Canisius Quadrangle 2016

2016

Canisius College

Quadrangle is a journal devoted to publishing the literary and artistic works of students, alumni, faculty, administrators, and staff of Canisius College.

Quadrangle is published annually and distributed by the student-run Quadrangle organization at Canisius College. The organization is funded by the Undergraduate Student Association (USA) of Canisius College and supported by the generosity of various departments on campus.

Copyright 2016 by Quadrangle. All rights revert to authors upon publication. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by an information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the editors of Quadrangle.

QUADRANGLE Vol.64

Staff

Editor-in-Chief

Nicole Kuhn

Moderator

Mick Cochrane

Designers

Jon Fitzsimmons Rachel Peck

Design Advisor

Ben Dunkle

Editors

Jessica Arsenault

Alex Segelhurst

Jack Cryan

Justin Smith

Brian DeFlyer

Hannah Szablewski

Aryanna Falkner

Gabrielle Weiss

Kyle Ferrara Kate Light Rayel Louis-Charles Keera MacDonald

Copyeditors

Brian DeFlyer Aryanna Falkner Kyle Ferrara

Nicole Masaki Natalie Medina Joana Moraes Darby Ratliff Nathan Ress Elizabeth Sawka

It turns out, that’s really not how this works. You can plan for a literary and visual arts magazine to look, feel, taste, smell however you want, but it always, always comes down to the work. The work has its own voice, and it has no problem speaking for itself. Our collection does not differ.

In the end, I had to stop thinking about what people would say about this magazine and instead listen to what the pieces were saying, to what the impressive and inspiring artists who trusted us with shards and slivers of their lives were saying. Only then did Quadrangle 64 come out of the woodwork.

In its final form, this book is an invitation. Accept it fully as we have and let it show you that with every page, it tells you everything you need to know about who we are. –Nicole Kuhn

A Word from the Editor

When I originally imagined this year’s edition of Quadrangle, it was nothing like this. The shape and theme were different, there were inserts and interactive flaps and folds, and the cover was a drawing. I kept agonizing, how can the staff, the designers, and I make this the best magazine possible?

What is the physical manifestation of the standard of creativity that the Canisius community upholds? I started the journey by wanting everyone who picks up this book to absolutely know that our arts programs are high-achieving and dedicated to excellence.

Table of Contents

Genesis Kate Light

11

Observing Ornithology Bethany Dudek

49

The Eternal Flame Brianna Blank

13

Vindicate Nicole Kuhn

50

Tunnel Bethany Dudek

14

Sealed Megan Smith

52

Chess with Dandelions Sarah Pozzuto

15

How to Over-Analyze Making Up Natalie Medina

53

Who the Dog Sees Darby Ratliff

26

Winter of Myself Kelsey Colwell

55

Milky Dream Brianna Blank

27

Ferns Bethany Dudek

57

Religion Kelsey Colwell

28

it Brian DeFlyer

58

Morning Coffee Nathan Ress

29

Recall 2/2 Clayton Shanahan

62

Career Made by Catching Darby Ratliff

32

Blood Moon Eclipse Brianna Blank

64

Choke Kelsey Colwell

66

Sex Appeal Aryanna Falkner

95

Mother and Young Chelsea Wisner

68

Sisters in Darkness Monica Wrobel

97

Before I was Too Old Aryanna Falkner

69

Escape Brianna Blank

100

Chalk Days Gabrielle Weiss

71

Untitled 1-2 Jon Fitzsimmons

101

Thailand Stamps Elise Miller

73

Colors Kyle Ferrara

103

Calhaus Joana Moraes

75

On Apathy Alex Segelhurst

112

Eighteen Alexandria Scott

76

dive metamorphosis Brian DeFlyer

113

Dancing Tennis Gabrielle Weiss

78

Morning Commute Margaret Bohan

116

Lucid Cage Laina Gray

94

Rainy City Elise Miller

117

From Another Era Rhys Watson

118

My Mob Husband Elizabeth Sawka

119

Civil Art, All Nature Darby Ratliff

125

Water Under the Bridge Michael Hockwater

126

To Live so Close to the Sea Darby Ratliff

127

Couch Surfing After Eden Kate Light

128

And she says (to herself, under the covers, her chapped lips burrowed

in the baby blanket wrapped around her fist)

this bright, static cloud of amoebas must be God. 2 By seventeen, she crouches for hours in the artificial dark of drawn curtains.

She teaches her body how to dig itself into the floor:

tops of toes and feet, shins, tip of nose,

forehead, arms, palms trembling into the carpet

while her vocal cords are plucked raw and hot as she sings every hymn lodged inside her

So that years later, when she unrolls the foam yoga mat like a tongue

Genesis

In the beginning, she is a child who believes the burst of light in her skull

(which comes when she pinches her eyelids so tightly

that her pupils eat the dark of their own sockets)

is more than a jumble of optic nerves and blood vessels,

Kate Light

1

11

across the hardwood of her first apartment and bows herself forward into child’s pose her chest becomes a furnace of muscle memory and the heat billows up her esophagus in plumes.

3 Now, on every seventh day, she sleeps in ‘til noon.

12

She fills the space between each of her ribs with fresh air as she stretches her naked limbs and she is not ashamed.

Kate Light

13

The Eternal Flame

Brianna Blank

14

Bethany Dudek

Tunnel

Chess with Dandelions

S a r a h Po z z u t o

My grandmother kept a lace tablecloth on the dining room table at all times. Not for show, because no one came over but us. Not for decoration, because the rest of the house was filled with stacked newspapers and spent tea bags. So why was it there? My grandmother was not preoccupied by material things. She didn’t mind when lumps of Spumoni ice cream were dropped onto the tablecloth somewhere in the transition from carton to bowl, or bowl to mouth. She didn’t mind when we let them melt, oozing across the loops of the fabric. She simply took a wet cloth to the chocolate, and never muttered angrily when it didn’t come out. What was the purpose of a lace tablecloth stained with chocolate?

My grandmother was the daughter of an immigrant, and she worked as a school cafeteria monitor when she should have been an artist.

She knew exactly how to shade pencil-drawn birds’ wings, and how to draw the creases on the palms of hands without making them look unnatural.

She could write beautiful, looping, twirling calligraphy, but couldn’t spell without a dictionary. She was the sort of woman who settled, who would never have all of the beautiful things that she had imagined as a girl: an immaculate lace tablecloth or crystal chandeliers or pearl necklaces. She had an imitation of each of these things, a placeholder until “another time, another time.” She was the sort of woman who had never been told that she was important.

My great-aunt Ginny was her baby sister. I always found it funny that Ginny was seventy years old but still known as the baby. She rarely

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spoke, and when she did, her voice was so quiet that I had to strain to hear her. She lived a few hours away in Pennsylvania and we rarely saw each other. Even so, there was a familiarity in the way she folded her hands, the way she laughed, the way she pronounced my name. She was a tinier, fainter echo of my grandmother. They had shared a bed as children, their curly hair tangling together. They loved to tell the story of how, when they were girls, Ginny was once so overcome by the beauty of a hand-painted Easter egg that she tried to keep it hidden in her dresser drawer. She wrapped it in a nightgown and it took her mother days to find the source of the smell.

The story was meant to be funny, but it always made my stomach do flips.

Ginny wanted only to have something beautiful. She hadn’t realized that it would rot.

Ginny married her husband Ray when she was eighteen. They had been figure-skating partners. I never heard them speak to one another when I was in their house, and I wondered if perhaps their synchronization was limited to the physical realm, if once they left the ice they could not feel as close.

I never got along with Ginny the way I got along with her husband. For years I thought that he, not she, was my blood relative.

I watched the way my grandmother tensed when I volunteered this information, and she was quick to correct me. My family did not care for Ray. He had a particular way of making a room feel awkward, like we all knew a secret that he’d been left out of and it was pressing at everyone’s lips.

Sarah Pozzuto

He was harsh and opinionated, extremely conservative, and he kept a loaded gun in the house at all times. At age four, this did not bother me. What did I know about politics, about life? What did I know about anything? I knew this: I loved my Uncle Ray, and I loved his skating trophies. I loved to run my fingers over the gleaming silver of the tiny skaters that topped each one, and I lingered on their skates, so small yet so detailed. I loved to go for walks with him, trudging through his seemingly endless backyard until we reached the train tracks. We brought a loaf of Wonder Bread and ate slices out of the plastic sleeve as we watched the trains pass. To any child, Ray would be interesting. He was smart, I thought, and quiet, just like me. We got along.

We saw much more of Ray and Ginny the year that Ray got sick.

He was being treated at Roswell, so it made sense for him to stay in Buffalo with us. It was the year of chemo, the year of money being even tighter than usual, the year of “don’t bother anyone, Sarah, stay out of the way,� the year of chess. Ray was a chess expert. He was in a competitive circuit in his younger years and considered it to be even more difficult than figure skating.

He said that if you were good at chess, you could be good at anything. My father said that Ray was the very best at useless sports.

My fascination with chess started with the pieces. I loved the knights the most because I loved the horses. Ray had a set of ivory chess pieces that felt cool and heavy in my hands, and their detail was exquisite, much like the skating trophies. They were a unique set of pieces that had been carved to look like full figures. Where other sets might have simply

Sarah Pozzuto

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a crown to symbolize the queen, this set had the entire body of a queen, with a long, flowing dress and a beautiful face. I remembered thinking that, because of those things, she was probably the Virgin Mary. It did not occur to me that there might be other beautiful women in long dresses. I traced the waves of the horses’ manes, and the indents of their nostrils. I pretended that the bishops, with their bowl cuts, were the ugly daughters of the kings and queens. I created an entire scenario in which one of the black bishop-princesses was friends with a white bishop-princess, but the two were forbidden to see each other. The pawns stood guard outside of the castle, where the white bishop-princess wept for a friendship lost.

I spread the pieces out over the lace tablecloth, analyzing them, turning them over in my hands as I wrote the stories of their lives. Ray came up behind me to peer over my shoulder, and I was so startled that I dropped a white knight onto the carpet at his feet. He bent down to pick it up. “I’m sorry,” I said, unsure whether I was apologizing for dropping the piece, for misusing the expensive chess set, or for being in the way.

“It’s alright,” he said, handing the piece back to me. I stroked the horse’s mane like a mother trying to comfort a child. “Do you want to play?” he asked me.

My father spoke up from an armchair across the room, where he sat reading the paper. “She can’t play chess, Ray. She’s four.”

My uncle ignored him. “Do you know how to play checkers?”

I nodded. My grandmother had taught me how to play earlier that

Sarah Pozzuto

same year, with an old, worn-out board that had backgammon on the back of it.

“It’s just like that,” Ray said.

“Okay,” I said. I liked checkers well enough. I liked the satisfaction of demanding “king me!” when you reached your opponent’s side of the board. I liked that black always started first, and that my grandmother always let me be black.

“Okay!” Ray confirmed, suddenly enthusiastic, standing the pieces in their respective squares. “I’ll show you where these go this time, and after that you set up your own side.”

I tried to memorize the order of the pieces by telling myself a story about them. The castle walls protect everyone, and the horses have to stay outside by the walls. The princesses like to ride the horses. The king and queen are in love so they’re in the middle together. I must have mumbled some of this out loud because Ray snapped sharply, “There are no princesses in chess.”

I slid a bit lower in my chair and studied him. Ray was a wilting dandelion, the pathetic remainder of something that had never been beautiful to begin with. His shirts hung limply around his bony shoulders, drowning him in flannel, never letting us forget that he had been someone else. I asked my grandmother once why he didn’t buy new clothes that fit, and she shook her head. Why bother? I watched him carefully and realized that she was right. His skeleton was pressed up against his translucent skin,

Sarah Pozzuto

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as if begging to get out.

Ray set up the white pieces at my side of the board. “They’re prettier,” he said. The word sounded strange coming from him, and I could have believed that he had never said it before. I ran my thumb along the green felt at the bottom of the castle. He finished setting up the black pieces and looked at me expectantly.

“Well,” I said dryly, “black goes first.”

He laughed at the thinly veiled spite in this statement, but did not spin the board as I thought he might, as my grandmother would have. He simply moved a black pawn forward two spaces. “When you are moving a pawn for the first time, you may move it two spaces forward,” he said. I mirrored his move with my respective white pawn and his brow furrowed.

“Try to think for yourself, now.”

His next several moves were to highlight the patterns of each piece.

