61_ by Molly Esteve

quarterlife

superstition

volume issue october 2011

editor molly esteve layout editors bo erickson hanne jensen copy editors karah kemmerly madeline jacobson staff grant bradley haverty brown gaea campe gabriella friedman andrew gordon tyler king emma nye paris white staff artists sam alden katie berfield claire johnson chelsea kern

quarterlife is a literary journal published four times a year that features poetry, short fiction, drama, creative nonfiction, analytic essays, alternative journalism, and any other sort of written work Whitman students might create. Each issue is composed around a given theme that acts as both a spark for individual creativity and a thematic axis for the issue. quarterlife is an exercise in creative subjectivity, a celebration of the conceptual diversity of Whitman writers when presented with a single theme. Each quarterlife theme acts as the proverbial elephant in the room, fragmented by individual perception: each portion is ostensibly unconnected but ultimately relevant to the whole. Every piece illuminates a different aspect of the theme. In this way, quarterlife magazine participates in the writing process. The magazine is not an indifferent vehicle by which writing is published, but rather is a dynamic medium with which writing is produced.

whitman.edu/quarterlife

letter from the editor

counting crows

One for sorrow. Two for mirth. When my family moved across from a Catholic academy twelve years ago, it was a squat, brick schoolhouse with a charming old bell, little girls in matching pinafores, and an air of old-fashioned acquiescence. Three for a wedding, four for a birth. In the years to follow, the academy’s Catholic cabal tore down the old schoolhouse and replaced it with a drab box of earthquake-proof grey concrete. It was then that I noticed the murder of crows that perched on the corner’s power-lines at noontime—their throaty caws intermingling with the screams of schoolchildren playing freeze tag. Five for silver, six for gold. Seven for a secret not to be told. Those crows, with their eerily childlike whines, grew from the rubble of that old school; I’m sure of it. Eight for heaven, nine for hell. And ten for the devil’s own sel’. In this issue of quarterlife, we invite you into our superstitions. Come, traverse through our graveyards and our irrationalities, look behind the hidden shelf, see what grows out of the rubble we have left behind. Welcome to quarterlife’s sixth year. -Scottish nursery rhyme.

contents 06 09 12 16 19 23 39 41 44 48 50 53

Nipuchanipira Adriel Borshansky Superstition #1 Robert Crenshaw Unexplore Eleanor Ellis An open letter to the superstitious Diana Dulek chumps next door Knock on Wood Paris White Garden Spectre Sam Alden The Argentine DoppelgĂ¤nger ZoĂŤ Ballering Cygnus Samuel Chapman Private Eye Molly Johanson For the Night Andrew Gordon Magpies Olivia Mitchell 4/7, you know? The Trolley

Cover Art by Sam Alden Illustrations by Sam Alden, Katie Berfield, Claire Johnson, Molly Johanson, Chelsea Kern

Adriel Borshansky

Nipuchanipira

To go on a trip requires a specific ritual in my family. It doesn’t matter who it is - if someone is about to depart, we do nipuchanipira. We line up and sit down together, papa being the last to sit down. We sit in silence for some time, usually just long enough to let the silence settle in. The silence grows into a kind of loudness and we sit for a bit more until the time is right to stand in unison and say to each other: “nipuchanipira.” Then we kiss eachother goodbye and goodluck, and whoever it is goes on his or her way. Nipuchanipira. I asked papa once about why we do nipuchanipira and I think he said something about going with a feather in a cap. Chances are it’s a really old Russian phrase that even he doesn’t understand anymore. It always seemed like a senseless superstition - it just makes goodbyes even harder than they have to be. Even so, I find that I still whisper to myself before I go somewhere: “nipuchanipira.” It’s absurd and brainless, I know, but I still do it. It’s like I’m scared that if I don’t do nipuchanipira even once I’ll curse myself, or worse: curse the ritual itself. At this point I’ve given up trying to under-

stand nipuchanipira. Maybe this is my own senseless superstition: I’d rather not really know what it means. I’d rather not ask, and just pretend that my family doesn’t need to translate what we do in terms that I understand. As soon as I ask for a translation of nipuchanipira into a rational English phrase, it will lose its power: I will render the distance between myself and my heritage real. Of course, asking about where I come from brings with it an unmatched feeling of rootedness and I want desperately to learn every Russian superstition, every idiom, every word my parents have ever used and why. But I hold on to the vain hope that if I simply repeat nipuchanipira, I will prove that my family doesn’t need to explain itself for me to understand. It’s my superstition now too: nipuchanipira.

