Parallax 2016 pr

parallax Ramaz Upper School

19 2016 No.

Parallax n. fr. Gk parallaxis, the apparent displacement of an observed object due to a change in the position of the observer.

parallax

you are here The Rabbi Joseph H. Lookstein Upper School of Ramaz Parallax Literar y & Ar t Magazine 2016 | Vol. 19 6 0 E a s t 7 8 t h S t r e e t | N e w Yo r k N Y 1 0 0 7 5

This publication is dedicated in loving memory to Edith Schrank. For more than a decade, she taught English in a distinguished and distinctive fashion. She had the capacity to impart to her students a sense of urgency about reading and an appreciation for the written word.

A

t the zoo,

at the mall, at the top of a ski lift, on the subway, someone insists:

“ Yo u A r e H e r e . ”

With a red pointer, each map designates that inevitable, existential truth.

For millennia, people have been trying to map out their surroundings.

Drawings on walls gave way to Ptolemy’s Work Map, the advent of longitude and latitude.

Then came the illuminated pieces of the Middle Ages with elaborate compass roses; then came printed maps. Now, with GPS systems and trackers, we can pinpoint our location at any time. But where exactly is here? How did I get here? Am I just passing through in a state of transience? Or is this who I am? Have I finally reached a state of permanence?

Am I finally, solidly HERE?

editors

literary editors hannah BenHamo tess Solomon adina Weinberger

design editors moselle Kleiner kitty Modell-Rosen

faculty advisors literary - dr. edith Lazaros Honig design - ms. barbara Abramson photography - ms. rachel Rabhan

8 Photograph kitty Modell-Rosen 10 Country Morning mollie Adolf Photograph oren Oppenheim 12 Photograph rebecca Silverman 13 Sally

moselle Kleiner 14 Photograph hadassah Brenner 15 The Firefly hadassah Brenner 16 Collage esti Beck 17 The Chip at the Dinner Party julia Levi 18 Photograph moselle Kleiner 19 Lazy Susan hannah BenHamo 20 Photograph hadassah Brenner Photograph rebecca Silverman 22 The Song of the Cicadas sarah Araten Photograph hadassah Brenner 24 Everything Looks Worse noa Attias Up Close Photograph hadassah Brenner 26 This Morning I Saw a Puddle kitty Modell-Rosen 27 Photograph rebecca Silverman 28 Again hannah BenHamo Photograph jessica Saad 29 The End of Summer Dance julia Levi 30 San Francisco kitty Modell-Rosen Photograph gabriel Zimbler 31 Photograph rebecca Silverman 32 Uber tess Solomon Photograph kitty Modell-Rosen 34 Photograph elisabeth Buchwald 35 The Cold Lower Level of the tess Solomon

Pennsylvania Station 36 Photograph moselle Kleiner 37 My Life Was Put in a Box noa Attias 38 Collage tamar Sidi 39 Rainbow Poems adina Weinberger 40 Photograph adina Weinberger 41 Turbulence akiva Weinberger Photograph oriel Bigel 42 Collage gabrielle Amar-Ouimet 43 You Stay Safe adina Weinberger

Table of Contents

transience

Parallax is the writing club of Ramaz Upper School, as well as the name of our literary & art magazine. The club meets every Thursday after school. Parallax is a juried publication that comes out in June in time for distribution at our annual Celebration of the Arts. Parallax 2016 was printed by Evergreen Printing on 80 lb. bond. Copy and layout were prepared by students on an Apple iMac in InDesign CS6. 450 copies were printed. All rights belong to Ramaz Upper School, 60 E. 78th Street, New York NY 10075.

permanence

44 Photograph kitty Modell-Rosen 46 Photograph moselle Kleiner 47 Multi-Colored natalie Kahn 48 Photograph hannah Blas 49 Michael kitty Modell-Rosen 50 Collage kitty Modell-Rosen 51 Blue Jays tess Solomon 52 Drawing gabrielle Amar-Ouimet 53 Femininity adina Weinberger 54 Photograph rebecca Silverman 55 Ophelia hannah BenHamo 56 Currently Occupied daphna Ash 57 Photograph eliana Present 58 To South Street Seaport elisabeth Buchwald Photograph elisabeth Buchwald 59 Photograph kitty Modell-Rosen 60 An Italian On A Bench gabriel Klapholz 61 Photograph meira Gilbert 62 Photograph moselle Kleiner 63 The City of Lady Liberty gabriel Klapholz 64 Photograph kitty Modell-Rosen 65 Prado Sketches tess Solomon 66 Collage meira Gilbert 67 Edit adina Weinberger 68 Drawing michelle Kvital 69 West End Avenue hannah BenHamo 70 Apartment 4B julia Levi 71 Collage kitty Modell-Rosen 72 Still Life rebecca Araten Photograph elisabeth Buchwald 74 When You Exist oren Oppenheim Photograph rebecca Silverman 76 Collage arielle Hadad

Cover Photograph moselle Kleiner Inside Cover Photograph kitty Modell-Rosen Title Page Photograph moselle Kleiner Introduction Photograph noa Attias Editors’ Page Drawing erica Leibowitz Photograph abbey Lepor Contents Photograph dara Doft

t r a n s i e n c e

C o u n t r y

M o r n i n g

The sun rose and everything fell.

The romance of darkness vanished.

The silence of the night became a blank canvas for the early bird’s chirps and the first fish’s splash.

She watched a tiny ant crawl under her leg and jumped up.

“I’d better go,” she said, noticing the imprints their bodies had made in the grass.

She turned to walk away, wiping traces of dirt off her thighs.

Morning had come, she stored her secrets.

oren Oppenheim

mollie Adolf

10

11

12

rebecca Silverman

S a l l y My dear friend Sally passed away a couple of days ago, and I find myself with a sudden regret not merely on her behalf—for who knows what secret dreams her death deferred—but on mine. I find myself tactlessly scrutinizing all of the time I spent with her—the many hours passed sitting on her backyard lawn, perched in wicker chairs half-sunken into the soft Alabama ground. Guzzling down mint juleps as though we were the epitome of Southern femininity and grace—two jobless, forty-year-old women imbibing light alcohol in the early afternoon, pretending, or rather, convincing ourselves, that we were immune to the passage of time—to the sprouting of gray hairs, to the existence of our husbands’ mistresses, and to the indifference of our sons. I found in Sally a companion in that distinctly feminine brand of discrete misery, the type of deep despondency that comes in recognizing within yourself a persona of clichés and in wondering how on earth you have become your mother, and your mother’s mother, when you swore throughout your entire adolescence and early adult life to do just the opposite.

I can vividly recall the day on which we met, a Monday during the Indian summer of 1959—I had just dropped off Dylan at elementary school and was on my return home when I caught a glimpse of a moving truck parked across the street at the old Driscoll Manor, which had been vacant for quite some time. Standing beside it, directing the truck’s workers with the ease and motions of a symphony conductor, was Sally. She was a pretty young thing back then, with her hair tied up in a kerchief, sporting slacks and a sleeveless linen top—an outfit that bordered on the mod fashions of the era while evidencing her refined dignity as a married woman. I suppose in those days we all bought into that misogynistic, commercialized garbage. Sally and I made eye contact as I exited my gray-green car, and I knew that I would be obliged to knock on her door later that day, neighborly casserole in hand, with an invitation to tea at my place the following afternoon. It was and remains the Southern way—or at least it is, according to the particularly Alabaman reading of that tacit code of social conduct from beyond the Mason-Dixon Line.