He showed me in one dramatic, sweeping move that castles could slide from one end of the board to another, like they were trying to build a wall that was not really there. The knights were my favorite, once again, because they were the trickiest. I traced their “L” patterns all over the board. “Could they move like this?” I asked Ray, and each time he only responded, “What do you think?” I had to picture the movements in my head before I could execute them. They were not fluid motions for me as they were for Ray. My head swam with the capabilities of the different pieces, and I used all of my good pieces when I should have been sacrificing pawns.

Sarah Pozzuto

Ray won the first game in a matter of ten moves. He chuckled each time he captured one of my pieces. I tried to spare my knights, but they, too, became a part of the pile of white pieces in front of him. He made a big show of capturing them, too, knocking the pieces together, striking the heads of my kings, queens, and bishops with the feet of his pawns like he was kicking my pieces in the head. I was personally offended. This was nothing like checkers. “Let’s play again,” he said, and I could only nod. I heard my grandmother’s voice in my head, Ray is very, very sick. Let’s be nice to him, okay? Sick like strep throat? (I was always coming down with strep throat. I would get my tonsils removed six years later.) No, worse than strep throat. How much worse? We should pray for him. That changed things. You did not pray for strep throat. You did not pray for anything that God didn’t have time for in my house. Here’s what you prayed for: people who were being carted away in ambulances, people we saw sleeping on the street, people who were very old, people who were dying. My Uncle Ray was dying. We set up the chess pieces again.

After a few games, when I could remember the names of the pieces, when I stopped calling anything a princess, Ray decided that it was time to get serious. He took a small green timer from the box. There were two clocks, and two silver buttons above them. One was his clock, and one was mine. We were racing now. I was to press my button when I finished making a move. As soon as I finished. No sooner, no later. “A good player can think very quickly,” Ray said. That made me a bad player, I realized.

Sarah Pozzuto

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22

Ray was very quick, very stealthy. He could sneak up on me for several moves without ever indicating that he was about to steal my king.

That was another sign of a good player: plotting the opponent’s demise. I tried not to get flustered when he stole my favorite pieces, when he evaded my simple, obvious strategies, when he boasted, “Checkmate.” I tried to be nice. “If you want to win,” Ray told me after one such boast, “you have to really win. I’m not going to let you. That’s not good sportsmanship.”

My grandmother walked past us carrying a stack of dishes and clicked her tongue to her teeth, as she always did when she thought someone was being unkind.

It went on for months, the chess. Sometimes I managed to get a few of Ray’s pieces, sometimes not. Once I even said “check,” and he laughed but simply took the offending bishop. That was the closest I ever got to winning. After that particular game, I locked myself in my grandmother’s bathroom and sat on the edge of the tub, trying not to cry. I ran cold water over my hands and splashed it on my face. When the lump in my throat was manageable, I walked back to the dining room and plucked my white pieces up off of the lace tablecloth in front of him. I set them back up. “Again,” I said.

No one said it, but I knew it. Ginny hadn’t brushed her hair in a week, and all we ate was tomato soup. Something was wrong. “Ray is too sick for chess today,” I was told every day for seven days. I was not disappointed, and I was disgusted with myself for feeling that way. It

Sarah Pozzuto

manifested itself in a stomachache that did not go away. The day that he went to the hospital for the last time, everyone went with him but my grandmother and me. I was too young for hospitals, too young for death.

My grandmother sat beside me on her floral patterned couch, watching soap operas. She flicked through the channels restlessly. We watched something in Spanish for a few brief moments before she turned the television off entirely. Her hands quivered as she stirred a pink packet of Splenda into her tea. “Let’s do something,” she said suddenly. “Teach me how to play chess.”

I fetched Ray’s set from where it rested under his bed in the guest room. I unfolded the board on the dining room table and set up the pieces for my grandmother because she didn’t know where they went. “Here,” I said, “you can be the white pieces, because they’re prettier.” She smirked.

I tried to explain the rules, but I used too many words and not enough examples. I traced the letter “L” on the board over and over, for the knight. “It can be any L,” I told her, “it doesn’t matter how you flip it.”

She squinted at the board and watched my tiny finger outline the pattern. “That doesn’t make much sense,” she said matter-of-factly. “An L can only go one way.” I moved my first pawn two spaces forward. “Well,” I said, “just figure it out as you go.”

I won in sixteen moves, a brutal massacre of her white pieces. She was defenseless, and I took advantage of the opportunity. My grandmother shook my hand in congratulations. “Did you let me win?” I asked her, and

Sarah Pozzuto

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she shook her head no. She was smiling. I wasn’t sure if I believed her.

Ginny came home in the middle of the night, weeping. It woke me. I was sleeping on the floral couch in the sitting room adjacent to the dining room. They weren’t really separate rooms. There were no walls. I had left the chess pieces out on the table in the same haphazard positions that the game had ended in. She picked them up and looked them over carefully, placing them in the box one by one. I let myself fall back to sleep, trying not to get in the way. I wasn’t sure if taking the hand of my crying aunt was considered being in the way. I realized suddenly that I had never touched her before. She had always seemed, to me, to be made of glass. When I woke up again in the morning, she was gone, asleep in another room. I walked across the carpet and lifted the lid of the chess box. One of the black knights was gone.

Sometimes I think that Ginny brought it back to their old farmhouse and propped it up with the rest of their knick-knacks, or slept with it under her pillow. It would be different than the rotting Easter egg.

Chess is timeless. No one would ever know. She left the rest of the game behind, for me, she told my grandmother. Sometimes my imagination lets me believe that she slipped the knight between the cushions of Ray’s coffin, though that seems a bit much for a frail, cautious woman like Ginny. I never asked anyone for the truth. It seemed nicer not to know. My grandmother assumed that the piece had been lost in the clutter of her house, perhaps accidentally thrown out. It felt strange to say, “Ginny took it,” so I kept

Sarah Pozzuto

the claim under my tongue like hard candy. For years afterward, we used a bright copper penny in place of the black knight. It worked just fine.

25

Sarah Pozzuto

26

Darby Ratliff

Who the Dog Sees

27

Milky Dream

Brianna Blank

Religion

Kelsey Colwell

28

-after Mary Oliver i don’t know my mother’s god or what new shame she learns at church. i don’t know the words to “amazing grace” anymore, or how to stay awake during sermon. all i know is that leaves look like they’re praying when they fall to the ground. i know helicopters flutter like golden pages of a bible in a summer breeze, and when i lie still in the grass, heaven moves around me; flies hum their hymns, clovers sway in a gospel trance, and pollen lands like grace on bees’ wings. this cathedral is enough for me.

From the couch I hear it in the kitchen as it goes about its task, starting with a sharp rumble, filtering water through mud, then settling slowly into a consistent snore, heated salvation dripping into the pot.

In that moment I close my eyes and instead of a little black and silver machine, hunched and hardworking in the corner of my kitchen, I hear the familiar vibrations from the throat of my father, a sound I’ve heard time and again for as long as I can remember, his eyes closed, mouth open, head fallen back on the sofa, his pallet scratching like the beard he wears nowadays.

Morning Coffee

Slow to rise on a Saturday morning, I long for coffee, usually drinking it black, a thickly-caffeinated start to my day.

I start the brewer and wait, a simple little machine nestled between the sink and the stove, not even mine; instead shared between roommates, none of whom drink coffee anyway.

Nathan Ress

A poem for my father

29

Miles away, down snow-plowed roads and through shy little forests, past the deli we went to, just he and I where the Slavic woman gave us each samples of roast beef, in the brick house we moved to after he lost his job and was brave enough to start over, I imagine him just now waking up too.

30

I imagine him rubbing his eyes through his morning routine; I see him standing over his own brewer, a black Keurig, the one with three size settings that he knows how to combine perfectly to fill any cup.

Or, more likely, the percolator he uses on weekends, given to him by his mother, an ancient device that he operates with the skill and faith of an alchemist.

My own machine beeps and I fill my mug, grimy red from a thrift store, the Channel 2 logo on the front, my only one.

I wonder which mug he’s using, carefully selected from our home cabinet collection, an assortment curated over years and years,

Nathan Ress

some from a matching set with faux pottery finish, some plain white with logos: HFW Industries, Head of the Charles Regatta, the one given to me as a gift, white and teal with the brave uppercase “N� on both sides.

I know he has his favorites.

I sip my coffee carefully, standing at my apartment window, savoring each bitter swallow, cradling the warmth in my hands, watching the groggy cars as they drive down Main Street through falling snow and traffic lights, the steam from my mug slowly fogging the glass.

Nathan Ress

31

Career Made by Catching

Darby Ratliff

32

I’m at the ballpark. Progressive Field is much different than I remember, and I think it’s mostly because Jacobs Field was my home, having spent a number of days with the “boys of summer” when my father worked in the marketing department. I’m also pretty sure that’s why I was hired to do promotional shots in the days leading up to the home opener. Now, the Indians have already had a few games, but Public Relations wants to keep “refreshing” the image. I tried not to laugh at the vigor with which they said it and agreed to be at the stadium hours before the home opener began. ‒‒

It is 1996. I’m warming up, and I can already see Liv from the stands. She has an old Polaroid camera with her, and I’m pretty sure that all of my girlfriend’s shots will be blurry because there’s no way to catch a ball or bat moving this quickly on film.

McClellan swings, and I know immediately that he’s golfing, the bat going low to drive the ball up into the outfield. This only works if he hits it hard enough for a home run. I know him better than to predict his success, and I regret it. I clap his shoulder as he walks back to the dugout, the ball caught by the center fielder with little expended effort. The coach is shaking his head, and I sense that McClellan will not hear the end of this.

I point to Liv with my bat, ignoring the pain in my shoulder as I spin the bat from the hilt until it begins to rotate in the space above my shoulder. I think that I can see her laughing, camera pointing in my direction.

That photo is not blurry, and it is the last of me in the batter’s box without a camera. ‒‒

Standing in the dugout, I watch them from afar, trying to get a sense of the 2015 season spirit. I’d introduced myself to one of the players on my way in, just before the general manager explained my presence.

A player comes up to me before heading to the field, offers his hand, and says, “Don Rodriguez.”

I resist the urge to say “I know,” and return his handshake. “David Butterfield.”

“I know.” He laughs. “I was listening to the GM.”

“Fair enough.”

“I just want you to know that this is the year, man,” Rodriguez says. “This is the one.” I say that I hope it is too, and I see his smile ignoring the pressure of the season. Or perhaps they were warned to be only positive around me. He seems authentic, I think, but from reading, I know that Rodriguez isn’t a Cleveland man himself, born in Puerto Rico before playing with the Yankees and then getting traded over to us last year. I want him to want to win for the city, but I don’t know if that’s it. I don’t think he’ll tell me.

They’re warming up for the game, and it’s relatively warm for April.

Some players joke that they’re doing everything they can to prevent snow, and Jerry Malone mentions googling sundances. I take his photo on the

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field, my lens extending to close-up on him. If I could control the caption, it would be “Jerry ‘Sundance Kid’ Malone.” but I doubt my editors will go for it.

I walk the stadium as I used to do, watching the vendors begin to set up. I see older men talking about the season ahead as if we’ve gone to the play-offs, taking their photos more for me than for them. There’s an energy here, I know. It always feels like it, even years ago when I came for a home opener and it snowed. When I step back onto the field, wearing a helmet for liability reasons, I ignore the play for a moment to find where I used to sit, and the seats seem empty, looking over a whole new park.

Johnny Davis comes up to the plate to warm up his swing and I raise my camera, quickly adjusting settings to focus in on him. He’s the new shortstop, pulled up from the minors, and most managers wouldn’t put him in play for the first few games. He doesn’t swing at the first pitch. Ball. For the second, he steps forward and swings, hard, and I notice him almost lose his balance because of the torque.

He should know better, I think. Sometimes swinging with force isn’t effective. The cylinder of the lens spins, and I see him gritting his teeth.

I zoom out and notice that his knees aren’t as bent as they should be. For the next pitch, he lowers himself as if he heard me. I’d taken my daughter to a few of his minor league games, and his form had been much more relaxed.

She’d said he’s her favorite.

I step down into the dugout, leaning to get a lower angle of him

Darby Ratliff

without having to squat on the field. He looks as though he’s going to spit, moving one foot out of the batter’s box to signal the pause (he isn’t allowed to move both in a normal game either), but then decides not to. I wonder if the nerves are getting to him.

Later, Jerry will come up to me and say, “I saw you get some shots of the new guy earlier. Can I see them?” He’ll look at Johnny’s pose after coming back into the box and at his swing. He’ll move to the next image and see the broad swing, and then my focus shifting to him, playing catch with the other outfielders. “He wants to do well, man, and it’s a tough job to be the only new guy in the infield, you know?”