Robert Crenshaw

Superstition #1

mama, is it alright to cut across the graveyard to save a little time? the corpses swaddled in tender wicker, fanned to pluck like god’s fingers; the loved ones laid in simple geometric shapes—worry free, i’m sure. their time— la vita, has come and gone. …i’ve toiled over an answer, mama. but satisfaction doesn’t come. my travels these days are long and weary (dare I say, fruitless). fatigue strikes me— increasingly. burying my will… i must shave increments where I can. destinations cannot come soon enough—time weighs tight and fleeting. but superstition says I shouldn’t, mama—

these wisps of matter need their rest: the living foul and always beating, a ruckus to such fragility. and how the colors in memoriam pop! corralled effervescence to entertain dimming eyes: the green grass, a prismatic emerald of aquatic flicker; the checkerboard stone, pressed from pebbles of grey and black. mementos left to bely the morbidity of truth: the bewitching tomb; the puzzle of family lost to flesh: how old regal souls, sipping vintage red wine and malt liquor in eternal eulogy, await the scythe of heaven, the sizzle of hell; how the children with their dainty, infantile stones, watched over by pudgy angels, cherubs with childâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;can be heard in rustling laughter when the winds lift

just right, flapping unfurling flags and bundles of flowers scented goodbye. how unpredictable. how certain. mama, all of this iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve heard second hand, from those bold enough to cross the hallowed and risk their permanence, their tired bodies dying to rest. i still wonder, mama, is it alright to cut across the graveyard, to save a little time?

Eleanor Ellis

Unexplore

You can’t unexplore. We put our arms around the earth, the ribbon of the equator coming untied in our hands. The mountains rough against our elbows trying to hold this stone that you couldn’t fit beside your thumb and skip across the water, watching it flit across the surface like something holy, or fit in your mouth like a cherry tomato. The earth didn’t taste like summer. You hold all the continents. We hold the continents together with our fingers, tracing the fjords and tying together canals that have left us standing here at the edge. Maybe there are new worlds and old worlds, this worlds and next worlds, between the ribbons tied up and down, latitude and longitude, between the meridians that have fallen past their prime. There are days when you can’t wear shoes. There are days como metáforas. Como metáforas. Do you eat metaphors, too? Do you eat metaphors with your fingers, as if they were not small worlds, as if it were not danger-

ous to try to drink the ocean or pour it over your own fingers, knowing that the coral is bleached and the seal lies there silent, like a rock on the sand, the kelp bursting under your toes, as if the tides could choose whether they carried her out to sea, whether she might wash up with the same ribbon in her hair? There are days when you canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t wear shoes, when the water falls and you dress your hopes in boots that barely fit, and you see them walking down the street, pinched, hunched, and then untied, unwound, undone, and you kick them off, and leap from crack to crack into all the spaces between the ribbons of water, leather laces lying in the storm drain, giving your hands to the air, covering your mountains in forests, looking for the sky.

Diana Dulek

An open letter to the superstitious chumps across the street

Dear chumps, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but my desk is right by a window that looks in on your dining room. From time to time, I happen to catch a glimpse of what goes on in your house. Usually, you guys just sit around drinking and doing what seems to be a whole lot of nothing. However, last Tuesday I saw two of you breaking a wishbone around dinnertime. I’m assuming wishes were made. This is where I feel the need to go all Rear Window and try to do something. I can’t, in good conscience, let someone else make my same mistake. That is to say, superstition is for chumps, and you should trust me on that. See, last year I was dating this guy who seemed pretty awesome. Things were getting kind of serious; I thought I had finally met someone who was comfortable with my need to communicate all my feelings exclusively through open letters. We even adopted a cat together. Out of the blue, he breaks up with me. I was devastated. I didn’t leave my apartment for a month. I

kept thinking up reasons why it didn’t work out between us. I started blaming it on our cat, which ended up becoming just my cat. I could think of no other reason for the break-up, aside from the black cat having brought us bad luck. I would sit on my bed crying and playing James Blake’s What Was It You Said about Luck on repeat. I bought a rabbit’s foot, took to knocking on wood, and was pretty much always crossing my fingers in hope of him and me getting back together. Eventually, I had to go back to my ex’s apartment and get the cat brush and some toys that were left there. It was on that visit that I found out the real reason why he’d broken up with me. When I walked in, my best friend was there making lunch for the two of them. It turned out they’d been boning for the majority of the time he and I were together. So you see, superstitions are for saps. Don’t make my same mistake. Luck isn’t real, but d-bag boyfriends and back-stabbing skanks are. Best, Your neighbor

