy and magenta.

You can breathe it in and taste it; Shelby Platt

Crack your windows, even in the cold. Be wary of the breath of your kettles and scrape the mold off your butter pats and don’t leave your sweaters out to dry.

7 / poetry

The theatre dims to a sapphire haze and The play begins. The buyer bids. A slip of light glints off tiny bronze cymbals.

Below the stage, the magician Lifts his wand into the air and

Strikes! Lights burst into flame! From the stage, the gleaming chandelier

Soars to crown the opera house

In iridescent, white-hot glory.

I leave the theatre dipped in stardust — An unopened box of candy in my pocket.

palatine hill review \ 8

Canopy walker

9 / visual art

Indira Lore Heller

To Help me fall asleep

In my mind I was in a dark cabin. On the edge of the water. The people of my heart, my family, you were there. But safely sleeping with doors closed.

My sister on the porch, we sat in the navy blue sound of waves She wasn’t speaking but she was smiling Nobody was looking at me, I didn’t have to have any face. I don’t think I did.

And when the wind called, I walked forward to the water. There was no temperature or sound and the universe wasn’t telling me anything It just was Everything was okay and nothing was asked.

palatine hill review \ 10

Dream Skin

Mamie Hogan

Last night, you in a t-shirt brought a thumb to your open mouth and moved it against a gliding (I imagine wet, I imagine warm) tongue.

You looked directly at me you reached out to my thigh it was covered in thick hair (thicker than on my waking body) and you pressed your thumb—

your thumb, wet, and bent back hitchhiker style—

into my dream skin. It (the dream skin) appeared to have been embedded years before with a tattoo of something like the sailor’s anchor found on your own arm (your waking arm).

and scrape the mold off your butter pats and don’t leave your sweaters out to dry.

I say ‘years before’ because the thick black markings looked dull enough, and the leg hair over them was fully grown.

Then I remember that tattoos turn blue with time, not black.

I guess it’s evident now that

11 / poetry

I never had a tattoo embedded, or set, or chiseled, or slashed, or etched— or anything else meaning ‘permanently marked’— into my waking body.

I’ve also never in my life had more hair on my waking thighs than I do now.

In the dream, your t-shirt was white. There’s something about a white t-shirt and masculinity. Maybe that’s why your t-shirt was white. I don’t know for sure why. But your t-shirt was white.

And when you reached out to me, it was sex. But it was also a thumb, bent back hitchhiker style (the way mine does, “good for playing guitar” my teacher said) and your black sailor’s anchor tattoo being mine, and the more-hair on my dream-thighs than my waking ones and your clean white t-shirt.

palatine hill review \ 12

Title OF PIECE HERE

Byline (Author Name)

Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of Being Together

Ryan Marshall

Tonight I’ll try to be a poet because The way you’d read poetry to me, Well, it’s one of the reasons I fell in love with you.

So, where else to start than where we started? I drove us to my favorite hangout, The place in the desert where you taught me To stargaze. I’d compare you to the warmth

Of sand dunes and summer wind,

But we aren’t boys who like the summer heat. We met in a pool, after all.

I’d say you were as beautiful as the sunsets

Reflecting the desert flowers, But we never go out there while the sun is still up.

Crack your windows, even in the cold. Be wary of the breath of your kettles and scrape the mold off your butter pats and don’t leave your sweaters out to dry.

Now something I can say: Your touch is like the desert wind, Sending a chill down my spine but

13 / poetry

the hydrangeas.

I kiss you. And kiss you, Like we’ve never been kissed before, Like you’re the oasis that draws me to This freezing desert spot in the pitch black Air. I can grab your ass if you ask, While we pretend that the stars are what we’re staring at.

I know I was afraid, ashamed, of Loving you. I don’t know how I could ever feel that way Because loving you is as easy as loving Clear stars in the desert night.

Remember that time we were high And ran naked in the desert rain? Let’s try it again, this time without my shame, So I can tell you that every piece of you Is better than a cactus’s flower.

palatine hill review \ 14

The October fog and the poison air come hand in hand, like lovers, smoke and dreamlike smog descending on the lichen-claimed land and reminding everything—tree root and infection, aster and infestation— collecting rocks and shells i wrote a name in the sand but the waves came up and brushed the shore clean again stealing away my carefully placed fragments to be crushed into dust

15 / poetry

as the grains underneath my feet slowly slipped away my heart was pulled towards the sea like an invisible string tied to an arrow shot straight into the setting sun only now, the sun dreams and my body still stands alone at the shoreline

a woman named frida taught me that love is like the tide pushing and pulling giving and taking the tighter you squeeze the quicker it slips through your fingers you cannot decide which shells wash up only whether or not you grab onto them and admire their beauty

letting go is the sweetest memorial for in your happiness theirs is remembered where there once was love there always will be even if it’s nothing but an echo or a whisper a smell or a street corner

palatine hill review \ 16

AUGUST

Piper Clark-White

My room had been dipped in a jar of soft pink honey

Coating everything in a warm glow. It was late afternoon but we talked about stars, Stars that have already been dead for millions of years. You’d tell me how at night

You saw the Big Dipper and Cassiopeia, All I saw were lies.

You always looked so good in neon lights, Your black t-shirt and silver locket made a good canvas for color. I usually hate the carnival, But it’s hard to hate with your hand pressed against mine. You convinced me to try the caramel apple You bought for 3 dollars and 6 cents, Your hands kept shaking with laughter when I took a bite, Candy dripping onto my palms, No amount of water could wash

17 / poetry

It was 1 in the morning

When you convinced me to swim with you, Pushing me into the pool still wearing clothes, The room illuminated in murky aqua marine, Reflections of the water dancing across the walls, Replacing the stars.

Wet fingers held each other’s cheeks, Our shirts sticking to our skin. You tasted of chlorine, And sang off-key to the 3 am radio

In my beaten down truck on our way home, All the windows rolled down In a poor attempt to dry our hair.

I collect eyelashes from strangers now, They’re kind enough not to ask what they’re for, It’s hard to tell how many are needed For a wish to come true.

I keep them in a bottle

Next to my jar of used birthday candles

And the polaroid picture we took together. At night I always wonder which constellation is yours.

It’s hard not to blame myself. You always called me the sun, Warm, Kind,

“And hard to look at.”

“No.”

So I guess that would make you my Icarus, Always a little too close.

palatine hill review \ 18

EVENING

Zach Reinker Oil painting on canvas

POST

palatine hill review \ 20

Digital photography The Welder 21 / visual art

Julia Maushardt

this is about playing golf

Tiani Ertel

I hold in pliant hands your darkness cast by looking down your head, fit solid in my hands makes shadows sweet, frightful and warm, I’m a full cauldron, boiling over, until you give it back to me, salted and soothed ebb and flow lips crushed soft against a pulsing spiral lace of suds webbed between gliding ridges tectonic plates earth quakes and bubbles over, nucleus reforms, and, despite everything, inside sighs life.

poetry \ 22

Elegy For Your Body, or, i body your body very much

Scarlet Rice

The back of my body prickles in the grass and I look up: honestly the sky is really not like a sea or a great big round belly or an eye, or even a million eyes (though I wish it was), it’s not like any particular thing because it can’t be; I won’t let it. But it has body, oh yes it has body. the kind of body that is always within another body: body of stars, body of water, body of text, body of my soul, body of, body of, body of.

My least favorite part about you is that you are far away. But I know you are witness to the sky’s body, and I know you are beneath its body, yes in the sappy way where we can both face our bodies upward to see the same stars, but perhaps also in the body way, where I can reach up and touch its body and you can reach up and touch its body and then we can both be bodies touching each other’s bodies because of the transitive property that we learned way back when our bodies were small.

23 / poetry

I forgot to tell you before you left. I imagine your body here, lying there against my body (to the left on the grass, I’ve decided). I like my body better when it is with your body, when you fashion my body and I fashion yours together and our eclectic bodies never stop happening or breathing or becoming bodies within bodies adjacent and interior bodies in the grass I always want to talk about bodies.

why do I always want to talk about bodies

I know the distance is quite simply much too far for my body to reach. But the best thing I know about my body is that it’s made of other people’s, too. I could be with you or against you or away from you (or is it you who is away from me?), but whatever, we are bodies of each other, always already bodies together, which is really to say that I need you in more than just a transitive way: I body your body, your breath, your ink, your body of bodying body embodied, this body in, body out, body of we

palatine hill review \ 24

25 /

art

visual

You, I, mountains, and Valleys

Jamie Kushnick

You walk from your private, winding path down skin switchbacks to valley, leaving warm footprints that cool when touched by morning breeze, reminding me where we’ve walked a dozen times. I tip back, that shock of the first steps of a steep path, but you catch me with sturdy, elegant hands, inviting, pushing my climb. As you descend I rise, legs tense from the journey you lead me on, towards sunlight that kisses my whole body warming I close my eyes and let you guide, I open and my chest lets free breath each set step closer and closer loose pebbles that roll down where I see you there and then I Crest the peak. Sit with you and watch the sunrise.

The view Ella Neff

poetry \ 26

Film photography ( on left)

Because

Byline (Author Name)

Mamie Hogan

Don’t remember where I came from in name or place Can reach it in my heart a feeling a smell a sound, curling up on my dad’s shoulder, toothpaste aftershave and old pajamas, listening to him softly clear his throat.

I’m afraid to go where my heart wants to take me, sometimes

Maybe that’s why I’ve been saying “I hate poetry” sometimes Cause I fear I don’t have a dream worth telling Or I don’t want to hear the polite comments Or I don’t want to see who I am inside But I still miss the soul of this existence that comes through to me deep and tender and real and Huge

Crack your windows, even in the cold. Be wary of the breath of your kettles and scrape the mold off your butter pats and don’t leave your sweaters out to dry.

when I step out into the uncut grass after it rains, and the world around me is expansive and purple, purple with twilight. And clouds scatter the sky, dark gray and pink and orange, dusty and rusty and dingy-looking. Everything looks so soft at this time of night.

This time of night happening for centuries and more, over and over and over again. My toes clicking together and apart, over and over and over

27 / poetry

again. The time in which I exist. The time that goes back to the earth, and the ancestors of the earth. The sacred patterns of the seasons and even the days. Every day there is a soft-blurry dark and purpled moment after the light is gone and before darkness descends. And it goes back farther than I know. I miss my toes in the wet clean and muddy grass, being licked, kissed, seen by the rain. I miss my arms raised to acknowledge the sky, exhale, and my hands extended downward to remember the earth, inhale.

Where can I be there again?

How can I be there, again?

I miss the sand in the early morning, the breeze so soft it could remind you of a parent’s hand dispensing love as you nap drowsily, happily, along. the way the grains feel cold at first, under the blue shadow of the night which lingers still, and when the sun’s first brilliant rays hit it and hit you,

it’s like fire, it’s like life.

Placing my hands on the bright sand, so smooth and flat and untouched yet by any passersby. Feel it still cool from the shadow of the night, beginning to change from the fresh morning sun. And moving my fingers through the soft grains I see millions of patterns show. It’s bright.

palatine hill review \ 28

I lay my body on its side and my face, too, right down sand is soft to the touch of my skin. I lick it with It gets in my hair, my clothes, on my skin, fingernails. It is beautiful.

on the lichen-claimed land and reminding everything—tree root and infection, aster and infestation— how to grow again.

Being a part of this world. The purple time and the bright blue turned bright white sand. I’ll be there again, listening to my insides one day and the inward life and soul of this world, the sand and trees and dirt and ocean wind and air and birds and sunlight all around me.

Crack your windows, even in the cold. Be wary of the breath of your kettles and scrape the mold off your butter pats and don’t leave your sweaters out to dry.

I reach out because I miss something— because I miss everything.

29 / poetry

Mojave

visual art \ 30

DayQuil and “steel Magnolias”

Shelby Platt

If I could click my heels and be there with you, to wash the dishes and cook quesadillas so you could rest beside a box of tissues, I would.

If I could sit at your kitchen counter and listen to your day without saturating the air with mine, perhaps

I could leave behind the longing to be carried from the car, and find the strength to lift others, even you, Mom.

But see how I am still Julia Roberts with freshly chopped hair, looking to Sally Field to tell me that I am alright, and that the world is holding together.

31 / poetry

If only I could borrow your voice, How are you feeling? Is there anything I can get you? I would.

Would you trust me?

If you woke, for just a moment, if I lifted you someday from the passenger seat, would you insist on walking for yourself?

If you let me,

Or would you close your eyes so I could lay you on the couch, untie your shoes, and cover you with a blanket?

palatine hill review \ 32

The Trials ANd Tribulations of Replacing

AN Empty TUbe of Toothpaste

Makena Dahir

Monday morning, Sarah was greeted by a most devastating observation: the toothpaste she had been squeezing the absolute life out of for the past three weeks no longer had any life left to give. Although this observation did not come as a surprise to her, it didn’t make the pain any less sudden. The answer to this problem may have seemed simple: she could either A) use her kids’ toothpaste, or B) buy a new tube. However, her kids were still stuck on using the bubblegum-flavored toothpaste that her husband used to buy for them (she just so happened to be allergic to bubblegum flavoring). Further, it was Monday, and with Monday came a whole new slew of tasks to complete before the end of the day. In an attempt to maintain her sanity as a newly single parent, Sarah would make a to-do list for herself every night for the next day. She regarded this as one of the sacred things that made up the last few strands of the metaphorical rope that kept her from plummeting into the deep end of insanity. Today, her list looked (unfortunately) like this:

- Get ready for work

- Get the kids ready for school

- Drop the kids off at school and go to work

- Answer all of the emails that were missed from this weekend

- Lunch break

- Send that one email to that one coworker

33 / prose

- Leave work in a rush to beat traffic and pick the kids up from school

- Take the kids to soccer practice

- Go home (finally)

- Make dinner

- Eat dinner

- Wash the dishes

- Help the kids with homework

- Put the kids to bed

- Get ready for bed

- Go to sleep

Sarah had not the slightest idea when she would have time to make a trip to the store. Nevertheless, she persisted. She added “buy toothpaste” to her ever-growing to-do list (with the intention to go during the 15 minutes she had between dropping the kids off at school and work), and carried on with her morning, bravely ignoring the dull, aching pain radiating throughout her sternum where her empty toothpaste tube had stabbed her in the heart.

