Route 9 Literary Collective
Wesleyan’s poetry, prose, and art magazine Summer 2025
The Lavender Team
Editors-in-Chief: Georgia Groome, Ella Spitz, Mia Alexander, and Mel Cort
Managing Editors: Mia Foster, Elva Lindeburg Leth, and Sarann Spiegel
Poetry Editor: Isaiah Rosenn
Assistant Poetry Editor: Fae Leonard-Mann
Prose Editor: Nettie Hitt
Assistant Prose Editor: George Manes
Design Editors: Madeleine Metzger, Kyle Reims, Eve Epstein, Stella Steele, and Tae Weiss
Copy Editors: Emma Goetz, Ben Goodman, Gray Sansom-Chasin, Zoe Sonkin, Sarann Spiegel, and Maisie Wrubel
The Team: Sydney Atwood, Julia Bartley, Suz Blattner, Samara Brown, Katie DiSavino, Ella Duncanson, Naomi Ellis, Eve Epstein, Yael Ezry, Jack Farrell, Eleanora Freeman, Sadie Gray, Georgia Guariglia, Asher Harris, Charlie Hartman, Esme Israel, Luciana Johnson, Clara Lewis-Jenkins, Tess Lieber, Olivia Pace, Kai Paik, Natalie Piergrossi, Alex Potts, Gray Sansom-Chasin, Sarann Spiegel, Mina Tschape, Lily Turner, Lyanne Wang, Sarah Weber, Tae Weiss
Cover Designs: Will Hardison
Logo Design: Leo Egger
Special Thanks to: The heroes at 72B Home Avenue and Fauver 112, all the dear friends who make this magazine possible, Oliver Egger, Immi Shearmur, Merve Emre, Ryan Launder, Alpha Delta Phi, the Shapiro Writing Center, the Wesleyan English Department, and the SBC.
Letter from the Editors
The first time we met it was already a year into college. You had lavender hair, which I thought gave you an unfair advantage in climbing the ranks. We both wanted to be managing editors, and we both wanted to do it together. We had an awkward conversation on the walk towards Exley where you were quiet and I filled the silence with giggles. I promise to always cherish our now-comfortable silences.
We met while making this magazine—sisters of ambition turned work-wives. Oliver sent out a call for a new managing editor, and we were the only two who applied. He introduced us, and we got lunch the next day. We talked about our childhoods. You now claim you had a friend crush on me even before we applied, though I think that’s revisionist history. I promise to always hold onto that initial spark—the smiley girl with curly hair across the table, making me laugh.
We truly “hung out” for the first time last spring, when you had those micro bangs and a freak-bob, and we squeezed into my high rise kitchen, hunched over a sheet pan meal. Stories we exchanged in my kitchen turned deeper throughout the semester, until you were comforting me as I cried, worried that I was going to be canceled for queerbaiting. I promise to always queerbait with you and continue to share my deepest secrets with you—I know you’d never judge me for them.
On the first day of fall, you wore gray cable knit stockings. We sat down for breakfast, and you said, “You don’t have to retain any of it, just let me speak at you.” You explained your latest thesis chapter—about classifiers in ASL poetry—and I listened and asked about anything I could think of, just to keep you talking. I promise to always listen to you—it’s my favorite thing to do.
In the moments you sit down next to me and fold yourself over without a word, I regret telling you that I’m an excellent masseuse and back-scratcher. But physical touch is one of my love languages, and I love you. I promise to give you unconditional back scratches from here on out, under the condition that you sometimes give them back.
When we were in the same English class, we recorded our conversation about our final paper ideas for The Vegetarian. At one point, I said, “whereas in the vagi—oh wait,” and we laughed so hard we peed. “Whereas in the vagina?!” you cry through laughtears in the recording. I promise to always share my thoughts and hope they make you laugh.
I know that I’m the other woman, and you’re never going to leave New York for me. But I can’t stomach the thought of us being apart for long. But once we finally call Apple Support about our texting issues, and perhaps you learn to drive, it’ll be okay. I promise it’ll be okay, and we’ll be friends (wives) forever.
When I visited you in Maine last summer, we shared a bed. You told me you had to get a good night’s rest, and I promised I would sleep like a rock. I didn’t, and each time I shifted, a few slats of the bedframe gave way beneath me. You were unbelievably forgiving, and we teetered over the last two remaining planks of wood for the rest of the night. I could spend every night like that if it meant I could hold onto our friendship forever. And I promise I will.
ms. steps by Natalie Lynne
13 Ways To Do Your Laundry by Clara Lewis-Jenkins
Sophia Molina
March 5th, Forever is a Day by Jordana Treisman
Georgia Groome
Avarice (extreme greed for material) by Beäm
my ten year plan by George Manes
Inside out outside in by Spenderiferous Thedarcy
What do people do all day? by Harry Gleicher
Party Time by Michel Morfaw
Quinn Frankel
Pygmalion by Charlie Hartman
Dinah Landsman Maisy Lewis
Shake Shack Takeout as a Metaphor by Natalie Kim
You take one word and suddenly you have a hundred by Elva Lindeburg Leth
She prays winged angel go faster by Lydia Tadross Marks
Miles Urban
Recurring (what I am scared of) by Susie Nakash
Honor Thy Mother and Father by Isaiah Rosenn
What is a Gaskin Sermon? by Mel Cort
Letter to the Editor by Georgia Groome
Leandra Sze
This morning my grandfather sent me an email with a picture of paperclips bent into Es Rachel Walker
We hold a colander over a blanket as it inches closer. The shadows cast are crescents. Little lemon wedges dancing across blue gingham. The wedges narrow.
