ENJOY EVERY DETAIL.
The Kitchen in Apartment 8B by Isabel Pizarro
Madeleine Metzger
the road to confusion/cannibalism by Angelina Bravo
Ugly Lady by Jordana Treisman
Vanity’s defense by Naomi Ellis
A Shard of Silence; a sestina by Fae Leonard-Mann
Ava Liberace
april 7th, 2024. by Eliza Bryson
When The Seasons Change by Ezra Holzman
Untitled by PS
Inaccuracies Noted By ___ by Lillian Hoefflin
Nick Glowacki
REVUP by Noa Koffman-Adsit
cosmopolitan commensalism (for there are pastures everywhere)by Michaela Somers
Wash Day by Georgia Groome
Opera Singer’s Lament by Abigail Grauer I Peat by Ava Liberace
I feel nothing that’s not self-imposed by Maisie Wrubel
Molina
July 15 by Nettie Hitt
jackson pratt / jay street metro George Manes
I said the first “I love you” as you ran to transfer trains. I wouldn’t give you time to answer.
You responded a couple days later, in my bed. You, in just a binder and Christmas socks, in March. Other than that, your timing was always perfect.
I could feel you changing in my hand. Most Friday nights I shooed my cat from my room, cold fingers on the back of my neck pulled me into my anatomy, made it hospitable. We made each other men.
Next spring you went first, scars healed by summer, when what once was mine was biohazard, burning across the river. Not allowed to shower, my mom washed my hair in the sink. Numb skin, flesh overtaking sutures beneath a compression bandage that smelled of sweat, stained serosanguineous itching, but unable to feel the scratch. It was not my body, not yet.
Always busy, understandably tired, I’m sure it must have been exhausting. So I said I hope you feel better when you canceled our plans. I refused to believe in avoidance. I stayed home, occupying myself with the drops of blood and lymph sliding down plastic tubing, looking up train times between us, dismissing my mother’s suspicions, talking to friends and wishing they were you.
You put it off until you couldn’t. A week before you were supposed to leave, still shaking, newly single, we sat eating conciliatory frozen key lime pies, and I was returned to my body.
A Facial Landmark
By Eleanora Freeman
The crevice on your nose makes a perfect Lounge chair, where I can see the world from your View. I prop my feet up on your nasal Apex so my toes point toward a wayward Curl extending its long arm. I could climb Up onto your scalp—though I like the view Much better down here, since I can hear your Lips as you talk to me. I stay reclined. You got mad at me when I playfully pushed Your nose up against your face. You said “Don’t make the crease deeper.” But why? It’s a Mark of character on your leathery Nose, from when you’re so excited you can’t Contain it. To love your skin is to wear it.
Ballet Dancer’s Feet
Eliza Walpert
Even before the daughter exited the womb, the mother gifted her ballet dancer’s feet: high arches and high insteps like the women they would later watch yearly in The Nutcracker.
For each of the daughter’s birthdays, the mother bought her a pair of ballet slippers—pale and fleshy, mirroring the shade of the daughter’s palm. The slippers seemed unnecessary indulgences—the daughter’s feet never outgrew them until after a new pair was bought—but still, the daughter heaved around the weight of her mother-given gift on the soles of her feet.
When the daughter’s dancing moved beyond classes composed of first and second positions, she began coming home with bodily fluids accumulated on the slippers. The mother never grew mad nor flinched at the substances soaking the shoes. Instead, she would devote hours to gently severing the seal between sweat and leather, blood and satin.
The mother watched and gripped onto the daughter carefully as the yearly slippers amounted. But distances pervaded in unexpected crevices. In hellos and goodbyes and inattentive eye contact, finally the daughter too-soon declared she was tired of dancing—her mother-given Gift.
The mother insisted the daughter stay with it and began massaging the daughter’s toes nightly, getting them back into shape for ballet. She dug her fingernails into the daughter’s skin as if docking it with a fork’s tines. She then pushed and pulled each limb—how she folded layers into biscuit dough, as if careful not to form butter-filled welts. But as the daughter’s hips dipped, thighs stretched, and breasts protruded out of her leotard, the mother’s efforts seemed wasted. The body became unbendable.
So, as she squeezed the daughter’s feet at night and the daughter seemed to look the other way, the mother instead took pieces of the daughter’s skin and cemented it to hers. Some nights she grew bolder, tying slip knots between her and the daughter’s veins until their bloodstreams became entangled.
Likewise, the daughter began touching the mother’s forehead when their skin grew close each night, gently wrinkling and aging her, forming lines that bridged her temples. Some nights she grew bolder, creasing her mother’s origami skin until it became a series of unforgivingly-folded paper cranes. Until she collapsed under the growing pressure of her hands. Until the two women no longer looked like mother and daughter, damaged as they were.
Her heart does not beat a steady rhythm
Samara Brown
Restless unopposed falling up up
Beyond my reach, Where the stars swirl around her And she becomes gravity In a darkness that roars its quiet.
She wrestles with Ursa Major And loses, Lacerations down her back, Drinks from the little dipper Until blood no longer pours from her But
Rain as it runs down the sides of the road, Carrying in it the refuse and precious things Of the world she left behind
With a scent that reminds her of the dirt and the truth Or the truth in those moments when she can believe In marble-white columns or the fires that raze them
A scent that pulls her back to me—
Starlight still dripping from the curl hanging over her eyes, Starlight pooling in their corners. And she is here beside me, Chest rising into mine and falling into nothing
Eyes gently closed
Breaths even
As her heart races and slows, races and slows.
Fucking, or the Modern Prometheus
Gray Sansom-Chasin
When you told me what you did last night, that unspeakable thing, it was like discovering fire. A new energy, raging mystery, a dance of heat and burning. I wanted to know it, wanted you to tell me everything. It smelled like this sounded like that felt like pure flesh, a divine synthesis of skin, miraculous and warm.
