The Sprig - Summer 2026

Sprig

Issue I

1 Summer 2026

The Sprig

T h e R o u t e 9 L itera ry C o lle c tiv e p re s e nts ...

T h e L a v e n d e r ’s M i n i a t u r e I s s u e :

The Sprig

Wes leyan’s prose, poe try, and art m ag azi n e S umme r 2026

route9.org • @route9wes

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Issue I

About Us

The Lavender is Wesleyan’s student-run poetry, prose, and art magazine that publishes twice a semester. The literary magazine is run under the Route 9 Literary Collective, which also publishes other projects, including The John Wesley Methodist Charter, Pre-Owned, Good Condition, and The Route 9 Anthology. Learn more at route9.org.

Why The Lavender?

The Lavender is an homage to the fact that Wesleyan University’s official color used to be lavender. The color was changed because, according to an October 1884 issue of The Argus, lavender was not suitable for intercollegiate sports. “Lavender is not a striking color,” the article proclaimed. Well, 1884 critic, we here at The Lavender find the color incredibly striking.

Why Route 9?

Route 9 is the road that connects Middletown to the rest of Connecticut. It is the central artery of movement that every Wesleyan student, faculty, staff member, and Middletown resident has driven on. It connects us and moves us forward.

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The Sprig

THE TEAM

Editors-in-Chief: Mia Alexander, Mel Cort, Isaiah Rosenn, and Sarann Spiegel Managing Editors: Elva Lindeburg Leth and Alexandra Potts Poetry Editor: Fae Leonard-Mann Assistant Poetry Editors: Kashvi Gera and Eli Goldman Prose Editors: Eli Hoag and George Manes Assistant Prose Editors: Georgia Guariglia and Tess Lieber Design Editors: Eve Epstein and Stella Steele Copy Editors: Ben Goodman, Clara Lewis-Jenkins, Jasmine Sklarew, Maddy Wisse, and Maisie Wrubel Intimacy Coordinator: Yael Ezry The Team: Julia Bartley, Amelie Creten, Katie Emmer, Claire Farina, Lila Fitzgerald, Phoenix Gault-Brown, Asher Harris, Bailey Jones, Eloise Linas, Clare Mahedy, Adelaide Matthews, Kai Paik, Astrid Robin, Melanie Sabino, Evan Salhanick, Anna Sewell, Oliver Stifel, Vyom Tiwari Cover Artwork: Quinn Frankel Logo Design: Leo Egger

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Special Thanks to: The heroes at 86B Lawn, all the dear friends who make this magazine possible, Oliver Egger, Immi Shearmur, G+E, Merve Emre, Ryan Launder, the Shapiro Writing Center, the Wesleyan English Department, and the SBC.

Issue I

LETTER FROM THE EDITORS

Dear Reader, After a handful of semesters, four issues, too many extra-large brown butter chocolate chip cookies, and countless long meetings at 116 Mt. Vernon, we’re writing this letter to commemorate a magazine (and the team behind it) that has shaped our Wesleyan experiences for the better.

For the Sprig, our smallest issue to date, we’ve decided to do it through the small moments that have defined our time at The Lavender.

I was scared out of my mind when I went to my first meeting in the fall of my freshman year. Everyone was brilliant and cool and creative — especially Mia, the poetry editor. I said I was looking for community and she said she was looking for an assistant, and something clicked into place.

The year after, we went on a group outing to Durham Dari Serv. I remember enjoying the rich ice cream and watching the sunset all together.

On the drive back, Elva and George in the backseat, I remember experiencing both a stomach ache and the feeling of being part of something larger than myself.

Last spring, our editors Georgia and Ella vowed to love each other forevermore in a combination release party/wedding/transition of power/ sobfest. Mia and I were snifflingly struck by how much this little magazine meant and how grateful we were to be trusted with it.

This year, we embarked on our largest and smallest issues to date. While some say size doesn’t matter, we proved that when it comes to literary magazines, it absolutely does. We had so much fun watching the issues, and the people behind them, grow, shrink, change, and evolve for the better.

Goodbye for now,

M&M

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

The Ants and the Worms by Kashvi Gera An Ode to the Orange by Isaiah Rosenn Rongrong Wen Knees by Liam Skelton Living Relief by Katherine Emmer Neoplatonism by Maisie Wrubel With Out by Nathaniel Marinari-Ferenchak Trance by Miles Urban Equally with the wind, they carry Him. by Charis Staircase Flowers by Matilda Ledger Stella Ross-Gray Tunnel Vision by Sarann Spiegel To go there you have to die first by Bella Rosenblatt The Split in My Lip by Bailey Jones Red on Maroon, 1959 by George Manes Untitled by Hanyue Wang Blooming - by Michaela Somers Eli Hoag Going, Going by Kaitlyn Schaffner

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8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18-19 20 21 22-23 24 25 26-27 27 28-29

Issue I

Katia Michals Silent Sufferers by Alyssa Fix Forlorn, Seductress by Jordana Treisman Jaime by Zeke Appel Beta by Anna Sewell Serotonin-Norepinephrin Reuptake by Zal Rimer Serial by Mia Alexander At Dusk’s Pyre by Vyom Tiwari Schrödinger’s Cat by Tommy Parker

All drawings in this issue are by Alison Hojlo.