“Mom? What’s for dinner tonight? I can help you cook if you need help,” asked Theo, Sarah’s oldest (and only) son, as he spun back and forth in one of the high chairs at the island in their kitchen. His shaggy dirty blonde hair was strewn about, as if he had spent the morning brushing his hair with a balloon instead of a brush. Her twin daughters, Elaina and Mary, were on either side of Theo, all

palatine hill review \ 34

Title OF PIECE HERE

ears, their eyes trained diligently on their mother, waiting for her response.

Byline (Author Name)

“Oh, I’m not sure, sweetie. I haven’t figured it out yet. What do you guys want for dinner?” Sarah asked the three pairs of bright blue eyes. She reached over the counter, grabbed the kids’ empty cereal bowls, and set them on the science-experiment-looking pile of dishes in the sink. “Is there anything in particular you guys are craving?”

“Mac and cheese!”

“Hamburgers!”

“Corn dogs!”

Well, that was unhelpful, Sarah thought. As the siblings bickered about what the absolute best item would be for dinner, Sarah sighed and leaned on the counter. When her clear discontent wasn’t enough to quiet the kids’ voices, she pressed her forehead against the cool tile and contemplated if the repercussions of calling out of work today would be worth the day off.

Crack your windows, even in the cold. Be wary of the breath of your kettles and scrape the mold off your butter pats and don’t leave your sweaters out to dry.

“Okay, okay, if you can’t agree, I’ll just pick. It will just be a surprise,” she said, voice muffled against the countertop, “and go get ready for school. We are leaving on time today!” The kids responded with grumbles of various levels of comprehensiveness as they turned and sauntered off to their respective bedrooms. Sarah took a deep breath. Innnnnnn and outttttttt, she told herself. Today was going to be an especially long day; she could feel it. She stood up, turned on her heel, followed the tails of her pocket-sized posse, and disappeared for 15 minutes as she got ready for the day.

- Get the kids ready for school

- Get ready for work

After Sarah got ready for work, she herded her kids into the car, and they set out for school. Theo, Elaina, and Mary all went to the same elementary school. Theo was in 6th grade, and the girls were in 4th, making Sarah’s life

35 / prose

the hydrangeas.

For now the thimbleberry and red currant and the flourishing shield bugs who venture like vagabonds across mirrors, lampshades, the frayed red carpet. For now it all blooms with no mind for beauty and lives without need for forgiveness. hysterical tone. Her eyes were blown wide, a scared expression on her face. Theo and Elaina wore similar expressions, and Sarah’s heart ached a little with the inherent desire to take away their worries.

“I didn’t do anything but get rear-ended … but don’t worry guys, I’ll handle it,” Sarah told her kids, who all seemed to visibly relax at her words.

“She reached over the counter, grabbed the kids’ empty cereal bowls, and set them on the scienceexperiment-looking pile of dishes in the sink.”

After checking to make sure the kids were okay, Sarah got out of the car and was met with a burly man in his 30s or so. He had a beard that was nicely trimmed and green eyes that pierced through to her soul. He looked like a lumberjack … he was incredibly attractive. Sarah forgot about her anger at being rear-ended. The man had rendered her absolutely speechless. The feeling didn’t last, however. As soon as he opened his mouth, Sarah’s anger came back in full force.

“This is exactly why they shouldn’t let females

palatine hill review \ 36

drive!” yelled the man, completely ignoring the fact that her The audacity!

Needless to say, Sarah no longer had her allotted 15 minutes between dropping the kids off and going to work. Fantastic!

So, Sarah reluctantly re-ordered her list in her head, moving her toothpaste escapade to her lunch break. After the man’s misogynistic comment, Sarah chose to ignore everything he said (except for his insurance information) and got back in her now-dented Ford Escape.

“Is everything alright?” asked Theo, eyebrows

“Yeah, that guy just wasn’t very nice,” Sarah replied. Even though they were still in the unmoving line for drop-

“I will forgive you just this once for the cuss word, because, yeah, that dude was a total asshole. Theo, if you ever talk to a woman like that you will be grounded for the an asshole because of how often you tell me things like that,” Theo said from next to her. His eyes were fixed on the mirror in front of him, with his hands in his hair, frantically brushing

“Well, I’m sorry, but I will have no son of mine growing up like that useless man. Maybe I should start teaching you how to drive now so that you won’t just go rear-ending people in a 5 mph school zone. And, hey, watch your language!” Sarah felt herself easing with the familiar

37 / prose

banter. Slowly, her grip on the wheel returned to a loose one.

“But Elaina just—” Theo groaned, “never mind,” he digressed.

Finally, the car in front of Sarah finished spewing out what seemed like 30 kids (they must be Mormons) and she was able to pull up to the unloading zone. The three kids practically tumbled out of the car, fumbling for bags and water bottles in an attempt to make a swift exit. Once they were all out, Sarah hightailed it to work, where she showed up looking as disastrous as a dropped ice cream cone.

- Drop the kids off at school and go to work

Sarah was the manager of the daycare at the local university. The daycare had walls that were offensively (offensively, as in to her eyes) painted, with each wall, floor, and ceiling a different color of the rainbow. Sarah liked to think of it as her own personal hell — perhaps some form of karmic punishment for sins she committed in a past life. Like, really?! Taking her husband from her, leaving her to take care of three children alone, and forcing her to drop out of nursing school wasn’t enough? She must also take care of other people’s kids on top of that? crimes must her past self have committed for this kind of treatment? she thought, while staring at a wall artfully splattered with red paint that looked a little too much like blood. At a daycare. For children. someone to fix that, Sarah had forgotten her initial intended goal upon sitting down at her desk: she needed to answer 50-something emails. God, why? Why her? do it … later. Yeah, she was going to do it later.

- Answer all of the emails that were missed from this weekend

palatine hill review \ 38

Title OF PIECE HERE

Byline (Author Name)

For the past few weeks, Sarah had had something of a problem at work. Every day, when she came back from her lunch break, there was a single rose placed on her desk accompanied by a piece of chocolate. The problem wasn’t the rose, or the chocolate (the chocolate was delicious, actually), or even that it was every day for three weeks straight, but rather the fact that she figured out who it was on the first day (she had cameras in her office, obviously), and the secret admirer was none other than their new 21-year-old intern. Don’t get her wrong, he was very obviously conventionally attractive, but Sarah had gotten to the age where “frat boy” wasn’t doing it for her anymore (apparently her type was lumberjacks now. Who would have thought?). When Sarah looked at him, she just saw an older version of Theo, and that was just weird. She figured that after a week or so, he would either come clean or the advances would stop. However, neither had happened yet. In other words, Sarah needed to do something about it. In an attempt to draft an email to the chary chocolatier, Sarah watched as her cursor, much like an American football player’s consciousness after their fifth concussion, blinked in and out over and over again. What to write … what to write … she thought. After what felt like her twelfth hearty sigh of the day, Sarah wrote her digital rejection, and without proofreading it, she hit send.

Crack your windows, even in the cold. Be wary of the breath of your kettles and scrape the mold off your butter pats and don’t leave your sweaters out to dry.

- Send that one email to that one coworker

Three hours into her shift, Sarah still hadn’t heard from the intern about the email. Then, after her fourth hour at work, Sarah was getting ready to leave for her lunch break — during which she planned on buying herself toothpaste — when she heard a soft, quiet knock on her office door. She told the knocker to come in, and in walked the intern, crying and sniffling.

“I’m so sorry, that was so inappropriate of me,” he hiccuped. “I’m sorry … if I ever made you feel uncomfortable. I should have never done any of that,” the

39 / prose

man said through tears, sniffling between every sentence. Sarah sat at her desk, intermittently handing the intern tissues while he cried for the next half hour, finding every way known to mankind to apologize. As the man (boy?) cried across from her, Sarah once again wondered what higher power wished upon her to take care of not only her kids and other people’s kids, but full-grown adults too. With her dreams of buying toothpaste during her lunch break out the window, Sarah decided that the toothpaste would have to wait for when the kids were at soccer practice.

- Lunch break

After the intern had stopped crying, Sarah ate one of the instant meals she kept on hand when she didn’t want to leave the office for lunch, and then shortly returned to work. Three more hours of stopping children from choking on various Fisher-Price products passed, and then it was time for Sarah’s favorite game, called “Will Sarah Make it in Time to Pick the Kids up From School Without Having to Wait in the Long-Ass Line of Cars Full of PTA Moms Who Think They’re the Shit but They’re Really Not That Cool and No Sarah Does Not at all Feel a Little Ashamed When She is in Proximity With One of Them Because of How Much More Stable Their Kids’ Lives Probably Are?” where she goes borderline felony speeds to get to the kids’ school to beat traffic. However, just as she was getting ready to leave for the school, her work phone started to ring. Sarah put her coat and keys down on the small table by her office door, and walked over to the ringing phone. At first, she didn’t recognize the number displayed on the phone’s screen. But the realization quickly dawned on her: it was the school.

palatine hill review \ 40

and scrape the mold off your butter pats and don’t leave your sweaters out to dry.

Evidently, Elaina had gotten into a fight with an older boy over a Jolly Rancher. Jesus Christ, a Jolly Rancher. Sarah felt like she deserved a parenting of the year award (not). Elaina had won the fight, of course, but Sarah didn’t want to let her kid know that she was proud of her for that. She managed to get away with no more than a slightly black eye and a sore jaw, which was lucky for her because she was going to be in big trouble, and chores are even harder to do if you’re injured. Sarah told her as much.

- Leave work in a rush to try and beat traffic and pick the kids up from school

41 / prose

From school, Sarah took her kids to soccer practice. All three of Sarah’s kids used to play soccer until Mary recently decided she didn’t want to play anymore. Now, whenever soccer practice was going on, Mary just sat on the sidelines with Sarah and read some romance book or another. Which, as far as activities kids could be doing, Sarah was glad that was what she had taken to. Sarah decided to take the time at practice to get some work done. Usually, she would spend the whole time watching her kids play. Theo was turning out to be quite the soccer player, so it was getting more and more fun every year. However, today she had way too much to get done, so she needed to sacrifice some of her viewing time. course the one day she couldn’t watch something would

once death season sets in. We huddle in our land-boxes and breathe water. We have an earthquake drill Thursday where we’ll cling like polyps to the unmoving land, and the flourishing shield bugs who venture like vagabonds across mirrors, lampshades, the frayed red carpet. For now it all blooms with no mind for beauty

“Evidently, Elaina had gotten into a fight with an older boy over a Jolly Rancher. Jesus Christ, a Jolly Rancher.”

“Mom, Theo is bleeding!” Mary said in a panicked tone, voice cracking in several places.

Fuck! Sarah looked up from her work to see blood pouring from Theo’s nose all over the soccer field. She gasped, and her heart started pounding loudly and incessantly like a gavel on a sound block. Sarah got up from her chair and started to run out toward him, making sure everything was okay. On her way over, he gave her a thumbs up. Only then did Sarah’s heart and legs start to slow to a normal pace. However, it was clear the bleeding wasn’t going to stop anytime soon.

- Take the kids to soccer practice

Sarah took Theo and the girls to the ER to get Theo

palatine hill review \ 42

Title OF PIECE HERE

Byline (Author Name)

checked out, even though he tried his hardest to get out of it. After muttering dozens of “I’m fine”s, he nearly passed out upon standing up, and only then did he agree to go. Theo ended up having a concussion from getting hit in the face with the ball; luckily though, his nose wasn’t broken. The impromptu ER trip was bound to cost Sarah way too much money, but she could handle that. The financial burden wouldn’t be too much, even with the added cost of the accident from earlier in the morning, because they had good health and auto insurance. More importantly, though, they had good life insurance, which gave them a pretty hefty check when Sarah’s husband had passed. The main problem that Sarah had was that the trip was a threehour process in total. Damn you, shitty American healthcare system. Sarah once again had to reschedule the toothpaste acquisition from soccer practice to a post-dinner activity. After getting a painkiller prescription from the doctor and strict orders to not let Theo play for at least two weeks, Theo was cleared, and it was finally time to leave. Once again, everyone filed into the car, and at last, they were all headed home.

- Go home (finally)

Crack your windows, even in the cold. Be wary of the breath of your kettles and scrape the mold off your butter pats and don’t leave your sweaters out to dry.

Sarah’s choice for dinner was instant mashed potatoes, canned corn, and a leftover rotisserie chicken from Walmart. The mashed potatoes were a little runny, but other than that, Sarah considered her dinner to be a success. The only complaint she received was from Elaina, who said that the corn was “bland,” as if Sarah usually put anything more than salt and pepper as seasoning anyway.

After dinner, the family cleaned up the kitchen. Or, more like Elaina cleaned the kitchen after they all ate as punishment for the little stunt she pulled at school.

43 / prose

Mary read, and Theo took this time to relax and play video games. It made Sarah happy that he could get time to himself, as it was something Sarah hadn’t seen him do in a while. It was obvious that the loss of his dad was affecting him the most, considering he was the oldest sibling with the most memories shared with his dad. It had become clear to Sarah that Theo was trying his best to step up in the role of the “man of the house,” and as much as she appreciated that Theo was always asking her what he could do to help, it made her feel guilty for having to rely on her 12-year-old son for things she shouldn’t be relying on him for. Sarah gobbled down her chicken and immediately shut down all of the emotions that were starting to bubble up to the surface. She didn’t have time to fret.

- Wash the dishes

Another strand that made up Sarah’s metaphorical sanity rope was the routine she had created with her kids on weekdays. After dinner and doing the dishes, the kids all did their homework together, helping each other, and asked Sarah for help if needed. During this time, Sarah also did her work. Only when the kids finished their work were they free to go off and do whatever they wanted before they got ready for bed. Every single weekday, this had been the routine. So why? Just … why did something have to come and fuck it all up?! Today of all days! The cruelty! The inhumanity! Sarah had planned to leave the twins with Theo to do their homework as she made a quick trip to the store to buy that God! Damn! Fucking! Toothpaste! As it turned out, Elaina and Mary had a project due the next day. And, get this … they needed to interview her and make a PowerPoint presentation on their family history, which they knew nothing about. sure that if it weren’t for a quick breathing exercise, she might have committed filicide (x2). Although she sounded like a malfunctioning air conditioning unit, it did the trick, and she was once again level-headed enough to remember

palatine hill review \ 44

Title OF PIECE HERE

that she did, in fact, love her kids. She agreed to be their interviewee, and only then could Sarah be free at last.