I didn’t know what I’d get when I asked you: trapped, my gaze fixed on an infinite horizon, a new frontier of what ifs and broken desire, a want that never ends.
This is metamorphosis, a chrysalis broken, thirteen years gestating and now a new animal, wings bathed in those words we keep behind hidden smiles and glances. I’ll never stop chasing this flame you lit, and finding only sparks floating in the night, embers of an inferno that never was.
Spring Again
Suz Blattner
You planted bulbs above my roots late one fall, years ago when you and I were still small. Your mother’s hands held yours as you pulled back the soil. You squirmed as stones dug into your knees, but your mother pursed her lips and urged you to move forward, brush the pebbles from your clothes, and dig deep. You scratched my roots with a trowel and stopped digging then; the earth was ready. Your mother pulled the bulbs from a paper bag and handed one to you. You cupped it in your palms and pressed it into the soil at your mother’s instruction, then the two of you pushed the soil back into the hole and left for the house.
Each day when the sun rose, you looked out the window expectantly, waiting to see green peeking from below my branches. Each day when the bulbs didn’t sprout, you went to your mother and she told you just to wait, but the bulbs didn’t grow that spring. My branches budded as my roots reached toward the once-living bulbs, and their corpses whispered life into me.
As I grew taller, you retreated into the house, making yourself small and spending more time hiding from the sun. You slept through the spring and summer until she shouted that we’re better than this, that you were worth nothing to her hiding away.
You swallowed down the voices that cried for her to love you and bit your lips that wished to tell her of the pain plaguing you in wakefulness and haunting you in sleep. Tears flooded your eyes, but you turned away so she would have no hope of your forgiveness. You stumbled away, tripping over my roots, with your back to her so you wouldn’t have to remember the last moment—the last time in the place where you thought you were loved.
My branches had grown tall and hung drowsily over the house’s roof by the time she called you and asked you to come back. The first cold had frozen my summer leaves. They fell as you took care of her, and she died before the first snow came. You drove to pick up her ashes despite a storm that blew in from the west. Gusts of wind threatened to pull you off the road as you came home, and sheets of ice bombarded the vehicle. You wished to let the storm sweep you away, but your muscles remembered the streets where they learned to turn the steering wheel and brought you home.
After that, silence consumed the house as snow blanketed it. For days, powder built at the doorstep and the walkway stayed unshoveled; you didn’t show your face in the window and instead held yourself in darkness. You resolved never to let yourself be attached to another as you were to her. Fits of anger consumed you at the thought of the time you lost with her, and you passed hours in feverish states, unaware of the storm outside. You wondered if spring would come again—it was clear that it would, but not to you.
Weeks later, you are still here. The snow melted into the earth that is cracked with frost like your lips which you chew on as you tell me you loved her. She is shattered within you. You try to tear her out as you rip at the soil below my branches. Stones break the calloused skin of your fingertips, but you keep digging into the earth. You seize a buried shard of a stake and jab it back down into the frozen soil, scraping again and again until the ground relents. Raising your hands, full of earth and bleeding, you splay your fingers to the air, and the blood drips with the crumbling earth. You dig down again, forcing away more soil and filling your open skin. When you lean back, it is to turn away and find the paper bag full of hibernating life.
You cup each bulb in your palms before forcing it into the dirt and burying it with your blood. For a moment, you imagine that the warmth holding them stays, and it’s like a piece of you—a piece of her—is able to forget the bitterness.
Growing Pains Lily
I think I am riding the 62 west, listening to that song the one I always play right when the plane takes off the type of song that makes your shoes feel real heavy
I am homesick for myself
we drive past a box of cornflakes left on the bench by the crooked stop sign it’s been 3 days—it’s probably full of ants by now nose to the window, I fall for the people in the passing cars
that type of brief beauty like when you toss a penny into the mall fountain and it catches a sliver of the sun
I wonder if the man staring across from me who smells of weed and oranges cares that the hot breath trapped by my mask makes my eyelashes wilt like awkward sunflowers
A walk home prayer
By PL
After the sun fell and the glass sky dimmed I opened my mouth once I was sure no one watched and tilted my head back stretched my jaw until it hurt then I pleaded for stardust to fall on my tonsils to grace my throat with strength.
Nomi
To Tug or Not to Tug
Eli
I became an intactivist when I was 16. We were sitting around my aunt and uncle’s dining room table in their Los Angeles home. My big cousin exclaimed: “Have you ever thought about how fucked up it is that you chop off babies’ foreskin?!”
“Jesus Christ,” her father responded, “we’re eating dinner.”
“I’m serious! I just watched a documentary called American Circumcision,” my cousin continued. “I’m an intactivist now. If I had a son, I wouldn’t circumcise him.” The adults collectively sighed.
“I think we should continue this conversation later,” my mom Susan replied diplomatically.
By the time I returned to Boston, I had watched American Circumcision and become an intactivist. “Do you regret circumcising me?” I asked my other mom, Jodie.
“No!” she responded, laughing. “You’re kidding, right?” I began spewing my intactivist talking points. “Eli, you know what?” Jodie interrupted. “This is just something I can’t get behind. Please, just move on.”