I believe I spoke too quickly earlier, in saying that Sally’s death has sparked within me feelings of regret. Perhaps what I mean, in retrospect, is that I regret our very predicament; I regret having found comfort in sharing with Sally the kind of similarly wretched circumstances that we had fallen prey to sheerly out of naivety and misguided innocence.

Sheerly out of being American females who, after graduating from prestigious women’s colleges, resigned ourselves to lives that required no preparation other than the standard high-school home-ec classes and frequent bottles of gin.

No, I do not feel remorse at having known Sally. I merely lament, in the wake of her death, the confines of the life she lived—the confines of the life I continue living.

And, on that note, I am reminded of the pressing urgency with which I was called to bring a copy of LIFE magazine to my husband—that, and a peanut butter-and-jelly sandwich. I’d better get on that, shouldn’t I? In honor of my dear friend Sally, who passed away a couple days ago, I’ll say. moselle Kleiner

13

f i r e f l y t h e

d ha

14

a

a ss

h

er n en Br

The firefly’s iridescent glow blazed in her hands.

It buzzed; it hummed on her still palm.

Was it immoral to capture such a pure creature?

But all she desired was to look upon its fiery soul, To watch the luminescent yellow flash in unison with the stars above Against the curtain of night, thick with the aroma of damp soil and blooming flora, Of blood-red roses that dripped and cascaded as water from a fall, A fall of the Angels from Heaven With the dew clinging to their bodies And the clouds weaving through their flaxen wings.

Ari-el, the lion of the Lord, Ari-el whose name rolled off her tongue, smooth and velvety, Both wild and tame, Like sand pounded by the shores of the far-reaching sea, Compressed to form emerald glass within the heat of deep fissures, Bubbling, oozing, spewing, Glowing brilliantly in the murky trench, Expanding and alighting– All sparks of life illuminating the hushed universe, Sparks of light illuminating the shadows against her skin Before fluttering away, flitting into the void.

hadassah Brenner

15

T h e C h i p

a t

t h e

D i n n e r

Party

esti Beck

julia L e v i

16

Specks of conversation and laughter bounce lightly around us, as a group of people sit on couches discussing how nice it is to be together again. It seems to have taken about a half hour to get everyone gathered at the couches and coffee table for appetizers. Ms. Rachel has been working on us all day, first buying us at the market and then tearing some, including me, out of a plastic bag before placing us into her fancy wooden bowls and plates, used only for company. Apples were shined to look prettier and bread cut into triangles and stuffed with lettuce, meat or tomatoes. A pitcher of iced tea complements us, and is surrounded with ribbed glasses. The seven people are divided into two: three of them talking among themselves about what they did that morning, discussing the best place to buy breakfast before work, and the other four discussing their opinions on fitting baby names for the woman sitting on the corner of the couch, who seems to be the pregnant one. She chuckles at the names the other three yell out aimlessly, every few rounds lifting her glass of tap water to her dry lips to take a sip.

"I really think you should stick to something classic, like Benjamin,� suggests a middle-aged woman, putting out a sharp-nailed, ring-covered hand and placing it on the woman's arm. The woman chuckles pleasantly, taking a gulp of water and seeming unenthusiastic about remaining classic.

"I don't know if it will be a boy or girl and I'm keeping it a surprise," she says somewhat proudly.

We sit awaiting attention. A man of about 37 years of age reaches out to grab a cashew from a nearby bowl and we all are abruptly startled. He places it in his mouth and crunches down, trying to keep his mouth closed while chewing, and nods along to the conversation around him. This move causes others to start grabbing bits of breads, some making a dent in the hummus and eggplant dips, while tending to their little conversations. I am still not chosen but I try to keep my composure as others are grabbed, creating a new space around me where I can change my position, and I become jittery.

"This is a delicious dip; did you make it yourself, Rachel?" asks the 37-year old man, licking his fingers quietly.

"I actually bought it at Westside Market. You can get it at the front—it was 25 percent off," she answers, with a sense of pride that she was able to catch a sale item at such a busy shop. He nods, acknowledging her response, quite impressed with her catch. The other side of the table's discussion about baby names has evolved into a sort of argument, the pregnant woman beginning to look flustered. People are becoming more hungry, and they grab chips and vegetables around me, now going from one chip grasped in two fingers, to a group of them being grabbed by the entire palm of the hand, and more and more and more space is created in my neighboring dishes.

I grow impatient, sinking to the bottom of the bowl.

17

L a z y

moselle Kleiner

S u s a n

18

hannah BenHamo

We were nineteen, and ours was the type of relationship that demanded alcohol. I might show up to a party and make my way over to the kitchen where I would find her: her gangly legs draped languidly over a chair, a half-empty bottle of Smirnoff ’s and a carton of orange juice situated before her on the Lazy Susan. She would swivel the Lazy Susan so that the neck of the bottle faced me, and I would see that neck and think of the bay stallion on my neighbor’s property, poking out its head over the split-rail fence to bid me hello.

She arched a single eyebrow. “Pour yourself a drink.”

Her father collected collegiate shot-glasses—Ohio State, Wisconsin, SMU—and she had lined them up before her on the kitchen table like a fleet of war ships. I nodded to them a bit, saluting imperceptibly, as I reached for a glass. She watched, a smile playing on her thin, chapped lips, as I diluted the drink with some of the orange juice. In her hand rested a glass of vodka filled to the brim, served neat.

She looked bored and got to her feet. “Want some alcohol with your OJ?” she asked, grinning now.

Outside, the party was loud, and I studied her glass as she spoke, waiting for it to tremble the way water might, or Tang, the fluorescent drink she sometimes sipped behind the counter at work. But it stood perfectly, monumentally still, seeming to have clouded over slightly since I’d entered the room, like the glazed eyes of a yawning audience.

“I’m going to go watch the game in the den,” she said flatly. Her hair, straight, center-parted, threatened to fall down around her face like curtains during a closing scene of a Broadway show.

“Who’s playing?” I asked. “I don’t really keep up with sports.”

“No,” she agreed. “But you can come if you want.”

I watched her make her way down a long hallway with her slow, loping gait. She had taken the bottle of Smirnoff ’s with her, and swung it imperceptibly from side to side. I thought of the stallion again, poking its head and then shying away, mocking me.

I finished my drink and followed her.

19

20

Th e Song of t he

C i c a d a s sarah Araten

21

The following short story is based on Ernest Hemingway’s “Indian Camp” and William Stafford’s poem “Traveling Through Dark.”

The night

was stifling hot and darker than the other side of the moon as he drove down the long, tar-paved road. On either side of the empty road was the dense forest where the cicadas’ song drowned out the car’s engine and the music he had turned on to distract himself from the unyielding atmosphere around him.