Byline (Author Name)

- Help the kids with homework

Because she was unable to do work at the same time as being interviewed, Sarah was running behind schedule. She thought she would have some time to answer the emails from earlier, but now she had to rush through them. She skimmed all of them, starred the ones that looked important, and sent a few half-assed responses. Even then, she still was supposed to be done with work before putting the kids to sleep, and that was most certainly not the case. Sarah warily eyed the stack of papers on her desk as she put her laptop to the side, stood up, and went to say goodnight to her kids.

“Love you, Mom!” said Theo.

“Night,” said Mary.

“Mm,” said Elaina.

Well, at least one of her kids loved her back.

Crack your windows, even in the cold. Be wary of the breath of your kettles and scrape the mold off your butter pats and don’t leave your sweaters out to dry.

- Answer all of the emails that were missed from this weekend - Put the kids to bed

Sarah rushed through the rest of her work, desperate for a few hours of sleep. After she had done her nightly lap around the house, closing the blinds, locking the doors, and turning all of the lights off, she went straight to the bathroom in a sleepy daze. In the bathroom, Sarah used the restroom and grabbed her toothbrush, running it under the faucet head, blissfully unaware for 3 … 2 … 1 …

“FUCK!” The explicative rang throughout the house, echoing off of every surface. Sarah cursed again, this time in her head and at herself for potentially waking the kids up, and let the dreadful truth wash over her.

45 / prose

Fuck it. Sarah grabbed the Listerine from under the sink, swished it around in her mouth, spit it out, and called it a night. She turned the bathroom lights off, went into her bedroom, and, with no pen, paper, or list in sight, she collapsed into her bed and fell into a sleep deeper than the Mariana Trench.

- Get ready for bed

- Go to sleep

- Buy toothpaste

palatine hill review \ 46

ode to the bathroom

Emma Krall

few parts so small hold purposes so grand as the not-so-humble bathroom, where the surfaces are smooth so as not to let the baggage cling— baggage has a habit of doing that, smelling rather vile when it accumulates. one can never overstate the magnitude of a little bottle of poo-pourri. o bathroom! o holder of hygiene! o fortress of solitude! o prison and sanctuary! you endure such grotesque situations, yet also those of such sweet humanity.

your toned arms have held people primping for all of life’s milestones, rouging cheeks and smearing on eyeshadow to match the occasion— pink for prom, blue for graduation, black for funerals, glitter for first dates. sometimes you shelter the bugs, too— they long for your warm, moist walls. you have made refuge for the girls at functions with bladders like ripe grapes, pissing alongside strangers who, in the process, become more like kin.

47 / poetry

you hold my beloved: the wide-mouthed, ever-soothing bathtub, where i have spent a cumulative number of years wallowing and luxuriating; lathering, scrubbing, degreasing, and pressing the reset button nightly; dunking my face into the steaming water for just long enough to tempt the fates. we must not forget the time i so frivolously brought my sunset lamp in to create: the vibetub—and it may be worth noting the two 9PMs ago when i did it again.

and upon your strong hips also perches my clandestine lover: the toilet. our relationship approaches seriousness, as we enjoy hours of shared presence daily.

i’ve fallen asleep in her arms a time or two, remembering and forgetting what it is like to be human again.

i’ve sat and murmured with other humans doing the same—and we’ve come to a strikingly unanimous conclusion: resting between these four undignified walls is the closest to living we’ll ever get.

palatine hill review \ 48

O Sweet Bird Lady Sienna Morell-Grant

49 / visual art

Pen and colored pencil

The Kiss

Tiani Ertel

“Beck, would you wanna kiss me?”

He didn’t look as surprised as I’d expected. Instead, he shot back with his own question, almost before I’d finished.

“How old are you?”

I laughed, kind of inappropriately. It was only that it had surprised me how our questions had followed one another so quickly. The nuance of his answering my question with that specific question was lost on me.

It’d be easy to lie. So I did.

“Sixteen.”

He breathed a sigh. I didn’t notice that it was of relief. I was looking at his lips.

Beck came back into his usual charming, easygoing self and said something so cheesy that I don’t even remember what it was: I could be remembering from a movie, having transposed it onto my own life. He drew closer to me, shuffling so his toes touched mine, and placed both hands around my waist.

prose \ 50

forget the blowfish image. So much so that I even leaned in again for another kiss, wondering if maybe he had been nervous at first, too, and now that we’d broken the spitswapping ice, he’d go back to his normal style.

Crack your windows, even in the cold.

Be wary of the breath of your kettles and scrape the mold off your butter pats and don’t leave your sweaters out to dry.

I was sucked back in, just as before. This time, a new element was introduced. Beck’s tongue drove into my mouth, burrowing against the inside of my cheeks and the roof of my mouth, and once again I had another distracting, unhelpful bout of imagery: this time a soaking mop which become animate, and wouldn’t stop until it cleaned out every square inch of the room of my mouth. It had googly eyes. I made an attempt to venture out with my own tongue, but it was quickly flattened by the mop. More concerning, said mop seemed to be incapable of avoiding tickling my gag reflex. I had the urge to open my eyes again. This time I obeyed and disengaged from the kiss, just barely keeping the contents of my stomach in their rightful place. Beck looked surprised, but dazed. For the first time, I realized he, too, had been drinking. A string of saliva hung from the corner of his lips, but I didn’t think it was important then to mention it.

He kissed me some more. I tried to like it. I got really close to convincing myself that I did. I even brought

51 / prose

where it may swallow us; but for now, the hydrangeas.

my hands up to his jaw, hoping I could guide a bit of the action away from fish and mops. His sighs should have helped a little, but my mouth felt so full of him that his hot breath — tinged with alcohol a lot less savory than black cherry hard seltzer — was just too much. But eventually it was over. He smiled and kissed me on the forehead. That was my favorite part, and I wondered if next time we could just stick to that.

None of it mattered, because in the weeks afterward, I replayed the moment so often that with a tweak here, an embellishment there, the kiss had taken on an element of messy, vulnerable, but tender passion — and nothing, not even the real memory, could dismantle my imagined sensations. My first kiss had been perfect.

palatine hill review \ 52

ote(a)ra(i)

I want to live in a world where the word for toilet is the same as temple, where the meanings of things can overlap and collide. I want to live in a world where I understand everything everyone everywhere says, every time. I want to live in a world where I can have my cake, and eat it too: A cake to keep beside my head as I sleep, a cake to parcel into neat slices and shovel into my mouth. I want to live in a world where people say what they mean, even if sometimes things like toilet actually mean temple.

53 / poetry

They know how to hold a knife.

They know how the air feels, a frigid bite turning them blue and easy to snap.

They know how a boiling mug should be held so the skin doesn’t burn.

poetry \ 54

Title OF PIECE HERE

Being Frank

Christian Larson Byline (Author Name)

it is 9:10 PM on a Tuesday and I brew a cup of coffee to watch the last moments of the sunset

I wish I could watch life pass by through an automobile window. framed by cheap textured plastic and black rubber I think I could learn to enjoy the sights as they go by in this ancient September I am feeling like a bundle of flowers overturned bound in twine drying until I’m a pale yellow. I hope the rain comes soon

Crack your windows, even in the cold. Be wary of the breath of your kettles and scrape the mold off your butter pats

o heart, are you in my feet? it is 9:10 PM on a Tuesday and I am wearing cotton socks

55 / poetry

Burton Scheer Ink on paper

Deux MoUlins

Café deS

visual art \ 56

They had been dating for five years.

“I guess so.” She slumped down in her seat. They sat in silence.

She shifted in her seat. “What is that?”

“What?”

“That noise. Is it the car?”

He shrugged. “Probably.”

They leased a car together.

“This thing isn’t going to work much longer.”

“What?” She turned to look at him.

“The car.”

“Oh. Yeah.”

They lived together.

“Hey,” she started.

He turned to look at her. “Yeah?”

“The light’s green.”

“Oh.”

Go 57 / poetry

visual art \ 58

Digital photography

Title OF PIECE HERE

Byline (Author Name)

Ode to the hyphen in post-grad

As it stretches like dental elastics between the here and now

As I chew through what’s tightly wound, bite down on taut rubber — the blue line’s spinning tires.

I screech westbound to Hillsboro, whistle along the rickety bridge, sing to service disruptions.

Somebody wired my jaw shut in the first grade. Only now can I keep anything down.

Crack your windows, even in the cold. Be wary of the breath of your kettles and scrape the mold off your butter pats and don’t leave your sweaters out to dry.

59 / poetry

palatine hill review \ 60

Title OF PIECE HERE

Byline (Author Name)

Green, Mitchell S. “The Philosophy of Language.” Oxford University Press, 2021.

Scarlet Rice

Today we received an email amassing the simple steps of how not to mildew.

Saying comes in two forms, one thick and the other thin¹, he wrote thickly, too thick for me, and too precise, so instead let me say quite thinly: there is a slug.

61 / poetry

So if you’ll allow me to say this, I’ll say it with thick inconsistency, right as rain, that right now I can see butterflies coming out of A Slug’s ears, and I bet it has been a long time since mister mitchell s. green has taken the care to look down at his feet to witness all the thick and thin and pink and lost and tongue and spring and impractical ways without needing to say anything about it at all.

palatine hill review \ 62

ode to library desk graffiti

Elliot McNicholas

I love you the most

At least my heart was open

I Love too many

Sometimes its the right person at the wrong time

Sometimes its the wrong person at the right time

I never saw a shooting star until I met you

Either way…we were wrong

63 / poetry

the lord of shalott

poetry \ 64

Some days I put on a green coat in the hope that the lapels creased against my chest will be the poetry in another man’s pen. I dress myself with my own desire. I adorn myself with the enchantment I am unable to escape until I am beautiful. I do not remember the day the curse was bestowed upon me — nor do I remember my life

65 / poetry

We live in ourselves as animals in the underbrush — quiet when alone. Our slick throats only ever noising in wretched fear or burning lust. Our flitting eyes only ever stilled by screeching prey or rare escape. Our savage impulse will always lead us back into the thicket.

palatine hill review \ 66

Title OF PIECE HERE

Byline (Author Name)

Crack your windows, even in the cold. Be wary of the breath of your kettles and scrape the mold off your butter pats and don’t leave your sweaters out to dry.

67 / visual art

Watercolor painting on paper

FAIRY Rings

Tiani Ertel

palatine hill review \ 68

I saw you got that tattoo today, those same coupled whooping cranes you always wanted. Now, they are yours, flying with red-tipped beaks, grafting your freckles into celestial geometry bridging dippers of one arm to the other and back.

Crack your windows, even in the cold. Be wary of the breath of your kettles and scrape the mold off your butter pats and don’t leave your sweaters out to dry.

Of course, you waited until after to set them free on your skin, unleashing even more beauty from top to bottom, bodily migration from cool green-water northern eyes to the warm pastels on your southern toes, up and over hills of perfect curves returning to the nest on the arm closest to your heart. Theirs is a romantic contract, bound by lifetime ink onto a canvas as abiding as a lover’s urn.

The more I open your old perfume the more I lose. The hairs you left behind on my clothes are all gone, too

…

… 69 / poetry

Our initials are etched into the walls of bars and local love-spots; Did I not tell you?

Never a tree trunk, that word-litter among the trash we hated.

No — I left our letters on a place with many others so I could save my words for you; That’s what I always thought.

once death season sets in. We huddle in our land-boxes and breathe water. We have an earthquake drill Thursday where we’ll cling like polyps to the unmoving land, rehearsing for that someday where it may swallow us; but for now, the hydrangeas.

I sit alone on browned roots, cackling leaves chisel the already sharp air of October without you, the clouds blend with skyline by way of fog — the first taste of cold fell sooner this year than last.

Of course, those cranes aren’t you and I. At least not anymore. Maybe to you they never were.

Below the swinging monorail there’s a staircase, dangling over a pathway bridging the houses to the city over the wheezing flow of speeding exhaust. The going of up and down in nighttime freeway overhead air frizzy and buzzing, the loudest autumn’s ever been. Is there happiness anywhere but this imperfect present? Am I meant to simply go up and down and back up again always?

Gentle waves of the seaside with a friend hug my ankles until shock turns to warm numbness.

…

palatine hill review \ 70

Piper McCoy Harmon Saturday Night’s Alright (For Crying)

The Saturday nights of the lonely are comprised of leaky shower heads and drooping orchids

Waiting for an invitation to politely decline, decades of practice being the party pooper

Saturday nights of the lonely taste like spit and toothpaste, and they smell like musty air

The nauseating stench of the inside of charter buses or your grandmother’s car

I could be at your party, standing around spreading my discomfort like a thin quilt across the room, yet to your betterment I have decided to withdraw

To wither and wilt and write poetry that doesn’t rhyme

To look through old texts with old friends

To stare at a screen and wish Ohio was closer to Oregon

To cry, or to try

Crack your windows, even in the cold.

Because campus crawls with the lonely on Saturday nights, and nowhere is safe for a midnight weep

Be wary of the breath of your kettles and scrape the mold off your butter pats and don’t leave your sweaters out to dry.

So I have mastered the art of the invisible tear

I cry as I walk to class, dry as a bone in the midst of a sea of mourners

I cry surrounded by friends, I cry alone, yet with dry cheeks

I go about my day

I would love to tell you how it feels to release

71 / poetry

Utrecht Conservatory

visual art \ 72

Burton Scheer Ink on paper

Fear in a Handful of Dust

Sam Mosher

5:48

and every word I speak is heavy with a bone-cold humidity, and it is difficult not to let yourself turn rancid.

Crack your windows, even in the cold.

The cheap dye slid down Elliot’s face. He poured a little more on and tried to rub it into the roots but they stayed red, looking like the ends of matchsticks. Jasmine said dressing up would give him something else to think about it but he didn’t see it. He tilted his head to look at the pigmenty silt stuck to his scalp but that just let the coloring run further down his face. Some crept over the staples behind his ear and he shivered, not hearing so much as feeling the impact, the tearing of metal, and someone’s cries right up against his inner ear. Elliot let his head drop to the left and watched the mirror as some of the black droplets swerved sideways, leaving thin mascaralike snail trails across his faded acne scars and freckles. Head still turned he smiled a little, the criss cross lines making his face look like an empty crossword puzzle, and pushed his left pointer into the unblemished spot on his left cheek. He twisted his nail a little until a bloodless mark

73 / prose

For now the thimbleberry and red currant and the flourishing shield bugs who venture like vagabonds across mirrors, lampshades, the frayed red carpet. For now it all blooms with no mind for beauty and lives without need for forgiveness. left corner, touching the beanbag, and dropping down to the far right. On the mantlepiece, in plain view if he could ever bring himself to look at it, was the jar. Jeremy’s jar.