30 31 32 33 34-35 36 37 38 39

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The Ants and the Worms Kashvi Gera wiggling, squishing on concrete slimy, sticky, string-like

a worm a worm

left out in the scorching sun a soulless shoe did the doing

a worm

cautious colonies on clean up duty feed and prey for queen ants the guilty green grass dies gawking at the squirming ants mandibles mutilate ovaries spoiled rotten insides larvae die, sickly stomachs when ants eat 8

a worm a worm

a worm

Issue I

An Ode to the Orange Isaiah Rosenn I had some pancakes this morning – Mother-made and chocolate chipped.

We sat there laughing and plating – Our maple syrup and cream that was whipped.

The chocolate stained my fingers, As well as Lilo’s, Ella’s, and Tae’s.

I basked in the frivolity Of the beauty of our days.

I could have lived another life, With any old people and any old fun.

I could have eaten oranges with strangers, But I’m happy it’s you. I’m glad to live this one.

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By Rongrong Wen

Issue I

Knees Liam Skelton I am nervous about wearing shorts outside.

Knees always seemed vulnerable and private, not something that should be exposed to the world. I’ll sometimes find myself extending my legs and shifting my kneecaps around. It’s disconcertingly easy to do. I have this fear that someone will run up to me with a tire iron and jam it into my kneecaps and pry them off and I’ll just be lying there bleeding on the ground unable to stand up and I’ll spend weeks in the hospital and when I get out no one will want to marry someone without kneecaps and I’ll never have kids and my family name will die out because I’m the only son of an only son.

This has happened to two of my friends. It was awful both times.

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Living Relief Katherine Emmer The sun still lingers below the horizon when the statues rise.

One by one, they up and stretch, reaching their stiff limbs out as far as they can go. Their feet strain to shuffle around the small plaster platforms to which they’re bound, but it makes no difference.

There they were made, and there they’ll stay.

The domed glass ceilings of the museum twinkle in the night. A makeshift, honeycomb sky encasing the world to which they belong.

Wide, columned arches frame the hall, drawing sharp intakes of breath from the throats of visitors. It is a living relief for the statues – bodies with lungs of stone who haven’t felt skin for hundreds of years.

The visitors bow at their feet.

They nod in approval at marble draping or the harsh angle of a nose while the statues can only stand still – pale as the ghosts of their creators and the four white walls that surround them.

Then, the statues must watch the people leave, waltzing away on free feet. If they’re envious, it doesn’t show. As the sun goes down they remain mounted in their Platonian world. A cave masquerading as a temple; the shadows of their former lives long gone.

But the statues are done posing. They settle deeper into their pedestal beds and a distant rumble echoes around the room as if the Earth itself was shifting its weight. Then, with empty eyes wide, they dream in stone.

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Issue I

Neoplatonism Maisie Wrubel “What’s real to you?” An eye-roll-worthy question, especially when coming from someone you’ve just kissed – I would most definitely make fun of it the next day when recounting the night to my friends. I said some bullshit about conversations that happen late at night, conversations that seem incapable of ever taking place in daylight once the transparency of delirium is gone, as you flicked cigarette ash onto my converse.

You texted me the next morning saying you thought we should just be “platonic.” I was reading Avicenna. I laughed.

— Six months later we sit in a bar in the East Village, listening to a charismatic drunk read mediocre poetry. You buy me a beer.

Occasionally we glance at each other with thoughts in our eyes, but then we go back to watching, each of us in our own worlds, accepting that we don’t need to be in each other’s.

We hug goodbye on the corner by the Cooper Union. I punch in the code to my apartment. I wish I was hungrier, I think to myself.

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With Out Nathaniel Marinari-Ferenchak Outside is a misnomer.

Out side has, while In side is undergoing consistent sterilization.

Pasteurize your home and eat the plaster.

There’s a common gnat flying 10 feet above its grass, a chip of wood rotted as dirt, a rubber tire piece buried in a creek, a field of white grass in billowing wind. Think: at this moment, where is the last bug you saw?

Think: all resists mystification do not call the out side Nature; as you seek shelter, so too does the centipede.

War against invading ants and feed them your food scraps.

Count every microbe as you sterilize, then spritz some more.