Paris White

Knock on Wood

If you could knock on the wood of my talent, you could protect me from my waning ambition. True that I don’t have a fairy godmother, nor guardian angel either. But you could bang once, rap a minute, wait, then whisper; she’d hear it through the grained membrane: my nymph, narrative steward, sister. But good luck with that; she’s sleeping. It’s funny, I curse her circadian rhythm and know that I am witnessing my eventual downfall unfolding itself in dream. Endless supplications against irony for essentially nothing, though it touches me now how the little waves of my useless storm pass through her. Her empathic nightmares run parallel to my woes, and the two continue on like pairs of lines, which go and go until you stop watching. She, spirited stabilizer of anxious banalities that waste my time, daily I bring out the quick work for her and the key to my peace. She does nothing and slumbers still. It is a security. We are supposed to rap once on a

table and be safe; we stop worrying and continue our lives. This is all I have. I don’t have a guardian angel because I’m not religious, and I don’t have a fairy godmother because I wasn’t born for fame. My one and only spiritual reassurance, and she sure is failing. They were the parts of myself that I could not touch. Now, still can’t, and I watch as the chance of maintenance gets bleaker. It is too long ago to track the originating shiver, the moment that planted it in my bones- it is only fear enabling its own possibility, I suppose, but me still helpless, banging on the door of my nymph’s bedroom, “Wake, thing!” My hands raw. Solution: Yes, it existed within me. And it is still sleeping there, actually- sleeping in my sleeping will that slept, my will like a child, a will that without a “must” would not. It doesn’t, it doesn’t, it won’t. It sleeps.

Sam Alden

Garden Spectre

ZoĂŤ Ballering

The Argentine DoppelgĂ¤nger for Cindy

Yesterday, when I was in Argentina, I saw the mother of my mother’s friend. At first it was hard to recognize her body—long as a beanpole, skin stretched tight—but her face was the same face. She was dancing the tango. How lovely she looked, those simple, complicated steps, arms wrapped around a homunculus partner whose toupee tickled the tip of her chin. I should send a postcard to my mother’s friend, some cheerful image of Caminito on the front. She will think it is an ordinary update: I saw this, went here, did that. But really, in a rectangle of space, I will try to explain the miracle of her dancing mother. Take heart, I will write. Just as seasons reflect strangely in the south, there are echoes of people here, doppelgängers, doubles. Your mother rots in a soiled bed, but her other twirls in T-bone heels. One gums pudding from a plastic spoon; one extends the second skin of a slender leg—lace stockings in a moiré pattern—and dips back like falling water on her partner’s arm. We talk about the dancer for hours at the café afterwards, idolize her as the mother lies idle.

Imperfect translation of verbs across the equator: that one forgets and one is remembered, one bowed, one bowing. Sometimes it’s purely homophonic: the feint of an amague as the mother calls faintly for a nurse. When she can no longer swallow they insert a feeding tube; she will cease eating as her doppelgänger executes an eight-step, bald, bawling, as she slides on the balls of her feet in the Argentine style. The mother has logoclonia, a verbal tic common to Alzheimer’s patients; she repeats the end syllable of every word as her other self—that barebacked beauty in a halter dress—ticks tempo with her toes, patiently following her partner’s lead. This is your mother in translation, sieved through seven thousand miles. She is happy somewhere. Such a difference—two words that nearly sound the same. Dancing and dying. Life as a function of longitude. Listen: she wants this ending to end. She is waiting for each day to pass away as a leg—her leg—whips behind her weighted foot in a boleo. She is waiting to wake up in Argentina. She is waiting to know that these last nine years have been nine hours, that her suffering should not be mourned because it fades each morning, forgotten. She is waiting because she wants to be a dream.

Samuel Chapman

Cygnus

The shelf was hidden From the counter of the bookstore where I worked last summer. You had to walk around an art display to see it. It was the occult shelf But my careless stocking had blended the ritual together with mythology, religion, and psychology So that one could no longer tell what belonged. The book was called The Cygnus Mystery And it had on its cover a cross formed of eight stars, Such a simple pattern It was a wonder that it put ancient man in mind of a swan And not some eagle, or tree with strong limbs, Or boat with outstretched oars. On the cover also are three men with arms held wide, Parodying the swan of Cygnus. They are absorbing cosmic rays, says the author, From stars they called the gateway to heaven. Cosmic rays, as is the occult thesis, Brought humanity from tree branches to aeroplanes, From smoke to the Internet.

All I know of Cygnus, I learned on a mountain In what state or borderland I could not determine. Lying defenseless on a gravel hillside, I opened my eyes at last to the depth of Deep Sky. Sirius barked at the heels of Orion as he slew Taurus, Cepheus grumbled, and Cassiopeia wept. Â Above them all, a bird swam through the Milky Way, The swan of Cygnus. I knew that the stars were not level, That the closer I drew to the swan, The less it would look like one. But it did not matter, Because one could place the gateway to heaven at any point on the sky, So long as one placed it at all. You cannont touch me, I thought, I saw Cygnus fly tonight.