A few months later, a small package arrived at our door. In it was a small, blue flash drive that contained hundreds of hours of digitized video from my family’s film camera. I summoned Jodie and my sister before plugging it into my computer and clicking on the file titled “04-20-2002.” The video showed my parents sitting on a vomit green love chair. I was swaddled in a white blanket, encircled by a group of swooning women. Everyone migrated to the dining room where our barren table was adorned with only a sterile medical pad. The mohel appeared clad in a surgical mask and scrubs as my aunt placed me on the table. I was disrobed as my parents shared a disturbingly slobbery kiss. “I am here, ready to perform the mitzvah of circumcising my son,” chanted my parents. The camera panned to my grandmother gleefully holding my legs apart and my mothers shielding their eyes as the mohel made her cut. “Why did you look away if you don’t have a problem with circumcision?” I asked my mom once the video ended. “Because it’s gross,” she opined. “And I don’t want to talk about it.”
I spent the following summer with my best friend and next-door neighbor, Abby, whose whip-smarts and tasteful vulgarities impart a magnetism that has earned her a place in Cambridge lore. She never shied away from talking about sex and other taboo topics, and, from the start, she entertained (and was entertained by) my intactivism. “Abby, I need to show you something,” I said as I
pulled up the video of my bris. She validated my confusion about my moms’ pre-circumcision makeout. Then, it was time for the cut. Abby closed her eyes and plugged her ears, horrified as any goy would be by the screaming and the chanting and the ritual of it all. “Okay, I’m with you now on this intactivism shit,” Abby declared after I paused the video. I introduced her to bloodstainedmen.com and Reddit threads on foreskin restoration. Abby was amused by the “tugging regimes” which stipulate that a “mutilated man” must apply two hours per day of manual tension for significant regrowth. She encouraged me to restore, both as a comedic stunt and in response to the calls of my intactivist brothers. By the time September rolled around, I announced that I would be embarking on a restoration journey. Susan, a self-proclaimed masc lesbian in hopeless pursuit of wokeness, responded: “Okay, sweetie, I’ll support you no matter what. I really am sorry that we hurt you like that.” When I broke the news to Jodie, she screamed: “Are you fucking kidding me! Do you know how much we paid for that mohel?! You’re lucky we hired one of the good ones. I should be asking you to show me what all that money was for, and now all you want to do is get rid of it!” Abby began introducing me to people as “Eli, the foreskin restorer.” I thought it was funny and provocative, and people flocked to me with questions about the ethical implications of circumcision. I was less vocal about my intactivism once I arrived at Wesleyan; I realized that there are more important things to care about, and I didn’t want my penis to be the center of my identity any longer. A package addressed to me arrived in April of my freshman year, sometime around my birthday. It was from Abby. As I cut open the wrapping, a logo that read TLC Tugger came into view. Abby later told me that a customer at the sex shop she worked at had recommended the device to her. I haven’t used the TLC Tugger; I think Abby knew I wouldn’t when she bought it for me. But in the back of my mind, the question remains: to tug or not to tug?
Z Santilli
Today
Natalie Horberg
The doctor knelt before me, waving a magnifying glass and tapping her foot on the linoleum with a shaky breath
She reported: inside my eye is a marble browned by time, rolling softly with mousepad awareness
I drove home and told the dog who simply blinked
Live Free or Die
Isaiah Rosenn
The trees turn to one as we barrel toward Northwood
A malachite mass becoming our shadow
Wind bashes through the window and gets caught in our throats
The music begs not to be left behind
We do not see the rock
As brakes give way to jagged stone edges
The car careens towards a looming trunk
Its bark promising a fatal bite
For we are seatbeltless
As are the ways of the great Granite State
I think of the cards slipped into airplane seats
Instructing you to put on your own oxygen mask
Before helping others
I never liked that concept.
I would rather turn to you and face your calamity
Than acknowledge that I, too, have seconds left of mountain air
I would rather yank the gray strap around you
Strangle your body and click it into place
So I would not have to settle with the notion
That I am made of the same flesh and bones
Torn apart by countless slivers of glass
As I fly through the windshield onto blistering dirt
Such a distraction would make me content.
But if you, too, reach for my vital waistcoat
Pull it towards its ruby buckle
Aiding my affliction as I aid yours
Then
With music still ricocheting off carpeted walls
Arboreal scraps falling before us
We’d brace to meet a fate caked with soil
Not knowing if we were to live free or to die
My chest would swell against the polyester sash
Knowing we would do it together
And I don’t think that would be so bad.
Our Town Esme Israel
Yesterday was the first time we drove together, knees crowded and close, windows down. I make you stop for a scruffy black dog too close to the road. You sigh. Pull over. We walk, my boots heavy over the damp grass, but the mutt leaves as mysteriously as it arrived. We kick pebbles on the way back to your car. I have to jog a little to catch one before it tumbles down and into the thick woods. I don’t think either of us have ever played soccer.
The pond’s parking lot is empty by the time we get there. We scramble up and into the forest. The trees here are teeming, the leaves over our heads licking at the air. You don’t have shoes, and neither of us brought bathing suits. The air is cool and heavy with island mist and mosquitoes and other morning things. We are both afraid of the ticks. When we lower in, the water is warmer than the air, and my shirt billows up to my chin with water like a bullfrog. I ask you if I can dive, and you shrug as if to say, why should I care?
It’s too deep for handstands, but I try anyway, fingers straining for nothing, legs kicking up in the air like a duck diving for fish. Our clothes are in piles on the dock, the knees of our jeans touching.
If you go deep enough in the water, flip belly up, the sun above you warps, cloudy and untethered. If you dive deep enough, I fear you will never want to come up again.
Just like the sea in the shell
Tae Weiss and the rooster at dawn. When our dreams become battered with grief I find folly in the ordinary.
Delight in the child who crawls to the only mother they know And when the inked pen hits the page
Dip your toes into reflection.
See their lamentations
Not a cry for help
But certain as the light from birthday candles
Heartful they sing
Drink the drought
Praise the stranger
Because, just as the sea rushes from the shell to your ear And the rooster crows at dawn,
Rise from your slumber
Read the ink
Let the truth ripple and splash.