Jeremy’s urn. The ant made feather-light pinpricks across his skin and Elliot felt so small as the jar filled his vision, its soft sand-surface and blue swirls twisting toward him, inviting him in. His skin tensed around the staples and he could feel the wheel in his hand and he took one palm off, to reach the jar, reach toward…

“Jeremy? Jeremy?”

Elliot snatched his hand back and looked at the large copper cage beside the bean bag. An eye as dark as the dye in his hair and the night in his head regarded Elliot. Barthalamiel said again in his warble, “Jeremy? Jeremy?”

Elliot extended the finger with the ant into the red speckled cockatiel’s cage. His mohawk flapped like those flags on a golf course but all Elliot could see was the red and white halfway up the pole. Big Barth snapped his beak forward. The ant was gone.

“When do I need to leave?” Elliot asked,

palatine hill review \ 74

“Looking at the jar he felt something twist in his stomach but he deadened the feeling and pinched into his hand as hard as he could.”

the steps. Identical houses lined his on either side of the street, so similar looking that when he’d first moved he’d had to leave a big sign saying “MY HOUSE” at the foot of the stoop. When Jeremy had suggested moving to New York after college, Elliot hadn’t imagined this copy and paste suburb just barely hanging onto the edge of the Bronx, with about as much excitement as a picture book

75 / prose

without the pictures. But it had been good for Jeremy to be by family again, even if Jasmine was always traveling, and Elliot had just needed any excuse to go somewhere new. He wished he hadn’t now. The empty driveway dared him to look into its absence but he kept his eyes forward and promised he would go into the auto shop soon — as soon as he stopped hearing metal crumple and screech whenever he thought of his hands on the wheel. Besides, he liked walking now. Or had at least decided that he did.

There was a couple sitting outside the 7-Eleven as Elliot walked up. They were just beneath the lottery signs on a corrugated bench and the red lights made them look like the display in a butchery aisle. The woman was wearing one of those skimpy nurse outfits with the red crosses and little hats except under it she had on orange activewear complete with the half zipper jacket. The zipper was pulled to her neck and bracketed by dreads. The man beside her looked like a pale Matrix extra but a shock of pink hair ruined his brooding and trench-coated noir look. He was smoking two cigarettes taped together.

The door dinged a little when Elliot entered the store but the guy behind the counter didn’t look up from the “Elle” he was reading. Elliot played his little “how many steps to the sandwiches section” game and made it in a subpar seventeen — they’d added a temporary Sour Patch Kids display which messed up his pace. He pretended to sort through the sandwiches for a second before picking the same “Bargain!” emblazoned turkey club he always did. It was fine to eat the same thing so long as you gave the appearance of considering the options. Jeremy hated that; he’d always picked different sandwiches.

palatine hill review \ 76

6:44

Elliot fled the store and plopped onto the bench. The couple was still there and he bumped the Matrix man as he sat down. The man got up and walked to the other side of the nurse and went back to lounging. Elliot imagined he’d say “sorry” and the guy would say “no worry, I only moved because I’m allergic to turkey” and then Elliot would make a turkey joke and they would laugh and he’d ask them where they were going and of course they’d say “Jasmine’s, duh” and he’d feel dumb again but he’s going there because he has this thing to give her that he needs to get out of his hands and that he also can’t imagine ever giving up so maybe they could walk with him since he maybe needs help carrying it and he just needed someone, anyone and … Elliot could hear himself thinking in the same way he imagined a skydiver heard the wind before realizing they forgot their parachute. He dropped his sandwich and opened his backpack with skittish hands, his eyes feeling so dry he needed to blink every second. Reaching his hands into the bag he held the jar, held whatever was left of Jeremy before Jasmine took him away but Elliot guessed that was fair since he’d taken Jeremy away from her forever and now he couldn’t move and his eyes were wet instead of dry and someone — the nurse — coughed beside him.

Elliot tensed and jumped and as he did his hands twisted and wrenched and the jar tipped over, its lid left in his hands. A thin stream of ash escaped and swirled on the edge of his backpack before he righted the cold ceramic. Elliot felt frozen, like he was both in front of the headlights and behind the wheel. His hands were numb and his brain felt so glacially cold his eyes began to water. The nurse reached over and scooped the fine gray particles back into the jar. She caught the bits on the backpack and the small eddies that had escaped onto and through the bench. Taking the top from him she fastened it back on then looked at Elliot, then his sandwich on the ground, then back at his face. Her eyes were very dark.

“I also like the BLT’s bread better — it reminds me

77 / prose

of my grandmother’s — and the packaging has that cute bubble lettering and also it’s 35 cents cheaper.”

The man beside her shifted his legs and pulled a box of cigarettes from his pants pocket. He selected one and lit it with a lighter as pink as his hair. The nurse pulled her own box out from her purse but when she took a cigarette her hand shook a little and she passed it to the Matrix man. He took it, blew out his first cigarette, then pulled tape from his coat pocket and taped them together in great loops. He lit both and raised them to glossy lips.

“I’m trying to quit,” the nurse said. “He’s European.”

“Okay,” said Elliot.

“So it’s not that I dislike the turkey club — except for the turkey it’s a BLT — but the combination of the preexisting factors always leads to me picking the BLT over the turkey.” She paused, tugged her zipper up, and patted the man’s knee. “I’m not choosing to like the BLT over the turkey club: my past experiences and innate biases combine to create a personality who will always choose a BLT. It is impossible to make a choice with no bias. Any decision you make will be processed on the basis of your relationship with your parents, what kind of teachers you had, where you’re from, et cetera. Let’s say you got in a terrible accident recently: feeling bad is okay, but it was an inevitable tragedy. You were always going to be there and so was anyone else involved, and all of you were always going to act in such a manner that would result in the accident. Everything happens exactly within your abilities and instincts and whatever choice you’re making is the only one you would ever make.” She still hadn’t blinked.

palatine hill review \ 78

Title OF PIECE HERE

“I didn’t choose to sit here and share my truth with you; the choice was first made when my grandmother was compelled to pass on her matriarchal need to share her

Byline (Author Name)

79 / prose

where it may swallow us; but for now, the hydrangeas.

Jasmine would be back on the plane by the time he got to the party.

Elliot found himself in one of those trash filled alleys behind restaurants that the customer or food inspection guy doesn’t need to know about. Four figures stood around a fifth lying on a four wheeled push cart. The form atop the cart was shrouded in something that looked like an alphabet soup inspired bedspread. A guy in a sleeveless bishop’s robe and stole was dribbling drops of something from a flask onto what Elliot assumed was the lying person’s head.

“A solis ortu usque ad occasum,” the Bishop began, pausing as the other three erupted into ooohs and yooos. The Bishop spread his hands to calm the congregation and did some weird clap handshake with the guy to his left — who was dressed as what Elliot could only guess was sleeveless Bigfoot — before taking a swig from the flask. “Get the incense going, bro.”

Bigfoot scrambled to light the joint in his hand and puffed before waving it about, the smoke trailing in the air like an oil slick on fresh water.

“You were our brother, our shooter, our dawg,” the Bishop espoused. “Off the jump you were a day one and I knew we could do anything together. You never took no for an answer—”

“Yikes,” said the guy to the Bishop’s right. His sailor costume, of course, sleeveless.

palatine hill review \ 80

81 / prose

“He had a great walrus mustache Nietzsche and the cravat and suit, sans sleeves, he was wearing looked not unlike that which a palatine could have worn to his 1876 lecture upon the ethics of the French Revolution and if we had killed God where did that leave us. ’

palatine hill review \ 82

that I soak up each and every thing outside myself and every word I speak is heavy with a bone-cold humidity, and it is difficult not to let yourself turn rancid.

Crack your windows, even in the cold. Be wary of the breath of your kettles and scrape the mold off your butter pats and don’t leave your sweaters out to dry. and walked into the throng. He made it about to the end of the sidewalk, just the beginning of the front walkway, before he had to stop and catch his breath. Through the throng Elliot could see Nietzsche atop a box of some kind, gesturing manically to his trio of boys. The man’s mustache quivered and he looked up, seeing Elliot dead in the eyes from across the lawn. He made to gesture Elliot over but someone in a bikini top and Abe Lincoln mask bumped into Elliot and

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and his mouth was dry and when someone tapped him on the shoulders he felt like a rubber band had been snapped against his stomach.”

85 / prose

shoulders in. Elliot didn’t know what to do but it was hard to stop his own sad little smile so he just let it happen.

“Seems like a nice party. He would have liked it.”

Elliot whispered the last part. He pulled the jar from his backpack. It looked almost oceanic in the dim light. To think so much could be reduced to so little. He handed it to her. Jasmine took it in both hands and wrapped her arms around it. She looked up at him.

“Who’re you dressed as?”

Elliot couldn’t take his eyes from the jar.

“Does it matter?”

palatine hill review \ 86

You Shed No Tears Tonight

Elliot McNicholas

The absence of grief

Is a greater relief that the abundance of happiness

But you shed no tears tonight

And their absence is truer than the sorrow

An ache pulses in the corners of your eyes

Your lashes are stiff and stay glued after each blink

There’s a trace of something salty

Dried to your cheeks in delicate tracks

But nothing was ever there to have been dried

You’ve been sapped of your self before Each teardrop carries a thought or feeling away And soaks into the ground

Your eyes are still closed

It’s just the mirage of an oasis ahead

The drought marches on

You can scrunch up your face all you like,

Nothing will fall out

You shed no tears tonight

Now the floodgates opening is not a matter of “when”

But “if ever”

Bottling up water can save lives

It might just be your death sentence.

87 / poetry

Your Grace is utterly intact

Alex Chew

“Your grace is utterly intact.”

—Maggie Nelson, “A Halo Over the Hospital”

Awe, reverence for the bearing of the broken.

Sick and tired of the sick and tired being exhorted, praised for being so strong, so brave, so gracious. And yet.

I want to weep when I see the photos.

The pain in the glassy, dazed stare.

The wan, bloodied, bruised skin.

And I weep for their courage, their strength, their bravery.

Your grace is utterly intact.

A lifetime of love and admiration and here comes a deluge of still more.

My three birds, my three heroes. How I prayed for healing in my hands, magic in my words. My silence.

Your grace is utterly intact, even when your body is not. I never cried as much as I thought I should. I felt that the tears were yours and yours alone. But I never saw you cry as much as you ought, either. Your tears didn’t stain where they fell when they did.

Your grace was utterly intact.

poetry \ 88

BRITTLE

Halcyon Orvendal

I sat at the kitchen table and cried that night. It was maybe three-thirty-five in the morning, and I left behind a warm bed and a warmer hug because I couldn’t bring myself to stay lying there while unwanted, angry tears warred with my desire to go back to my dreaming. So instead I curled up in a wooden chair, hoping that my sobs were quiet enough not to wake my partner, waiting for all this dissonance to end.

There is always a faint disconnect between my mind and my body, swaying between mild disappointment about its state and excitement about the ever-nearer opportunity to make it look the way it should (the thought of making that change myself has briefly occurred to me, but it’s a stupid, reckless thought, more silly than anything else, and . It is a truly harrowing thing to feel this new feeling, to recognize so keenly that one’s body , and there is nothing they can

I fly in a holding pattern this year. Too little time to change my shape, my name, the one-letter marker on all my identification, but the knowledge that they are all wrong grows like frost upon the lake — slowly, imperceptible, (ice is an incredible structure, strong enough to carry my weight, but I don’t feel strong.

before. I didn’t feel this before. What happened?)

Eventually, finally, the onslaught faded away, and I could pick up the shattered remnants of myself and glance at the clock on the oven. Three-forty-six, I think it said. It was a little too bright and blurry for me to look at.

I had something I needed to do after I woke up properly. Couldn’t remember what. I just knew what I had to do next, and so I did — wiped whatever tears remained off my face, took a deep shuddering breath, and walked back to bed. I curled up under the sheets, and except for the distance I was mindful to keep (I don’t want to be touched. I want to be close to you. I don’t know what to do), nothing had changed from fifteen minutes prior. Maybe I would forget when morning came. Maybe I’d be normal again.

(I didn’t.)

palatine hill review \ 90

Jamie Kushnick my room

91 / poetry

palatine hill review \ 92

Title OF PIECE HERE

AJ Di Nicola

Digital photography circa spring 2018

93 / visual art

Innocents

Axel Jurgens

Standing up against the weight Of time in light of brighter days And faded wait against the haze That drives the sheltered sun away

A morning gaze of stifled light Which signals all the people rise

In stinging glare all they fled Yet behind their shackled flight Where broken dream forever lies And like burnished tears they bled.

poetry \ 94

The floor tastes nice.

Kind of off lemony, boot-branded by field dirt and motor oil from the car exhaust running into the puddles.

It’s rainy in the non-rainy season, so there’s been more to clean at Churchill High. Two days of clouds amidst the boiling heat, and then it will be back to fire roasting until he’s the color of ketchup.

“Hey. Cary, right?”

In the breakroom Cary looks up from his thermos of hot chocolate to his new supervisor. Thin, brown-haired, tired-looking. Lincoln Meyers. Cary admires the scraggly whiskers on Lincoln’s chin that others would have probably shaved by now. “The girl’s bathroom is flooded again. And remember to get that graffiti on the side of Mrs. Nowell’s door before the day is over.”

There’s an awkward lapse where Cary says nothing, and then realizes the man waiting for a response. “Okay,” Cary says.

His supervisor stares for a moment longer then shakes his head with a half-eye roll. He goes to the counter to pour himself another coffee. It smells burnt. He takes one packet of fake sugar, and two creams. Cary thinks that’s perfectly average. The other man checks his watch.

“Time?” Cary asks.

“You’ve got three minutes.”

Good, he thinks. Just enough time to finish his egg, mustard and pepper-jelly sandwich. He eats the same thing everyday. When Peter Dash Deli at the corner of Penley Court Ave is open, that’s where he orders. Today he had to make his own, and it’s never as good. After putting his lunchbox back into its spot, Cary gets the supplies he’ll need for cleaning the bathroom.

95 / prose

Arriving at the bathroom goes slower, and louder, than Cary would have wanted as the bell rings and students flood the halls.