I’ll say, “Sure,” even though I don’t (I was a catcher), and he’ll pat me on the shoulder before asking to see pictures of himself.

Johnny Davis comes to sit on the bench, helmet next to him. I offer a hand, introducing myself again. He nods, and I ask if I can call him “Johnny” because I think he’s younger than me. I wonder who knows more about Indians baseball.

He doesn’t say much, so I go to the door and shoot from there. I ask him if he has any tips for other players’ quirks, but I don’t expect him to say anything.

“Donny likes to tap his bat on his foot, and the third baseman playing today always kisses the crucifix on his neck as he’s walking into the batter’s box.” He lists off more, then asks who’s at bat now.

“Wilson.”

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“He tips his helmet crookedly when he pulls the brim down.” It’s as though Davis is narrating his teammate’s move, even though he’s watching the infielders toss the ball around.

“You do a lot of watching?”

“Says the photographer.”

I choose not to say that I used to play. I choose not to say that I didn’t usually watch because it sounds both bitter and wistful. He stands, and I wonder if I’ve offended him, taking off his batting gloves and pushing them into the slot marked as his. “I don’t play a lot.”

“Yet.” I say as penance, even though I’m not sure I believe it. He shrugs and goes onto the field. I focus on him, having gotten shots of all the others playing catch. Davis is the only one looking serious. I hear Malone yell, “Chill out, Johnny Baseball. Have a little fun before the game” as he throws his ball from the outfield toward the shortstop who fields like a pro, feet galloping in sync with his arms, arm cocked sideways to catch the ball, then releases it toward Sundance Kid. Then a grounder comes in close, and I know it’s the third baseman’s ball even as I follow Davis to the catch. He smiles then, but it is determined.

By the time he throws the ball to the pitcher and settles back into his stance, he is serious again.

“Did you ever miss playing?” I ask the GM, setting up a tripod. A lens like this is heavy, and so it’s nice, sometimes, to hunker down and shoot from one place.

Darby Ratliff

“Of course,” he says. “I don’t know anyone who’s retired that doesn’t.”

I laugh, and I know that he’s right. He doesn’t know that I fall into that category, that I played college ball until I threw out my arm, that this was the easier way for me to stay close to the action. I don’t tell him that I wanted to be a better Johnny Baseball.

Rodriguez comes up to the plate and I watch him tap the bat against his foot like my daughter likes to do, like Davis said he would. He misses the first ball, then shakes out his limbs. I watch the GM roll his eyes but say nothing. The machine throws to a ghost until Rodriguez steps back in. ‒‒

Two months later, the Indians are playing just as they always do, and the city thinks that perhaps they will go to the play-offs (just as they always do). My extended family has a bet around their odds, and I’ve got Johnny Baseball’s back. They’re playing a doubleheader away, and I’m at my daughter’s softball game. I’ve got the front of the heavy, telescopic lens propped up on the fence. It saves my neck from the added weight and gives me the freedom to adjust more than one setting at once. Unfortunately, it also makes it more difficult to zoom, having to lift the whole camera, just to adjust the lens in or out. My wife asks, “Who are you stalking today?

“Take a guess.”

This is a routine, and she surveys the crowd with interest,

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wondering which parent she’d like to know more about. Mom drama, I learned as a new father, is just as captivating as high school drama was; it’s also a serial drug, perhaps a result of days without sleep when Ellie was an infant. Liv points, “Her.”

This person is new. Some weeks, we return to older subjects, just to check in, see if he or she looks more tired than us (with seven-year-olds, it shouldn’t be a competition). I always look at Liv first just to see her reaction, eyes squinting as if through her own invisible telescopic lens, adjusting thoughts and feelings like I do aperture and shutter speed before settling in on that final image. When it all clicks into place, I see her postulate, building a life for this person out of a picture in her head. We both understand why we work as a couple.

“David! Get a look before she notices!” I spin back to my camera, manning the battlements at the order of the captain (patriarchy be damned; Olivia rules the household).

I lift the camera from its perch, spinning its cylinder until autofocus can divine the remaining details. “She’s yawning. Oh, and her arm is wandering into the man’s face next to her. I don’t think it’s her husband.

He seems genuinely offended.” It’d be a funny photo, but I have a policy about taking peculiar photos of people that interact with my daughter (unless, of course, they ask).

“David.” Liv nudges my arm, and I think she wants to see her target, but then I turn. There’s a ball coming toward Ellie. It’s a grounder,

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coming through the grass, and I wonder what my daughter will do. Usually, in right field, she touches very little. “David! Get the shot!”

Like Davis coming up to that catch, our daughter runs over to the ball and for once, I wish she wasn’t listening to the coach; it’d give me more time if she waited for it to stop first. I never shoot in anything but manual, and so I swing the lens toward her, feeling as though it’s rotating on an axis from the fans in the shade to her in the brightness of a July Saturday. All of the settings need to be adjusted for light and I do so quickly, listening to Olivia narrate, almost an announcer:

“She’s headed toward the ball. Do you think she’ll remember to throw toward first? You better get it, she’s almost there.” I try to watch through the viewer to match Liv’s voice to the image in front of me, but it’s easier to toggle, swivel, and spin the various components of the camera while looking at them.

I don’t want to miss the moment either. Photography is a career made by catching.

“She’s picking it up! Oh, she’s pointing toward first. She’s going to do it.”

I get it. I get two and then three, my shutter speed increased, focus on her, and I bring the camera down to see her excitedly pump her fist in victory, realizing that was the moment to catch as I hear the ball meet the first baseman’s glove. That’s the third out. We move around and closer, and I switch lenses as I walk, still upset I missed that one.

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“Did you get it?”

“Hold this.” I spin the telephoto off and pass it to Olivia. Her look reminds me to answer the question. “Yes, of course.”

“Can’t you just put it right into your bag?” My camera case is across my chest now as I fish through it, pulling out a shorter lens to shoot photos of Ellie’s team as they’re up at bat. The coach lets me hover around the dugout because he knows my shots are better than most (all) of the team photos. Seeing the lens, Liv understands, and I screw it on before I pop the cap back onto the telephoto and slide it into my bag. Its length shows through the bump over the zipper. “She used to have such trouble remembering what to do with the ball.”

“Remember that time she tried to run it in?” That’s a photo over our mantle, Ellie desperately trying to make it to first before the runner, who had more than enough of a head start. I watch Liv nod before saying, “She’s gotten so much better, comparatively.” There are nights when she needs reassuring, games where she didn’t touch the ball or a teammate chose someone else to warm up with, but, for the most part, we’re lucky.

Ellie’s never been huge into competition. She’s never really cared about the outcome, at least in softball. She doesn’t carry the weight of the city on her back like Davis does.

We position ourselves with a slight angle on home plate, and having wanted to sit directly behind the base, I curse the umpire, whose large physique would’ve blocked both catcher and batter. I can see the

Darby Ratliff

woman we watched earlier even better now, despite the shorter lens, but I calibrate the light and focus as the team gets ready for its first at bat. I think that some parents are like mine were; they hated the lull, thinking of dinner at home and the Saturdays they used to spend at professional events, but they understood that wrangling ten or more kids takes a while because for them, handling two seems like an impossible task. I need the time to make sure that all batters have quality photos, even the ones whose parents constantly ask us to cover their snack days or complain about having to bring snacks at all, sending passive aggressive emails to the rest of us.

Emily—no, that’s Annie—comes to bat, and as I zoom in to catch her determined face staring at the pitcher, Liv yells, “You’re like the Annie Oakley of baseball! You can do this!” I see the young outlaw smile through my viewer, and I capture that as well. She swings and misses, and my missus keeps encouraging her, sometimes offering tips for her position because the coach knows little to nothing about softball. Her foot grinds into the gravel as a slight bend of her knees adjusts her center of gravity, tightening the strike zone. I zoom back out to see how she seems tighter and then in again to watch her knuckles whiten as they grip the bat. When I notice the pitcher, a coach, bring her arm back as if to bowl, I wonder if she aims for strikes. They’re just seven, after all.

I catch her in full motion, the bat way out and the ball flying in a high pop-up that kids her age still aren’t sure how to catch even though professionals love nothing more than popcorn, and she runs to first, Annie

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Oakley’s perfect shot taken.

My daughter bats fifth, and Ellie loves the story of Babe Ruth calling his shot (I tell her every night before a game when she lays in bed), so she points toward the outfield. I could fill an album with photos of her doing this. I take another, and a second as she brings her bat back, ready for her pitch. She’s short for her age, but the doctors said she would grow, that she’d be very good at basketball in three years. She told them that she wanted to play softball instead.

“She’s smiling,” I tell Olivia, whose laugh comes through her cheers of “That’s my girl! You call that shot! I’ll buy you a Babe Ruth later.” I shake my own head and chuckle, “Of course she’s smiling.”

Ellie leans back toward the catcher and, when the pitch comes, almost seems to throw her whole self as she swings, missing. As the catcher returns the ball to the coach, I catch her tapping the bat against her ankles and wonder if she’s just made of stories, our bouncing baseball player. This time, she alters her approach and grounds herself like Annie did, weight equally on both feet. Liv tells me that it’s good that she’s open to trying different stances, and so I capture this one as well. Her bat tips the ball, and I catch it on camera as it goes foul. She strikes out on the third, but the image shows her heroic.

I finish the inning and do my due diligence, taking shots of all of the players, which I will spend tomorrow touching up before sending them to the parents. Then I sit and play father rather than photographer, yelling

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in unison with Olivia from the stands.

“I hated when my parents did this,” I tell Liv while we go to get popcorn from the snack bar. “They were so obnoxious.”

“I’m choosing not to read into the fact that you married someone who was just as annoying as your parents.” She laughs. “Did they come when you were away?”

“They always came to the first and last games of the season.” I had played for Fairfield University’s team for two years, and it was an eight-hour hike on I-80. “My grandma always liked to yell that I would one day play for the Indians.”

“And then?”

“And then I couldn’t.” I shrug. “It is what it is.”

“I’m glad Ellie doesn’t take it too seriously. That is one benefit to her not playing baseball. She’d be the only girl on an all-boys team.” Liv pays for our snacks even before I can get my wallet from my back pocket.

I roll my eyes. “I hate the very premise of softball.”

“I know you do.”

This doesn’t stop me from my oft-repeated tirade: “Why do girls have to hit balls that are bigger than men’s? Their eyes aren’t inherently worse just because they’re women. And the boys’ teams get pants and nicer shirts! The national pastime isn’t supposed to be sexist!”

“Honey?” She rests an arm on my shoulder when we return to the stands. Some of the other parents are already staring.

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“Yes?”

“You’re spiraling.” This is code for when I get more (vocally) concerned than I need to be. It’s tempering. “Ellie likes being on an all-girls team. She doesn’t have to worry about outperforming the boys.” Liv doesn’t say that she has to worry about outperforming me, and I doubt she is thinking it. I worry that I would compare her to myself, even unconsciously, so I agree because Liv is right. This is easier to say than my own thoughts.

At the end of the day, Ellie is on base once because of a walk, but her last at bat comes and goes as the first did. She is still smiling. ‒‒

I’m due for a “refresh” (months later and I still laugh) with the Tribe at the end of the season, but before we know who’s going to the play-offs because PR wants photos of everyone in case we do. We’re at home playing the Yankees and I bring my daughter without asking the department. She’s wearing Davis’ number and she asks if she’ll meet “Johnny Baseball.”

I say, “Maybe.” I think that, if he’s the same as he was last time, she may be good for him.

She holds my camera case so that my hands are free to take photos of the park at its busiest. I buy her an ice cream even after she doesn’t finish her hotdog, but I make her promise not to tell Liv. We have seats on the third base line, and so I observe Davis through the viewfinder each inning.

He is more relaxed, but still less than he was in the minors. It’s harder than

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it was last time, with foul balls always heading our way and me wanting to protect Ellie. She does not constantly ask to walk around because she knows this is half-business, but I have to explain the shortstop’s every move. I also take her to the team shop after the second inning and buy her a pair of sunglasses because she only stops asking questions about Davis to complain about the sun.

She grabs for my camera during the next few innings, and I shoot her a look that says, Is this what you’re supposed to do when you want something? So then Ellie asks to take a picture, and, because I’ve already adjusted to watch him, I set her up to take a number of pictures of him. She likes to play with the long lens, so I see shots of his shoes, glove, and serious face. In that one, she must have accidentally toggled the aperture because his eyes are very in focus and the rest of him is not. He is perhaps happy in this one, but I still think it’s a trick of the light (and that it’s because the horizon is crooked; his eyes form a diagonal across the screen).