His young daughter was sleeping in the back seat, her eyes closed. Having nothing to interest him on the road, the father began to glance into the forest to search for the cicadas that he could hear but could not see. As he realized that he was drifting out of his lane, he quickly turned the wheel to keep from careening into the metal separating the road from the forest. There was no harm done. The night was just as still as it had been a few seconds before, and his daughter hadn’t awakened from the sudden motion of the car. He quickly turned to the backseat to confirm this, and was not surprised to find that he was correct. As he looked back at the road, he passed a yellow sign with words that he couldn’t decipher. As he kept driving, the music in his ears faded, and he could still hear the cicadas’ song, so he began to look for them again in the dark and ominous forest.

As he turned back to the road, he noticed a movement in the forest on his left. Just as he took a second look, he felt the car jolt, and he slammed on the brakes. He felt thrown to another time, when a car had been going in the wrong direction and it was too late. Confused and flustered by his sudden, unpredictable movements, he put the car in reverse and backed up a few feet. Then he got out to observe the scene. The weather was cooler than when he had first gotten into the car. As he walked around to the front of the car, he noticed something sticky on the road. He looked down and noticed a dark, viscous liquid running on the tar from the front of his car.

Upon following the stream, he saw a dark hoof on the ground and heard a soft sound emanating from the front of his car, where he discovered a deer lying on the cold ground. The deer was whimpering in pain. He knelt down to examine it more closely, and he put a hand on its body. _____________________________________________

The warmth surprised him, and he was again flown back in time to the other time, the tragic time, when he had lost the life he knew to be true. He heard a soft crying from the car and turned to see that the light in the car was on, and his daughter was peering at him from her seat. Unsure whether to bring her out into the darkness or to leave her in the light, he turned back to the problem lying in front of him, the doe dying before him. Upon further examination of the animal, he saw that the doe seemed bigger around the middle, a phenomenon that the man assumed was due to the impact of the car on her body. The trail of blood seemed to be getting darker around the deer’s hooves, and the father worried. Again he was brought back to that other time, when the pools of blood had darkened and then were cleaned off the road by the volunteer paramedics who had rushed to the scene. Two lost in one. He looked up, startled out of his reverie, to find his daughter standing next to him, her white sandals beginning to be stained by the blood on the pavement.

22

“What happened?” she asked. She looked perplexed by the strange creature.

“I made a mistake,” he answered. He didn’t know what else to say. These words seemed to be his favorites in the past month.

“Why does it look so sad?” she asked, “Doesn’t it know we are just trying to help it?”

“No, Hallie, she doesn’t know we are trying to help her. She thinks we’re trying to hurt her,” he answered.

“What’s her name? Does she have a mama or a baby?” Hallie asked with curiosity. At that comment, the father realized with astonishment why the deer was big and warm around her middle.

“She will have a baby very soon,” he answered, both to answer her question and to confirm his suspicion.

The deer began convulsing and his daughter jumped back from the deer and splattered a little blood on his white shirt and jeans. _____________________________________________

“Is this what happened to Mommy?” Hallie asked. Her father gulped and looked down at the pavement, tears pooling in his eyes. Instead of answering, he motioned to the girl to help him move the deer into a slightly more comfortable position on her side. Hallie stepped closer and helped her dad move her and then sat on the ground next to the deer, with her hand on the deer’s abdomen. “I feel the baby,” she said in wonder, as her father sat on the other side of the deer, careful not to sit in any of the blood on the road. After a few minutes, the deer began to cry out in pain again, and the father saw his daughter’s hand moving up and down as the deer’s insides worked to deposit a baby on the pavement. Both the father and his daughter moved closer to her side, trying to help her through her pain. Hallie began to whisper into her ear, silent words of happiness and encouragement.

The deer began to push the baby out, but after a few tries, the mother was too tired to continue, and her breaths began to slow and her eyelids fluttered and began to close. The father moved closer to the deer and pushed her abdomen in an attempt to push the baby out, and the movement startled the deer, which caused her to continue pushing the baby out again. The mother cried in pain and out came the head of the fawn. Another push brought out the neck, and the mother closed her eyes and did not move anymore. Hallie began to scream and shake the deer, but the father came to the fawn and gently yanked its neck to extricate it from the insides of the dead mother. The new deer looked around bewildered and began to stand up on the ground, but slipped in the blood on the floor and lay sprawled on the ground.

“Can we keep him? I want to name him Bambi, because he lost his mother, just like Bambi did,” Hallie spoke through the silence.

“No, Hallie,” the father said.

“Why?” she asked, “We have one less person at home.” They waited in the silence for the new doe to stand and make her way into the dark forest where the cicadas chirped in innocence. Together they got back into the car and the father started the engine.

“I made a mistake in having you see that, Hallie,” the father said.

“It’s okay,” she answered, “Now I see why you don’t want to talk about Mommy. I saw how she died.”

The father sat in silence with the words on the tip of his tongue, too deep for his daughter to understand, to understand that a month ago he lost two, and here only one was lost. He took out his phone and dialed the local park ranger’s office. He began to drive once more down the road into the dark night, the

the emptiness.

cicadas, and

23

E v e r y t h i n g

L o o k s

The first thing that hit me was the smell—the smell of disinfectant used by the cheap motel off the highway as a futile attempt to mask the lingering stench of smoke and the faint scent of mildew underneath the peeling yellow wallpaper.

It was the only decent motel I could find in the shortest amount of time before I veered off the road, as my eyelids fluttered through the haze of the feverish red-and-orange of the turn signals and the soft hum of the engine.

There was something dangerous in the shape of the moon, as if it got stuck amid the tip of the pine trees, as if a small group of little boys had tossed it upward at the end of an endless hot summer day. And there was something weird in the way it flared like an old flashlight in the back of a disorganized drawer, in the way it emitted light that glistened on the hoods of cars like gossamer threads and reflected on translucent drops in between the blades of the windshield wipers. There was something odd in the way the sky looked like a dark cardboard box with sagging holes, poked through by a kindergartener’s fat number two pencil, while the streets were slathered with thick shadows of wispy doilies stuck underneath badly painted porcelain bowls. And the echo of the slammed car door seemed extremely loud (too loud) and seemed to ward off the flicker of fireflies and the buzzing of mosquitoes as I trailed along the cracks in the slabs of the cold concrete, which reminded me of crooked veins the color of margins on my reinforced, three-hole-punched loose leaf paper.

I didn’t like the color of the room— the measly cot with a coarse, wool blanket strewn over scratchy cotton sheets, the intensity of the light that bounced off the yellow walls that made me squint and rub my eyes. The room was unlived in. Its only contents were a shabby kitchenette and a broken television set pushed into a corner where the peeling wallpaper and chipped, white paint met.

There was something odd about the view of the parking lot, where two ghastly pine trees stuck out like gap teeth. Everything looks worse up close.

I closed the white paper blinds, with a last look at unsettling blue eyes staring back, and sat on the staggering bed, grazing my hand over a lumpy, pilled blanket, seeking some degree of warmth.

Then I fell asleep to the silence of my thoughts and the green light of the VCR.

24

U p

W o r s e

C l o s e noa Attias

25

This morning I saw a puddle.

It was murky And shallow And gray.

Yet despite its unappealing surface, I imagined sailing across it.

This morning I stared out across a puddle And prepared for a treacherous voyage.

The water seemed still, But a sailor knows better Than to trust the waves To declare the weather.