There is a hole in the sky and gray leaks through. The gray sits on us, a blanket of dark cool quiet. The mother goose hangs her head. The birds do not chatter.
How would you know if the world wasn’t ending?
The moon shifts the last millimeter that is 100 miles. The gears of the oiled galaxy churn. The moon clicks into place. The dark claws around us, clawing at the gaping ring that is sun and moon churning gleaming on fire.
My heart beats and thumps and reminds me that there is a hole in the sky. The sky and the birds and the light are still and I am and I am. I am, still.
Water in III Reflections
Esme Israel
I.
Primeval ooze seeps between us in clumps, smelling sick. We twine it along the ridges of our fingers and toes while the great beast rears its foamy belly to greet us.
II.
The caulked tub is peeling near where I sit watching as the ants crawl out of the overflow. The water cradles my stillness. Then, a flushed knee emerges, a blank exclamation echoing about the tub and licking the walls. My head stretches into a reflection. The ants wag above my big toe, peering into the murkiness.
I am cool as a specimen when the stopper is pulled.
III.
Land drones along the fault line. The air is buzzy and hot. Your sinewed body presses against the dark hillside, folding like a big knee. Below you, a hollow is scraped out of the hard dirt. The waves of sand have raced outwards and the water has eroded.
Evidentiary
Sadie Gray
With each pace across his room, he picks up a piece of clothing from where it fell and pulls it on. I try not to move, because he has put himself where I am not and I don’t want to encroach. My knees stick out from either side of the blanket balled in my lap, bare, shiny from my scars stretched taut. I don’t see any of my clothes in my range of vision. I could go looking, but I am still suspended in the feeling of being left here. I realize I am mourning.
I think about his skin under my fingernails as he grows more agitated. Cellular, microscopic—in a court case to prosecute a murderer, the skin under the victim’s fingernails is forensic evidence as to who killed them. They clawed at their attacker, gouged into their skin to be left alive. DNA, then, is the navigator, guiding suspicion. It points the finger—he did it—when the dead are indisposed. Wash under your fingernails, my mother used to tell me. We had a purple plastic scrub-brush specially for it. Testament to my need to explore the world utterly, to make things reveal themselves not only through sight, but through smell and taste and touch, to cake myself in knowing. I curled my hands into the dirt and the cookie dough and my combed hair so it crumbled and squished and streamed between my fingers.
I have scars because I have nervous fingers that tap and pluck and scratch. They pull loose threads to unnerve and unclothe. They peel loose edges and unglue. They pinch loose skin and unbury. Since I was little, when my explorations gave me wounds, I have scraped at scabs over my knees and elbows until they are liquid again, pooling. Then, my fingernails are outlined red and I curl my hands into fists to hide them until I can clean them, feeling blood pooling in my cheeks too, feeling biohazardous.
Scenes of torture targeting fingernails make me squirm because my fingernails are right there in my hands, benign, and I am suddenly reminded that they hold the potential for pain. It’s like the first time you are told you can tear through your earlobe like a piece of lettuce or bite through your finger like a carrot, it’s just that your brain won’t let you. Then you have to tug on your earlobes a bit, squeeze your fingers to test their durability. I have to slide one nail under another, put pressure where skin runs up against the hard keratin, and realize that what our brains will not let us do to ourselves, they will let us do to someone else. Rip off their nails, shove pins underneath them. Fingernails are one of those places on your body where you confront that you are discontinuous, that you are
parts fused together.
There is no dirt, no blood, no pin under my nails. I didn’t get here clawing, I didn’t get here digging, I got here reaching for him, around him, all over him. Following my fingers behind his ears and down his back, sun-warmed.
I wouldn’t have done that if I’d known, he says, and it is the first time I see him trying to forget something about me.
We’re not together anymore, I say. I told you I’d started dating.
I didn’t think dating meant you’d had sex with someone else.
He thinks he can smell it on me now. He wonders if he could taste it just minutes ago. He imagines it violent, imagines marks left by someone else’s want, someone else’s pulling closer, digging in.
I’ll see it whenever I’m with you now, he says, and he’s already looking away.
You should have asked me before all this, then. We used to break the space between us with the weight of our bodies and our gaze. We promised those things would stay each others’ in some way, remembered, not discarded.
I guess I didn’t want to know. He didn’t want to know who I am now, who we are together after all our time apart. He would rather regret me, rather tell me to go and watch it hit me. If I tell him I was always changing, he won’t believe me—he thinks I have only changed since I saw him last. He reduces us to bodies that we let belong to each other, cheapened if we let them belong to someone else. We have always had different ideas of what it means to love each other. I wonder if skin cells are something you need to scrub away with a brush, or if they will shake free on their own, falling behind me as I walk down the stairs and out the exit. Either way, I won’t be able to tell when they’re gone. This is the last time I will touch his skin, the last time he will linger on me. I wish it could be tender, wish I could hold onto something instead of imagining the emptiness into a kind of memory. He doesn’t think we’ve left anything to each other: it’s really over now and we should shake it off like wet dogs. The pain proliferates. I breathe it up and down my spine. I felt pieces of this pain the day we met; I always knew how deep it would run. I am so desperate to remember that we were once gentle with each other that I imagine myself dead. Imagine someone tearing me open, sterilizing their tools to conduct an autopsy. They collect dry tears and stray hairs and sheet lint. They clean out my discontinuous pieces and all of the pain with them; I am just a body and it doesn’t belong to anyone. But when they swab for DNA beneath my fingernails, they find evidence of us.