Malone is more serious now, but I still see him dance onto the field, watching through my camera when he settles into position and his lips mouth what I assume is his refrain, too quiet to taunt the batters. I see him catch popups like popcorn, and when the popcorn graphic comes onto the Jumbotron, I explain to Ellie. She likes it and shouts “popcorn” through the rest of the game. After an inning, I wish I had brought earplugs.

“Will they win the World Cup?” Ellie asks.

“The World Series?”

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She nods, “That one.” Shyly, she adds, “I forget sometimes.”

I laugh and say that I do too before explaining, “They’re one game from the wild card spot, which is a lucky spot that would let them play another team, and if they win, they go to the play-offs.”

“I hope they go.”

“Me too, kiddo” I reply.

After the game, I try to catch some of the players outside of the locker room under the guise of business, and so Ellie pulls on my camera bag when she sees Johnny Davis come out in a suit. When Ellie last saw him, walking through the stadium to the parking lot after a minor league game, he was wearing shorts and a t-shirt. He has, perhaps, become jaded.

“Dad! That’s Johnny Baseball!” She jumps up and down until he gets closer, then shuffles behind my leg, suddenly shy.

“I Googled you,” he says, I think accidentally but unapologetically, shaking my hand. His hair is still wet from a shower. “You used to play.”

“In college, yeah.” I forget that Google knows everything. I wish it didn’t. I am also surprised that he remembered my name.

“Pitcher?”

“Outfield.” Davis nods.

“It said you messed up your arm.”

I hope this line of questioning will stop. “Yeah. Doesn’t really affect me now as much, but I try not to put too much stress on it if I don’t have to.”

Darby Ratliff

“Did you want to play professionally?”

Yes, I almost say. I could’ve been great. “Doesn’t everyone?” I don’t tell him that it’s easier to take photos because I know I see myself in them, see how I would want the photographer to frame the shot, see how I would be seen as more than sports star, but as father or friend or champion for the city.

“Fair enough.” He finally offers a hand to Ellie, who looks at me before she takes it. “Is this your daughter?”

“Yes. Ellie, this is Johnny Davis.”

“Johnny Baseball,” she asserts quietly.

“Johnny Baseball,” he repeats, laughing, “What’d you think of the season?” I get the sense he doesn’t talk to many kids.

“Will you get the wild spot?” She returns with what little she knows, and I am reminded that I have quite an apt little girl.

“I think so.” His optimism surprises me, “but I don’t know.” This uncertainty is what I am expecting.

“Why wouldn’t you?” She asks. “You won today, and those were the Yankees. My dad calls them bad names that he says I’m not allowed to repeat whenever they win.”

“Does he?” Johnny’s eyebrow floats up to me, and I shrug. No good Clevelander likes the Yankees. No good baseball fan should. Ellie nods.

“Well, the other teams are really good, much better than the Yankees.”

“But you’re really good!” she insists. “You’re the best.”

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He is surprised when she says this, and I think that he probably doesn’t hear it a lot because he still doesn’t have a lot of playing time.

Rodriguez and Malone have the highest averages on the team and so they get the most attention.

“Thanks, kiddo.” He smiles, but I don’t think he believes it.

“You’re Johnny Baseball,” she says again, shrugging. “Mom says that it’s good to tell people what they’re good at so that they don’t worry too much.”

“I’ll do my best, kiddo.”

“My Dad will follow you to make sure you do.” She means ‘followup,’ and I mouth the correction to Johnny so he knows that he doesn’t have a stalker. I don’t tell him about my wife’s and my little game.

He kneels down for a photo, and she smiles victoriously, though, in the second shot, she yawns. I wonder if he’s exhausted too. This is the only photo in which he doesn’t seem tired.

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Observing Ornithology

Bethany Dudek

Vindicate

Nicole Kuhn

50

-1999 Like frogs, Harley and I warmed our backs at the shallow entrance to the pond. Crouched with our knees hugging our shoulders, we dappled the water, two spots of sunlight barely breaking the surface tension. Five and six years old, we scooped muck from under our toes, raised island castles in six inches of water.

Mom swung in the hammock, wrists draped into August air thick with sweat and dandelion fuzz tumbling over the pond’s rough-rock teeth into its open mouth. Dad stood fishing for bullhead in the far arc, cut-off, jean-short swim trunks baring farmer-pale calves and collarbones.

The game was to see how far out we could get before we couldn’t reach the bottom. Our legs

curled and uncurled beneath us, the tails of seahorses while we bobbed to keep our ears from flooding.

When it was my turn, I twisted back to look at my sister who waved me on. Farther, she said, keep going.

I didn’t realize I had inched over the drop-off until I was underwater, arms floating weightless above my shoulders like my mother’s when she danced. Spine swaying in bent light,

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I could only crave the atmosphere.

I don’t remember Dad ripping me from the water, though I would find bruises under my arms days later like we would find his socks in the laundry for months after he had left, postcards in the mailbox boasting Montana mountains, orchid and indigo under Big Sky gold.

I only recall the look on his face when he held me to his chest the way he must have when I was born, so glad to see me breathing.

Nicole Kuhn

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Megan Smith

Sealed

My mouth opens awkwardly as the need to speak instinctively rises and is consciously stifled.

I have already said enough and there’s a fascinating throbbing in your throat as you close the distance, engulfing your ears in my silence.

I wait for your response then am irrationally disappointed when you are silent. My haggard breaths make you hyperaware of your lungs and between soothing back stroke six and eight, your hand is no longer warm enough.

How to Over-Analyze Making Up

My feet shuffle in ridiculous half-steps because I’m not certain if you want me closer or if I need distance or which one of us deserves to be soothed.

Natalie Medina

After we have yelled our way through doorways, I am mid-sob and you are lingering.

Uncomfortable heat builds up in my chest as I hold back those fragile stutters of breath.

My throat is tight and there are too many tears in my eyes; the clarity of your face comes and goes.

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We kiss slowly, thoughtfully, tongues stale and teeth passive-aggressive once the worst of the coughs have cleared.

We exhale whispers of surrender, but between languid kiss three and meaningful gaze one, I feel the curve of your jaw sharpen against my fingertips. The perfection of comfort does not tend to last.

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Natalie Medina

so when i slipped off my shirt, my skin came with. my collarbones chattered a wind chime melody while you laced your fingers in the twigs of my ribs. you tasted the color of my femur, deaf to wind howling through hip sockets while i failed to shift the broken places away from your searching touch. you asked me, lined palms gracing my wrists, how my bones became so ridged with scars. i told you a tree pumps sap

Winter of Myself

and let it freeze.

Kelsey Colwell

every november, i mourn the blue spaces peeking between bare branches, each its own knotted spinal cord. it wasn’t until i bared my own bones that i realized the strength it takes a tree to uncover the summer of itself

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through ringed veins all winter, regardless of its fractured skeleton. you kissed my sternum below an old break and told me that trees look stronger without leaves hiding their secret wounds.

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Kelsey Colwell

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Ferns

Bethany Dudek

It

Brian DeFlyer

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1. fuchsia sways around my strangely clean calves. a roughly-embroidered, golden flower sprouts from my left hip. a friend bought me this skirt, i was too embarrassed to shop for myself. a frumpy black top, which leaves my too pronounced biceps exposed, and a pair of borrowed clogs. these are the best i can do. i have no idea how to wear any of these pretty things. you two are big, not like me. you brashly commandeer my side of the sidewalk, assuming i’d concede. i do. you walk with a lion’s pride, a vulture's temperament, you speak to one another in a subdued way quiet enough for me to hear perfectly:

it.

2. i hadn’t realized how awkward i’d be when i got all dressed up to go out and pick up some spaghetti sauce. yet i wore high heels, and toiled over my lips for 10 minutes (the trip to Tops lasting 4). i forget how apparent my face’s shadow can be until i catch a glimpse while checking the rearview. i forget how, from the wrong angle, i am hideous.

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but i wanted to be noticed—celebrated. i didn’t realize how awkward i am until you noticed me, and stared unashamed. not up and down with a nod and a smirk, like i think i had hoped for, but with your head shaking, and lips so pursed, i know: it.

Brian DeFlyer

3. i think back to that morning in september your knuckles had brushed my neck while you were straightening my tie for me. you’d complimented how well i’d put my outfit together. i looked away to conceal how taken i was. in high school, neither of us were out yet.

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my fingertips looked for that place your knuckles had rubbed against while i was sitting on the bus a few seats behind you, wondering if that smile would ever come off my face. we went out on a date since then, while you were visiting from L.A. where you’d gone to study. you smelled like sandalwood, your eyes felt more direct then. i got butterflies just from seeing your car pull up. we’d gone for a walk through town,

Brian DeFlyer

found ourselves on a bridge over mossy water. you told me about your coming out, how your parents had been more worried about your smoking cigarettes. you’d wondered how i’d been. you’d come because you wanted to see if i was the same boy you’d crushed on in high school. i looked away from you, down into the obscure water which seemed more concerned with reflections than anything else, knowing that there is more than that boy you knew, more than what could just be scraped off.

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i wanted to tell you that i am it.

Brian DeFlyer

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Clayton Shanahan

Recall 1

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Recall 2

Clayton Shanahan

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Brianna Blank

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Blood Moon Eclipse

Choke

Kelsey Colwell

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“There were only five birth defects.”

–press reporter in Love Canal, NY, January 1979 Six months into pregnancy, the air smelled noxious. Gagging, she thought it must be the baby.

She heaved at the smell of cooking chicken too.

Seven months in, her neighbor mentioned a thick, green leak in his basement. She gave him the number to her plumber, forgetting to be worried when the baby kicked.

She didn’t sleep much in the next week.

Every inch of her pillow echoed with mutters in grocery store aisles about extra fingers on this baby, clubbed feet on that newborn.

Her blankets felt heavy with remembered shock

of the child with a cleft pallet in the papers. Everywhere, the air choked on its own breath.

The crinkled, tin foil reception of an old radio announced in Jimmy Carter’s voice that her home is a national disaster.

Her neighbors packed suitcases and chased housecats into carriers, booking the last rooms in motels.

But she was on her way to a hospital ten miles away, where her doctor

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would press a freezing stethoscope to the burial ground of her stomach and listen for a heartbeat, finding none.

He would induce labor while she huffed chemical fumes, her womb echoing like a crypt. She slept in the cold embrace of starched sheets and unfamiliar wires, dreams tying the umbilical cord into a noose.

Kelsey Colwell

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Chelsea Wisner

Mother and Young

you carried me up the stairs to our apartment, my limp limbs like a tea bag in an empty mug, draped across the lip of your body. Then you tucked me under blankets, took out notes, finished your essays and exams.

Your shoulders curled over spiral notebooks, rushing

Before I was too old

letting me fly, flip forward on the floor, fingers blistering on parallel bars, bones bruised from bumping the balance beam. When I fell asleep in the car,

A r y a n n a Fa l k n e r

You finger-combed my hair into pigtails, pulled velvet over my hips, onto my shoulders, fixed the leotard’s triangle pinch on my thighs.

You waited in the lobby each Monday,

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to finish your sentence before I cried your name. You brought the binder in one hand, warm rags for my shins’ aches in the other, studying in the shadow of my nightlight.

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After I am too old, years since I needed you to take me to practice, you tell me that you risked failing finals, pled for extensions and revisions the mornings after you let me slip into your bed on top of papers, sleeping how I always did on Mondays, like I was still a part of you, drunk on your womb’s wine, unburdened baby breaths on your belly, because it was only us.

Aryanna Falkner

We’d draw ‘til stars glistened like teardrops,

Chalk Days

We colored oceans, controlled currents, steered every ship. We were sirens luring men, or the pirates searching for golden chests.

On land, we outlined brick roads and gray stone houses beneath clouds of an ever expanding sky.

We were marble statues in the middle of town squares, our names repeated in purple ink in history books, our portraits painted in the margins.

Gabrielle Weiss

It was the summer we gossiped on top of frayed beach towels laid out on the velvet blacktop of your driveway.

We were seventeen.

Queens ruling over castles drawn with sidewalk chalk.

Sketching yellow compasses that shot us like boomerangs in the direction of new realms.

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‘til our hands were stained pastel blue and pockets of pink dust rested in the threads of our jean shorts.

Now, we make homes in separate cities, forgetting to write letters, to return phone calls.

Promising to save for black and white bus tickets that will lead us back to your old driveway.

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I imagine that daffodils have started growing through cracks on the black pavement.