He hides in an alcove for the five minutes of passing period with the WET FLOOR–CAREFUL | CUIDADO and OUT OF ORDER signs tucked under one arm, then strides with them the same purposeful way artists do with their portfolios, pulling the cleaning cart with his mop and bucket behind him.

He sets up his signs, not spotting any chunks of brown yet, which is always lucky, and he can still smell the wax on the floor, so he knows his shoes won’t smell of pee later.

He knocks before entering, announcing, “I’m here to clean!”

The problem, he quickly finds, is the maroon bra shoved into the bowl’s passage located in the third toilet down; it has choked the toilet off better than any pile of shit could.

He takes it out, holding it by the strap in one rubber gloved hand, and then his skin starts itching uncomfortably when a stream of water drips from it. He wrings it out so that it’s the okay drip-drip of damp cloth on a clothing line and not the kind of drip that makes him want to throw

“He’s already mentally in Arizona after bribing someone to drive him across three states, then hopping a plane to Germany, visiting the WW2 museums and cathedrals.”

palatine hill review \ 96

Title OF PIECE HERE

Byline (Author Name)

He wonders offhandedly how bright the red would be if the fabric ever had the chance to dry, and feels a level of upset at knowing he’s never going to know, because he has to throw it out. It’s been sitting in a toilet, after all. But he knows this is going to bug him until he sees exactly what shade of red it is when it’s dry. What a fucking thing

The October fog and the poison air

“Cary finishes cleaning the girls’ restroom, and adds “bras” to the series of things he can discover inside a toilet bowl as he mops.”

how to grow again.

He steps out of the bathroom, still holding the bra aloft between the claustrophobic sweathole of his cleaning gloves, just as a white haired goth chick rounds the corner of the hall with a neon pink hall slip. She raises it as a shield at the sight of the school’s janitor pinching the bra, who suddenly wants to quit his job and move to a different country. He’s already mentally in Arizona after bribing someone to drive him across three states, then hopping a plane to Germany, visiting the WW2 museums and cathedrals.

Crack your windows, even in the cold. Be wary of the breath of your kettles and scrape the mold off your butter pats and don’t leave your sweaters out to dry.

He only exits the fantasy when he has successfully completed disposing of the bra by flinging it underhand at the garbage bin. It lands with a bathing suit plop against its black plastic lining. Her eyes track it automatically, then snap back to him when the rubber of his gloves squeak as he peels them off, and he clears his throat.

“I still need to mop.” He jerks his head behind him, explanation lame in the face of her squint. He could see her hand twitching to grab her phone, likely about to blast his face all over the internet, or dial 911, whatever her first

He talks fast, pointing to the left. “You’re new. There’s another girls’ restroom at the bottom of that flight of stairs.” He clears his throat again. “There’s also a neutral gendered one closer to the principal’s office, near the

97 / prose

cafeteria entrance. And the men’s is on the other side — the right side, of the stairs.”

“...thanks?” she says, eyes darting. Goth girl then leaves so quickly for the stairs, there’s a contrail of sour mascara left in her wake. It gives Cary a headrush and his shoulders rise to his ears until he has no neck.

He tries to focus on the smell of the floor, and it helps. He can taste lemon again. That’s good, he thinks.

and breathe water. We have an earthquake drill Thursday where we’ll cling like polyps to the unmoving land, rehearsing for that someday where it may swallow us; but for now, the hydrangeas.

Cary finishes cleaning the girls’ restroom, and adds “bras” to the series of things he can discover inside a toilet bowl as he mops.

He wishes he could stop thinking about what color the bra will be.

Would be. It’s already in the can. It’s already gone, so he mustn’t think about colors anymore, or the odd gravity of toilet water.

He rolls his cart to the cafeteria and sweeps and mops the floors there. Students mill about the tables on their off period, mostly on their phones with the occasional rare creature actually studying. “Yo, Cary!”

He glances up from where he’s trying to get spaghetti off the floor to see Eddie. He’s a 1000 watt shiteating smile senior that transferred in his sophomore year, who has made it his life’s mission to prank the ever-loving fuck out of his teachers. Cary had since gotten to know the boy when cleaning up the messes left behind.

“Find any more bananas?” Eddie asks. He’s scratching his neck. “I think I got them all, but I might’ve missed one.”

Eddie’s latest brilliant idea was a banana scavenger hunt. Except he forgot where he put them all.

Cary sighs. “Where do you think I swear to god, if I find another fruit in the vents again two months out, I’ll get you suspended.”

Eddie laughs. “Man, your nose is just crazy! That orange was all the way above the gym in the ceiling. I had to get roof access to pull that off.”

Cary grunts. His last great idea was oranges, which

palatine hill review \ 98

and reminding everything—tree root and infection, aster and infestation— how to grow again.

“Come on,” Eddie cajoles. “I know it wasn’t actually because it was in the vents. You like a challenge. Was it the message? It couldn’t have been that bad.”

“You carved into its peel ‘a rat poison dilemma–should I, or should I not?’ I feel like I should be making sure my thermos isn’t going to send me to the ER.”

“Point,” Eddie concedes with a look of deep thought. “I guess that would be possible, especially in this … place.”

“It’s fine,” Cary grouches, rubbing at his brow. It is only after the nubs of his glasses are off his nose that he realizes the splitting headache.

“Something the matter?”

Crack your windows, even in the cold. Be wary of the breath of your kettles and scrape the mold off your butter pats and don’t leave your sweaters out to dry.

Cary’s gaze lowers to level with Eddie. “Don’t you have a seventh period art this year? You also have that math quiz next Wednesday for Mrs. Hearse’s class. You should be studying.”

“Touché.” Eddie pulls out a notebook, licking his fingers as he flips to a new page and clicks his pen. “What number am I thinking of?”

“For the last time, I’m not fu—” Cary grimaces. “I’m not psychic, kid.”

“And yet you somehow have my schedule better memorized than I do three days into the school year.”

“Seven hundred and eighty-eight,” Cary spits out, clutching his mop and devoting himself to getting the spaghetti off the floor. Meatball Wednesdays should be Meatball Mondays, he scowls. “Leave, for the love of God.”

99 / prose

me, your timing couldn’t be better,” he exclaims in delight. Cary puts the brakes on on his cart. “Glad to be of help, Mr. Tarasov.” The chemistry teacher’s class is all in their second year, so Cary recognizes all their faces. He’s careful not to eye the lacrosse boy in the back who likes to

“Why does this banana say that I’m over sixty percent cannibal?”

decorate the hall election posters with highlighter, or the girl with the perfectly iron-curled blonde hair who deals coke after school behind the dumpster where there’s a camera blind spot. She’s been smart about it so far, though Cary bets she’ll get busted two months in, once the new school policy he’s heard whispers about is implemented. His attention returns to Mr. Samuel Tarasov when he

palatine hill review \ 100

“I’m Cary.” Since entering, Cary has been smelling something … starchy. His eyes narrow and begin to wander the class. Just where is…? He remembers to respond then.

“Just doing my job, sir.”

“Well, I appreciate it, Cary. You do good work. And from what I’ve heard, you never complain, even though you’ve got it tough.” What? “Hey, uh, let me know if anyone ever gives you any problems, yeah?”

This place and its climate mean that I soak up each and every thing outside myself and every word I speak is heavy with a bone-cold humidity, and it is difficult not to let yourself turn rancid.

“Why would anyone give me problems?” he wonders. It’s a bit sharper than he intended, but he’s rather distracted by the smell of starch beneath all the chemicals. He catches a whiff of the other man’s shampoo. It’s flowery. Either he likes it that way, or his own ran out and he borrowed his wife’s.

“You know, because, uh—”

Crack your windows, even in the cold. Be wary of the breath of your kettles and scrape the mold off your butter pats and don’t leave your sweaters out to dry. speaks. “You know me? I’ve seen you around a lot, though I’ve never gotten your name.”

Cary’s eyes catch on something duct taped above the fire alarm. “Ah, there’s the first one.” He only realizes he interrupted the teacher when the man stalls.

“I—” The pudgy teacher looks flustered, then sees the thing on the wall. “Is that a banana?” His voice rises in confusion, catching the attention of the rest of the class. Half had already been watching the interaction with evident interest.

“Yes. It was meant for you, but you must not have found it.” Cary moves half a step over to peel it off the wall, the ducktape making a burping noise as it pops off the stucco. He hands it to the teacher, who takes it automatically.

“It’s a bit green,” Cary says, “much harder to smell

101 / prose

than yellow. But it should be fine in a day. Goodbye, Mr. Tarasov.”

“Bye, Cary,” the man replies dumbly. Then quietly, “why does this banana say that I’m over sixty percent cannibal?” Cary hears the man wonder just as he leaves.

He’s decided to rest in the lounge until he can scrub the paint off Mrs. Nowell’s door after classes are out, so he doesn’t disturb the students. Or Mrs. Nowell. He puts the cart in the closet.

His supervisor isn’t in when Cary enters, and he smiles.

Cary hates learning new rules. Churchill High’s gone through seven Facility Managers in the … nine? Nine years that Cary has been employed here, and he hates change. He also hates people believing they know his job better than he does when at the end of the day, efficiency should always be their priority, and Cary is always efficient.

He waits until exactly 4:45 pm, until Mrs. Nowell has left campus to head for her classroom with his cleaning supplies, because the woman always gives him the stink eye whenever they run into each other. Cary thinks it’s because he always remembers to erase her whiteboard, and she never remembers to put a do not erase note, except for when there’s nothing of substance on the board.

He uses a paint stripper and a wide blade chisel to clean off the graffiti on the door. Cary observes the green oil, believing it to be a rendition of Medusa. It’s a pretty design. Unfortunately, paint on the walls isn’t sanctioned by the school outside the art department. He hopes the artist

She always speaks to him in a certain tone she reserves for small children.

palatine hill review \ 102

how to grow again.

entrances to the gym lockers. He only finds a dropped water bottle and sweatshirt, so he carries those with him to the principal’s office as he tries to think like Eddie.

“Cary!” the secretary greets him with a terse smile as he deposits them in the lost and found bin. She always speaks to him in a certain tone she reserves for small children. When there was one other janitor on staff, Linda, a hispanic woman who spoke near fluent English, Secretary Julia talked to her the same. Cary dislikes it so much he’s become extremely accustomed to forcibly suppressing their interactions, and he’s become so good at it that her babying is always an unpleasant surprise during their next interaction.

Crack your windows, even in the cold. Be wary of the breath of your kettles and scrape the mold off your butter pats and don’t leave your sweaters out to dry.

“Thank you so much for bringing these in! That’s a very nice thing for you to do.”

Cary nods, and leaves without saying anything.

Eddie mentioned something about a challenge, and sometime last year from Eddie’s previous arc of evil, he discovered Cary has a particular distaste for the teacher’s break room. He heads there next.

Upon arriving, he knocks, then enters when he hears someone shout a confused, “Enter?”

Of the three heads holding stacks of papers, only two blink owlishly at him. The one who doesn’t glace up from his work has a balding blond head that Cary feels a curl of distaste at seeing. Another new hire to replace the

103 / prose

retired history teacher. The same man asks, “are you a parent?”

“You must be Mr. Collins.”

The man looks up. “What the hell?” Mr. Collins grunts, squinting. Cary tries to get a word in, but Mr. Collins won’t let him. “You’re the janitor. You’re not scheduled to be here at this time. And how the hell do you know my name?”

“Oh, that’s just Cary, hun,” Mrs. Herrera frowns at Mr. Collins. “There’s no need to be rude.”

Cary’s eyes go to Mrs. Herrera. “Hello, Mrs. Herrera. Have you seen a banana?”

“Pardon?” interrupts Mr. Collins again, his voice still that unpleasant tenor. “It’s a bit dark in here to be wearing those, don’t you think? Take them off.”

The man can only be referring to Cary’s shades. “First you ask if I’m a parent, and now you mistake me for one of your students. We’re not in a classroom, Mr. Collins.” Cary doesn’t bother to explain his glasses are prescription, either, as the break room’s door closes behind him. Mr. Collins sputters and the other two teachers laugh at him. Mrs. Herrera is holding her hand over her mouth as she meets Cary’s eyes behind his glasses. Her gaze was one of the few he didn’t mind. “Sorry. You said something about a, uh, a banana?”

“Yes. Have you seen it?”

He can only smell refried beans because of the microwave, and the nose hair-curling scent of glue from the aging plywood beneath the new carpet. “It’s probably green. It also probably has a threatening or ominous “

You must not have a lot of friends

“if you start every conversation this way with a

monotone,

palatine hill review \ 104

message, like ‘you can hide.’”

Title OF PIECE HERE

“Can hide what?”

Cary shrugs.

Byline (Author Name)

“We’re busy,” Mr. Collins grits out then. “Please leave.”

“We’re just grading papers,” Mrs. Herrera interjects with a half forced smile. “You’re fine, dear.”

“That—” Mr. Collins starts and Cary interrupts this time, gesturing at the microwave. “When was that last used?”

“What?” Mrs. Huerra asks.

“Last call for the banana with the threatening message that says I’m watching you.’” ’

that I soak up each and every thing outside myself and every word I speak is heavy with a bone-cold humidity, and it is difficult not to let yourself turn rancid.

“The microwave.”

“No idea,” Mr. Yamamoto replies, much tamer than his fellow history teacher, whom he then rounds on with a severe expression. “Lay off, Kelly. You’re the new guy here, and he’s been here longer than Mrs. Song.”

“So?” Mr. Collins bursts out.

Crack your windows, even in the cold. Be wary of the breath of your kettles and scrape the mold off your butter pats and don’t leave your sweaters out to dry.

Mr. Yamamoto stares at his middle-aged colleague in what can only be astonishment. “Mrs. Song has worked here for seventeen years.”

Cary, by this time, has made his way over to the microwave. Eddie, he knows, is again unfortunately aware of Cary’s hatred for anything that makes beeping noises. They’re positively repulsive, every last one, the king of which is this dreadful contraption: the microwave.

He pushes the open button, it beeps, he flinches, and the smell of burrito gets worse as it clicks open. The glass tray is empty, save for the grime attached to the inside of its every surface. He feels ill just looking at it. His lips purse when he clicks it back shut, and the damn thing beeps again. He shudders.

105 / prose

is a passable whisper, and is really not. “There’s something extremely doing!?” his voice goes two octaves up as he sees what Cary is doing.

from the wall. “You must not have a lot of friends,” Cary responds monotone, “if you start every conversation this way with a stranger, Mr. Collins.” On the back of the microwave he spots the gleam of duct tape. “ he exclaims in delight.

detaching from stucco. Banana in hand, he shoves the microwave back against the wall and replugs it in.

stem, repulsed.