This morning I floated on a puddle In my little sailboat by the harbor.

I gathered up the lines keeping me safe on the dock.

I raised the sails, letting the wind hit their canvas.

I lifted the anchor from the depths of the puddle.

And I directed my little sailboat straight ahead.

This morning I sailed on a puddle And the winds Nearly knocked me off my feet.

The waves were choppy, And the sky was gloomy, And the sun didn’t dare show its face.

This morning I conquered a puddle With only minor cuts and bruises.

If only I could say the same For my tough, little sailboat.

It sliced its way through the toughest of waves, But its sails are, sadly, no more.

26

rebecca Silverman

This morning I stood by a puddle And pondered its vastness And strength, Had it only Been made into An ocean, a sea, or a lake.

t h i s

M o r n i n g I

s a w

a P u d d l e kitty Modell-Rosen

27

A g a i n hannah B e n H a m o

Morning was bright but gray, and I woke and sat primly at the very edge of my bed murmuring spare words from Revelation 20:1 and thinking with watered-down, nondenominational gratitude how thankful I am that nights always end.

The city spares me pleasantries in rush hour and I enter the building bleary-eyed, contact lenses misshapen from three-day wear, sight shifting in and out of focus so everyone for a moment momentarily (bear with me—it’s early) appears a stranger.

jessica Saad

8:13, I’ve missed breakfast save for two cartons of skim milk lying on their sides.

I stare at the dust of sneaker-crushed sugar cereal on flecked linoleum and wait for the starting bell before I head to class.

28 28

Th e En d of

S u m m e r

I enjoy sitting on the old wooden bench in the afternoon at the end of summer, watching the children jump around the rusty sprinklers as the unknown hours go by in timeless fashion. The air in the morning is moist and compact, but it has expanded throughout the day, with a light breeze serving as a reminder that fall is approaching. This time of year doesn’t seem to serve a purpose. Parents and nannies are weary from pushing strollers around the playground all summer, and the faded hues of old water balloons and flavored ice wrappers litter the ground in a depressing manner. The faint, stale smell of chlorine from the local pool lingers in the children’s hair, and I can smell it as they move lightly around me, yelling at each other in murmured voices, not noticing that I am there, watching every move as if it were a dance. They move lightly as they fight for that last water balloon of the season. It ultimately splits while being thrown and I shudder as a sharp dash of cold water trickles into my ear. The small section of neon orange plastic lands in one of the crevices in the bench beside me. A little girl with dirty blond bangs springs onto the bench, retrieves her neon plastic while at the same time whining for an ice cream cone because of her broken water balloon. Her sticky hand brushes my forehead as she runs toward her nanny, although her flip-flop is flicked off her running foot, and she lands on the asphalt, her knee splitting into a small cut, as she bursts into muffled tears. The end-of-summer dance has come to a sudden halt as a parent pulls a tissue out of her purse and offers it to the little girl to clean up the cut. The little girl has triggered adults to exit their little worlds and look at the sky and their watches, realizing that it is time to head home for dinner. A sharp breeze hits my bare shoulder and I shiver, but I stay seated on the bench watching families move slowly out of the park, while the sun sets behind me.

D a n c e julia L e v i

29 29

S a n

F r a n c i s c o

He’s excited, no doubt about it. He’s been away so long and so have I, but we’re together in spirit as we talk over the phone at twelve and one and two and three in the morning... those weird hours he calls me...and all he wants is to submit the last of his applications and get into college and be successful, and maybe we’ll see each other again one day after we inevitably go down opposite paths...but for now, he’s here, and I’ll try to cherish that while I can, before we reach the fork in our lives where everything will change.

I’m compelled to tell him good luck. I'm compelled to tell him to let me know what he decides to do. But the moment fades, and the clouds over my lonely, romantic side settle onto my existence once again, as he walks away, engrossed in conversation with someone closer, more friend-like to him, and no doubt prettier than I. And here I am...and I'm typing late at night when we should be talking on the phone.

And I try to type "romantic side" but it autocorrects to "monkey frantic." And I try to type the word "write" but I type "right" instead and I curse myself, quietly enough not to disturb the snoring lump a few yards away in the living room, but loud enough to jolt me into another minute long bout of consciousness...just enough to write this much...just enough to write all that’s in my thoughts, as my thoughts turn into emotions, and then those slip into dreams, as my head falls to the keyboard with a soft thud, and the flip of a light switch allows slumber to enter my room and my eyes with grace.

gabriel Zimbler

kitty Modell-Rosen

30

rebecca Silverman

31

When he pulled up to the hotel, a second rate establishment where the second-generation Hispanic doormen overcompensated for the unpleasant location and shadowy lobby, it was already 2am outside. She had been a tired passenger, an end of the day passenger, one whose disdain, which he could feel from the back row, like the coffee-flavored air that filtered out of his car heater, had proved yet again his incompetency. He drove home from his second day of driving and was fully committed to his vision of himself as Tragic Artist, capitalized, whose art quite literally fell by the wayside for want of sustenance.

Only, he mused, he couldn’t quite come home drunk and rip up his masterpieces—a detail that needed consideration.

His apartment was on the edge of the urban sprawl, and though his window faced a street, he liked to think of the view from the back of the building, low rises crumbling into the desert to the east, highway 66 speeding off to Las Vegas. His window faced low rises, and absurdly tall palm trees towered above them, toothpicks in Dr. Seuss wigs. The streetlights, 20 feet apart, gaped down at the pavement. A figure passed in and out of focus through the pools. Above him, Paul Ben-Victor stared out of reflective sunglasses at a crowd. “He didn’t see the future.” Period, for dramatic effect. “He heard it.” I’m sure he did. Martin Scorsese.

Capitalized straight into success. Your car does not smell like coffee. You also do not drive it. The lime green writing against the black-and-white face sickened the night.

His desk light was on, lighting his last attempt at a screenplay, a dismal modern travesty complete with a vaguely androgynous femme fatale. The directors were looking for alt, and it made him scoff. Alt was the new postmodern. No one quite knew what it meant but it dangled in front of him, and every other 20-something in these incessant low rises, like a ball of yarn for a cat. He tossed his car keys on top of it and turned off the light. He could not part with it. Maybe he could make it sarcastic? No, Hollywood was sincere in some respects. He lay in his cargo pants and sweatshirt on his back. The buttons of yesterday’s rain jacket pressed into his back, but he was too tired to move it. The sky above the building stretched far, far away over the desert and ocean in their respective directions. He fell asleep.

32

U b e r tess S o l o m o n

osen dell-R o M kitty

33

the cold lower level

of the Pennsylvania

elisabeth Buchwald

Station

34

I awoke not from sleep but from stupor as the night sank. We, the night and I, descended into the station, hands that needed washing, news in a puddle on the track.

A fog filtered through the grates like water through the holes in a colander over a kitchen sink.

The people above, noodles, swimming, then dry.

A train station is where you go before you die, in your silky tatters, your sackcloth and ashes the wrinkled remains of a night out.

Underground, the bundled men who slept on the benches were seaweed in Sharks and Minnows, not it and not out.

The quiet and the morning were not yet bright enough to be fresh, the dawn gray-fingered and languid and bored.