Hear their ode
As when the bees quit their buzzing sweetness tastes different on the tongue.
Issue XIV: UP CLOSE
Ava Liberace
Lavender Leaves Natalie Lynne the tower that leans but never falls the place my grandparents came from was it built like that to stand through time because most things start falling anyway the silhouete i never met the green diamond vine the missing father patient zero he must be the one the blood of many others ran through him and the poison ivy begun is it leaving if you never left is it falling or is it dying or is it simply life’s final theft
catching leather feeling autumn october every night rattling bottles flying hours google search the date and time i wish i knew it i like to remember but i can’t fault somebody’s grief sometimes it happens it always happens life doesn’t always name a thief
See You Next Fall
Megan Sigalos
It’s November, I’m 11, and I’m surrounded by wooden boxes and faded velvet pouches that hold all of Yiayia’s old jewelry. Papou says to take whatever I want, and Dad laments that none of it has ever been properly organized. I look down at the cluster of stones and metals that rest on my lap: orange, silver, bronze, and a deep blue stone she once told me is called lapis lazuli. I don’t remember her wearing nearly any of these pieces, and Mom agrees with a judgmental tone, disdaining Yiayia’s hoarding habits. There are tarnished necklace chains and unpolished rings, which had become too uncomfortable for her diabetic fingers. Miniature gift boxes with price tags still taped to the bottom and matching blank holiday cards. When I try on a distorted owl’s face in the shape of a ring that perfectly fits me, I realize I’ve inherited her tiny hands.
Suddenly, something we all recognize: a pair of large gold hoop earrings. “Very mature,” Mom says, and I think to myself that I’ll wear them eventually, once I earn all of their grown-up glamor. We all have memories of them falling from her wilting earlobes. They join my growing pile of mismatched textures. All these possessions of Yiayia’s that are now mine forever, and yet I couldn’t even bring myself to cry when I watched Dad let her ashes flutter into the ocean a few hours ago. There are many more goodbyes to be had before tomorrow, when that ocean will merge with another on the flight home.
It’s November once again, and I am 21. I find myself at a party where I’m trying to have a good time. Yiayia’s gold hoops have proven themselves the perfect mood-boosting accessory when things feel strange, and I’m conscious of them in my ears as I dance among an enthusiastic group. My 11-year-old self would be confused to hear that I’m still trying to earn that same adultness I should surely embody by now. These earrings sometimes help me believe that I have.
I’m conscious of them when I take them out and place them in my jeans pocket, fearful that all this movement will cause them to fall out. And then, when I am back home, I am all too conscious of their absence from its soft and linty fabric.
“Yeah, I know exactly which ones you’re talking about. Those really were great earrings,” Mom says to me on the phone when I hesitantly tell her I’ve lost them. Consolation isn’t a strength of hers. She isn’t upset, but I’m still nervous to break the news to Dad. He has always been more materialistic than Mom.
I’m still 21 and in Papou’s room at the nursing home where he will die. This has been a particularly bad visit with most of his sentences completely indecipherable. He mutters something softly and gestures to my neck. “That’s a nice bracelet — necklace,” he says raspily. I clutch the orange stone in my fingertips. Its color matches the leaves on the dying tree outside his window. “This was Yiayia’s,” I tell him. He lets out a breathy “Oh,” and I infer that he doesn’t quite remember. It’s okay, though. I know in some small way, he probably does. She’s there with us for a moment, if only in reference. Tomorrow, Yiayia will have been dead for ten years, her earrings will have been lost for a week, and I’ll be no more certain that I’ve grown up or that I am just fragments of what remains of her. She is in the tidepools of the shoreline I always drive the long way to see. She is in Papou, who sits in his wheelchair just three miles west. She is in that little pumpkin pendant I wear every autumn when I think about the sun’s retreat and my approaching birthday. I’m on my way somewhere, and maybe it’s that same silvery sea with the lapis on my hands and the metal on my neck and the gold that used to be in my ears.
The Kitchen in Apartment 8B
Isabel Pizarro
On the wall one blue broom she bought for me
After I tried hers equal to my height
Three steps to her window’s open city Count taxis passing the construction site
Her four stove burners, her kettle empty Cake tin on the table, no bundt inside Folding chairs against the wall, just for three Her amaryllis sits—recently died
A rubber band holds the bedroom door closed, On the radio there are napkins left, Her Hepburn tea towel was left reposed, Our old holiday cards leave me bereft,
Boxes outside labeled ‘den’ with her things
To one labeled ‘kitchen’ my father clings
Madeleine Metzger
the road to confusion/cannibalism
Angelina Bravo
i’m a craving creature that currently craves another, in what way i am still not entirely sure. whether to bite or stand back savoring him in a way that seems humanly possible, politically correct.
our first interaction merely a shake between our outreached limbs while the palm of my feelings opened up to this new possible friendship that feeds in the way that i do on my fingers.
and somehow i always find that he pays perfect attention to the wrong subject, catching nonexistent words as they exit my mouth, while someone else runs theirs.
i’m a predator, a consumer of the flesh that he touched so fondly. at times my largest organ bleeds as much as the small one that pumps this longing feeling that faults when ever so slightly, his thumb falls over a crack and digs into the broken skin.
hanging pieces of the little moments on cinder block, slipping off and over-taping the corners, raw edges too new to cause any cut too deep. miscommunications, voiced thoughts of one’s own misinterpretation, our words butt heads as we lean against the wall with eyes closed.
we sit close to our sentiments, weary of letting them get too strong and able. able of letting more than just a glance or breath leap onto the crown of the other’s will. the warmth of his fingers reopen wounds, as i pick my skin in the uncomfortable oasis.