Molly Johanson

Private Eye

It’s not like I was a particularly mean kid… I was mean to the extent that everyone is mean in elementary school. You know, there are always those kids you hate… who dress better than you, or won’t let you borrow a pencil. Or kids who steal your pencils. That was me. I stole pencils. I stole sticky-tack in small increments from the posters that lined the classroom walls. I created a whole world out of appropriated crayon stubs and twigs that could fit in to my detective kit: a folded up bookmark, secured with clear tape in the shape of a purse. I solved crimes no one else was brave enough to solve such as: the case of the stolen afternoon snack (It was that one kid, the tall 2nd grader… Jack? He was such a chubster. Clearly the culprit.,) or the case of Quinn’s rejected love letter (the secret admirer was Zoe. But I only knew that because she wrote her name on the bottom of the card because she couldn’t spell secret admirer,) OR the case of who let the class hamster out of its cage (Mike, duh. No one would suspect it was him because he had the biggest and best rat-tail.) People caught on to my tricks pretty soon. Probably

because I had a big card-stock sign taped to the back of my chair, proudly proclaiming the seated party to be a “Private Eye!” complete with a large blue eye drawn in the center, eyelashes sticking straight out. I guess I didn’t understand the meaning of private. Or eye. I couldn’t keep secrets from anyone except Samantha and Ashley, but only because they wouldn’t talk to me. They had those colorful hair wrap things… the kind that you had to cut off when you were done, I guess? I never understood why those were cool. It wasn’t long before kids figured out that it was me who was posting incriminating “case findings” in the form of sticky notes on bathroom stalls. And it wasn’t long before I was hated. I was never able to solve the mystery of who defaced my “private eye” sign to read “Private DIE.” Or the case of who scribbled in pencil on my graham crackers so that I would get lead poisoning. I also didn’t solve the case of who threw my green fleece coat in a

mud puddle. The clear solution was to hate them back. I had read in a book that Egyptian pharaohs used to have portraits of their enemies painted on the soles of their sandals, so that they could step on them all day long as the strutted about their pyramids, or whatever pharaohs did all day. I drew pictures of my classmates, with Xs for eyes, on lined notebook paper, colored them in, and cut them out, all the while sneakily hiding behind a Lisa Frank folder during writing time. I slipped the drawings in to my light-up Velcro sneakers. And jumped.

Andrew Gordon

For the Night

You took the family car and drove up the coast to join the night. But it refused your offer of Vicodin and wine. Am I breathing or is that the wind? Sunrise over the water.

Olivia Mitchell

Magpies for Sarah

The morning your cousin goes into labor, your sisterin-law miscarries her first pregnancy. It is not entirely unexpected—jinxed, you say. That night, for the first time, I dream of giving birth. The hospital room materializes slowly in the cavities of my body, blurred, as though coming to me through warped, sepia glass. At first, I am alone, the walls and instruments, white and sterile, clustered around me in discriminating silence. But then, the magpies come. They enter in a flurry of whispers and warm air currents and soon there are more than I can count, their wings clicking against one another insistently, a whirring louder than my dense breath. Sometimes, I am inside myself, curved into the arch of my back and the wide angle of my knees. Sometimes, I am a magpie, reveling in the rush of my wings against my sister’s wings. My lungs stretch—saw-tooth mountains, deep sea caves, deep sea vents fissuring marine forests—my lungs stretch. I know that time is passing and I expect

hospital personnel with calming voices and clean hands and drugs, but I am alone. I tilt my head back against the paper-grey pillow, hovering below the shades of their wings, a pale, glacial stream in the belly of a canyon.

When my mother and I drive back to Walla Walla, winding back through the river valley, we are surrounded by flocking magpies, black and white patterned wings flicking against one another soundlessly.

The Trolley

4/7, you know?

Your body is so superstitious baby Why don’t you lie next to me maybe… Hot. Damn. I’m so superstitious [yelling] A white Will Smith/Beat poet the color green I wanna scream Superstition. there’s a black cat squeezing my toothpaste I break the mirror as I floss seven years of bad love between us the color red 12 minutes til you’re done Where am I? I don’t live here! Walking under ladders just to step on cracks Tuesday? Do you mean superstitious Tuesday?

the color yellow chartreuse! no blue! [teenage angst] Black fridges; to meâ&#x20AC;Ś

Thanks

quarterlife would like to thank the Associated Students of Whitman College (ASWC) for their financial support, without which the production of this magazine would not be possible. Our utmost gratitude goes to John Sasser with Integrity Design, The Whitman College Pioneer, blue moon , and our advisor Professor Gaurav Majumdar. All work featured in quarterlife magazine or on the website is displayed by express permission of the author or artist, who holds all relevant copyrights to her or his work. This magazine has been printed on paper from 100% post-consumer waste.