No storm would come, but the sky would lie there purring like a fat cat.

tess S o l o m o n

35

M y

L i f e

W a s

i n

P u t

a

moselle Kleiner

noa A t t i a s

36

B o x

My life was put in a box,

Within an orange crate, in between layers of plastic bags And empty salmon coffee cups that seem lively enough to swim away, Surrounded by jaggedly cut newspaper clippings Not worthy enough to be hung on my bulletin board.

The crate holds the still lives of material things, The forgotten things: The crumpled-up wrappers and the jingle of loose change, The incessant scribbles of black ballpoint pens on the backs of old coffee shop napkins, The yards and yards of aged mustard-colored yarn tangled in year-old headphones Like the knots in my hair, headphones that only emit sound in the left ear, And years counted by the faded dates on the backs of punctured ticket stubs Instead of candid birthday photos in old, frayed photo albums on a forgotten shelf, The washed-out fabric swatches from my downtown tailor On a doggy street corner that still holds the remnants of once Vibrant shades of emerald and mauve, The collections of bottle caps and unopened neon-colored straws From excursions to Portland and Seattle, As a reminder of how the water tasted different on the tip of my tongue, And the new set of acrylic paint, set aside for a special occasion, Packaged in satisfying, untouched paint bottles With caps devoid of crusty old paint.

My life was put in a box, leaving everything that mattered behind.

37

r a i n b o w

P o e m s

adina Weinberger

38

red

The margins are from notes that you left, your cursive graffiti words written To show you don’t care for the rules that ensnare us like rabbits by ropes of tuition Textbooks are loud when dropped in a crowd, but softer than gentle frustration We resent the scholars who for all their honors can’t even evoke motivation

orange

Your breakfast consists of egg white omelettes, juice and multigrain toast Your children don’t call, though their children grow tall; what if they don’t know that you love them the most?

You’re old but not dead, and old things are best; all good music has long been composed What you wish would improve is the treatment of Jews, “but it won’t,” says Jerusalem Post

yellow

You live lights, yellow crossing guard vests, your child is home after dark Your face yellow sick, and yellow’s the risk of adventures you choose to embark Up on the fridge is the love that you live for, she’s turning eleven in March Yellow her spirit but yellow your fear—of the plague and strange men in the park

green

The room is full of undressed pretty girls; I’ve fallen into some bad habits I’m not sentimental so I must be mental; I’ve fallen in love with an actress If life were more fair, then the kisses we share would be better than those that she practiced In the back of my mind I know that she’s mine, or else just an evil seductress

blue,

Your makeup is it’s so much like you, your celebrity status in question Born in a limo, paparazzi in vitro, your given face just a suggestion So I don’t critique, others call you a freak, but me I have more compassion I wouldn’t trade places, but happily trade faces, if you would just make the donation

Put on your sunglasses, beware of the rays that inhabit this place Though it seems ironic, the snow is sardonic and reflects rays I put on my mittens, with fingers frost bitten, too cold even to turn a page Now sunsets are early I watch their full glory Their beauty like cold summer days

ultraviolet

tamar Sidi

39

adina Weinberger

T u r b u l e n c e

40

er erg b ein W iva ak

"Not as turbulent as it should have been," muttered the passenger next to me. She sounded disappointed, like she needed to feel the unpleasant bumpiness of a turbulent sky.

My eyes were determined to close, but the cramped nature of the seat wouldn't let them. The blue stared at us from below and above, the horizon simply marking the boundary between shades. I looked away. A slight tremor, and the lady's face revealed her excitement. She was trying her hardest to will a bumpy ride into existence, it seemed. I looked back out the window.

Thankfully, the rest of the flight completely disappointed her.

oriel Bigel 41

Y o u

S t a y

S a f e

gabrielle Amar-Ouimet

{song lyrics}

4242

We will get hurt and ride this ambulance together We’ll sing siren songs to make the time pass faster Yes there was love inside the bruises on your knees Your galaxies covered in blood and plaster What can I do to protect you?

If you get caught I’ll take the blame I’m happy to break but you stay safe I’ll unravel and hang from my final thread But you stay safe Because everything, everything, everything, everything Everything I do for you I’d do anything, anything, anything, anything Anything for you You rise and fall like the tide of the sea I pray please God don’t take her from me We all have our sins and He has His plans But I need her here, don’t let her days end What can I do to protect you?

I’m lucky to love you but I’m scared to death When you find your joy in disobedience You’ve threatened to run away These past three years since that day that changed everything But please stay safe Because everything, everything, everything, everything Everything I do for you I’d do anything, anything, anything, anything Anything for you You rise and fall like the tide of the sea I pray please God don’t take her from me We all have our sins and He has His plans But I need her here, don’t let her days end What can I do to protect you?

If you are leaving find something to believe in Outside of yourself so as not to be found out Beyond the horizon if the sun isn’t rising It’s just beneath your feet preparing to launch What can I do to prepare you?

Because everything, everything, everything, everything Everything I do for you I’d do anything, anything, anything, anything Anything for you You rise and fall like the tide of the sea I pray please God don’t take her from me We all have our sins and He has His plans But I need her here, don’t let her days end What can I do to protect you?

adina

Weinberger

43

p

44

e

r

m

a

n

e

n

c

e

45

M u l t i - C o l o r e d

moselle Kleiner

natalie K a h n

46

The painting in the gallery was a little smudged on the edge, perhaps from the

wind that trickled in through the little cracks in the window. But the smudges were charming in my mind. They made the painting seem more raw, more real, and less irritatingly ethereal.

I could picture those flowers, whose names I never bothered to learn, playing in a field and bending in the breeze. They had the summer to live, to laugh, to enjoy, and when the weather would cool and the leaves on the trees would turn brown and orange, they would die. There was something intriguing about a short life like that. There was something enigmatic about the summer.

In the field I stood, watching the hundreds of flowers all around me, unable to pick out each individual one beyond a distance of several feet. To me, they all appeared alike, each one a clone of the next, each one more uncaring and relentless than the next.

I had to find a mistake, a weak spot in this supposed masterpiece, so I approached it. With each step, the painting became less blurry, more vivid and sharp. I began to notice the angles and minute details, such as a graceful butterfly resting on the ground, its vibrant wings spread across the dirt. Upon a closer look, it almost felt as if the artist had painted in regular green, red, and blue paint and then cried on the painting, giving it that watery touch.

47

48

You remind me of dancing at midnight with a black sky and a full, white moon.

A baritone vibrates in our ears, through a 20’s microphone, capturing the sounds of passion effortlessly like the movements of our bodies, and suddenly but silently sway-by-sway we are swept away.

And now I am one with you in a questionable jazz bar that reeks of love and loneliness and just-polished brass.

M i c h a e l kitty Modell-Rosen 49

B l u e J a y s

kitty Modell-Rosen

tess Solomon

50

I was invited to a total of fourteen weddings in one summer in 1985. I was twenty-five. I worked in

a law office in the mornings, and in the afternoons I walked twenty minutes from my Bronx apartment to Yankee Stadium, where I sold Chipwiches with a Dominican nineteen-year-old named Luis and rooted against the home team. I was a Mets fan as much to be contrary as to stand up for my real home team from Queens, my favorite, notorious, outrageous loves, the New York Metropolitans of the 1980’s. Their time would come. Nineteen eighty-six was their time and their pinnacle and the way we love to remember them now, but these Yankees, with their discreet pinstriped uniforms, were as white collar as you could get sliding into second, and so Luis and I, calling for whoever wanted a Chipwich, with the radio on in our truck, would slap each other loud high fives if things went downhill; anyone against the Yankees was an underdog.