Remedio William Gonzalez
She had gone to the kitchen and brought back an egg. She had him bring his palms together and traced the cold shell along his arms and around his head as she recited a prayer. She made a cross with her index finger and thumb, neared it to his face, and he kissed it. Amen.
Again
Gray Sansom-Chasin
A sin like snowflake melts, symmetrical and warm into more thick ice
Kate Marriott
Dadda
Vienna Rist
Dadda wakes up every morning, slices up some apple pieces leaves them sitting in a glass they’re brown by noon those dapple pieces.
He breaks from work, tired, trembles, weary of the scalpel pieces, he scrapes teeth all day—they chatter—talking, storied, babble pieces.
When I was young I found the pills. I picked up the capsule pieces. Went to ma. She chewed him out. She made him quit those gambler’s pieces.
His urges gone, he’s formed new habits, slicing fruit with papal peaces now he trembles, slowing, quaking, my brain messy rattling pieces,
I brush my teeth, I’m crying, water, minty flecked lapel pieces, Dadda wake up every morning, don’t dare go. The chapel’s peaceless.
Hunting Season
Julia Bartley
The leaves begin to change color, and Daddy takes out his hunting rifle. He cleans the barrel while standing behind the living room sofa, glancing up periodically to see me sitting far away from him. My mind likes to play tricks on me: flashbanged by fake memories of a loud crack, bullet through the eye, brains scattered on the family photos, blood saturating the braided carpet.
There aren’t any bullets in it, he says, straightening his back and leaning the gun against the banister. I nod, and avert my eyes, fiddling with the pilled edges of the couch cushions.
Mom doesn’t come hunting with us, but she teaches me how to put my ponytail through the strap of my hunter-orange baseball cap, and to tie my sneakers extra tight so they don’t come off in the mud.
Her daddy isn’t alive anymore— loud crack, bullet through the eye, brains scattered on the motel paintings, blood saturating the cheap carpet. I wonder if it was a hunting accident.
Daddy helps me into the passenger seat of his rusting Ford, and the gun rests between us. He asks me to put his coffee in the cup-holder. My hand brushes against the gun and I get visions of the cool barrel against my skull, unnamed finger pressing on the trigger.
We drive down the logging roads, and come across a partridge. As soon as Daddy steps in front of the truck with the gun raised to his eye-level I squish both ears closed with the palms of my hands and wait for the loud crack, bullet through the eye, brains scattered on the rocks,
Between Whispering Trees
Suz Blattner
There’s a place in the woods you don’t remember going.
Two friends play in a clearing. They race to the woods on their bikes and splash each other with rain-soaked hair until the sun dissolves the clouds. They lean up against their favorite tree, their laughter ringing out towards the sun. They wrestle in the grass and pause—one on top of the other—as their breath begins to mingle.
Walking down the trail at dusk, the dog’s tether is clutched between her palms. Her little body soars without care for her father and brother wandering the path behind her. She trusts, and is led, not seeing where the trail forks away from her footsteps. She swears her eyes are open, but the blackened trees whisper century-old secrets through her ears. Beyond the gentle rise and fall of her breath, another sound creeps out from behind the trees. A creature hidden behind a log startles her, training her eyes toward its stripes of dark and light.
He drifts along the edge of the trees, but he can’t see their leaves. He turns away and follows a path of broken bottles along the sidewalk. He bends over and picks up a cigarette out of the mud. Placing it between his lips and sucking, his footsteps trail between the shards of glass. It seems he is surrounded by nothing but gray—the same color as the nausea that swells in his throat. He searches for a place to fall from.
She goes back to the place where she will die, thinking tomorrow must be the day. She grips the railing and looks over the edge, imagining a body splayed on the rocks. She ignores the cars rushing behind her—tasting the blood on her lips and drawing it in, sucking at them with pleasure. She is not bleeding yet.
I push past the “No Trespassing” sign to convince you to stay. Dragging you by your arm, I slip down the rocky hillside to the creek’s bank. You complain, telling me, This place will do. Don’t look. I pull you anyway and turn your gaze to where the creek runs under the overpass. Beside the shelter of the cement walls, a tent is set up, with trash bags and bottles scattered about the entryway. Someone is living in this place you plan for us to die in.
Gut Fire
Laila Azmy
The magnolia tree in our yard
Froze two winters ago I saw it bleed and I was holding you
Everything on the corner
It was crisp and orange-blue I felt it first
Leather cornfield, the sky was open to crushed cans off of Fourth Street
Small eyes for seeing Palm magic truth Five minutes
More than Becoming; something realer than skin on bloom
Sleep Juggler
Lyanne Wang
Every April I split into this Place of smooth disaster. This is grief, they say Of the unsayable. See, I am Sliding, unwillingly, to sleep. I curl a thin blanket above My waist and tuck myself Into the hollow cave. There are things to do But I am tossing time into the air. I am burying my chin Into my thighs and my hands are Clenched then opened then catching Wild dreams. This is the escape. The later hours are suspended In the dark. I am dreaming, now, Of the rise, the pause; And the fall. The thrusted Ball spinning then giving to The hand of gravity. Then Mine, my warm fists opening To catch the body, still tucked Like a shell. The body, suspended, Hung in April. I am throwing myself Between hurt and hope, Surrendering To the light spring air.