He proffers the banana to them. “Do any of you three want it?”

grown a third head. The Spanish teacher is silently laughing behind her hand, Mr. Yamamoto faintly amused, and Mr. Collins is still visibly seething, clean shaven cheeks having gone from a handsome tan to a spotty, sunburn puce, making him a study in abstracts.

stutters between giggles. “I need to thank them. That made my day.”

up the game. He lifts the banana higher. “Last call for the banana with the threatening message that says ‘I’m watching you.’”

shifting to stare at Mr. Collins. He must be making a point of some sort, Cary thinks, though what, he doesn’t care to parse out.

really meaning to. “Please. Treasure it.”

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“With my life,” Mr. Yamamoto agrees.

Title OF PIECE HERE

Byline (Author Name)

Cary’s eyebrows go up. “I wouldn’t go that far. It deserves to be composted after being subjected to the smell of electricity and triple cooked beans.”

Mr. Yamamoto chuckles. “You’re an interesting guy, Cary.”

The October fog and the poison air

Cary is already making for the door, though pauses briefly to shoot him a glance before exiting. “Have a good night, Mr. Yamamoto. And you, Mrs. Huerra.”

He’s halfway down the hall when he realizes he forgot to say goodbye to Mr. Collins, then shrugs and checks his watch. 5:12 P.M. Overtime. He sighs.

He grabs his lunch bag from the facilities room and makes for the park a mile and a half up the road. He walks fast, trying to make up for lost time.

There, he sits at his bench by the small pond. The

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family of ducks he feeds every day is already waiting for him, and honks excitedly as he retrieves the small sack of oats from his coat pocket.

As he feeds them for the next half hour, he sips at his hot chocolate. It helps cover the wet cling of algae against his nose and taste of feathers, which he usually doesn’t mind, but is still nice not to experience. The ducks are all whitish-gray, with yellow beaks and orange legs. He lets them crawl over his shoes, smiling as the biggest one nips at his fingers when she gets irritated with him for scratching her head.

He feels the wind pick up, and frowns as the first drop lands against the pale skin of his arm. “We have to cut today short, I’m afraid,” he informs the small family. He picks up the smallest off his lap, who chirps at him. Their mother flares her wings until the chick is on the ground again. “Emma, you know I don’t have waterproof feathers like you, and it’s still a good walk to my apartment. I’ll give you extra tomorrow, I promise.”

Cary doesn’t make it home before the sky breaks, but it makes the hot shower after more rewarding. He enjoys the smell of incense smoldering by the open window as he sits in his favorite striped green and black robe. His basil bush in its chipped pot on the sill gets buffed by the breeze picking up. He sucks on a lemon-honey cough drop as a treat because he doesn’t like the taste of sweets, but has an unfortunate liking for the taste of medicine.

He is reminded of the taste of the school’s floor that he cleans every Tuesday and Thursday — its vacuum stick floor linoleum wax refreshes every new school year.

Tomorrow, he will arrive at exactly 9:45 A.M. at Peter Dash Deli on the corner of Penley Court Ave to pick up his pre-ordered sandwich, get to Churchill High five minutes early for his shift at 10:00, and work until his shift ends and he can feed the ducks.

Cary eats another cough drop. A crack echoes through his apartment as wide molars break through the first one. He eats the bag before the storm has passed.

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Digital photography aussie dragon 109 / visual art

Julia Maushardt

Elegy for a native tongue

Alina Cruz

Sientes el zumbido de la arena

While we worship the sun with our mariachi band

Y puedes sentir el aire frío que sube con la luna

To remind you that you cannot read your story in Nahuatl runes

Ellos existen en tu sangre mezclada y sin filtrar

Oh, caramel girl, not that part of the white flood

Que vino en barco para apagar nuestra luz

On that fatefully dark and dreary night

Nos obligan a rezarle a su lengua sórdida

But the moon knows our story, the one we have clung

To, mientras el sol nos irradia con su sonrisa

So that our remembering skin would turn mocha to his trial

Cariña, nos llevas sobre tus hombros, fríos y calientes

Sometimes our rage splashes out of our tortilla fry pot

Sí, vinimos del desierto y a él hemos regresado

You were born of the desert, and to it you’ll return

poetry \ 110

111 / poetry

palatine hill review \ 112

113 / visual art

AJ Di Nicola

where we’ll cling like polyps to the unmoving land, rehearsing for that someday where it may swallow us; but for now, the hydrangeas.

Five days after twenty-three

For now the thimbleberry and red currant and the flourishing shield bugs who venture like vagabonds across mirrors, lampshades, the frayed red carpet. For now it all blooms with no mind for beauty and lives without need for forgiveness. let’s crack open my chest with a couple of compressions, grasp at shattered bone to pry my rib cage wide, scrape my carcass clean of crimson viscera, and deposit what remains among the underbrush so maybe new sprouts and sunlight can crack through my decaying skin instead of the anxiety that pings through my nervous system with every passing thought.

Bugging

out!

( on left) :

Zoe Steele Pen and ink on paper

poetry \ 114

on hellfire

Emma

Krall

the bones in the socket tip the scales. they shift and pull, grinding together, shaving the cartilage down to oblivion, throbbing, torrid, repenting past lives, as if sent from dante’s seventh circle.

the pain is vast and consuming: it strangles you in sunlight, drips down your throat in sleep, follows you to school each day, burrows into those you call home.

poison pounds through your veins, pricks like a needle in a sinner’s arm. the clock ticks faster every day: blaring, blaring, blaring, silent — peace beheld only in sleep and death.

it weeps with you in solitude, creeps and flares behind your eyes, squeezes your skull until it bursts: searing, searing, searing, dark — it does not cease until it is all.

it pulses in orangey crimson waves, every corner of your fragile frame alight. you manage by means of heritage — generations of wordless pain.

115 / poetry

SHE CAN DO EVIL; SHE CAN DO EVIL

visual art \ 116

Corryn Pettingill Oil painting on canvas

Title OF PIECE HERE

Between two oaks

Byline (Author Name)

Pluck me from your heart like a splinter

A hole succeeds me

And damn you for trying to fill it

I’ll come back and stretch it out

Double its size

The October fog and the poison air come hand in hand, like lovers, smoke and dreamlike smog descending and reminding everything—tree root and infection, aster and infestation—

I’ll grab your tubing and pull

Pull it all out like a woman possessed

Severing vein and artery alike

amassing the simple steps of how not to mildew.

I’ll eat your heart out

This place and its climate mean that I soak up each and every thing outside myself and every word I speak is heavy with a bone-cold

God damn you for trying to fill the hole I leave behind

117 / poetry

No nuns, no nuns, none! :

love notes

Eli Dell’Osso

of our marriage bed, or chance the crackling whip on weeping knuckles bruised and battered already.

do you love me?

little schoolboy, go and cut yourself on the bloodied pages of theology crusted over like red wax and stained with relics of the others gone before.

little schoolboy, come lie with me now that you have grown sharp and broad and ripe with blood.

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you in the depths of me. as I force you to choke on that tome and swallow it for me lest you spit up tears and bones and all that you have kept from me.

little schoolboy, don’t you love me? I will make you show me that you love me.

palatine hill review \ 120

Title OF PIECE HERE

Byline (Author Name) Renz Johnson Film photography Emergent

121 / visual art

Detroit, 1972

1972, Detroit, Michigan

I, hockey stick in hand, stare at the floor-toceiling, wall-to-wall collage of stacked beer cans my parents had constructed in the family room. I am alone; the house is quiet. I get up, walk over to the wall and proceed to knock my hockey stick against each and every can until they all have a noticeable dent. It takes me hours to reach all of them, but before I had even begun, I had resolved to destroy the entire wall, so I just kept going, precisely swinging my stick over and over again without stopping. That was it. No one mentioned it; life kept going. The wall of beer cans eventually disappeared, replaced by Dana and Bill’s new hobbies, like cultivating a miniature marajuana garden in the kitchen, and not buying their son the glasses he desperately needed.

“Dad,” the voice split like he could hear in stereo, “Dad, are you listening to me at all?”

“I— I’m sorry, honey, what were you saying?”

“Oh my god I’ve been talking for like ten minutes I’m not going to repeat it.”

“Maren, I’m sorry. I will do better.” I will do better.

“You’ll never be as good as them.”

“Here’s 100 dollars for college — don’t expect any more.”

“Happy Birthday!” Received 9:52 p.m.

“Maren?”

“Yes, Dad?”

“Did you know I love you?”

prose \ 122

and she’s moshing in the pit of my indie pop stomach.

and reminding everything—tree root and infection, aster and infestation— how to grow again.

the disco ball rotates my face toward a glittering penumbra, this sliver of light.

they call this club the Holocene, as in present epoch, This will last forever.

my friend comes in waves — crimped hair and slick edges, their jangle irrepressible, two hoops through one piercing.

Crack your windows, even in the cold. Be wary of the breath of your kettles and scrape the mold off your butter pats and don’t leave your sweaters out to dry.

they’re so happy.

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she plays another unreleased song, but we mouth along anyway, exhaling gusts of purple-blue, spanglish canticles.

quítate ese miedo you’ll be a lot more, trust me, yo te entiendo

For now the thimbleberry and red currant and the flourishing shield bugs who venture like vagabonds across mirrors, lampshades, the frayed red carpet.

For now it all blooms with no mind for beauty and lives without need for forgiveness.

then, Ambar extends the mike, fingers outstretched for my friend and their six iridescent rings.

now they’re on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and all i can do is cheer — reach, Adam! reach.

For Rowan 09.17.2023

palatine hill review \ 124

I Called HOme from the ferry

Kit Graf

while sweating out dirt cheap cocktails and could’ve told home about kissing a girl for the first time in the Aegean sea. How we swam out past the buoys and yelled at the sail boats in the distance, saltwater making us float like a flame above a wick as we looked up at planes flying through the polluted sky, later wooing passengers to look down at two naked girls, sirens for a moment, before being whistled back to shore by a security guard who shined his flashlight in our eyes. I called home from the ferry and instead I told them about art. Picasso’s Nude Woman with Raised Arms and how I wondered why her arms were raised. My father responded, why do people do anything?

old enough

Ella Neff

125 / poetry

Film photography ( on right )

visual art \ 126

NATHAN

Tara Schmidtke

Illustration: Pen and ink

Nathan was horny, buzzed, and on the hunt. He sat alone in a tucked-away corner of the scungy Roppongi bar, poised on the barstool like a gangly, pimply Hugh Hefner, Nintendo T-shirt stretched thinly across his angular shoulders and too-short pants exposing a bit of seductive, sharp-boned ankle. He leaned forward, hunching over his sugary cocktail and sending quick glances at an ass in some jeans, petite curving wrists, the lace-covered underside of a boob, feeling like a secret agent in a fancy, expensive suit. He figured he probably should light a cigarette, then wondered if smoking alone would look lonely instead of mysteriously charming, as intended.

He pondered this profound dilemma as he perched, picking at the sticky spots on the tabletop, feeling along the edges of conversations as if walking along the edge of the surf, bits of words washing and lapping over his ankles and toes. To Nate, most of it was unintelligible, but he was listening for his “go words”: Foreigner, handsome, takai, Ikemen, foreign guy, Amerika-jin, “Hi will you teach me English?” He willed himself to be noticed, a phenomenon in this tiny nobody-bar, a singular bright light of mysterious and exotic allure, pure sexual magnetism. They’d notice him soon, maybe in another hour, maybe if he smoked, or maybe if he didn’t and told them it was because his dad died from lung cancer and drew them in with his sensitive soul.

It didn’t strike Nathan as efficient to needlessly waste time studying Japanese, to pass whatever grammar lessons necessitated basic conversation, to shave or wash his hair or learn about the etiquette of nanpa pickup culture. Just earlier today, he had modeled at that one university fashion show for free ice cream — everyone came up to him with broken English

127 / prose

and professional smiles. Some of the girls were too starstruck to even hug him. He smirked to himself. If only they knew how nerdy and down-to-earth he was… all too possible they just assumed he only hung out with other models, maybe even small-time celebrities.

Just as he was making to get another drink, the fated woman slid into the seat across from him.

Her eyes were cast demurely downwards as she said, “Would you like this drink? I ordered it, but I don’t like it very much … and you seem to have already ordered it?” She was soft-spoken and had the cuteness, that soft shyness, that there-but-not accentness, that desirable Japanese woman-ness that Nathan knew was just—

“Of course… uh, I-I can order you, o-sakeh?”

“Oh, arigatou! So nice.”

The drinks kept coming. The conversation kept flowing. She was cute, so cute, her head bobbing with polite giggles at his nerdy jokes that he had been half-sure she wouldn’t even catch. She elegantly hid her laughter behind a pink manicured hand, and he caught a glimpse of the edge of her canine tooth between her fingers as it flashed white in the blueish bar lights. He stumbled over his story about getting piss-drunk in China as he vividly imagined running his tongue over her sharp little incisor, pictured her

palatine hill review \ 128

flush against his body in some scenic park with the city glittering behind them, her hands on his chest, gazing up warmly into his eyes.

Occasionally she would lean forward, her eyes wide and curious, and her small, round chest would swell over the edge of her white lacy tank top. Nathan could feel he was the one doing all the talking, but her gaze seemed to grow bigger as she leaned forward more and more. He figured that after he clearly riveted her on this first date, he could ask her more questions on the second — did she have LINE? So weird she didn’t, but he’d grab her Instagram in a minute — after he finished telling her in slow, loud English about how his dad dying when he was seven fucked him up, after he told her all the ways he was actually a romantic who just looked like a globe-trotting man of the world, after he told her every faded fever-dream memory he had of broad hands lifting him high into the air — his dad was even taller than him — and spinning, spinning, spinning him around…

At some point she must have (finally) been touching him, because Nathan remembered feeling electricity running in hot waves from his head to the base of his spine, remembered hearing “kawaisou his ear as the multicolored lights wheeled on the ceiling — is this what the ceiling had looked like? He remembered stumbling over his clunky brown Merrells his mom had bought him (for their excellent arch support), and slamming his back into the wall. She was all over him, her petite sharp hips snaking along his own. He swallowed down his nausea and twisted the front of his body into the wall as she laughed and playfully tugged at his scrawny bicep, her

129 / prose

little hands barely shaking him because she was so tiny and cute and—

She must have loved talking with him so much that she took his wallet and passport as her cute little way of making sure to see him again. She was so shy, so innocent and whimsical — she left him in an alley by the bar because

palatine hill review \ 130

Title OF PIECE HERE

Byline (Author Name)

Belladonna / The Prodigal Son Meets a Girl in Barcelona / Atropa and Apathy

Sam Mosher

She gave me her Instagram and asked if I wanted to go to the club, her red shoes leaving Barceloneta sand swirls as she taps them by the door. The music from downstairs was hands-on-drums-on-waists-on-chilled-glasses so I said no but didn’t say I’d thrown up two days ago and decided to cut myself off.