If 1986 was the year of the Mets, 1985 was the year of the Toronto Blue Jays, which was rather pertinent.

Here’s how I was feeling about most things American: at wedding number six, I watched my gender studies major roommate from college wear a suspiciously lacy dress and marry a lovely salt-and-pepper forty-five year old. We got tired of spiritual renewal, you see, scoffed at disco and other things pre-January, 1981, when our wrinkled cowboy renewed our faith in what it meant to be a man and asked us to make his decade. That we did, and so it served us right to watch the American pastime favorite get cleanly defeated by a team who came from somewhere else.

I watched myself slingshotted from the inevitable flex of my parents’ conservatism into the face of Goliath, otherwise known as my spinsterhood of twenty-five. It had been twenty years since “A Bunny’s Tale,” and Steinem had been arrested the previous year. I wasn’t as pretty as her, anyway, and that mattered. I wanted a career, of course. Nevertheless, fourteen weddings came and went with their various satin invitations, strapless, sleeveless, long-sleeved, one-shouldered dresses. And, to my great satisfaction, that same summer of 1985 was the summer of the Blue Jays.

51

F e m i n i n i t y adina W e i n b e r g e r

52

When the navy blue sidles down the sky, like a girl collapsing onto her boyfriend’s chest, I am reminded of something—something feminine and concrete, a woman in a tailored suit jacket standing behind a podium. I remember that receipt someone leaked, which traveled from a middle aged mom’s Facebook feed to mine—complete with a clickbait title, “OMG! You wouldn’t believe how much this politician spent on her haircut!” Of course I read it. I wanted to feel superior. I thought to myself, “My forty-dollar trim looks better on my young self, better than her multi-hundred dollar haircut ever could.” And I didn’t think about her Yale diploma or her foreign policy because she is shriveled, and who cares?

I wonder if my body could ever run for office. I wonder how much it costs to always be on display, on every TV screen in America. I do all this wondering and I stare at the sky. When I stare at the sky long enough, I forget whether it is navy or black. When I was a little girl, all my drawings had blue skies, as if my little girl head couldn’t process the complexities of color. What about all those oranges and reds and pinks and purples, and yes, blue, but do you ever just stare at a blue sky the way you do at a sunset? At that age all I wanted to do was grow up to be an artist, or a mom, mutually exclusive. I did not think about my hair, and it frustrated my mom because I would be such a pretty girl if I tried, if I just stood still and let her rip through my knotted curls with a comb. Well, I’ve gotten better at standing still and letting things tear into me. But it’s been so long since my hair’s been curly. gabrielle Amar-Ouimet

53

O p h e l i a

hannah B e n H a m o

rebecca Silverman

54

Art School was a funny place, an uncomfortable congregation of others who wished now—in their sly, reluctantly optimistic manner—that things would be different. The students had funny habits, and even in their summertime absence the school smelled of all these peculiar customs: marijuana smoked by the bathroom windows and angst that insulated the thin walls between the dormitory rooms. The art students liked to characterize those they lived among by saying something decidedly random about their character and then something decidedly specific about their art: Isaiah eats only hot pockets. He only works in digital, never film. For the other art students, nodding at this while engaging in their own idiosyncrasies (plucking stray eyelashes, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes that required constant relighting, nibbling systematically around the edges of a Kit-Kat candy bar), an artist’s medium said far more than any fun fact of theirs.

The students were not particularly fond of storytelling, and spoke of each other not in narratives, as most college kids do, but with little spurts of observations that sometimes left one slighted. But there was in senior spring 2016 one time when Zoë Wyatt found herself excessively given to storytelling, and if not storytelling then recreating, fabricating. It began with the suicide, by aspirin overdose, of Zoë’s roommate, a double-major in painting and psychology in a joint-degree program at a nearby liberal arts school. Zoë Wyatt (Wyatt an assumed name, Zoë a name which she had elevated through the addition of an umlaut) could not recall the roommate’s name, nor did she ever recall seeing her for longer than a minute, when she had not quite met her at all but had instead passed by this roommate, in Hello-Kitty towel and carrying purple-pink shower caddy, on her way back from another night at the studio.

Once, later in the year, Zoë had again crossed paths with her roommate, although it had been something of an incident. Still recovering from a bad breakup, Zoë had stumbled into a depression she had not yet experienced, one that curbed the appetite just as politely as a picket-fence curbed a modest suburban home, something distinct from the previous depressions Zoë had known, all of which required pints of ice cream and big, sloppy sculptures made from stolen mixed media. She grew rather waifish and missed her mother’s food dearly, missed the interests she used to take in things like ice cream cones and chicken pot pie and white bread. Sensing this, as mothers whose children take “alternative paths” do, Zoë’s Mom had come up last week and had taken Zoë to the local Applebee’s and asked if she would not eat more. Just one week later Zoë had encountered on her roommate’s perpetually clean side of the room a box of chocolate caramels. Zoë, exhausted from weeks working on a sculpture, had considered that maybe this was a surprise her mother had left her (along with washing and folding Zoë’s hefty collection of paint-stained overalls). She took a chocolate and left down the hall, and remarked to herself that it was sickeningly, sickeningly sweet, so much so that she headed up to the rec room, where she made some black coffee using another student’s can of instant. Later, Zoë returned to her dorm room and there, right where the chocolates had been, was a Hello-Kitty post-it note and written on it in pristine bubble letters: “I am so glad you liked my chocolates! Please take as many of them as you would like!”

“I have a roommate,” Zoë had remarked, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear and recalling that she had left a paintbrush there.

Two weeks later, the girl was gone and school psychologists Zoë had not known were available (for surely Zoë would have consulted them after her big breakup had she known) arrived at Zoë’s door and posited that the roommate’s double-major of psychology and art represented something of a suffocating schism in her brain, a constant tug between rationality and creativity. “Can you understand that?” they asked Zoë.

Zoë nodded yes, but became, in her roommate’s pointed absence, in the pointed presence of the removed absence of her roommate’s absence, obsessed with eulogizing her. For her senior project, she recreated the neat dormitory bed, complete with extra storage beneath, with a single box of caramels on the bed, one chocolate removed and a Hello-Kitty post-it note “Take as many as you want!” left behind. She named it Ophelia because any work inspired by the death of a young woman was meant to be named Ophelia, and her art teachers said it was very good, and the school psychologists said it was very concerning.

55

C u r r e n t l y O c c u p i e d One curtain left half open.

Four people, three different generations.

One pair of red socks, size extra large.

One gown, left open in the back.

Five bags full of food.

One hospital bed, currently occupied. daphna 56

Ash

57

eliana Present

I pictured you dark,

eerily drenched in history, layered in the stench of crustaceans.

I witness bricks that are stacked and sandwiched and stacked again.

Surely their grandparents were sturdy bricks, handmade, genuine bricks.