Sacred R
I bite my tongue
I press my lips together
I mustn’t make a noise
From my laughter comes my sin
And for all sins, I must atone
I wait for the sound of his heavy footsteps
To head towards my parents’ bedroom
Breathe in and out
Twist, twist, twist my fingers
Bite my skin until I taste
Sweet, sweet blood
One, two, three times more
As many times as I can
Maybe since our veins share blood
The spilling will exorcise those footsteps
From behind my door
I used to believe that if I looked hard enough
I could find something that Could grant me relief
But my cheek still stings
My brother still cries
And my mother still looks the other way
This is my sacrament
I breathe in and out
This is my worship
To whoever might be there
To accept my silence, and my blood
I can’t hear the footsteps anymore.
Dandelions
Samara Brown
There are flowers at the end of the world.
It isn’t the end of the world, not exactly, though the air burns our throats and the sun burns our skin. Bombs fall from a sky streaked with red and every day everywhere there is something dying—but no one ever told us this was the end, and so we keep living. We just keep going about our days, pushing on as we always have.
The flowers aren’t really flowers, either. Dandelions, those stubborn little weeds, are the only things that come close these days. When the world falls out of focus in a hazy heat, they poke out of the browned earth, their brilliant yellow petals curling in on themselves. We bend down to tear the ones that survive from their places, drooping and withered, and bind their stems up with twine to make wedding bouquets. There are weddings, too, at the end of the world.
We are tucked into the nooks and edges of my one-room underground apartment, with its low ceiling and unpainted drywall. Our friends are scattered; pressed into corners and up against the door, sitting on chairs, resting on the mattress shoved against the right wall. And Livy and I sit on the concrete floor, holding hands, squeezing tighter just to make the other smile. Smiles are not hard to come by here, at the end of the world.
All of us are facing the front of the room, where my best friend, Danny, stands. He holds our journal like a Bible, the one our group writes everything in—the things we say, the colors of our eyes, the poems we’ve read that we think someone else would love. The pages bulge with the trinkets we’ve taped in: a worn movie ticket from seven years ago, a dried leaf that had once been so lovely a green, a torn-out quote from a novel.
“Matt and Livy,” he says, the words resonant in the small space. We stand. The eyes of our friends follow us as we walk towards the front, each taking a side of him. As we part, so must our hands, though the fingertips linger and slide off each other gently. Her hands drop to her sides, but my arms stay halfbent as if ready to reach out again.
Livy and I turn to face each other. She is beautiful. After five years, I should have more to say, but after so long trying to define the exact candlelight shade of her hair, I have circled back around to that first descriptor. And after five years, I still cannot look away. She smiles at me, broad and radiant and uncaring of grace, and my fingers tap on the seam of my black jeans, doing anything to
made than the ones that are clear just by being here. Danny takes my hands and places the rest of the dandelions in them, takes Livy’s and places them on mine. Her fingers are delicate and cool and I know that I will never lose the wonder I feel every time she touches me.
“Matt and Livy, I pronounce you man and wife.”
I do not let go of her hands as I lean in to kiss her, and the flowers stay clutched in them as our lips touch, dry and chapped yet somehow soft. The moment lingers, and if I could stay there forever I would. Our friends burst into applause as we part, and as they slowly break into conversation, we sit, hands still wrapped around each other and the fragile bouquet. The dandelion is still perched precariously behind her ear; it has not fallen, not yet, and she giggles as it tickles her cheek. The flower is warm like her skin, her hair, and she glows. She leans forward to touch her forehead to mine, and we stay there, our friends’ voices echoing off the walls, ceiling shaking, stems breaking in our grasp.
Pushing on, as we always have.
Sadie Gray
13 Ways To Do Your Laundry
(After Wallace Stevens’ Poem)
Clara Lewis-Jenkins
1.
Seven washing machines
Six dryers
And one spare bottle of detergent
In the basement laundry room
2.
I have seven tasks
And much more to do
Heaps
Clothes pile up
I forget to tuck in the corners
Lopsided shirts and sheets
3.
My fingers stick to the pen
Perhaps there is too much to write
Or it was the tide that spilled over
In the laundry room earlier
4.
The old woman with the cat on the first floor and I
Talk politics
Her cycle completes at the beep
She invites me over for the debate
Leaves
5.
One of my white socks
Crept under the leg of my pinstripe pants
During the wash
As if it knows of shelter
As if to say,
I think I’ll stay here
11.
There is a small stain of tomato juice on my white trousers I pray for it to seep through Find home in a black shirt
I hope it knows That I wear my past mistakes to remember them But maybe I don’t want others To see them too
12.
I have come all the way down To the Laundry Room With no remaining card balance Perhaps it is time to give up
13.