I want to outline their shadows in yellow, use their petals as the arrows of a new compass.

Until rain washes them to runny lines, pooling into puddles of color in the street.

Gabrielle Weiss

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Thailand Stamps

Elise Miller

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Elise Miller

Thailand Stamps

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Calhaus

Joana Moraes

Eighteen

Alexandria Scott

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The old biddies squawked at the sight of us.

We crept through the lobby, a slow march to the tinkling, clinking bottles too heavy to haul without stooping. Ten in all, a balanced mix of dark and light.

Our number doubled like shots of chilled Belvedere.

Spiraling up in a tizzy of slurred laughter, I thought we lost our heads.

It was the slowing down that was hardest.

Even when we staggered through the halls, past the rooms of prim, proper grown-ups, we clung to each other and reeked desperately of booze and bud.

We knew it was just a front.

Huddled, naked, and drunk, the four of us recoiling from the horror of hotel-grade porn, lusting for a terrible intimacy we’ve still yet to find.

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Alexandria Scott

Dancing Tennis

G a b r i e l l e We i s s

78

If my cousin Alexis were a playlist, she’d be a lot of angry alternative rock, the kind that makes you want to pull out your eyelashes one by one. You’d listen to it and for the next few hours you’d cry into your bowl of Panda Paws ice cream, trying to eat away the urge to punch out your pillow. Right now, we’re riding our bikes to the park to play tennis.

Alexis leads the way. Her dark, curly hair whips in the bike’s breeze behind her. Bits of my hair fly into my mouth and get stuck on my lip balm. When I move the hair, I just drag sticky cherry streaks across my cheeks.

I dug out the bikes from the back of the shed this morning. Of course Alexis wanted my mom’s old purple one, the one with a basket my mom hot glued sunflowers onto years ago. When we were fifteen and rode the bikes around the neighborhood, it was too tall for Alexis. The bike still is, but she won’t admit it. I’m riding my brother’s—Anthony’s—bike. He used it for his paper routes years ago. It’s an ugly hunter green and the seat is way too skinny. The tennis rackets are in my backpack. Their handles stick out at the zipper.

When we get to the park’s entrance, Alexis stops by the sign that announces in big black letters, “Welcome to Como Park!” There’s a discarded ice cream cone covered in ants beneath the sign. Alexis’s feet can’t touch the ground, so she’s holding herself up on the tiptoes of her green Converse, trying to avoid the leftover strawberry ice cream.

“I don’t remember how to get to the courts,” she says to me, as if it’s my fault she’s been leading the whole time. I ride past her, knowing the

trail behind the big purple jungle gym.

If anyone asks, Alexis and I have decided to play tennis because there’s nothing else to do, or because we don’t want to babysit Mindy again.

Our family is in town for Anthony’s wedding. My other brother and his wife and their daughter Mindy traveled from Boston to come. They’ve infiltrated our house for the week. Alexis and her mom, my Aunt Sharon, snuck in there too. If anyone asks, I can just say I’m sick of being stuck inside with Aunt Sharon. She always smells like the lavender incense she burns around her house. She’s now burning the stuff around ours as well. Everything smells like one damn purple flower. I think it’s her revenge, since we’ve given her the spare bedroom in the basement.

If anyone asks, we won’t mention how Alexis and I shared a dorm room together during our first year of college (which ended only two months ago), that I ended up transferring colleges and she ended up joining a sorority and the ski club, and made lots of friends who liked to go out every Saturday and then sleep in my bed without telling me when I spent the weekend at home. I won’t talk about how she had her own friends at college and all I wanted was to find the same, a group that could be mine, just as easily as she did. But I didn’t know how.

She will not say anything about how I was talking to the counselors at school to figure out how to deal with her, that she kicked me out of the room one night so I called the University Police in some dumb fit of anger.

We won’t talk about the fact that when I think about what I did, it feels

Gabrielle Weiss

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like there are a million bouncing balls colliding and jumping through my stomach and chest, bouncing off the edges of my rib cage.

We leave our bikes resting against the fence that outlines the tennis courts. The courts are empty right now, but there are two teenagers smoking at the top of the jungle gym. Dead tennis balls with no bounce litter the ground beneath the high black fence around the courts. Some family party is blasting an Aerosmith song from their shelter nearby. Two little girls, who must be four or five, in matching one-piece bathing suits hold hands and dance to the music together. A woman, who must be their mom, stands behind them and laughs and claps. I hand Alexis the light blue racket with the skinny handle and fraying tape. I take the heavier purple racket with the cushioned handle for myself.

At home, Alexis and I are sleeping in my brother’s old room. That means we’re sleeping in the old bunk beds my dad built. I won’t tell Alexis that while she left the room last night to take a shower, my mom snuck in.

It felt like one of those heart-to-heart moments you have on TV where the mom sits on the bed and then sort of pats the seat next to her. She expresses all her concerns to her daughter while the two softly braid each other’s hair.

In my version there are scratchy Peter Pan sheets and old inserts from a KISS CD that my brother posted on the walls next to his pillow. I’ve got Peter staring at me from his flight around Big Ben below, and Simmons is coming at me with his blood red tongue from the side.

Mom couldn’t sit on the bottom bunk without hitting her head

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and she’d be too freaked out to try climbing the ladder to the top bunk. She sat at the old computer chair at the desk, picking at the bottom corner of the seat where the fabric peeled back to reveal yellow stuffing.

“Alright Jess,” she said. “I don’t think it would hurt for you and Alexis to talk again.”

“I think we’re fine. Sometimes we say good morning and good night.” I didn’t mention that when I want Alexis to pick up her clothes, I put them in a pile on her pillow. When she wants to get changed alone, she does it in the closet in the dark.

Back when we shared a freshman dorm, I would ask Alexis how her day was to feel out what sort of mood she was in. If I got a one-word answer and she didn’t meet my eyes, I would know not to say anything else in the fear that she’d snap at me. If she answered and asked about my day, then I knew I was at least okay to move about the room without fear.

“I think you two should get out of the house tomorrow.” My mom said this with the same tone that she uses to say, “I think you should do the dishes after dinner,” or, “I think that you should leave the room so your father and I can talk about this.”

“I told Mindy we could finger paint tomorrow,” I told her, hoping she’d believe the excuse.

“I’ll hang out with Mindy. It’s time for you and Alexis to be friends again. One day you might not have anyone but Alexis.”

“Well what if Alexis doesn’t want to be friends with me?”

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“I’m sure she wants to be friends again. You used to be so close.

Even before you went to college, we’d drive out to see them once a month, ya know? Don’t you remember making sand castles at the beach or anything? How you’d try to form mermaid tails out of the mounds of sand?”

“Well, it’s not like that anymore. And don’t you miss Aunt Sharon?

You guys aren’t exactly talking to each other anymore.”

I could feel my face turning red. I wished I had taken a microsecond to think about that before I said it. My fight with Alexis at school became my mother’s fight. She called Aunt Sharon one night out of anger and mamma bear protection and told her that she raised Alexis wrong, that she should be making Alexis apologize. Aunt Sharon told her she was too controlling and that my mother never thought she was a good mother, that she would always see her as the younger, messier sister. My dad had invited Aunt Sharon to stay with us behind my mom’s back. It was the same sort of effort my mom was making to get me and Alexis back into a state of cousinly love.

She sighed. “That’s not your concern. And don’t want you to end up like me and her right now anyways. You’ll really miss her.”

“Do you think that you’ll talk again after this week?”

“I’m sure we will sometime. Aunt Sharon just needs some more time to cool off. She’s always been more emotional, you know?”

She didn’t look at me when she said it. I could hear her afterwards, cleaning the kitchen floor, scrubbing the space between the tiles with a

Gabrielle Weiss

toothbrush. She always does when she wants to distract herself. Aunt Sharon came upstairs and told her that she missed a spot by the stove. She laughed, my mother didn’t.

I wondered if that would be my future with Alexis. I saw us, passing by each other at weddings and family parties, catching up awkwardly while we hovered near buffet tables. We’ll ask how the other is doing, and we’ll just say that we’re fine and that everything is going the same as always. I imagine that I’ll have to attend her college graduation; she’ll hold a degree from a place we dreamed of attending together. Things couldn’t be the way my mom wanted them to be. We couldn’t be the same as a year ago. When we could have sleepovers, and stay up late eating salt and vinegar chips, our lips burning with salt and secrets.

I can remember when we were fourteen, and I slept over at her house. It was past midnight and the music video channel we were watching was playing commercials. I wanted medicine for a stomachache, so I made her sneak into the kitchen and stand on the counter to grab it from the cabinet above the fridge. She grabbed some Tums, but knocked a bottle of her mom’s medication onto the kitchen floor. Little white pills scattered everywhere, rolling beneath the tables and chairs. Her cat wandered out and stretched out on its side, suffocating some. We grabbed what we could, trying not to make too much noise as we put them back into the orange container. Alexis and I didn’t tell her mom what happened. Not even the next day when she swallowed one and then swore that there was cat hair in

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her mouth. The memory used to make us laugh. We felt like accomplices in a crime ring.

I thought about what my mom said, knowing that Alexis and I might never share secret stories. She has her own secrets with her friends at college now. She has pieces of her life that I’ll never know. But if she and I aren’t friends, then my mom can’t make up with Sharon. Maybe if I tried, then she could think about getting along with her sister. So I gave myself a pep talk, and when Alexis was pouring herself a bowl of ten o’clock cereal, I asked her if she wanted to go for a bike ride. If she noticed that my mom smiled at me, she didn’t say anything. Alexis told me that she had something to do that night, so we had to do it soon.

I found the bikes and the rackets. All of the family, except Aunt Sharon, sat on our front porch drinking the iced tea my mom made from a packet, to watch us bike down the block to the park.

“Do you want to serve first? Or should I?” I ask.

“I know your mom asked you to do this. So we don’t really have to play. I get it.”

“I came because I wanted to play tennis. Now do you want to serve first or not?” She crosses her arms.

“Okay, I’ll serve first.” I move to the other side of the court where the sun is shining, so she doesn’t really have a choice in if we play or not.

The sun is red and angry in my eyes, so when I blink, I see little purple specks that seem to shout at me. I’m already sweating from the bike ride,

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but now everything feels much worse.

“Okay, so the score is love right now,” I say to her.

I throw the ball underhand the way Anthony taught me to when we first started playing. I thwap it over to Alexis’s serving box. It bounces once, but she’s ready for it and volleys it back right away with a surprising snap. Well frick frack, I think. She’s still good. I smack it overhand so hard that it bounces out of bounds near the fence behind her.

“Got some pent up anger there, Jessie?” She knows that I hate the nickname “Jessie.” It used to be a little joke, like a game, when she introduced me to other people. “Hey, have you met my cousin Jessie?”

And then I would fake roll my eyes in annoyance and explain that I was “just Jess.” We judged the person we just met by how they reacted to our introduction, and by which named they called me afterwards. We stopped playing those sorts of games when we got to college.

Alexis serves perfectly, tossing the ball up high and coming down on it, like a sprite fairy with a tennis wand. On the ball’s way over to me, she springs on her toes like she’s ready to fly away. The ball lands too far in front of me, so when I swing and miss, she does a little dance, bopping around with her arms cabbage-patching. Something about her little dance makes the balls in my stomach turn to the size of bowling balls, packing a weight that makes my stomach harden. I toss the ball up and slam it.

Once again she hits it right back, swooping her racket to the side and balancing on one leg. It flies over my head. I back up and try to come

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down on it like a fly swatter. It doesn’t make it over the net.

I grab the ball deciding that it’s still my serve. This time when my arm swings, I think about the time that Alexis broke a mirror in our dorm room and didn’t clean it up for three days. When I finally vacuumed, she didn’t even say sorry for making a mess or thank you for cleaning it up. She didn’t apologize for all the dirty clothes, or the weird smell of wet towel that followed. I hit the ball into her serving box hard and soon we have a volley going.

Each hit is the time that she yelled at me, the time that she played her music too loud while her friends were over or in the morning when she was getting ready, the time she left Chinese food to rot on her desk.

The time she disappeared for three days without telling me where she was or that she was going at all. The time the room smelled like pot, and then she laughed at me, because I honestly thought that someone had brought a pet skunk. Each hit is for the time she screamed at me for always being in the room, for not having a good time at college. For the times she told me she would hang out with me that night and watch a movie, but ended up canceling plans and going out with her friends instead.

It feels like the bouncing balls inside of me aren’t growing anymore, but have turned into some kind of balloon that rises and pops outside of me. I’m lighter with each swoosh of my racket. The muscles in my arms feel like they are growing their own wings, like Alexis won’t be the only one to take a fairy flight from the tops of her toes. I’m keeping score in my head

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but neither of us comments on it out loud.