This new generation has stamped on their graves: “Fulton Street Market- Under renovation.”

South Street Seaport doesn’t smell anymore.

I encountered a single sailboat like a trophy wife.

I envy my grandparents who viewed the South Street Seaport that once was.

All I see is the South Street Seaport that is, just another shopping district.

I’m living in a time of artificial history.

elisabeth Buchwald

elisabeth Buchwald

58

T o

S o u t h

S t r e e t

S e a p o r t

59

A n

I t a l i a n A B e n c h

O n

Life in Britain felt like placing bare legs in a bucket of ice water. The result? A runny nose and a consistent need for brown wool mittens. For some reason, warmth was not a part of the language here. It was a much different atmosphere than native Castelsardo, the budding hamlet on the rocky Sardinian shores. A hug in Rome was a handshake in London, and a smile at home was a stern look behind a cup of tea and three hard, crunchy biscuits.

September nights were always cold. Father, however, wanted to live in the more northern climates.

After all, he was Italian, born and raised. Marco sat on the wooden bench outside the Adkins Manor, iron bars supporting from below and steel bolts rooting the bench onto the cobbled sidewalk.

Marco disliked his work as a footman. It was tiresome and overly formal for his sociable Italian nature.

On his first day of work, Master Adkins offered, or rather forced, a uniform of white gloves and a black bowtie that left marks on the neck after removal. As a bonus, a day’s work required a silver platter on which to serve guests the appropriate delicacies and the assortment of French wines that always filled the cupboard, not to mention the hard drinks. A cold Scotch was not uncommon. Surprisingly, the English were sometimes willing to borrow from a neighbor. Marco would have hoped that the English would borrow some Scottish social skills, but the liquor would suffice.

The house was more of a brownstone, near the center of town. It was comprised of three floors and a basement for the staff. Unlike some of the servants, who wanted to live, sleep and eat where they worked, Marco decided to live in a nearby apartment. Darcy was the landlady, a disheveled pedophiliac in retirement who cherished money even more than children. Living under Darcy’s greedy fingers made Marco’s financials problematic, yet still mildly manageable. He always worried that she would confuse him with her underdeveloped lovers for whom her adoration often became obsession. Marco had no desire to take part in such misplaced feelings.

He longed for Sardinia’s warm beaches and the white-hot sand that sat dispersed among the jagged, serpentine jetties. He could feel the sun tickling his 60

olive skin and could hear his three brothers loitering and yelling under the striped blue patio. “Mi hai detto che non ti piaceva la sua – you told me that you didn’t like her,” gossiped the boys about the prettiest young lady in town, Francesca. Before he left for the Isles, Francesca had planted a tender kiss on his cheek, leaving a mark of red lipstick and a tingling sensation that lingered on his skin until he disembarked from the vessel in the London harbor. He felt the kiss on his cheek, sitting there on the bench. It warmed his insides and melted the snow as it lightly fluttered onto his face.

The hand on the frozen bench pumped a frosty chill into his bloodstream, making it course through his veins. He could feel the texture of the bench in his rough hard hands, made tough by years in the workforce. As long as the factories did not claim him, he was happy warming himself with the soft, idealized memories of Francesca in her white holiday gown, cheering and singing the songs of the country—

Why was Francesca so far from reach? Her supple hands cupped his head onto her bosom. Would home bring solace? Would it end the endless cold? How strong would the sun need to burn down his neck in order to melt the countless layers of northern European ice that had frozen him in an Anglicizing cocoon?

Marco sat on that bench, watching the clock’s giant fingers turn atop the town hall that sat across from him. Above the clock was a pole, jutting out from the top of the entrance and clutching the flag that could be seen throughout the colonial world—the flag that breathed freedom and democracy with such heaviness to the point of forcefully imposing the edifice of British might on the peoples of Africa, Asia and the Americas.

He thought of faraway places and peoples defeated by the mighty Queen of England. He imagined the shores of Ethiopia, where his Italian forefathers took up arms against the dark-skinned peoples of Africa and where, to his father’s disappointment, the British guided the Ethiopians to victory and independence. Master Adkins often taunted him with this sorrowful defeat, where the horde of Ethiopian Emperor Menelik II trampled their white opponents, armed with British guns and a disdain for Italian belligerence. Marco grew red at the mention

meira meiraGilbert Gilbert

gabriel K l a p h o l z

of his country’s embarrassment, yet the next day he would show Master Adkins the wrinkled piece of paper that had been weighing down his trousers all day—the paper that declared Marco a citizen of Her Majesty the Queen’s Great British Empire. Was he just another conquered denizen, or was he a part of something far larger than his nuclear Italian family, far larger than Castelsardo, far larger than Italy for that matter?

And as the snow descended, the Sardinian sands dissipated from memory. Francesca’s face was replaced by that of Mistress Adkins and her intimidating, desirous looks. Marco would be a liar if he said that those looks were never returned. Feeling the cold, white skin of a fellow Briton made him feel a part of a world where the sun never sets and where all peoples submit to tall white men. And as he stood, trying to hum the British national anthem, Marco understood that Britain was not defined by its snow nor by its frigid metal benches and perfunctory gestures of formality, but rather by the sweet lovers dancing in figure eights on the frozen River Thames just because they could or by the morning bicyclist tossing papers into cozy, warm homes, celebrating the next overseas victory. And even if it snowed more often here than in Castelsardo, this country was home now—a home filled with pride and a national self-obsession with the Isles that comprised the beating heart of an empire. Putting on his brown wool mittens and buttoning up for the frosty walk home, Marco felt that there was no person on this earth, Francesca included, who cared more about him than his gracious queen—the mother of all Britannia.

61

T h e

C i t y of Lady Liberty

moselle Kleiner

gabriel Klapholz

62

Her endless metal beams comprise her inhabitants’ backyard, a rugged metallic jungle gym that echoes the future and the past. Psychotic guitarists on subway cars and protestors whining about income inequality, overweight women in their twenties running by the reservoir, and school children dressed either in provocative, short skirts and argyle vests or jeans hanging lower than perhaps they should—this intimidating amalgam of immigrants, porters, financiers, and cab drivers has a unique identity that transcends Joyce’s snow-covered Dublin and Sandburg’s husky Chicago. The water leaks into her crevices, the nooks and crannies between her long fingers, which jut out from her tender port, through which millions have entered in the hope of finding streets of gold and converting their torn, foreign rags into American riches. But she simply sits atop her iron pedestal, torch in hand and crown atop her head, basking in the glory of being the successor to Athens and Rome. She is the first and most prized fruit of the tree of the democratic experiment, the big apple in a basket of over-ripe, worm-infested counterparts.

63

64

P r a d o S k e t c h e s

In the beginning God created a garden of earthly delights.

Clocks lounged and chattered, Fountains spewed scythes of soft gallant half-moons.

We pointed at things and learned each other’s languages, Wary, at first, as a bear across from a man with a rifle, But in the end, Circling because we felt like we were supposed to.

Our antediluvian clairvoyance moved us Always equidistant from a common center.

Likely it was beautiful.

To my right, a beetle drinks our blood, Bodies broken in two with jagged edges. A passive face Watches animals twist themselves through our legs.

Rats coagulate.

We never left that circling, only broke, timeworn faces that screamed.