My life Is dull and routine My clothes Are dried out and clean
Thanks to the Lean, mean, Washing Machine
Sophia Molina
March 5th, Forever is a Day
Jordana Treisman
If you wake up and it is still dark out, go back to sleep. If the sun is glowing grey through your window shades, sit up. If you can hear your mother downstairs making breakfast, then you can move around on the creaky floorboards and get dressed. If it’s still quiet, sit in bed and think. You can feel the pulse of the air around you, jumping in threes like a waltz. Then you can lift your hands up in the air and pretend they are birdlike people, dancing and falling until your mother’s awake.
Kiss your mother goodbye on her left cheek, and then you can walk to school.
Look down at the pavement as you walk. See how every crack is really a gap? It’s just air, air that goes down to the center of the earth and its core. Feel the heat emanating from under the concrete. Feel it coming up, warming your skin. The sun is above you, the fire below you.
When you get to school, you don’t need to close your locker all of the way. Let your jacket get caught in the opening, purple polyester under the yellow fluorescent lights. Did you know that purple and yellow are opposites on the color wheel? They told us that in art last year. I knew you weren’t listening.
You will climb the stairs two at a time, stamping your sneaker down on each step like a dance routine. Then you will go to class. If your math teacher is present, sit still and listen to the tremor in his voice, a vigorous vibrato. If there’s a substitute, look out the window at the trees. They are skeletons, skinny arms outstretched to hug you. They could never be anything else. They could never be trees.
Go to the rest of your classes. Hear the hum of electricity in the room around you, of the overhead lights and the radiator beside you. And notice that the kid on your right, the one with the mole on his neck, is humming as well. He is electric, too.
For now, I’ll let you rest during lunch. I would tell you to do whatever you want then, but I know you won’t. You won’t remember what to want, will you? There’s no will to want. Yet.
When you walk back from school, pass the homeless shelter and the fire station. Take a coin from your linty jacket pocket and drop it in the Whirl-
A-Wish donation box. I don’t care what the donation is for, as long as you hold your breath and watch the coin spin down the spiraling funnel until it finally goes through the little slot. Notice if it went in on its side or flat up and down. If it spun on its side, like they’re supposed to, then you can stop to look at the firetrucks for a few minutes. If not, go straight home.
Eat dinner just as you ate your breakfast, counting the bites and chews so that they’re odd numbers. Take a break to digest and look at the static that appears when you close your eyes. Remember to drink your water at the end of the meal.
Give your mother another kiss, on the right cheek this time, and tell her you are going to play on the trampoline in the backyard. Tell her not to worry, and then go outside.
This is the last time you’ll feel peace, you know. The rustle of branches above you, the pinpricks of stars in the sky. It’ll still be there, long after this moment, but you’ll never be able to live in it again.
And then when you get to the trampoline at half-past nine, I will be there. I will sit you down, and I will set fire to your head. Your beautiful, tiny head that moved through hallways and sidewalks so happy and stupid, so gullible and guiltless. And the fire will burn on and on, flickering in threes like the pulse you knew was always there, and you will burn from the same heat I feel now.
And I won’t need to tell you these things anymore, these instructions. The seared lines will be branded in your head, and you’ll grow into them to become what you were destined to be: that quarter going down the funnel, spinning and spinning and spinning. You’ll remember from now on.
And you’ll go back home with my arms wrapped around your back, disappointed to find that those arms are really your own.
Georgia Groome
solace and good head.
life has felt so strange lately—
seeing red charms and enchantments, speaking euphemisms and emblems, circling comrades who’ve known peace and rejected it for pacifism and private equity. I sat at the ends of the car, where the emergency break and telecom were located. the doors between carts were open, so the screeching of the railway and the rattle of the city drowned out any prolonged thoughts I may have conjured on my pilgrimage back to Connecticut.
On my return— where even the decay felt familiar, threads of fiber hung off wood skeletons peered into my corner window, in the backdrop of a dark blue.
Tucked away behind the blinds, The porcelain cat I adopted 2nd hand stared at me like an auntie trying to understand why her nephew had gotten tattoos of anime girls, and is dating a non-binary-vegetarian-anthropology major who is also a person of colour from eastern europe. I appreciate her concern. But there were no more city sounds to pillow my thoughts.
my ten year plan
George Manes
I’m thinking of deleting the apps. It’s not like I really look at them anymore. All this swiping for what, a couple makeouts in dirty parks? It’s time to meet guys the old-fashioned way. Or maybe not just guys. I’m thinking of expanding my options, going bisexual, you know. And if that goes well, I’m thinking of going straight. I’m thinking of getting my act together. I’m thinking of meeting a girl and loving her very dearly, like a sister almost. By this point, I will have dropped out of college. What would I even do with an art history degree? I will be aimless, but she won’t mind. She will set me right. We’ll go to church. We’ll wait till marriage. On our honeymoon, we will go to Walt Disney World® Resort and enter the Epcot Ball where we will sit in little carts and over the course of sixteen minutes, Dame Judi Dench will narrate the past, present, and future of humanity. I will see animatronics invent writing and go to war and paint the Sistine Chapel and sit on shag carpet, gathered around a boxy television, watching the moon landing. At the end, Dame Judi Dench will ask me what kind of future I want. I will answer some questions on the touchscreen in front of me. Here is the future, custom-made, just for you. At this point, I will have forgotten the notes I took for Art History 151 on the Sistine Chapel, forgotten that Michelangelo hated painting it, that he was probably a homosexual. I will have forgotten every painting and performance art installation and post-minimalist art intervention. A single tear will come to my eye. This ride, if I can even call it that, will be the single most beautiful thing I have ever experienced. That night, I will tell my wife I want to go to seminary. I’m going to be a pastor. We proceed to make love for the first time. It will be missionary, under the sheets, lights off. Neither of us makes any noise. I will pull out, a little too late, and we will both be a bit sticky. After some time, she will start showing. Doctor says it’s twins, but we don’t want to know the sex. Let it be a surprise. How sweet. We will move to Missouri, so we can be near her parents while I attend Lutheran seminary for three years, plus one year of vicarage. Her mother’s going to help out with the twins. I will be busy studying, spending lots of time with John, a fellow seminarian. One day, our aging professor will drop something and John will bend down to grab it. As he rises, I will remark that this looks like the standard composition and colors for annunciation paintings—he with his golden curls, salmon polo, supplicant pose, and arm outstretched to the right, where the reverend, in a red shirt and navy blazer, stands in place of the Virgin. John will
ask me where I learned this tidbit. I will draw a blank. I have forgotten.