When it’s my serve and I have the advantage with only one score left to win, I think of the last fight we ever had—before we had a sit down with an RA, before my mom my mom called Aunt Sharon on the phone.

“You were never a role model for these girls. You were barely ever a mother. Moms can’t be best friends with their daughter all the time. Are you really surprised that Alexis turned out this way?” she asked, while I sat at our kitchen table, listening in.

At college, everything fell apart the night that I called University Police because Alexis had set up a game of beer pong with her desk in our room. I was sitting in my own bed with a bag of sunflower seeds, watching a show on my laptop when she told me to get out.

“You’re making me hate you sometimes. This room doesn’t even feel like I live in it. It’s your room, not mine. Just leave for one stupid night and go get some friends or something. Don’t expect to just be friends with mine all the time.”

Her three friends wouldn’t meet my eyes and twiddled around on their phones. I silently moved my stuff to the lounge down the hall. I could hear their music blasting. There was the same bowling ball feeling in my chest then, and I thought of all the times Alexis and I had talked of going to college together. The parties, the friends we’d make, and the duo that we would always be. I thought that I was the one holding all of her secrets inside of me. I was just going to call the police for a noise complaint. And

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I knew that when Police knocked on the door, Alexis would have enough time to store the booze in some hiding place. I thought that she would be safe.

University Police didn’t even have the chance to knock on the door.

They showed up just as Alexis’s friend slammed the door open in a desperate attempt to reach the bathroom. She was sick all over the hallway floor. The police had to call an ambulance and they stood outside taking everyone’s names while another officer sat with the sick friend in the bathroom. I watched from the lounge. Alexis looked over at me as the officer copied down her student ID number. I thought that right in that second, she knew.

She knew that I was the one who made the call. But she didn’t look mad or betrayed; she just looked tired and scared. The same way a girl would look when she thinks her mom knows she spilled her pills on the kitchen floor.

Afterwards there was a stain in the hallway outside of our dorm room, a reminder that I was the reason Alexis was on resident probation and the reason she had to take an AA course online. My cheeks still feel hot when I think about it. When she told me she had to meet with the Dean because of an “incident,” I realized she had no idea that I was the one that called.

I throw the ball to myself underhand, pretending that the ball holds every instance Alexis and I fought over the past year. I put my mother’s fight with Sharon into the swing, and I can feel my arm shaking with nerves as I hit the ball diagonally. It lands just beyond the net. She’s not

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fast enough and when she swings, she misses.

My legs wobble. I sit down on my side of the court and Alexis laughs. “That’s it Jessie Jay? How about one more game? We’ll play with Anthony rules okay? Even if the ball goes out of bounds then you have to get it.”

“Don’t you have somewhere to be today?”

“Someone from school came up this weekend. We were going to get coffee or something. But we can just do something tomorrow. You can come if you want. All of my friends from school want to know you.”

“I didn’t think you’d want me to hang out with them,” I tell her.

“You made that pretty clear.”

“I felt bad sometimes, okay? It was like I was always ready to invite you to hang out with us. But then I’d come home and you’d hate me for not hanging out with you. People would be over and you wouldn’t want to talk to them, so why even be there at all?”

“Well I didn’t like talking to them.”

She sighs. “Why do you make this so hard?” She stands up with her racket and takes a deep breath. “This is ridiculous,” she says. She walks back to her serving line, signaling that I should do that same.

There’s something funny about this game. I accidently hit the ball into the court next to us. When Alexis runs she takes huge horse gallop sized steps and nearly trips. She’s lost her groove, or her will to beat me, so she’s suddenly missing the ball when she swings and it makes her laugh. It’s like

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the laughter has made her whole body weaker. She starts hitting the ball straight into the net. In this game that Anthony made up when we were ten, smashing the net gives you fifteen points.

Alexis has really lost it. She lets the balls fly past her on purpose and dances towards them. Sometimes she puts her arms around the tennis racket like she’s wrapping her arms around a slow dancing partner and waltzes in steps of three, swirling and twirling toward the tennis ball. Her back arches far backwards and she steps on her tiptoes like she’s floating, the tennis court her own personal cloud.

“New rule! If you chase after the ball you have to dance towards it.”

“I don’t think so,” I say to her. “I think that’s just your rule.”

She doesn’t hear me, or she pretends not to. I smack the ball directly into the serving box in front of her, but she slaps it to the left so it goes to the next court over. Someone walks their Jack Russel Terrier past the tennis courts and as it tugs at the leash to sniff at the bounce-less tennis balls, its owner laughs at Alexis, probably because she started salsa dancing towards the tennis ball. She swings her hips and begins to cha-cha like she has her own personal party conga line. She kicks one leg out as she goes, making her own music. Maybe her playlist would not be all alternative songs that are rough in their riffs. Maybe she has some cha-cha beats, and mariachi sounds.

When she hits the ball back and I don’t move quick enough to reach it, I walk towards it.

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“If you don’t dance then you lose points.”

“Not fair,” I tell her.

“I’m going to win then. Now you’re at thirty and so am I.”

I wouldn’t be able to handle Alexis’s face if she told my mom she won, so I pretend that I have noodle arms, moving them against my body like I have no bones. I can feel my face heating up to a shade of red and my hands shake because I know Alexis is looking right at me. But instead of making fun of me, she laughs loudly. When I serve it over to her, she skips to hit it back to me. I purposely miss, and then swing my arms out with my tennis racket and spin “The Hills are Alive,” Sound of Music style. The tennis racket cuts through the air making powerful whooshing sounds. I even sing a riff for her and she laughs so hard that I see her wipe tears from her eyes.

She tries to Macarena with her tennis racket but she almost smacks herself in the face. We ballroom dance across the lines of the court too, pretending to dip our rackets across our legs.

We soar across the courts. We carry on like this, just dancing towards the balls that are coming until we are too tired. It feels like my right arm is heavy from carrying my racket like a dancing partner. I didn’t know that I had these kinds of arm muscles. Alexis rubs her thigh, it’s probably sore from the time she attempted a Rockettes style kick as she sashayed towards the ball.

When we finally collapse the sun is behind the clouds. It’s still a sticky kind of hot outside. She lies next to the net on her side and I lay on

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mine. It’s silent for a little while.

“We should go back soon,” I tell her, and I start to roll over to the side, not wanting to feel the silence anymore.

“Let’s just stay. It’s still a nice day,” Alexis doesn’t look at me when she says it. She closes her eyes and folds her arms across her stomach like she’s napping.

“You should come tonight, I think you’ll have fun,” she says. “And my mom’s not making me invite you.”

That makes us both laugh for a second.

“It’s okay. I’ll just stay home tonight,” I tell her. I don’t think I can handle any more college memories today.

“You know, I was a real bitch when we were at school. But I didn’t want you to transfer.”

I want to tell her that it’s fine. And I think that maybe this is my chance to confess, to tell her that I had made the call that night. Sometimes I think that I’m not sorry for getting her in trouble. Sometimes I think there is nothing left to say, that she was asking for it all along and that she doesn’t deserve to know. At least when our freshman semester started out, we had something in common: nerves and excitement, the feel of a new place that was ours to grasp. She had just grasped it tighter, in all the wrong places.

“It’s not like you made me transfer. I didn’t because you made me.

It was the people. The town was too small. It didn’t fit me right.”

She nods like she knows. “Maybe things would have been different

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if we just didn’t live together,” she says. And that’s true, but there are a million other what ifs. Like what if I told her that I made the phone call?

What if we were just no longer meant to be friends?

For so long it’s felt like a volley with her. Like the words were smacked back and forth in an intense game. Now she tosses the words to me, slowly, and lets me hit me back when I choose.

“I think my mom wants us to come back now,” I tell her.

“Let’s just stay here a little while longer.” She looks over at me through the net; the sun peeks out from behind a cloud and there’s a shadow of a checkered pattern on her face.

“Okay,” I say to her. “Okay.”

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Laina Gray

Lucid Cage

me aside, thrusting a maternity shirt into my hands. I remember her nails digging into my shoulder, trying to shovel into my secrets—past my crush on Joey V. and the bubbles of curses on my tongue in the girls’ bathroom. Deeper. Searching, knowing there had to be something more

sex appeal

I was eleven. My belly bare, I expertly tied a white towel around my waist, cotton teasing my knees and her father’s fantasies as his heat dried my skin. My lips darkened in a mistress’ smile with cherry syrup. His wife pulled

A r y a n n a Fa l k n e r

I wore my innocence like lingerie at a friend’s pool party, ascending from the water pure: freckles whispering across my nose, neck rubbed raw from kissing the sun too many times that summer.

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tempting than the small hills of my body marked with pink spots, unexplored.

I feel her grip now, tightening on my arm as I keep my eyes low, my hips covered, when lingering stares follow me like wet footprints on concrete.

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Aryanna Falkner

sisters in darkness

Didn’t we teach you, sharpening your Teeth to knives So they didn’t wear soft Grazing on grass?

Those ashes we smeared under your eyes, Warrior lines, preparing you for battle.

Didn’t we bleed for you?

You never wanted this destiny, Not you—the one who talked, dazed, to

M o n i c a Wr o b e l

This is the way we will always remember you, Riding away in that gilded carriage, your Shining veil like the shorn fleece Of a sacrificial lamb.

The last light we see before Those same chickies—you know, The ones who sewed your evening gown, lace Threaded through spindly beaks— Gorge on our eyes like pulpy elderberries, Split dark with dribbling.

Is that what you wanted?

We wonder, Blind and fumbling as the Fates.

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Trees and nibbled in the dirt at lentils.

Why else would you have run At the whisper of dawn?

Even sheep know not to lie with wolves.

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But then, you did learn Our tricks, lamb child Pulling tight the corsets into cages for our Lungs, plunging dressmaking pins into Our plump peach skin Without so much as a peep— Dear little sheep.

Make no mistake, we knew you at the ball Your once dusty face scoured, gleaming Like the Second Coming of Christ.

Squinting, our eyes met yours Dear God!—We were shocked to see There, reflected, The mirror of our own making.

So we sit in darkness, our phantom toes Tapping, twitching, The heel clicks to keep time.

Monica Wrobel

Is that what you wished for?

Worming our fingers into the Hollow sockets, we try to catch the last Glimpse of the burning-white Veil of righteousness.

Grasping for our second sight, We’ve decided the Joke’s on us.

Well done, little wolf.

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Monica Wrobel

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Brianna Blank

Escape

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Untitled 1

Jon Fitzsimmons

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Jon Fitzsimmons

Untitled 2

Colors

Ky l e Fe r r a r a

“I’m not suicidal,” I tell the woman in the yellow sweater.

“I don’t think you are.”

“Yes, you do.”

“Why do you think that?”

Yellow is for happy people and cowards, and the lady in yellow is both. She’s happy, has to be to deal with the folks who come in and out of her office. I know I’m not like them because she’s scared of me. She’s scared of me because she can’t use the same cookie-cutter dialogue on me that she uses on her actual patients.

She’s a sweet woman with kind eyes, whatever that means. They’re brown, her eyes, gentle. Her hair is brown, too, hanging down straight and wrapping around her ears. She has smooth skin and a contagious, inviting smile. I’m immune to the contagion.

I’m not yellow. It’s a worthless color. Instead, I’m red, powerful, passionate. Red is assertiveness and attraction. I’m red.

The yellow woman speaks again. “Why do you think you’re here?” ***

The first things I do in the morning are stand in front of the mirror and slap my bare chest five times. Then I spend exactly four minutes and fifteen seconds flossing, brushing, and gargling. After that I slap my chest some more, this time with cologne on my hands, until it turns red.

I live alone in a ranch house in the suburbs. The seclusion allows me to power down and recharge, and it keeps me calm.

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The second thing I do in the morning is eat breakfast; bran cereal out of a white bowl and vanilla yogurt. My kitchen is empty except for appliances and a picture of the Boston skyline hanging on the wall. There’s one window in the room, and when I look outside it I can see the house next door where a girl just a few years younger than me still lives with her mother. I don’t think she’s awake yet. Sometimes when she is, I can see her doing yoga in her living room. She’s beautiful when she stretches, the way her shirt lifts and reveals the small of her back when she touches her toes.

She’s a Greek goddess, but she’s green.

She’s green because she’s full of life—always smiling, perfectly toned body—but it’s deeper than that. She’s filled with envy, her biggest problem. She’s envious of the women I bring back here. Of course she is.