But from here, the third dimension, things drift.

We have become self-aware. We have become self-aware?

Dried tubers, not an end but an eternity, a hollow place we inhabit, Our niche, the object of our natural selection, No jagged edges; padded walls, perhaps a straightjacket That keeps me quiet right here. The body does not shatter.

It is broken when it lives the longest, Worn smooth like rocks on underwater volcanoes.

tess Solomon

osen odell-R kitty M

65

E d i t {song lyrics}

adina Weinberger

66

Maybe we are half angel, half feral Then my matter is of heaven and hell And if that is true, my body is just a shell Then I’ll float away to the next level I was happier before I knew there was more My dreams are where my mind goes when I let it I get just one draft that I can’t edit If you took control I wouldn’t mind Love is a defense that makes us defenseless Selfish and selfless Precious but so reckless So what if it’s all a Freudian slip And we’re just predestined by our unconscious Maybe it’s what CS Lewis said Eros and Venus, angels and demons I’m overthinking this All I know is Someday we will travel the whole world I want to give you a Jerusalem of gold If you would carve my name in your vocal chords I have no conception of time, We will not grow old I was happier before I knew there was more.

My dreams are where my mind goes when I let it I get just one draft that I can’t edit If you took control I wouldn’t mind t er ilb aG eir m

67

W e s t

E n d A v e n u e hannah

BenHamo

michelle Kvital

68

I

was erected in 1924, on West End Avenue, standing twelve stories tall—a respectable height at that time, I sometimes remind the metallic high-rises on Riverside Drive who stare down superciliously at me from the floor-to-ceiling windows of their thirtieth-floor penthouses.

I am a sleepy building, bushy-browed and heavy-lidded, and my occupants are of a peculiar but not unique sort, strange yet banal in their sameness: They are old men who speak of their wives in past tense with dogs that are hounds or terriers but never retrievers, lethargic droopy-eyed canines that conjure up things like scotch and flannel and good, old-fashioned Anglophilia. These tenants collect The New Yorker from my mail room that smells overwhelmingly of pennies, wet, mildewed pennies that have sunk to the bottom of a fountain in a park designated for wishing, for children and young lovers who toss in a copper Abraham Lincoln and pray that somebody loves them. They collect the magazine and they never read it, and they leave it outside their welcome mat that reads Cape Cod, though we are not in Cape Cod. They walk their dogs once at seven in the morning but again at eight, and always, always, they, like me, with my faded brick exterior and tattered green awning, are in need of modest repair, like the entirety of the old, quiet Upper West Side.

At noon, you can hear the howling of the wind whip through my ribs and rattle about my skeleton and I drift down to maisonette 1A. The tenants, my odd little occupants who tuck themselves into the corner apartment crevices and offer me a sense of wholeness, they themselves will never call 1A by its apartment number but rather by its occupant, the Doctor. The Doctor is a Freudian psychoanalyst who meets only four clients and struggles to make rent. One of her clients is an obese man, another a beautiful girl, no more than thirteen years of age, who already flirts with my part-time doorman, a tawny figure in a horrible polyester suit, though she never bothers to learn his name. I imagine if she did, she would not like him much. He quit night school just six months in, and his hands, clad in white gloves like those of Mickey Mouse, smell always, even after the gloves are removed, of the poultice with which he polishes the brass awning poles.

I make my mistake twenty minutes into the Doctor's session, when I stretch like an ancient tabby cat and the client, an older woman crippled by a recent bout of anorexia, stops mid-sentence. The doctor, laconic in the way that all Freudians are, reluctantly explains,

“It's an old building; sometimes it just needs to get up and stretch its legs."

69

I step into apartment 4B every Tuesday afternoon at five to play with fourth-grade Jack. The smell

of dirty shoes left out in the front room along with the waft of cooking dinner greets me at the door, somewhat invitingly. The carpet is an oatmeal hue, and the walls a stark white, scattered with faint dirt marks from children's grimy hands and artwork of monotone colors, bought at the local 3rd Avenue living room boutiques. A large television fills the center of one of the walls, and a big faux leather couch, partially covered by a coarse beige blanket, faces it, filling up the other side of the room. The nearby brown wood table holds a few framed photographs, just enough to give some sort of legitimacy to the family, some from summer camp, others from vacations to Orlando and family events. A few books are stacked under the television screen but there is no bookshelf in sight. I assume there is one hidden in the parents’ room, where old high school yearbooks and college newsletters are kept, along with a novel here and there. The part time babysitter is examining her nails as corn, rice and chicken cook beside her for dinner. She adds no spicing as Benjamin, the eight year old child, is allergic. They eat dinner at approximately 6:10 pm every night, except Saturday night, which is movie night, and they always invite me to stay, but I decline. They enjoy playing simple board games, stored in the children's closet and stacked in colorful piles, with some of the pieces falling out or missing entirely, but they do have their Scrabble board intact and, led by Jack’s mother, play a diligent game every Thursday night.

She is the kind of person who never forgets to give a birthday or holiday present to her boys, and their father frequently surprises them with tickets to sports games and father-son bonding road trips to Philadelphia at the end of the summer. They always look forward to homey Thanksgiving dinners at the grandparents’ home every November, where they eat bland turkey and pose in the backyard in crimson and brown for an annual photo-shoot, later featured on the front of a holiday card mailed to all associated with the family.

It is always overwhelming to depart from 4B when it comes time, at six pm sharp, leaving the smell of a classic, mediocre American home, along with the smell of dinner, cooling, to be served in ten minutes.

70

A p a r t m e n t julia

Levi

4B

t kit

en os R ell od yM

71

It’s not much, but it’s still life. Your heart is forcing your

blood through your right ventricle, whether or not your brain chooses to believe it. And every cell in your body is constantly giving its all, even when you decide to have a lazy day, wear a t-shirt, and leave your hair a tangled mess. Neurons struggle to turn the world right side up through your backwards frame of vision, even when you make a conscious effort to ignore the undulating earth beneath you and the dizzying chatter of the people near the window, whose effervescent laughs cannot be stopped by the stark, white walls of the bathroom. Your body sways with the rhythm of your breaths and your long sighs of nothingness. Your sighs are not made of despair or misfortune because you feel numb, despite the number of pain receptors that exist on every inch of your body. You think that you don’t matter, even though billions of cells know nothing but you, sometimes sacrificing their lives for your own, like your dream lover who would run across the world for you. You hoped for something great. But it didn’t happen—you didn’t happen, though every square centimeter of your body is working to keep you in existence. So live, even if it’s not for yourself. Live for the idea of life, for them, for the existence of their overarching principle that life has worth, and stay alive.

Because no matter what this is, it’s still life.

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s t i l l

L i f e rebecca A r a t e n

elisabeth Buchwald 73

He slurps up the ramen noodles

with a pocketknife-shaped tongue, wounds small enough to be covered by two band-aids dotting his jutting chin.

The darkness comes to say hello– he pops it with a fingertip and it deflates like a fallen balloon.

He’s used to this.

The loneliness used to sting but now it smells to him like orange peel– tangy, citrus, welcome.

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W h e n

Y o u

E x i s t oren Oppenheim

rebecca Silverman

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Y o u

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e r e H