John and I will graduate. We will be assigned to different parishes, quite far apart. I will email him occasionally. I will invite him to the annual church Fourth of July barbecue a few times, but he will decline. He will have a wife now, and kids, who are too young and impatient for the long drive. I will tell him that our kids used to be balls of energy, full of beans. Now, they sit perfectly still with their mother in the front pew every Sunday. Just give it time. My wife will drive our daughter to ballet, and I will take our son to Little League. I will strike up a friendship with one of the other dads. His name will be Greg. He will tell me he was raised Episcopalian, but has not gone to church for many years. His parents forced him to be an altar boy and he hated it. He and his best friend snacked on communion wafers and got tipsy on the sacramental wine before each service. But now he misses it. The pouring and the outfits and the sitting and the standing and the kneeling. I will laugh, and tell him you know, I wasn’t always a priest. I will become very quiet, and he will wait for me to elaborate. I will say I used to be a bit of a bad boy myself, and I will leave it at that. I will tell him to come on down to church next Sunday.
Sunday will come and I will see Greg in the pews. It will be time for communion and he will stay seated. The line will get shorter and shorter but finally he will stand and join the rest. He will be last. He will bow his head and I will place the Eucharist, so white it’s almost transparent, on his tongue. I will remember the feeling of kisses on each of my fingertips, but will have forgotten where that sensation came from. I will have forgotten the summer I was nineteen, my first date with a guy from Tinder, going from the park to his tiny, sweaty apartment. I laughed when my hand started to cramp and I had to take a break, but he said it’s no big deal, held it and brought it to his lips. I will look Greg in the eye and say Body of Christ, given for you.
I’m thinking this is a solid plan.
What do people do all day?
Harry Gleicher
Do you think the other groundhogs know about Punxsutawney Phil? Will asked. We sat on $5 lawn chairs and watched green patches grow wider and wider on our front lawn. It was April. Flowers bloomed. The cracked plastic seats and rusty screws holding the chairs together added character to the porch, we decided. And it didn’t matter how they looked; we had only two months left of college. They’d get thrown away with everything else. Will pointed to a squirrel passing in front of the duplex across the street, as if to say, Look, a small groundhog. It was 60 degrees for the first time since fall, and a yellow sun enveloped the porch. Envelop, what an odd word. Develop. En-velop. Un-velop. Could you un-velop what you develop?
Do the birds get excited when it rains, knowing there will be a small worm massacre the following day? I asked.
Of course, birds are very smart animals, Will said.
I was disappointed in his answer. If birds were so smart, why were they so fascinated by windows? And wouldn’t they feel some remorse for the dried worms they scraped off the concrete the day after it had rained? Why let the worms dry? Perhaps the more radical chickadees and cardinals would erect small shrines in the jasmine trees along the River Trail. Not hawks—hawks were cruel animals—I thought to myself. At 21 years old, I had become so full of questions I could barely see my own toes.
You don’t think so? Will said. Let’s start feeding the birds in the morning, and see if they come back.
How will we make it rain?
With the hose.
Such were the conversations we had, meaningless to most, full of would-yourathers and questions about the creatures, animal and human, on Home Avenue. Would you rather have to spend another year living in Middletown or have Ben gain 500 pounds? Would you rather ask out your professor at the end of the semester or watch ten seconds of porn in class? One, two, three, four, we would begin, realizing once again how long ten seconds was.
We rarely spoke about jobs or classes or San Francisco, but I knew about his art and he mostly knew what I was reading. He asked the questions I wanted to answer. I didn’t know if I believed in God—my mother was an ex-Catholic and my father gave up on God after his bar mitzvah—but I knew I’d rather wear shoulder pads to class than pour a bucket of water on my professor, that I could bear-crawl a quarter-mile in fourteen minutes.
If we can make it rain, can we also make it sunny? I asked him.
Are you a worm or are you a bird? Will said.
Are you asking if I live by the rain or die by it? I asked. Or both, Will said. Isn’t that what worms do?
But we can make it rain?
Of course, he said. Why not?
Party Time
Michel Morfaw
I open my door to you, alone.
Alone, my metallic veins pumping, pump inside drywall, my frame shakes, shaking from the party bursting, bursting with rodents, you jump, oh my, my delicate insides, break under, under the weight of the trash you let in.