I’m exactly right for her, tall—6’3”—muscular, still in the prime of my life, and I’m paid a six-figure salary. With me, she’d have the life she’s always wanted, but I won’t be with her because she’s too green. Green people always end up wanting more.

The kitchen smells like gas, and I notice I left the stove on. I grip the dial to turn it off, but first I pause. I fantasize:

Trillions of carbon- and hydrogen-composed, toy-sized soldiers are storming my kitchen and living room. They’re looking for me, but I don’t hide. I’m on the couch listening to a Rolling Stones record, waiting. An entire brigade marches into my lungs while the rest destroy my perfectly

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organized home. I can’t breathe.

I drive twenty-five minutes to work every day, southbound on Route 93. I’ve driven this way so many times I could go the whole way with my eyes closed. Sometimes for lengths of it, for fun, I do.

My office is on the forty-ninth floor of a fifty-three story building on the North Side. I’m an advertising sales director at a firm called The 9, where I’ve worked since I graduated from HBS, Harvard Business School.

I’ve got it made here as long as I keep the wheels on the tracks.

The wheels aren’t on the tracks.

I ride up the elevator with the office secretary, a pleasant, albeit boring, girl. She’s pink, the color for the affectionate, the congenial, the sympathetic, but she’s boring and heavy.

“How was your weekend?” she asks me.

“Extravagant,” I say. “And yours?”

Her mouth moves, but I don’t listen.

“That sounds excellent.” I smile at her.

We stand in silence from floors twenty-five to forty-seven. I cross my arms behind my back.

“Oh,” she says. “The boss would like to meet with you at ten o’clock”

“Wonderful.” I smile again.

A dim trail of pink follows her off the elevator before me. I walk to

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the opposite end of the floor and enter my office. It’s like my kitchen, nearly empty but in pristine condition. I sit in a red executive chair at an L-shaped glass desk in the middle of the room. There are two black chairs against the wall by the door. There’s a window behind my desk; otherwise the walls—painted corporate blue—are empty.

I have three drawers underneath my desk where I keep the essentials—paper, pens, bourbon, a picture of my mother but not my father, pain killers, my computer and phone chargers, business cards.

I take out the picture of my mother, who left a message for me yesterday. I had the pink girl tell her that I’m on vacation. I’ve been “on vacation” for seven weeks. I put the picture away and I pour a glass of bourbon. I pop four pain pills and close my eyes:

The building is on fire, and my door is locked. I jump up from my desk and feel the knob, which burns my hand. The fire is outside my door.

I can either jump or wait, so I wait—I’m not yellow. I put on some music, George Harrison, to keep me relaxed. The walls are melting. I loosen my tie and pour more bourbon. When they find what’s left of my body, the girl from next door cries heavy, green tears.

I’m startled awake when the pink secretary knocks on my door at five minutes after ten. My boss is waiting for me. I fix my hair and adjust my shirt collar, and I follow her to his office.

Kyle Ferrara

He greets me.

I nod and sit. He isn’t much older than me, maybe thirty-two to my twenty-seven. He’s not physically big, but his intelligence is unmatched.

He’s smarter than me, and we both know it.

His office is similar to mine, except that he has a shelf on the back wall lined with books, trophies, and other objects demonstrating his superiority. There’s also a purple lighting throughout the room that suggests royalty and mystery. The glow comes from the boss himself. He’s the purplest man I’ve ever met, and he knows that he’s purple, too.

“I want to talk to you about your performance over the last month,” he says.

I fidget. I miss my power chair.

“As usual, your sales are exceptional . . .”

I flash him the same smile I gave the secretary. Surely a man like him can see through it, but he’s never indicated as much. My mind wanders:

He pulls a handgun from underneath his desk and points it at me.

I lean toward him.

“Do you need me to repeat the question?” the purple man asks.

His hands are empty.

“I’m sorry?”

“I asked if you’ll be able to attend this afternoon’s board meeting.”

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“Oh, yes. I thought I said yes.”

“Very good.” ***

I’m at my high school, sitting in the office that belonged to my guidance counselor. He’s sitting across from me, but his head is missing.

Instead, there’s a blue light floating above his neck. He’s blue because he’s trustworthy, and thus I’ve spent more than an hour babbling to him about stress, about the colors, about my father’s suicide.

He’s talking now, but I’m not listening. I’m confused. The colors have always been there, but my disgraceful, detestable, yellow father won’t shoot himself for another eight years, when I’m far away from my high school and my overweight counselor. I’m trying to look the blue old man in the eyes, but his eyes can’t be found. He reaches out and hands me a piece of paper on which he’s scribbled a name and phone number. A friend, he says, quite reputable. I sent my own daughter. . . I tear the paper in half because I won’t need it at Harvard. The blue light where his head should be explodes. ***

I wake up in my office. In my sleep, I spilled a glass of bourbon on the floor. The board meeting started three minutes ago. I burst into the conference room without fixing my hair, but my arrival is met with only a few stares. The purple man looks disapprovingly from the far end of the table. Everyone is talking, but I don’t make out what they are saying. Soon they are shouting.

Kyle Ferrara

The purple man’s mouth moves and he points at me. I’m not sure if he wants me to speak. There’s too much noise, all kinds of it: white, brown, pink, blue. The noise colors clash with the reds and purples of the board members. I lose focus—there are only flashes of color now. A streak of yellow is coming from someone. Nobody will shut up, their vocals like bees buzzing around the room. The bees crawl into my ears and begin to colonize my brain.

I catch sight of myself in a mirror. The yellow light is coming from me. I start slapping at my chest to get it off me, but I just keep getting yellower. The other colors whiz around the room as everything spins. I scream. The bees have set up a throne for their queen.

The entire room is quiet now except for the bees. The colors are floating in mid-air. I’m floating with them, a terrified frequency of yellow light. I’ve been yellow the entire time. ***

It’s been three weeks, and I’ve seen one color only—white, for purity and cleanliness. White walls, white floors, white nurses, white clothes, white plates, white food, white lights, white beds, white pills. It’s for the best. The white keeps me calm.

Since I’ve been here, I’ve talked to the same woman every day.

A medical professional, she calls herself. Today, she’s turning me over to someone new.

I walk into the yellow woman’s office. Her desk faces the back wall,

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but she spins around in her chair so that she faces the couch where I sit.

There’s something familiar about her office, something I’ve missed.

“How’s your stay been?” she asks me.

“Extravagant.”

There’s a poster featuring North American wild flowers on the wall above her desk. The colors are so vivid—the deep purple of the New England Aster, the red and gold of the Blanket Flower, the blues of the Perennial Lupine—it hurts.

“And you’ve been taking your medication?”

I think about the weeks’ worth of pills I’ve buried inside my mattress.

“Yes.”

Yellow begins to consume the office.

“Your file says that you want to die.”

“I’m not suicidal.”

I squeeze my eyes shut and put my hands over my face, but I can still see the yellow.

“Why do you think you’re here?” she buzzes.

The yellow is so bright it’s burning. I’m lying on the ground.

“Perhaps that’s enough for today,” she says. From my spot on the floor I see antennae sprouting out of her bumblebee head.

“I’m red.”

Two gold nurses grab my arms and take me from the room. I yell at them to put me down, but they can’t hear me over their self-importance.

Kyle Ferrara

My eyes are still squeezed shut when they push a white pill down my throat.

The world is spinning shades of yellow, gold, silver, turquoise, orange. I hear a symphony of a trillion bees. Everything turns black.

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Kyle Ferrara

On apathy Alex Segelhurst

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the first time i saw you, on stage at the Saybrook, steeped in red stage lights, i thought you were just another fragile specimen tossed on up there to please the idle. smudged eyes, not quite unappealing, cigarette burns on the blond face of your Epiphone, a cherry still smoldering, hanging from the corner of your mouth. like a palisade, vacant bottles line your amp; all these things hint at how you must be.

dive metamorphosis

you catch the light well, auburn-haired boy. daisy stems behind your ears, braided suns and white slivers crown you.

Brian DeFlyer

Orpheus

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well—i’ll say it: vulnerable. your voice scratches out “Yer Blues,” you throw riffs like rocks, thumb-wrapped grip—depress every string.

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all attention is uprooted as you rasp and rail. swing that tempo, roll the bar. the stools pivots, everyone becomes your fanatic.

Orpheus, honey, you drip off stage offhandedly, clumsy in your abandon. you are prowling like any fox would, with a sure foot, sharp eyes. after such a play, i won’t say no. in between kisses you apologize for being drunk, for not being able to handle the buckle.

Brian DeFlyer

your eyes mystified. lips slack. in my hands, you are wildfire to the wind.

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Brian DeFlyer

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Margaret Bohan

Morning Commute

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Rainy City

Elise Miller

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Rhys Watson

From Another Era

My Mob Husband

Elizabeth Sawka

I learned a lot about the mob when I spent a summer studying abroad in Florence. I learned about how the wives of mobsters weren’t supposed to know anything about the mafia’s crime. These women raised children with men they couldn’t fully understand because part of being a Mafioso wife meant that an entire part of your husband’s identity was a secret. If a widowed Mafioso wife told the police who killed her husband, she would be shunned by the family. They could be killed by a rival Mafioso family as a way of getting revenge on the men in their family. Though I’ve never been married and I didn’t meet any mobsters while I was in Italy, learning about the Mob families made me imagine Zach as a mobster and myself as married to him.

Zach was a Psychology major from Syracuse that I met at a Florentine bar. We were studying abroad at the same school and he was my travel companion. We went on a lot of day trips together, and since people always assumed we are a couple, at some point I started to think about what it would be like if we were married mobsters. On walking city tours I worried that he noticed how much the Italian summer heat made me sweat, but he never seemed too shy to put his arm around my sticky shoulders for a photo. When I would put my arm around him for photos, his back was damp, but he was always more sure of himself than me. I doubted that he worried about his sweat. On our fourth day abroad, he stopped carrying a map while we were in Florence, but I kept mine at the bottom of my purse as a safety net. I hid it under my wallet so that no one knew that

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I still thought I might need it. Even when he was lost Zach walked with confidence, as if he were on a purposeful path and no one watching him was able to guess that he was really walking in circles. When we went out for dinner, we always ordered at least one bottle of wine and he always poured me a glass before he poured one for himself. I imagined him as a mobster that stops other mobsters from killing women and children in the house of a target—his confidence inspiring his boss to ask his advice before executing an order out of revenge.

I imagined that Mob Zach came from a long line of mobsters and he didn’t want to be a boss, but a rival family killed his brother, or maybe his cousin, so he felt the need to take revenge. I saw him as a husband that holds my hand while we’re driving to the grocery store just because he wants to, not the husband that puts his arm around his wife only when they’re out in public. With Zach, I saw myself as a woman who dressed impeccably well—high-waisted skirts and intricately styled hair, the kind of woman who knows how to mix patterns in a purposeful way and wears high heels to brunch. I pictured my straight hair in big curls and pinned away from my face. This wife was the kind of mother who knew how to fix the kitchen sink when it clogged—she didn’t need to call a handyman.

I’ve never actually been a mother or wife, but I imagined it a lot.

I imagined babies clinging to me the way they do in diaper commercials, sleeping drool-free with a well-rested mother stroking their back, the baby in an impossibly white onesie and the mother’s hair too perfect to be believed.

Elizabeth Sawka

I saw Zach as a capodecina, or the boss’s right hand man in charge of ten picciotti—Mafia soldiers. I saw him going to new business owners, and I imagined it was easy for him to charm them into paying for protection. I pictured Zach’s shaggy brown hair slicked back and him wearing a white button-down with a skinny, black tie. I imagined that he would change out of his work clothes as soon as he came home so that he could eat dinner without worrying about staining them. I saw Zach wearing his undershirt at home because he played with his kids in the backyard and got dirty. His clothes didn’t need to match the charming man he played with the mob.

This other woman was more patient than me. She forgave Zach for forgetting to take out the trash or do the dishes on nights he came home late. She didn’t take it personally when Mob Zach left a coffee cup on her bedroom dresser.

Real Me ranted in front of Real Zach a few times, mostly about small annoyances like crowds of tourists that slowed me down on my way to class. I pictured Mob Zach patiently waiting while his wife ranted. Just like Real Zach, he didn’t try to solve her issue. He sensed when there wasn’t a problem to be solved, when his wife just needed to be mad for a few minutes.

I saw Mob Zach as the kind of father that talked about his children a little too much, telling his coworkers about his baby’s first word so many times that they started to resent our baby a little bit for causing Zach to

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dominate the conversation. I saw Zach and me as a team. We both tucked the children into bed and we took turns making up stories for our kids about imaginary places with talking zebras.