Ugly Lady
Jordana Treisman
I see you, Ugly Lady, two spots ahead of me in the supermarket checkout line. You have a shopping basket slung around one arm, and a demonic-looking toy poodle in a magenta bag around the other. Why did they let you bring in this inbred specimen? And why does it look so much like you?
Ugly Lady is, simultaneously, so fat and so skinny. So dour and so lanky. Her eyes are massive, popping bug-eyed out of her ovate skull. Her long neck is hanging off her bent body, swooping down like a threatened goose. She is not a swan.
I can see the tag from her shirt sticking out. The shirt is from Eileen Fisher, where my ex’s mom used to go before opening up her Medicare brochures. Ugly Lady is not quite on their radar, not yet on their mailing lists. I can tell that behind the drooping jowls and swollen ankles is a younger woman. Maybe around her late thirties, like me. And that’s what makes it all the more tragic.
Ugly Lady has filled her shopping basket with items I could maybe afford with a year’s salary. There is not a single generic-brand object; I do not know why she is here and not roaming the isles of Erewhon. Maybe she is too ugly for them.
I see her paleo agave granola, organic pistachio butter, and wild dover sole. Free range, fresh catch, fuck you. The toy poodle is sitting inside a Fendi purse.
I bet Ugly Lady’s smart, too. She’s probably the owner of the Lexus with the UPenn sticker in the parking lot. The car’s beautiful, not a single dent. It’s cruel that she almost got everything right—and then somebody upstairs said no, no. Let’s just mess up this one thing.
Ugly Lady is checking her phone while the cashier scans her food, the dirty cotton ball in her purse making a noise somewhere in between a shriek and a wheeze. Her home-screen is of a tropical location that I cannot place. In the bottom corner of the screen, I can see two bony legs with big feet and tiny green toenails sticking out in the sand. What were you doing there, Ugly Lady? Who did you meet? Why green?
I wonder if she has a husband. He would realistically be just as ugly, but irony makes me believe that he’s gorgeous, like the underwear model I dated in high school. He’s probably gotten work done, though. And does she have any little, ugly children? I want to turn this Ugly Lady to face me with all her asymmetry, and I want to look into her extra-terrestrial eyes and ask her about everything.
I want her to tell me, as she hands her Amex Platinum card to the cashier, about when she went to a daddy-daughter dance with her mother’s sleazy boyfriend, or when she won her seventh grade science fair by turning a potato into a battery, or when she saw her whole future in a coffee pot while high off edibles in graduate school.
But Ugly Poodle is yipping from Fendiland, and Ugly Lady gathers her four hundred and thirty dollars worth of groceries to go to her car. I realize, as she walks around the massive line and towards the automatic exit doors behind me, that she smells wonderful—fresh lilac and pear, maybe. Oh, to be you, Ugly Lady! All my dreams wrapped up in a nightmare.
Vanity’s defense
Naomi Ellis
A curly whirly head of hair I look right in my underwear when stripped down to my birthday suit it’s crystal clear, I’m oh so cute
Now, please don’t judge my modesty its lack thereof is silly me I write these words to make you giggle not to make you squirm or squiggle
If you catch my striking eyes be warned that I may smile wide to be loved is to be seen admire me, and I will gleam
A Shard of Silence; a sestina
Fae Leonard-Mann
It was in the vein
Of innumerable hopes, soon to deteriorate Like glass. And all I could hear Your breath, an asset
To what you could not say.
In what was, say
A thousand veins
Of the body, my assets
Lost, deteriorated, And here You were, broken glass.
The type of glass, I have said, One would hear
Breaking in a storm, slashing a vein
The type of glass that would never deteriorate. A set
Different from my mother’s fine crystal assets
Her prized glasses
That only deteriorated I would say
After her veins
Could not be heard.
What I can hear
Now is only an asset
To my own vain
Conscience: your glass
Eyes, watching, saying ‘I am waiting for you to deteriorate.’
I have already begun to deteriorate. Can you hear? When I say
There are no more assets To be had, no more prized glasses. It was all in vain.
Ava Liberace
april 7th, 2024.
Eliza Bryson
“And it’s not for singing about It’s not for making into art When real death enters the house, all poetry is dumb”
- Mount Eerie, A Crow Looked At Me
I found out that you were dead on an unseasonably warm day in April, sitting on a couch surrounded by people and listening to my mom’s voice crack over the phone. “What do you mean he’s dead? He just posted a photo dump,” I asked my mom, immediately taking her off speaker.
“He’s dead,” she said. “They found him this morning.”
The air hung in place. The last time I saw you was in January when we had gone with our families to jump into the ocean on New Year’s Day like we do every year. The water was freezing, and you shrieked as you ran back to shore, feet pounding on winter wet sand, racing to get back to the warmth of your clothes. We shared a grilled cheese on the beach. I sat on the couch, dumbfounded, wondering how someone I had just shared a sandwich with could be dead. That isn’t something that can happen, I thought.
I shook my head like an etch-a-sketch, ridding myself of any thought of you and resolving to focus only on getting to the funeral home as quickly as possible. In order to brave the crushing absurdity of having to get to my friend’s funeral via Peter Pan bus service, I would have to carry with me a kind of impenetrable zen, so that if my journey went wrong (which, from experience, I knew it definitely would), I would be able to carry on without bursting into tears on the side of the road and cursing God for bringing me into a country with such abjectly horrid public transit infrastructure. This way, the sadness and grayness of the world around me would fade from a scream to a dull distant humming. This way, I would be ready for the inevitable moment when the bus driver would say something like actually, we just side-swiped someone on the highway, and now we’re going to be sitting here for another 45 minutes. I would simply say, “Oh well,” and continue with my day instead of lighting myself on fire.