Your loud vibrations push, pushing against my frame breaking, breaking in, shaping up, fixing, fixing is renovating is replacing replacing one by one, piece by piece.
I pray to Theseus, save save me from their storm storming through as they dress dressing me up, and then stripping strip me raw then leave having left with pieces every time, timing their sorrys before my collapse collapsing into the horizon before my my creak and moan through patches patches like pouches, bearing bear witness to their cannibalism.
My tinder foundation thickens, littered with these patches waiting for a spark, waiting to burn.
Quinn Frankel
Pygmalion
Charlie Hartman
they say the gods pity two kinds of people those who don’t get what they want and those who do but that’s a plaster platitude the whippoorwill’s word to the wise a long low-throated cry in the dark
they say it’s like adding wings to a tiger bones hollow like birds and soft like corded muscle beating flight into shape a silk-threaded serenade
and they said he carved her from marble like the lord in the fucking garden, i swear it breathing lifeless breath into living stone letting rock bleed did you love him, annabel lee?
they told me she ran away from his carrion laboratory on the hill or maybe (maybe) she stayed fell into his waiting arms an absent-minded messiah already putting away his tools that bloodstained chisel before the membranes on her eyes clear the milk of birth dripping from her pupils his leather bound bible eaten completely clean
they call her she like they’d call a ship at port or like a mainer would scold
inclement weather but she’s putting up her hair brushing it past scars twin velvet nubs where he’d decided she’d have antlers for a day
her name is galatea she cuts a brilliant figure when the squall peels back copper nerve and granite bone it’s rage that fills her sails and she cries only sometimes streams of oil dark as pitch
Dinah Landsman
Maisy Lewis
Shake Shack Takeout as a Metaphor
Natalie Kim
Shake Shack thrives on Fridays. Glistening in late afternoon sun, the infamous toasted potato buns don’t have to do much to attract a disparate swarm of locals.
Slivers of half-conversations escape as you squeeze into the crowded building. The glass slides back into place and seals you inside, frenetic with energy but unwilling to leave. Everyone pretends to be surprised at the herd. You thought this place was unique! A hole-in-the-wall, perfect for a cheap little first date. Wrong. There’s nowhere to move. Everyone is secretly-not-so-secretly hoping for everyone else to leave so they can hurry up and get their food.
Tap, your pointer finger clicking, NO, I WOULD NOT LIKE TO ROUND UP A SMALL AMOUNT TO DONATE TO MAKE THE WORLD BETTER. Tap (water), no, it’s not free. Tap, the foot of the person behind you, whyareyoutakingsolongit’smyturnimattermorethanyou. Look, the high school couple is already leaving with their chicken nuggets. Why didn’t you order those? Why did you have to get that customized SmokeShack burger with pickles, without peppers, and ask for the sauce on the side? You have pickles at home.
Oh, it’s your number! Hurry, go up and get your food. Check to make sure they actually gave you a burger, that it’s not just a wrapped brick. Got it? Good. Now get out of there, those glares could kill a mockingbird.
As you pull out of the parking lot, your right hand gingerly inches in and out of the bag balanced on the center console to stuff a steaming fry in your mouth. But no matter how valiantly you try avoiding the oil, the slimy grease slides across your steering wheel, your phone screen, your blinker—STOP WHAT ARE YOU DOING YOU IDIOT, CUTTING ME OFF—oh, and now your horn, too. Greta Thunberg would be so disappointed. You managed to cut a couple of minutes off your drive, though, and your jaw unclenches as you pull into your driveway.
Finally, it’s chow time! Bite 1: Your tongue embraces those juicy Shack carbs. Instant heaven! Bite 2: (see Bite 1). Bite 3: Why is the middle lukewarm? Bite 4: Try to disguise your disappointment with a few fries. Shit. There’s only a few left. And those bottom-of-the-bag fries? They’ve been congealing for twenty minutes. Forget about it. Bite 5: You should’ve asked for ketchup. Silently, you chuck the whole mess of the meal into the fridge, your fingers leaving a signature
on the cool metal.
Around noon the next day, you open the already-crammed fridge to the pathetic, paper-wrapped lump of gluten/dead cow/sour cucumber that stares back at you. Sighing, you toss it in the microwave (you did not spend $8.59 for nothing). Wait a sec, that smells half-decent now! But alas, you Rocky victim… you have been suckered. The patty is stiff. The pickles are mushy. The bun is disintegrating. You choke down a few bites before deciding you’re on a Saturdays-only diet.
Your feet shuffle to the trash can, where the bun releases its grip on the plate after a second with a squelch, plummeting into the empty trash can. Entomb it with last Friday’s branded Shake Shack napkin. Garbage day is in a week.