Crack your windows, even in the cold. Be wary of the breath of your kettles and scrape the mold off your butter pats and don’t leave your sweaters out to dry.

I painted on a smile saying I have a flight tomorrow morning and she said text me if you ever come to Lisboa. Her hair had the black gloss of Belladonna berries in the night’s shade and I imagined the bright-lights-dark-liquor-pale-skin if I’d said yes.

My Dad told me you should experiment more but I’ve never been much of a scientist.

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It is hard to know what may come back once death season sets in. We huddle in our land-boxes and breathe water. We have an earthquake drill Thursday where we’ll cling like polyps to the unmoving land, rehearsing for that someday where it may swallow us; but for now, the hydrangeas. For now the thimbleberry and red currant and the flourishing shield bugs who venture like vagabonds across mirrors, lampshades, the frayed red carpet. For now it all blooms with no mind for beauty and lives without need for forgiveness.

I washed my face with soap from the wall dispenser and practiced being aloof as I picked up my book. I felt rest-regret-need-nothing-random-anger as the screeches of night buses filled the emptiness of the room.

My high school Spanish teacher said the best way to learn a language is to fall in love but I only got a B in that class.

palatine hill review \ 132

The Dacryology Of Crabs

Eli Dell’Osso

No, you idiot. Choose the other one. It’s not going to be C five times in a row.

You should have studied last night, but no, you were too busy binging Castlevania for the third time, fixated on that scene where Alucard lies weeping on the floor of his childhood bedroom, swaddled in a lonely, gilded silence. But hey,

What can you say? You’ve never seen a boy who wasn’t prettier when he was crying.

not to let yourself turn rancid.

Crack your windows, even in the cold. Be wary of the breath of your kettles and scrape the mold off your butter pats and don’t leave your sweaters out to dry.

The first boy you ever loved was crying when you met him. He was kneeling on the shore, filling tidepools with his eyes. You marveled because you had never seen God cry before. And maybe that’s why

You fell so fast. For him, and for your old classmate Chris, whose salt-streaked face shone from the cross in the red light as you crucified him in your high school production of Godspell.

133 / poetry

It’s not sadistic, is it? To enjoy the softness underneath that calcified shell, to cherish silver droplets spilled on the back of a trembling hand, and find relief because the ocean has found a suitable channel to bleed out of.

But come on now, focus. Look at number 6. You know this one, right?

It’s just that boys are like crabs, which feels fitting, because of carcinization,

palatine hill review \ 134

135 / visual art

near Fayetteville NY

Renz Johnson Film photography

poetry \ 136

( on left)

Title OF PIECE HERE

I. A quiet Resurrection

Byline (Author Name)

Excerpted from the novel “The Familiar Witch”

Cleo Lockhart

The bird on the workshop table was dead, and open. It was Damien’s first time looking at the inside of a bird, and he had admittedly seen better views. It lay with its tail closest to him and its iridescent blue head farthest, as though he were standing at the foot of its bed, and its wings, intact, were spread out on either side of its belly, which had not fared so well. Bisected at the base of the neck, its organs spilled from its skin like jewels from a treasure chest salvaged from the bottom of the sea, and they glistened like them, too. Damien tried to keep a neutral face as he was told the name of each one of them in turn. Even with his experience in measured neutrality, though, this proved a difficult indifference to maintain. It was, in a word, gross.

Crack your windows, even in the cold. Be wary of the breath of your kettles and scrape the mold off your butter pats and don’t leave your sweaters out to dry.

“Crop, liver, kidney,” said the gruff man beside him, pointing. His mentor was a man who always spoke like a sea captain, though he had confided in Damien on his first day of apprenticeship that he could hardly set foot on a ferry for the nausea. He was a tall, broad man, a sprinkling of stubble across his chin, and, at present, he wore an apron splattered with blood that, moments before, had belonged to the creature which now lay before them both. It had been dead already, of course, though Damien didn’t ask what had happened. That wasn’t the sort of question he was here to ask. “And this here is the heart. Tiny thing, isn’t it? Reckon you could skip it across a lake, like a pebble.”

Damien thought, I’d rather not, to which another, snider voice inside him responded, It would be pretty funny, though. Damien shushed the second voice, privately. He was trying to focus.

He said, “What good is anatomy in constructing a

137 / prose

This, on the other hand, was the right question to ask — Damien could tell because the grin of his instructor widened, and his eyes lit up like two gas stove burners. Damien steeled himself for what he knew could be a longwinded explanation. Surprisingly, his mentor was brief. “Because,” he said, “You can’t hope to give a thing a body without knowing how that body works. Once a spirit is made physical, it isn’t just one puzzle piece you’re working with anymore. Instead, you’ve got a whole mess of different parts, all working full-time to keep that which wants to live alive. That’s what spirit magic is all about, contrary to its name. The life of all things, sea-sized or pebble-sized. For your first construction, we’ll start with pebble-sized.” At this, he gave Damien a “lesson’s-over” pat on the back (his hands, thankfully, had not suffered the same bloodsplattered fate as his apron), and crossed the room to the large sink that sat behind the table, beginning to clean off his tools. Damien stayed still, looking down thoughtfully at the broken body in front of him.

“And this here is the heart. Tiny thing, isn’t it? Reckon you could skip it across a lake, like a pebble.”

palatine hill review \ 138

Title OF PIECE HERE

His mentor turned to him with a quizzical look, wiping off a pair of forceps with a dish cloth. “What about the bird?”

Byline (Author Name)

“What can be done for its life?”

His mentor set the cloth down and looked pityingly at the small, motionless body. Despite the bright hue of its coat, it looked miserably ordinary in death. “Listen, son,” he said, which Damien, notably not his son, only bristled at somewhat. “There’s not much we can do for what’s already dead. There’s no bringing it back from where it’s gone to now — not in flesh and blood. At least it gave its life for a good anatomy lesson, eh? Not all of us are so lucky.”

Crack your windows, even in the cold.

Soon after that, the man returned to his bedchambers upstairs of the shop, leaving Damien to his closing tasks, which, by now, he could nearly do with his eyes closed. When he had finished, he found himself — almost against his will — returning to the still form on the workshop table. He looked at it for a moment, and then made his decision. He scooped the thing up in his palms, wincing only slightly at the sensation of the juices that squelched out and made their unwelcome way onto his hands. With a final glance toward the stairs, and the certainty that his superior would not be returning, he moved swiftly for the back door.

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The two split sides of its skin weaved themselves together as though joined by a thread, reattaching seamlessly from neck to tail, and the feathers became full again, no longer the tattered garments of an unmoving corpse. The air was electric as it sewed the soul back together, strung taut, hot with the friction of reanimation, but the boy hardly felt it. He held his hand by the bird as it re-formed, his eyes trained on it, unblinking, until, suddenly, he stopped, pulling his hand away. And the bird was whole. Coming to, the bird shivered slightly, like the cold air had nipped at its feathers — nevermind that, moments before, its unbeating heart had been utterly exposed to the elements — and then, having assessed its surroundings, took off in the direction of the marina.

Damien watched it go, unsurprised. That was the way all of them flew.

palatine hill review \ 140

141 / visual art

The Lost Cavern

Mary Hatten Oil painting on canvas

palatine hill review \ 142

Three-Legged Frustration

Max

Allen

A man sits by himself at a round table in a café, gnarled hands sandwiching a cup of Earl Grey. Knots and folds work their way snakelike through the dark mahogany of the table, and the weak reflection of the light, cascading in from the glass walls, is punctured by speckles of jilted Splenda. One granule latches onto his viny silver arm hair as he lowers the too-hot mug to the tabletop. His arm lifts into the air seconds later as he plunges a thick yellowing nail into his ear cavity, wriggles it violently, then pulls it out, a little bit yellower than before. The Splenda pulls itself deeper into the weeds of his arms as his wrist relaxes back onto the table, cradling the porcelain cup once more. It is not particularly cold in the room, but he likes the way the heat of the tea diffuses through his hide and loosens the strings and cords of his hands.

Crack your windows, even in the cold. Be wary of the breath of your kettles and scrape the mold off your butter pats and don’t leave your sweaters out to dry.

To his right, beyond the floor-to-ceiling window, fluorescently mossy hills stretch, and past those, the ocean slumbers, breathing gently into the pebbles. A diminutive horse stands alone on the crest of the tallest hill, silhouetted against the pale clouds smeared across the sky. The horse looks back at the café with a mix of intrigue and disdain as she dips her meaty head to the ground to pull at cottony lichens. She whinnies something like “stupid humans” through her mouthful. She feels no need to elaborate.

On a humbler hill in front of the horse, a scraggly husk of a tree extends from the ground like a ghoulish hand, hundreds of fingers grasping towards the web of

143 / prose

gain purchase and pull its body out from its hillside tomb. The limbs flex and writhe but touch only air. The horse looks straight past it.

The man pays no mind to the goings-on outside the window, but instead stares pensively into the void. His leg, not visible from this angle, jumps obligatorily, as it always does when he’s lost in thought. A waitress bearing his check steps up to him, all lank gray hair and rusty orange lipstick. Her mouth is a little too long, not quite realistic enough. Forklike fingers extrude from her inorganic hands. Maybe God fumbled when He crafted her from the PlayDoh in His toy drawer. Her flowery green dress floats gently in a breeze of unknown origin. Except — oops — the dress begins to bleed into the gloss of the concrete floor, and shoot, there goes her ear.

The man turns to her. “Oh dear, are you doing all right? Your dress is streaking again, and your, ah, your ear is running down your shoulder. Can I help you with anything?”

The waitress smiles, black alleys looming between every tooth. “No, I’m quite alright, thank you. Nothing a little touching up won’t fix. In fact, I can feel a new ear coming in as we speak.”

“Ah,” the man rolls the mug between his hands. “But I feel obligated to tell you that the residue from the last one is staining the table behind us.”

“Well that won’t do,” the woman says. “I’ll have the busboy clean that up in a jiffy. In the meantime, here’s your check.”

The man unfolds the padded black folder, glances down at the receipt. “Strange café, isn’t this? Bills and servers rather than cash registers and baristas?”

“Suppose it is, yeah.” She gestures toward

palatine hill review \ 144

face, blotting out his eyes and smoothing the texture of his seventy-one years.

and infection, aster and infestation— how to grow again.

He reaches up, feels at his eyelessness. “Well I’ll be. We sure are two pieces of work, aren’t we? You don’t reckon we can get a plastic surgeon in here, do you?”

“Uh-uh. No surgeons on the menu, and the chefs aren’t gonna make a special order like that.”

“Well, then I’m done here, I think. Would you mind clearing me from my table?”

“Not at all. Come to think of it, I’m quite ready to get out of here myself. You ready?”

He flashes her a thumbs-up. Splenda tumbles from his arm hair.

Crack your windows, even in the cold. Be wary of the breath of your kettles and scrape the mold off your butter pats and don’t leave your sweaters out to dry.

Alright waitress: Now plunge your boxy fist into his fleshy face, let it sink in, let it sink through, watch it shoot out the other side, raining dough onto the pastry plate of the customer behind you. Put your whole body into the motion like you’re throwing a softball, go too far and lose your balance. Fall to the floor, the milky green concrete floor, next to the deflated folds of skin that compose his headless body. Listen to what his neckhole has to say: “You are a fraud and a failure and will never be proud of anything you make.” Now burst through the window, send little glimmers of glass all up and down the hills. Clamber onto your moody steed and leave this accursed place.

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It is hard to know what may come back

She lies on her tummy before the great stone fireplace, a solid blue puzzle piece pinched between two fingers. She examines the edges, the way they alternately extrude limbs and recede into themselves, and sets it into a gap in the snaking river growing in front of her. She always works from the middle outward, frequently declaring that only babies start from the edges. Her feet kick idly in

“Listen to what his neckhole has to say: ’You are a fraud and a never be proud of

checkered shirt. Buttons strain and choke, pulling against their bonds in a desperate bid for freedom. Circular spectacles nest into a divot on his ruddy, bulbous nose. A handlebar mustache interrupts the pockmarks of his face, its arms open to embrace crumbs from food or froth from drink. He has the aesthetic of a pipe-smoker — all the rustic playfulness and outdated wisdom — but he instead wedges a strawberry cream Pocky stick between his flaky lips. The girl talked him into buying her a box of the treat a few weeks ago, and he’s been hooked ever since. He may as well be a nicotine addict, seeing as how he blazes through three packs a day.

Now, looking into his face, the left side dancing orange from the flames, the girl says, “Daddy, where do dreams come from?”

He shoves the whole stick into his mouth and dust shoots forth as he replies, “Dreams? Well, that there’s a big question. No one knows, really.”

“Don’t be silly. Of course you know.”

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to see the other side of the puzzle for just a moment. We flip one piece over to see it, and then we turn it back over and go back to our own world. Only, the puzzle is so big, we will never actually know anything that’s going on in the other world.”

“Oh.” She digs her nail under the blue piece she just put in, flips it over.

“Daddy?”

“Olivia.”

“Your story doesn’t make any sense. If you flip over a puzzle piece, it doesn’t fit anymore.”

Crack your windows, even in the cold. Be wary of the breath of your kettles and scrape the mold off your butter pats and don’t leave your sweaters out to dry.

He grins. “Busted.”

“I don’t like when you smile like that.”

“Like what?”

“Your teeth aren’t reflecting anything. They’re like

147 / prose

The walls are a little oversaturated, and the fire’s too

“Daddy? Daddy, it’s dripping.”

“Oh, cripes. You’d better get out of here. You’d better get out fast.” Enamel dribbles down his chin and into

She stands still for a moment, then turns. White matter is now gushing between his fingers, spurting onto the hardwood floor, oozing toward the puzzle.

“Run!” he gurgles. She runs.