So this is the situation that I found myself in, sheltering with a stranger from the rain under the bus station awning in New Haven, united in our helplessness as we waited for a bus that was never going to come. After an hour and a half and multiple calls to the corporate headquarters of Peter Pan bus lines, we ultimately found out that both of us had missed the bus because the attendant
told us to stand on the north side of the station, opposite where the buses actually stopped. Clearly, strangerman had wised up to the zen trick as well, because instead of either of us throwing an actual tantrum, we simply shared a look of understanding and walked over to the correct side.
When we finally located the Peter Pan bus stop, the tickets that we both had were for the wrong bus. I pleaded with the driver, telling him I was going to a funeral. “You got $40?” he said.
And so I sat on the bus, passing an expanse of strip malls, highways and McDonald’s so all-encompassing it started to obscure the existence of any world beyond it. I wondered whether the grayscale view that enveloped the bus could somehow be more American than the funeral that I was going to for my friend who died because he was lonely in college, living without mental health resources as an economics major in a competitive sport. I resolved not to think about it.
After my bus broke down and two consecutive Ubers canceled on me, I arrived at the funeral home an hour late, numbly wading through a crowd of people I once knew like a school of fish. The air hung in place. I did not cry. Even in the far back of the room where I couldn’t see the casket, the death filled every inch of the space, saturating it with grayness so walking through it felt like swimming in molasses. I stood and looked down at the tile, imagining my head full of TV static.
The first speaker was his guitar teacher, and he told the crowd of mourners that before he died, he was learning the song “Wish You Were Here” by Pink Floyd on guitar. He took a moment, adjusted his posture, and strummed the opening chord of the song.
And, in this moment, it found me anyway. Though I thought I had numbed myself to the point where no injustice could shake me, though I thought I was successful in ignoring the reality of the situation, in this moment, the unfairness of the world became so blisteringly lucid that I felt the blanket I’d wrapped around my head ripped off of me, violently and in one singular motion, and the noises I’d muffled for myself came to a screaming roar like I was standing in the middle of the highway. Here they were deafening, and they battered me down like a line of cars so long the horizon seemed like a made-up concept. They hit me over and over again, until I found myself howling in a crowded funeral home in Ridgefield, New Jersey, sobbing it’s not fair, it’s not fair, he wasn’t supposed to die. It was grief, and only grief, that could take this blanket away. It was looking at a piece of posterboard with my friend’s face on it mounted next to his casket, it was remembering how we used to play King of the Playground and
how he was allergic to gluten and how he was a real person who died a preventable, stupid death because he didn’t get the help he needed, but I didn’t know, how could I know. No existing defense stands a chance against this. No blanket can drown out the highway.
You wore sports glasses, the kind that wrap around your head. You were chubby and sweet, and you brought radishes to school in a Tupperware for snack. You loved the Beach Boys and Steely Dan. When all of your friends went out, you would stay in and play piano. You had a faint lisp, almost imperceptible. And there you were, laying in front of me, in a blue suit, never to have a 21st birthday or a wedding, never to graduate college or even see this coming summer.
A woman I had never met stood beside me and wrapped her arms around me as I cried, her tiny body absorbing the shock waves of my sobbing. I didn’t look her in the eyes, but she interlocked her arms around me, and for the rest of the service, she held me in place, held me until I could get up by myself, until it didn’t feel like I was drowning anymore. Your family is Korean, and so many of the eulogies were also in Korean, and as this woman held her hand out to share her program with me so I could also read the hymn, it occurred to me that she probably didn’t speak English.
Just when it seemed like the universe was nothing more than a gray, unaccountable highway expanse of McDonald’s and strip malls, a woman who I’d never met picked me up off of the floor and wrapped her body around mine. It wasn’t okay, and it was never going to be okay, and she knew that, but she held me anyway, an action that demanded nothing, for which there are no words or language. And though the highway seemed so wide and vast I could never surmount it by myself, she wrapped her arms around me until I didn’t feel so small anymore, until I could breathe again.
After the service, I sat outside on the concrete with our middle school friend group and shared a cigarette, talking about our favorite memories from middle school. We leaned on each other outside in the cold and laughed inappropriately loudly for the circumstance we were in. It wasn’t okay, and it was never going to be okay, but we were holding it together, and that was something.
On the way home, I listened to Pink Floyd and cried in front of strangers. The air was heavy, and the wind stung, and I breathed it all in, with no barrier in between me and the world, no blanket to protect me. The highway was long, and the bus was full of people. The buds on the trees by the McDonald’s were already turning green.
When The Seasons Change
Ezra Holzman
The seasons change with the furniture in my living room and the waves in my hair, when the crispness of apples and skin is traded for a fever of childhood cares.
They punch a hole in the ceiling spouting a slow, dripping leak, as they sit down on the foot of the bed to ask the unusual questions; ones forgotten within the safe shell of a season at its peak.
They disagree and tug almost every other hour, stuck in a strange sunken tomb, where the sun could approach and leave in a single bound, where the trees can be a home or a view outside the living room.
All in the thoughts of a wrenched open mind, molded in sleep, and victim to the cause of helping the seasons finish their leap.
He speaks waterfalldown virtuoso tongues, juice of unripe timmon slithers downways tell me about the flowers.
Daring against the rocks to be my Lighthouse, crash towards the queen make foam pastiche
if you put a tarp down you don’t get the thorns. We go to the radiotower shrieking, for pea soup and blowover seatbelts
it’s like something i’d read in The New Yorker. Rubbing legs with uncovered prisms, light splatters overallabout shorter hairs not too much. He stays true to the wraparound somewhere, left behind us soon vacant aerodrome what is this? i don’t need it, i don’t want it.