You take one word and suddenly you have a hundred Elva Lindeburg Leth
You take one word and suddenly you have a hundred. You take one ray of sun and suddenly you have a life. A life with two feet and two arms: a woman. A woman who stands with soil between her toes, her back to the house, her eyes facing the sea. A woman I don’t know the name of and who doesn’t turn around to look at me. A woman with a face (she must have a face), a face that is caressed only by the descending sun. The sun that sinks into the ocean and returns in the morning—dripping, onto a woman with outstretched hands that let both light and water through. A woman leaning on an oak tree possessed by ants so that she doesn’t fall over. One body covered in a hundred smaller bodies: they are in her hair and in her ears and in the crevices of her mouth. Bodies that bite and a body that accepts and a mind that will do anything not to. A woman. A woman who woke up early and drove three hours to stand exactly where she is standing now. To place her feet where she has placed them before. To look at the water. To be with herself, only. Herself. A woman with a self. A self to define every day through language so that it doesn’t disappear (if it even can appear in the first place). A self that now stands in a patch of grass refusing to speak or blink, its corneas burning like paper, a self that can no longer remember if the sun is rising or setting, a self indistinguishable from the light and the water and the tree and the ants, a self that will return to its regular life tomorrow just to return to this patch of grass the next time it wakes up screaming. A self that is a woman that is a life that is made up only of words.
Miles Urban
Recurring (what I am scared of)
By Susie Nakash
a woman frightened in my body.
the sun is spilling into the hip of the moon, a union followed by darkness and completeness, but I can still see into the chambers of the sky, an unorthodox galaxy constellated with the tears of a distressed bride whose eyes are unblinking like a repertoire of run-on sentences that speak franticness into the air with veils that block only her vision, but she consoles herself, saying that it will be okay because her dad is coming to escort her down the aisle as flower petals drown the ground around her with the softness of a lover’s hand, and all of a sudden her clothes are torn off and the entirety of the Torah is tattooed on her skin like a body that is wholly sacrilege until the verses start peeling, chanting to the trope of a favorite song, and now the meaning of love and coveting and self are pushed down to her stomach, curled and carved behind a sudden pregnancy.
Honor Thy Mother and Father
Isaiah Rosenn
I thought my life was a joke when my rabbi parents asked me if I believed in God in the corner of a bagel shop, which I stumbled into half-hungover, the morning after I saw my friends perform at a concert called Heaven and Hell. Still hazy from the prior nights indie rock ecstasy mixed with second-tier boxed wine, the hot sauce from my egg and cheese on everything set my head straight. But as my parents raised the question, Frank’s RedHot began to turn metallic on my tongue. My heart beat faster, pumping out Ashkenazi blood tainted with shtetl induced inbreeding at two times the pace.
I made some wisecrack comment about the Holocaust that stung so hard my mother laughed and my father dropped his smile. But deflection only got me so far. After I finished fiddling with the legs of my wooden stool, whose bearings had suddenly begun to feel a bit too unstable, I told them that I didn’t believe “there was some big guy up there with a beard calling all the shots,” but rather God was more of a force of nature—if that made any sense. I think they understood my claim about the bearded fella, but didn’t quite grasp what I meant by force of nature. My mom turned to me puzzled. “Then can you have a relationship with God? Can God love you?”
I took a second to flick some poppy seeds across the table before I lifted my head and firmly said, “No, I don’t believe God can love a person. But a person can love God. And I think it’s better that way.”
To be honest, I’m still not sure what I believe. But as we sat there—Father, Son, and Mother (in place of Holy Spirit)—I was sure of one thing: what they wanted me to believe. As they looked down at me from the lofty red cushions of a refurbished diner booth, I felt as though I was facing a Talmudic tribunal. And, if I squinted at just the right angle I could make out the words bolted to the courtroom wall. Plated in gold the phrase was identical to the words printed on the two dollar bill taped above the store’s cash register.
In God We Trust.
Letter to the Editor
Ella,
I thought an ode to you would nicely bookend our co-editor-in-chief tenure and serve as a love letter to our working relationship. After our release party in December, you texted me, “I’m so grateful for you and for someone like you to know me and everything about me.” Maybe then I knew for sure: we had become inextricable from one another.
I wrote a list called “things that hold.” It included items like advent calendars, grudges, command strips, kite leads, bladders, record sleeves, and book spines. It ended with you. You hold: my hand, my head in your hands; my brain, my brain in your brain. You know everything: my entire schedule and what I want most out of life and my pasta order and the names of all of my family members and my favorite nail polish color and how to tell when I’m feeling stressed out and the authors I admire and what time I wake up each morning. I’m always handing you the small things I collect each day so you can inspect them, laugh at them, and internalize them for safekeeping. You hold everything; you hold me up, and you hold me together. You are my container, the place where I go to find myself.
You are the thing someone would find if they whittled me down to the smallest pinky of my being. One of the best things about you is that you know how to read me, how to handle me, and how to see me with astonishing precision. You know the right things to say and how to balance me out. And you let me fit into your gaps in exchange for fitting yourself into mine. It’s more synergy than friendship, and it’s more ritual than synergy. It’s repetitive and reliable. Hard-wired and meaningful—sacred. And now it’s consecrated in written form as a bookend of our job, a tribute to our work-wifery. But something more, too. Always something more.
As someone who loves to write, I feel wrong to conclude that words are never sufficient; but no matter what shape feelings take, they never appear as a ribbon of letters. When I look at you, I don’t see language—I see myself. But as Maggie Nelson once said, “It is idle to fault a net for having holes.” So here’s my net, Ella, woven from the fibers of the small things I collect daily, ready for your inspection, laughter, internalization, and safekeeping. Whatever leaks through— in ribboned rivulets—know it’s called love. It was really fucking fun doing this whole Lavender thing with you.
It’s been my favorite thing in life so far.
Love, G
And I love you, of course. Of course.
Georgia Groome