The room begins to fill; the expanding tooth gobbles up the puzzle, feasts on the fire, climbs up to the man’s face. A lone Pocky stick floats towards his mouth; he wrenches his jaws open and swallows it whole. A hint of a smile, then his face is engulfed.

Maybe in a hundred thousand years, archaeologists will uncover this immense tooth — a massive molar poking out of earthy gums. They will muse at what bizarre beast produced such a house-shaped tooth. Maybe the dentists of the future will examine it and click their tongues at the cavity sunken into the doorway, the cavity shaped like a fleeing girl. More likely, the landlord will see it tomorrow and gnash her own teeth at another property lost.

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Byline (Author Name)

This time, there’a a snake lying contorted in a clearing. But the snake isn’t the main subject here, for a few feet away stands the imposing figure of a buck, profound eyes glimmering in the shafts of sunlight. Something dances in those eyes, something that could be wisdom, or just as easily fear.

And fear would be justified; this is no ordinary wood. Trees stretch upwards in precise rows, as if the forest neatly combed and gelled its hair. Birds flit and flirt through latticed branches, singing like swords. Their flight is nothing short of miraculous, as fluids congeal on their featherless wings, dripping like tar over the notches and turns of the trees.

The deer ducks to avoid a spot of falling sludge, and expels a snort. He shakes his head and shifts from hoof to hoof.

What’s wrong, deer? You should be happy in this neat little world of yours.

He glances behind him, to where his herd stands,

149 / prose

Too bad, my friend. You’re just as stuck as me. Only he’s not as stuck, is he? He can still fill his lungs with clean air, can still move about and do what he pleases. He doesn’t understand how I feel at all. But that could change. I could make you feel just like me.

With a vicious vigor, I send oaks and maples skyward, clogging up the forest. They fuse with other trees, losing texture and character every time, until they are unadorned brown beams driving themselves skyward. They consume the deer readily. Let him be immobilized! Let him

“But that could change. I could make you feel just like me.”

When this acrimonious act doesn’t soothe me, I scream and split the forest in half with a galactic hatchet. Bark soars everywhere, calling out angrily at me. The trees sing out their dismay, calling me a filthy traitor and an

I throw the canvas down, let it clatter to the ground next to the other two. One is slathered with white paint. The other sports a gaping hole in the middle. I slump back into my beanbag chair and bury my

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Mercury THE PAST CAN ONLY FOLLOW THEY WHO REMEMBER

Maddening memory, the unfortunate cornerstone of my world. Muddy and masticated, from half-truths to full misremembrances. I dance, only to forget the first step by the second.

151 / poetry

Ryan Marshall

SHADOWS

Shadows seek, son of the darkest Spring, The one whose story burns bright even in Hades’ core. Guard your heart lest Melpomene ring Her bell and don her mask. Do not let your sin

Drag your Icarus into the Night. Son of the darkest Spring, Run. Learn, reach your sun, and hold on, Leave the Night, unfurl your wings, Make Knowledge proud. You will not abandon

The stories you sinned to see. Son of the darkest Spring, Rise. Remember the Night is in your past And summon your strength. The muses will sing Your epic. Shadow, sin, sun, shine. Outlast.

Son of the darkest Spring, you know

There is no time to rest, so spark with Lighting and tell your story. Show Even the gods may feel your scythe.

You survived the prophecy that claimed Your life. Son of the darkest Spring, be their blight. Your sun continues the fight, aimed With the rage of your sacrifice. Spite.

Bright. Sin. Shadow. Shine. You have reached the sun.

Son of the darkest Spring, line The world with their bodies. Make even the constellations run.

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153

art

/ visual

( on left)

Hecate Rising You From the Grave

Corryn Pettingill Oil painting on canvas

Of the Flesh & of the Father

Cleo Lockhart

Sometimes I catch the wanting when it isn’t looking — breath fogging the shop window, sick with need for what’s inside, a secret shame-shape which crystallizes at the corner of the eye and burns wax candles in salt circles

begging for the deliverance of indulgence.

The preacher starves himself another day. The philosopher calls his devils. I — what?

I hold my jaw like a sturdy-carved bow, walk in the dark and bite necks. Find loudness at unholy hours and try to hold a girl named for the sea-witch the way a man would.

Who is this prayer-boy who kneels in supplication?

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155 / poetry

And still — I am not enough, it seems, for the gap-toothed god I keep in my coin purse nor for the witches in the sugar-spun woods who call the devil on their landlines and kiss her full-lipped when the lights are low. fine, then — I will water-walk alone. I will grow a head of antlers. I will be a man, and a woman, and the ache in your teeth.

I will seek absolution in the in-between spaces where walk only the saintly and the damned.

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contributors

Josie Alberts’ (BA ’26, world languages and literatures: Spanish and Russian) love for reading and writing began in first grade, under the guidance of her caring and dedicated teacher Arlene Harrington. Josie would like to dedicate her poem to Mrs. Harrington, whose encouragement made a world of difference in countless lives.

Max Allen (BA ’25, biology) does not like body horror and is not too chuffed that it’s the only thing he knows how to write.

C.Avery

Sheppard Braddy studies) hopes in his poetry he can provide a space for understanding his own and others’ emotional experiences in relation with the natural world. He will continue writing and sharing that writing with anyone he can, and is very grateful to be a returning contributor to the Review

Crack your windows, even in the cold. Be wary of the breath of your kettles and scrape the mold off your butter pats and don’t leave your sweaters out to dry.

C.R. Bride writing) is an aspiring author in the urban and high fantasy

xiii / miscellany

Alex Chew (BA ’25, English with a minor in gender studies) can most often be found haunting woods, libraries, and hobbit holes. Their poetry can be found haunting the pages of Open Minds Quarterly and Synergia: Journal of Gender, Thought, and Expression. They themselves are haunted by stories told by fellow queer writers, spirits of fictional characters, and music written by immortal forest deities.

(she/ella) (BA ’25, art history) está aprendiendo

and the flourishing shield bugs who venture like vagabonds across mirrors, lampshades, the frayed red carpet.

For now it all blooms with no mind for beauty

(BA ’25, English with a concentration in

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Title OF PIECE HERE

Byline (Author Name)

Tiani Ertel (BA ’25, theatre with a minor in English) would like to dedicate each printed work to her biggest supporter, Peanut the cat. “This is about playing golf” is, in fact, about playing golf. “The Kiss” is an excerpt from their upcoming novel (but don’t hold her to that). “Fairy Rings” was painted by Peanut.

Kit Graf (BA ’24, English) says hi to Sam Mosher!

Piper McCoy Harmon (BA ’26, computer science and mathematics, and MAT ’27) has a lot of feelings and likes to write about them. Aside from tutoring calculus, singing in choirs, and exploring mossy nooks, Piper fills her free time with words. Piper’s writing explores the intricacies of grief and love, which she believes are two sides of the same coin.

Mary Hatten (BA ’24, English with a concentration in creative writing) is a writer and artist who draws inspiration from fantasy and sci-fi themes. Her piece, The Lost Cavern, incorporates fantastical elements to evoke feelings of awe

Crack your windows, even in the cold.

xv / miscellany

graduating, she has interned for the Portland Book Festival and now works at Northwest Children’s Theater. Jillian can’t believe she gets to use the words “stupendous” and “bamboozled” at a Big Girl Job. Find her @jillianjwrites.

Renz Johnson (BA ’24, rhetoric and media studies and studio art) is a photographer exploring tensions between human and the natural world. Alternative color film processes allow more information to be embedded in photos at the expense of photographic reality. His pictures ask the viewer to consider new ways of seeing through distortion and unexpected composition.

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Title OF PIECE HERE

Byline (Author Name)

Axel Jurgens (JD ’25) is a second-year law student. He holds a BS in biochemistry and an MMA record of 2-0. Axel’s poetry practice is primarily inspired by rap music; other interests like military history often provide themes for his writing. He also collects orchids, primarily Laelia and Cattleya species.

Emma Krall (BA ’25, history and English with a concentration in creative writing and a minor in Ethnic studies) is the only child of Randy and Stefani (her best friends), and the proud mother of three healthy plants — and one plant that is trying its best. In her non-scholastic hours, Emma enjoys cooking, creating music, making zines, and appreciating her people (who she loves and thanks very much).

xvii / miscellany

Anna Littlejohn (BA ’26, English with minors in French studies and music) is an avid appreciator of the arts and a true academic. She loves literature, plays the violin and viola, and creates visual art as a hobby. An Inner Light is meant to reflect the beauty of the fall colors and the spirituality she sees in the natural world.

Cleo Lockhart (BA ’25, theatre with minors in art and art history and English) is trapped in an endless house with a thousand doors. The only way to get them out is by reading their published novel The Well Where the World Ends (a sequel, excerpted in this review, is currently in the works)! Do it quick!! It’s dark in here :(

Ryan Marshall (BA ‘25) is an English major with a creative writing emphasis and a rhetoric and media studies minor. In his minimal free time, Ryan enjoys playing story-based games, reading books that make him cry (yay tragedies), and writing his own stories and poetry.

Julia Maushardt (BA ’24, mathematics with a minor in Hispanic studies) has been taking photos since she was ten and has had her work featured in the magazine and President Joe Biden’s house. She’s currently on the Lewis & Clark rowing team and works as a freelance marketing photographer when she’s not frolicking around with her friends.

(BA ’24, classics) is a queer, gendernonconforming student who loves to escape into fantasy a little too much. They started writing poetry in earnest when regular journaling couldn’t answer their questions anymore. They are inspired to understand the world around them, past and present, while the future still eludes them.

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and every word I speak is heavy with a bone-cold humidity, and it is difficult not to let yourself turn rancid.

Ella Neff (BA ’24, international affairs) enjoys photographing people in everyday scenes. See more of her work on Instagram: @eknphoto

Crack your windows, even in the cold. Be wary of the breath of your kettles and scrape the mold off your butter pats and don’t leave your sweaters out to dry.

Elliott Leor Negrín (BA ’25, world languages and literatures: Japanese and Spanish) is a young writer from Los Angeles. He has been published in the Altadena Poetry Review, Sugar Pine Literary Magazine, and the Palatine Hill Review. He has worked as an administrative assistant for Flying Milk Productions, a television production company, and currently interns for YRG Partners, a literary agency. He (allegedly) speaks Japanese, Spanish, and Hebrew.

Halcyon Orvendal (he/they) (BA ’25, environmental studies) is LC’s resident #1 cloak wearer. In addition, he draws, drinks tea, plays Dungeons and Dragons, and occasionally wanders about campus at ungodly early hours. Their guiding philosophies are thus: first, there is always a third path; and second, to choose joy.

xix

/ miscellany

Corryn Pettingill (BA ’24, English and studio art) loves reading fantastical stories and has gotten very invested in Greek mythology recently. For her senior thesis, she is illuminating stories of female rage and power. In her submissions, she presents Medea, the sorceress who killed her children to enrage her cheating husband, and Hecate, the powerful necromancer.

Shelby Platt (BA ’24, English with a concentration in creative writing and a minor in religious studies) cries every time she watches Steel Magnolias and hopes she always will. Her life goals include living near friends, reading and writing poetry, and making lots of blackberry cobblers.

Zach Reinker (They/He) (BA ’23, English with a minor in art and art history) is a writer, artist, singer, SCAdian, TTRPG enthusiast, and general practitioner of nonsense. Since graduating Lewis & Clark College in 2023, they have continued to haunt the Portland outskirts. They can be

palatine hill review \ xx

Title OF PIECE HERE

Byline (Author Name)

Soleina Robinson (BA ’25, English with a concentration in creative writing): Sol-lei-na. Sol, as in the sun, meaning she has a sunny disposition — most of the time. Lei, a Hawaiian necklace of flowers: she loves nature and it often grows into her writing. Na, the drum sound for moon: no she is not nocturnal, but she sometimes wakes up to write when the moon is still in the dark sky.

Ronen (BA ’27, computer science) is a goofy goober who writes sometimes when he feels sad.

Willow Rueckert-Gardner (BA ’27): Originally from Madison, Wisconsin, Willow Rueckert-Gardner is a freshman at Lewis & Clark’s undergraduate campus. They have been writing poetry since 2023.

Izzy Runi (BA ’26, art history) likes to do a bit of everything. That doesn’t mean he is good at everything, but he has fun trying. Izzy wrote this piece for fun, but maybe you can relate to it. Or maybe not. He doesn’t really care.

xxi / miscellany

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Additionally, we would like to thank the Morgan S. Odell Professor of Humanities, Mary Szybist, and the brilliant English administrative coordinator, Amy Baskin, for serving another year as our faculty and staff advisors, respectively. Their mentorship and guidance is, as always, invaluable.

We would be remiss if we did not thank the Student Media Board (SMB) for not only providing us with funding but also coming together to try to raise the optional Student Media Fee so future leaders of our organizations aren’t faced with the same budgetary struggles we have weathered for years.1

Crack your windows, even in the cold. Be wary of the breath of your kettles and scrape the mold off your butter pats and don’t leave your sweaters out to dry.

We would like to thank the student-run newspaper and fellow media organization, The Mossy Log, for lending us their office space and computers for InDesign — as well as the lovely company when we were both in layout. Editorin-chief, Amelia Doyle, was also instrumental in co-leading SMB’s effort to raise the Student Media Fee with AJ.

Our sincere thanks to Chris Hammett and Morel Ink for working their print magic yet again, and to the Campus Activities Board (CAB) for co-sponsoring our 51st edition’s

1 This was written before we knew whether the Student Media Fee was raised. Here’s to a hopeful future!

xxiii / miscellany

For now it all blooms with no mind for beauty and lives without need for forgiveness. Copy Chief Max Allen worked odd hours from New Zealand to achieve his “calling” — proofreading this entire edition before we submitted it to Morel Ink. Design Editor & Social Media Manager Burton Scheer masterfully designed spreads and built up our social media presence all while helping get Synergia (a fellow journal) back on its feet.

Design Editors Shelby Platt and J Frank also helped the Review deliver yet another gorgeous book, putting in extra hours scanning over 100 paper scraps (J scanned over 100 paper scraps) and navigating the various challenges of preparing an edition for print. Associate Editors Ryan Marshall and Josie Alberts managed emails, earlier rounds of proofreading, and so much more — helping keep the Editorial Board alive and well.

Last, but not least, we want to thank you, our readers. Your continued support and interest in this college’s creative community will help us continue for many more years to come.

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