Inaccuracies Noted By ___
Lillian Hoefflin
My freckles were no longer freckles, but sunspots. Externally, the freckles looked the same as they always had: little brown dots measuring to differing circumferences. I traced them with my finger, focusing on my reflection until its disappearance into a landscape of finger-printed glass. Doing due diligence, I lined up my face with the window’s Pollock-like prints, putting olive trees into my blind spot until the tunnel from Cannes to Aosta disrupted my focus. Despite the sun’s absence, I pretended to know the spots’ exact locations, mark-making with light and heavy pokes to form constellations in the dark. Pressure changed in time as I prodded and picked. Weight transferred from index to middle then back, hitting choreographed marks in a four-count swing. A pair of feet shuffled past and my fingers matched tempo, triple-step-stomping across my nose.
4/4 freckle counting was the final devotional step to a summer’s pas de deux. Our time tripping the light fantastic had passed, only choreographed to measure two months. I had let him touch my skin barrier and in this touch felt gentleness. So, I retraced my tingle of nerve endings wishing I could connect the dots he claimed to know. That their rootedness, my failure to wear sunscreen, and the subsequent vanity and shame of their permanence was as physical as it felt. I had let someone teach me a word I knew. It was an allowance of the elasticity that comes from a different place or tongue. “Taches de rousseur,” he had said as he held the weight of my head in orbit. I disagreed with the word entirely because my freckles are brown and he had said “marks of redness.” He could not understand my argument, and I couldn’t understand his accent, so he made light by kissing each freckle, absolving any miscommunication.
*****
I needed to hold onto this French phrase for freckle, perhaps as penance for my guilty plea of misperception or in remembrance of the reconciliation that followed. I borrowed a pen from a stranger on the train to jot down the phrase and its definition. Yet instead of making spheres of hot plasma permanent in yet another location, I began to describe the man himself. He had spent the past hour watching me trace my face as if he knew the tender thoughts I was keeping, so I let myself burn holes with a glance. I wrote slowly and empirically:
graying slicked-back hair
short-sleeved brown silk shirt with diamond pattern and popped collar tan arms with polished nails
navy tailored pants that do not match his tailored top leather Armani derby shoes…
I first noticed the emptiness of the train and then that we were no longer moving. The train had stopped 15 minutes prior. The man sat quietly, patiently waiting for his pen, watching me write.
Ink swelled in splotches and smears, gravity more persistent than ever. My solitary study of another’s physicality had become stationary and not entirely my own. I could no longer continue mark-making, holding his pen in my hand, but he could continue watching. His face hadn’t been of note and couldn’t be noted now. Momentarily consumed with my own inaccuracy, I clicked twice, leaving dots on the page. Upon the pen’s return, the man used it to point in the direction of the train station’s Flying Tiger Copenhagen, where I could purchase a writing utensil of any kind. I gave an understanding nod, and he touched his cheek.
Nick Glowacki
REVUP
Noa Koffman-Adsit
She was brass-knuckled and white-hot, black leather boots cracked-up and beaten-in ready for more
Cigarette ash and roadkill, ready for more
Doppler-affected, wind-whipped and flattened by her squealing tires. tearitup
She was efficient with a crowbar tearitup
And virtually dead already.
TEARITUPOUTTHERE
A whirling, perfect corkscrew of every trick in the book, Slingshotting into and around the sun, wind-up wings ripcorded exactly when they need to be.
cosmopolitan commensalism (for there are pastures everywhere)Michaela Somers
in the high valleys the cows and egrets sing in a windswept moment of chance, and here some form of satisfaction
deep in the bones of this fertile earth lie memories of the complex world— of great tall trees in their wild place in shades of green innumerable.
the rich ground lay beneath, dark and sure as ever, touched now by all the force of day. and kicked up as the heavy hooves drag on: the buzzing bounty of the birds.
white wings open to settle still on bodies rather than branches. and through the wide fields, a grateful language in unspoken words.
Wash Day
Georgia Groome
“Ok, I have a potentially sensitive question for you,” my friend Megan said.
It was November of our freshman year, and we were sitting on the dusty linoleum floor of my dorm room. Megan peeled oranges while I painted my nails. The room smelled like citrus, acetone, and mold. The paint on my walls peeled and curled where it met the floor, inviting wet grime to burrow in its crevices. As such, a dark ring of grit encircled Megan and me as we exchanged increasingly more personal questions, our nascent friendship crawling beneath the surface of sanitized pleasantries.
“Try me,” I said.
“How often do you wash your hair?” she asked, guilelessly, sliding an orange slice into the pocket of her cheek.
“Well,” I said, smiling. “Kind of… never.”
“Like, once a week?” She looked at me with the cunning glance of someone who already knew the answer. I nodded sheepishly. “Me too!” Megan exclaimed. She slapped the floor with delighted astonishment, rousing a cloud of dust particles that whirred, almost imperceptibly, in the air between us. She tossed the last shred of her orange peel aside with newfound comfortability. “Wait, this is so validating.”
Both of us enlivened by our mutually perverse curiosities, we continued to share and commiserate about our unhygienic habits. We traded our most repulsive behaviors in which we had once or twice engaged: popping pimples in public bathrooms, using our hair as floss, wearing a pad in a pool, waxing only a few squares of leg hair before getting bored and leaving it patchy, and burning our skin just to peel the sunburn after. Unlike these other one-off, aberrant experiences—which were humiliating but able to be regarded as distant and juvenile behind the screen door of time—our refusal to clean our hair was a quotidian offense that we practiced almost unthinkingly, so ingrained in our everyday routine it had become.
“How does it go for you?” Megan asked.