Joe Bonanno was a really famous and brutal mobster, and once he talked about how thankful he was for his wife. He said that she loved a man who would always keep a part of himself secret, but that she never complained and that she accepted him for the sides of him that she saw. I imagined Bonanno as Zach’s boss, and that he talked to Zach about living a double life with the Mob and his family.

I hate that the women in my family teach their kids to find women when they cry. The real mothers in my family seize upset children, cradling the child the moment the first tear falls without giving their husband a chance to step in. My grandpa would joke that he couldn’t babysit my mom and aunt when they were kids because he didn’t know how to play with little girls. As a former little girl, I can attest to the fact that we’re not any harder to talk to or play with than little boys. I saw Zach as a dad that knew when to talk down a tantrum and when to just let our child cry.

I always thought married people talked about their days while they got ready for bed, so I pictured us getting ready in silence broken up by stories of our children and neighbors. I imagined that while we got ready for bed, the crime sat heavy on Zach’s shoulders like actual weights that make him walk more slowly from the bathroom to our bed. This wife was more forgiving than me because she forgave Zach’s silence.

Elizabeth Sawka

I imagined that this is the husband who hated not talking to his wife about the real parts of his day, the times when he was scared or anxious, or the times when he was happy and laughed so hard it was a little embarrassing. I imagined that Zach told Bonanno about this, and Bonanno understood.

I saw our professional wedding photo in the living room in the center of our mantle. I was holding my bouquet in the center of my stomach and my dress had sleeves that went to my elbow and the fabric spread wide at my waist. My hair was pinned away from my face, and there was a pearl hair clip on one side. I was wearing red lipstick that looked perfect in a way Real Me could never manage. Zach was standing behind me with his hands on the narrowest part of my waist. His hair was combed like Alex Turner’s in the music video for “Why Do You Only Call Me When You’re High,” and his smile looked like the one in our real picture by the Arno River after our hike in Cinque Terre.

On either side of the wedding photo were pictures of us and our kids. One photo was a professional one we paid for after having our first child. He and I were both wearing red sweaters and the baby was in a red dress. The red helped it pass for a Christmas card photo, but the lack of green allowed for it to be appropriate all year long. In this picture, Zach was standing behind me and the baby was sitting on my lap. His hand was on my shoulder, cupping it like his palm was designed to fit my shoulder perfectly. My hands were on either side of the baby’s stomach, helping the

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baby balance but not clinging to her too much.

Next to our bedroom dresser, I saw a picture of Zach giving our son a bath in the kitchen sink. Zach’s shirt was clinging to his stomach because the water splashed on it, but Zach was smiling at the baby like he didn’t notice. His hair had fallen out of how it was combed in the living room pictures. This was a picture that wasn’t posed, so we kept it in our bedroom and away from guests that might laugh at Zach’s hair.

Most of all, I pictured Mob Zach and me waltzing in the kitchen.

In my imagination I knew how to waltz. This would be one of our kid’s memories of us—easily shifting from washing dishes to waltzing barefoot on the tile. I saw intricate spins look effortless, as though all we did was practice for an audience of babies.

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Civil Art, All Nature

Darby Ratliff

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Michael Hockwater

Water Under the Bridge

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To Live so Close to the Sea

Darby Ratliff

couch surfing after eden

Kate Light

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“I remember when it was me,” Pandora sighs, eyeballing shots of Jack’s liquid sunshine into coffee cups, glubglubglub.

“Minus the whole eviction bullshit, of course.”

Eve is resting her cheek on the countertop’s coolness, clutching an open cardboard box full of plants in her lap, each nestled in its own ceramic home she’d spun herself with muddied hands. He took the pets, but the earth was always hers.

Lamb’s Ears tickle her wrists with their softness.

Her eyes are closed, swollen plums ripe among the dark fruits rotting on the curved orchard of her jaw.

She presses frozen peas to purpled skin, and Pan coos over the sizzle of eggs frying on a low gas flame.

“Everyone’s so goddamn quick to blame the girl,” the hostess murmurs to bubbling yolks, yellow goo pooling in grease.

“I was so curious,” Eve breathes into the sleeve of her sweater, “About his lips. How they would taste.”

She feels Pan rest a palm between her shoulder blades and rub a gentle circle into her muscles, almost lulling Eve to sleep, the warmth of her touch like a sunrise.

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Kate Light

Thank You

Contributors, for being donators of the blood that keeps Quadrangle alive.

Staff members, for being a wonderful group of thinkers and idea-sharers, and an even more wonderful group of friends.

Jon Fitzsimmons and Rachel Peck, for probably thinking Nicole was crazy but listening to and helping her anyway.

Dr. Cochrane, for tirelessly being the one to go to bat for Quadrangle.

Rick Bruno and the Dual Printing Staff, for always making Quadrangle feel welcome on your pages.

Ben Dunkle, for always being willing to share your knowledge of design.

Deanna Pavone, for always encouraging people to see the best in themselves and others.

Undergraduate Student Association, for giving the money Quadrangle needs to keep getting better.

Canisius College Community, for proving that art will always have a place on this campus.

Margaret Bohan is a sophomore majoring in Communications Studies and Animal Behavior, Ecology, and Conservation. She grew up in the Bronx, but loves aimlessly wandering the streets of Manhattan. She says the word “dude� way more often than she should.

Kelsey Colwell is a terrified graduating senior majoring in English and Creative Writing who, like all hobbits, has a deep love of things that grow.

She's also pretty much the lady in that eHarmony video that promised herself she wouldn't cry about cats in bowties and then did exactly that.

Brian DeFlyer is a junior. The most money ever paid for a cow in an auction was 1.3 million dollars.

Bethany Dudek is a Canisius Digital Media Arts alumnus and now also a graphic designer on the edge of corporate America and urban creativity. She likes to photograph quiet moments and be outdoors. She often finds herself getting dirty with ink and solvent while letterpress printing.

Contributor Bios

Brianna Blank is a 2014 Canisius alumnus who graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Digital Media Arts and Communication Studies. Now a video editor and director at Fisher-Price, she can often be found playing with toys and directing babies to be America's Next Top Model.

Aryanna Falkner is a junior majoring in English and Creative Writing, and she spends most of her time looking for her many lost book-lights. Her biggest wish in life is to be able to read in the car without feeling carsick.

World peace is a close second.

Kyle Ferrara is a senior majoring in Communications and minoring in Creative Writing. A passionate Cleveland native, he is a former Griffin editor and journalist for the Buffalo Bills who likes mismatched socks, Sudoku puzzles, and his Yorkshire Terrier puppy.

Jon Fitzsimmons is a senior majoring in Communications from London, Ontario. He is glad to be included in this year's issue of Quadrangle and hopes it wasn't just because he helped design it.

Laina Gray is a senior Environmental Studies and Psychology major, aspiring storyteller, and Rottweiler companion. She is perpetually unicycle-tightropejuggling an existential crisis. She finds peace when immersed in water, and also in a hot toddy, savasana, nature walks, people watching, the dentist's office, indie films, sci-fi, daydreams, nightdreams, and avocados.

Michael Hockwater is a senior majoring in Adolescent Education and English, with a minor in Netflix & Chill. He holds the record for the longest outline ever written for a 10-page paper, just ask Dr. Astiz. His dream came true

when he was accepted into an Ivy League grad school. When he’s not hopelessly overachieving, he likes to binge-watch The X Files and read Kanye West’s twitter rants.

Nicole Kuhn is a senior majoring in Creative Writing and English and minoring in Theatre. She is so extremely proud to have been involved with Quadrangle during her time at Canisius.

Kate Light is a senior English and Creative Writing major, definitely a cat person, and a fan of the Oxford comma. She would like to thank her parents for their unwavering support and the Creative Writing faculty for their invaluable guidance.

Natalie Medina is a senior Creative Writing and English major. In between Netflix binge sessions she likes to imagine that her brain is the universe's gift to her and that the words she types together into statements and stories are her best way of showing gratitude.

Elise Miller is a freshman DMA student aiming to be a graphic designer one day. She loves primary colors, fashion editorials, and food with nice packaging, and she resembles an old lady sometimes. She hasn’t unveiled her full potential yet, so stay tuned.

Joana Moraes is a sophomore majoring in Creative Writing, Psychology and Grey's Anatomy. She is fluent in Portuguese, English, and Sass. She is an expert in talking to strangers and procrastinating—both involving Netflix.

She pretends to be chill, but in reality she overthinks everything.

Sarah Pozzuto is a junior English and Creative Writing major who writes obituaries part-time. She enjoys Crash Bandicoot and The Strokes, and is perpetually stuck in the early 2000s. She has a lot of feelings about social issues and will rant feverishly about them if even slightly provoked.

Darby Ratliff is a senior Creative Writing, English, and Political Science major with an Economics minor. She is the quintessential Dad, from her jokes to her eternal curiosity about "what the kids are doing these days." She likes to do many things while watching Top Gun, including write, and her wife and girlfriend both can only roll their eyes as she serenades them with its classic soundtrack.

Nathan Ress is a sophomore English and Creative Writing major. He fears caffeine withdrawal and anything coming into physical contact with his belly button. (Yes, he is serious.) He spends his time bicycling, combining various foods with pasta for immediate consumption, procrastinating his laundry, and wondering how it got to be so late.

Elizabeth Sawka is a senior English and Creative Writing major with a Psychology minor. She is the quintessential Mom. She enjoys writing everything from fiction to Wegmans grocery lists. In her free time she fights for women’s rights, actively avoids dinosaur movies because she’s afraid of them, and is reluctantly serenaded by Darby Ratliff. In ten years, she might be married, but she’ll definitely have a cat.

Alexandria Scott is a senior English and Creative Writing major. She loves reality television, Earl Grey tea, and Lysol wipes. When she's not revising and working on assignments with Divorce Court running in the background, she is often napping and watching re-runs of her favorite shows or hyping herself up to put on real pants and interact with other humans.

Alex Segelhurst is a junior English and Creative Writing major and, if you cant find him procrastinating or sleeping, then you probably aren't looking hard enough and should appreciate the fact that any vaguely flat surface is a viable option for him. Otherwise, he's just started a paper due in an hour and really needs to concentrate.

Clayton Shanahan is a sophomore Biology and Environmental Studies double major. He finds love in all things but especially in bananas, bikes and his sister, Olivia. He wants to thank his friends and family for always showing unconditional love and support in whatever he does.

Megan Smith is a senior Communication Studies major who will be working next year as a Jesuit Volunteer in Cleveland, Ohio! Her all-time favorite word in the English language is “lugubrious.” Megan would like to thank Lady Luck for the beautiful shot of her decrepit, yet beloved, shed, Tom Wolf for being the best and only photography teacher she has ever known, and coffee for being the lifeblood that fuels the dreams of champions.

Rhys Watson is a sophomore. The sound of E.T. walking was made by someone squishing her hands in jelly.

Gabrielle Weiss, better known as Bambi, or Gabs, or Gibbity Gab to her friends, is a senior English and Creative Writing major. Her passions include Teen Wolf and waffles shaped like Mickey Mouse. But don’t let her doe eyes and love for Disney World fool you, she can still beat you in a burping contest. Really.

Chelsea Wisner is a graduating senior majoring in Animal Behavior, Ecology and Conservation. As a lifelong animal lover, she finds great joy in exploring the natural world with hiking boots on her feet and a camera in her hand.

Her love of adventure has taken her around the globe, but of all of the subjects she has photographed, her eight hairy dogs are still her favorite critters to capture on camera.

Monica Wrobel is a junior majoring in International Relations, Spanish, Political Science, and Latin American Studies (whew, that’s a mouthful).

She is over the moon to be included in Quadrangle among such gifted contributors. When not consumed with the college workload, Monica enjoys dressing in long, bohemian skirts, expanding her worldview to learn about social injustices, singing a capella with the fabulous Canisius Crescendon’ts, and being an amateur ukuleleist.

This magazine and its contents were designed at Canisius College in Buffalo, New York, 2016, by Jon Fitzsimmons and Rachel Peck using Adobe InDesign The fonts included are:

Adobe Garamond Pro Besom by Krisijanis Mezulis & Gatis Vilaks This issue of Quadrangle was printed and bound at Dual Print & Mail in Cheektowaga, New York, with the help of Rick Bruno Front Cover Sealed, Megan Smith Edited & Designed by Jon Fitzsimmons Illustrations designed by Jon Fitzsimmons Layout Design by Rachel Peck