Day 1: Clean and silky, if not a bit too squeaky. Each strand stands alone, brushing against the others but never congealing together. A few flyaways frizz at the root, but this is unnoticeable to anyone but me.
Day 2: A sheet of sheen. The individual strands are no longer so independent, and they fall into a unified coat. The flyaways are put to death by the first kiss of day-old oil build-up. It is still very much presentable and can be worn down.
Day 3: Sometimes, a little dry shampoo can reduce oil clumping at the root. Other times, the best course of action is to twist it into some low-effort hairdo: a messy ponytail or a low, sloven bun. The ends of my hair look fine; they remain near-perfect until day five.
Day 4: If there was any question yesterday, the hair must be put up. In a harsher up-do, the very visible grease can appear as hair gel. A slicked-back bun or two severe braids are equally effective in achieving this look.
Day 5: At last, the ends look as mangled as the roots. Once again, a slicked-back bun or two severe braids. No other coiffure can mask the dirt or, at the very least, pass it as presentable.
Day 6: My scalp is itchy. My hair looks the same as yesterday’s, but today, I tell myself that I will wash it tomorrow.
Day 7: My hair is matted down with grease, uneven and flat against my head. It looks wet, so I wash it. As it dries, I watch the strands differentiate, the flyaways spring up anew.
After outlining this process to Megan, I asked her, “Is that how it goes for you, too?”
She nodded hard, pulling her hair in front of her eyes. The overhead light shone down on her, bleaching her skin and accentuating each oily noodle that composed her days-old bangs. Through its gaps, I watched her big eyes blink; my reflection in her dark pupils.
Opera Singer’s Lament
Abigail Grauer
And up tempo I swing:
Running to my future (top of the treble clef) along the top of freshly laid (decaying) Pavement and hot tar. My heels (un-tied half notes) stick— And barefoot (begging) I continue Along a horizon of endless train cars (sonatas and waltzes of women I might have been), engines That never run down (already dead), side doors gleaming (rusting), bloody feet sticking (holding for the quarter rest).
My mother’s new (scratched) record plays (skips) in my hands. And I feel the conductor Rushing the strings (I stretch for a fermata). Wheels turn, tuba cases, black smoke From exhaust pipes (exhausted)
We are building towards a (de)crescendo.
Peat
Ava Liberace
How dead bodies are held, how dirt melts, molted with the bake of first sun, bog rosemary branches bear banters and embrace its memory in graves green, ochre A dialect, preserved in shale and shat The way an apple core holds a bite, and brings its teeth to thistle seed
Issue XIV: UP CLOSE
I feel nothing that’s not self-imposed
Maisie Wrubel
“I feel nothing that’s not self-imposed.” Entry number god-knows-what in our quote book. About my family’s grave in Indian Hill Cemetery. I’ve never actually shown any of them the plot, though. It feels like something that would have happened by now, especially considering the people we’re talking about. They would eat up the fact that I can daily visit the place where I will someday be buried. But no, it hasn’t happened, not yet. It does feel a bit like I’ve waited too long, like any action now taken would be inadvertently symbolic.
I’ve never actually been with anyone to the cemetery. Other than my dad when we toured campus. He put a rock on his grandfather’s tombstone. A Jewish thing, I think. I now do the same thing whenever I visit—or at least whenever I visit with the intention of it being a “visit.” Runs don’t count. But even then, the experience holds some weight.
I always feel more Jewish in the face of death. Cultural heritage seems to work like that. Maybe it’s because those are the moments when we hold on to the tradition… because we need to. My family stopped going to temple when I was young. Someone said it was because our temple made us pay extra because my mom wasn’t Jewish, but I can’t imagine my dad being that invested in my sister and my religious upbringing anyway. I mean, we’re talking about the man who got a 7% on one of his Hebrew school tests… and still to this day brags about it.
My dad so desperately wants to be a spiritual person. He went through a whole “I’m going to apply to Harvard Divinity School” thing a couple of years ago. My mom would roll her eyes. She so desperately wants not to be a spiritual person. I don’t know where I fall. I don’t know if I care. But the fact that I keep coming back to the question probably means I do.
I can’t see my mom being buried in Middletown, Connecticut. It’s not so much the Connecticut of it—she is a California girl—it’s more the idea that her forever resting place might be next to her mother- and father-in-law. But then again, she’s not a spiritual person, so by that logic, she wouldn’t care.
Most college students probably don’t think much about where they’ll be buried, at least not as much as I do. But then again, most college students don’t live less than a mile from a giant obelisk with their family’s name printed on it in bolded capital letters. An intense proximity, I suppose. But it’s also one of those things—like going to school across the country—that just comes with the territory. Part of what’s included for me in “I’m going to college.”
And so here I am, presently, in Middletown, Connecticut, with all the requisite proximity of my past and future. And so I allow for the strange, brief reflection that comes with every late afternoon run through the cemetery and its glowing trees. And so I do occasionally indulge in the more-prolonged symbolic, intensely present, awareness of a “visit,” placing a rock on the inelegant—yet still somehow beautiful—obelisk or my great-grandfather’s tombstone. And so, in those moments, both brief and prolonged, I search myself, wondering if I still feel nothing that’s not self-imposed.
Sophia Molina
July 15
Nettie Hitt
What about the drought this season makes me want to cry. I jab my knife into the earth and push down.
Today that damned golden doodle won’t stop at anything since we arrived. Shush now, Rosie, the homeowner tells it. Seriously, Rosie, you actually have to be quiet. I’m on my knees now and the lily stalks are pulling up easy today.
Today we brought swimsuits, my suggestion. It’s so hot that we lunch at Lake Garfield, my suggestion. Clayton walks in right up to the edge of his trunks and, arms out, I fall in backwards.