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Issue I

“Trance”

By Miles Urban

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Equally with the wind, they carry Him. Charis The man who swam an uncaring channel of water every night for some too-late heat from an islander woman whom his body convinced him he needed for wholeness, you’ll imagine instead that the body and mind are the same thing. their hormones are like photographers at a fashion event do: the brains’ receptors snap and capture the warm lust as if they’re models slithering with confident, cool strides with oiled legs protruding them forward, the hissing of cameras noise-pollutes the arena, eager to catch the frames of their motion. Without warning, the woman lingers, caressing her hip bone, and in a cascade of throbbing light that reaches my rafters, she bathes in excess before turning, as if too good for it all, back, with still more desperate snapping, to the unseen realm at the curtain, but before she can even be missed, another is taking her place now, These are the things I have known with my own two eyes.

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Issue I

Staircase Flowers Matilda Ledger A rainbow confined to a clay fist Oh what did you do sweet ones What was your crime that you Beautiful you Must remain stationary Wilderness shackled to metal and stone How can your faces point Ever reaching Towards the beating sun When your roots are stunted and dry Your siblings wilted and dying 17

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By Stella Ross-Gray

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Tunnel Vision Sarann Spiegel I eat grief for breakfast. Every oat is a lament. Sorrow bloats and settles sediment falling through ill-caulked cracks. In Japan, they build the tunnel first. Here we dig and build as we go under earth cooled by murky water.

Drive over men’s bones heartbeats in the badum beneath the tires.

How to be nothing: lie there and take it. Violated driven over like you’re not there. You’re not. The silt has taken you away, down south eaten by clams and turned to pearls on a Rockefeller or Kennedy’s neck.

I eat grief for breakfast: oats, silt, stone grinded down into sand. A tunnel is a mouth esophagus, stomach, intestinal tract.

It eats me for breakfast.

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Issue I

To go there you have to die first Bella Rosenblatt He is pretty and talks to me about anime even though I do not care, I feel that I know he could hurt me if he wanted to. Our parents are home and we go for walks in the park on school nights. We sit behind shrubbery, his lips are wet, they swallow mine and he sticks his hand down my jeans and I keep my hands far from his. Sitting on the top of a cavernous playground structure frozen in time he pulls out a rainbow 3x4 sheet of LSD tabs from his pocket and waves them in front of my face. He tries to teach me a lesson on spontaneity; if you’re not present every minute.

I try to walk past this field of car wrecks and stand up from this bench where his hands were down my jeans and start walking along the cement riverside towards the city center towards home. Instead I have to take a square from his sweaty palm, I try to silence the mouth that moves incessantly the mouth that veils all that taunts and torments me with what I do or do not really want or need or care for. I place it upon my tongue but do not let it dissolve, he thinks I do. As he looks toward the illuminated New Jersey high rises that sink to the bottom of the Hudson I expel the paper from my mouth and into my hand. Dinner awaits at home and eyes beat into my back, burning my skin’s surface. And the steam rises from the plates all the way up to heaven.

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The Split in My Lip Bailey Jones Has returned From which I haven’t seen For three years I do not moisturize my lips, Because I want to see the past

lapse (time)

Through the bleeding crack, Sleeping on the right Stares at a door Where ghosts can enter I cannot sleep on the left So ghosts invade my slumber Of past lovers death sex that i’m too scared to have 22 22

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Of

his return saying he’s learned he will not hurt me promising to be better this time

I return the message With a note of No.

(imaginary)

I moisturize my lips So he does not get a second chance.

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Red on Maroon, 1959 George Manes You taught me to see and to speak. I have your atheist eye. My sentences share your floorplans, and we hire the same man to feel things for us. You decided I was your son, despite blood or lack thereof. Then August ended, and you changed your mind.

I found myself dumb for not understanding Rothko, but assumed one day I would stand by your side and finally see what you do. In your absence, I am blind and mute. I am hungover from last night, and wondering if it’s too late to see you, see the paintings. At this point, I’m desperate.

Amidst your silence, I have become curious about God. I’ll try anything once. Thomas shows that the only way to get past doubt is to put your hand inside it. So I get my answers by stepping into the gallery, which is a ripped open torso, which is a quietude.

Alone, surrounded by bruised canvases, I wander this new ability, where paint bypasses eye and feeling bypasses taxonomy. I am nauseous but not fighting it. You have to pick one minute a day to yield.

I stop acting like you. I shut off. I lick the walls. I am beyond doubt and sight. Porous, understanding.

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Issue I

Untitled Hanyue Wang spring came and notified my nose first. i held them instead of cigarettes, told you, like a coin in hand. the day you left you gave me a bottle of rum. and for Chuan, a poetry book. we dyed flowers with rum and uprooted them as bookmarks. a bookmark used to be alive. now a specimen put between pages. not really cruel. in pages I would read on a train. the train that always looks the same in my dream. the train i could only catch, with a long exposure in sight. i stumbled upon compiling a fragile book. i will reciprocate your gift, with a book on plants, On Fragility. to narrate on details how they survived this invincible spring.

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Blooming (The many colors of the sky) Michaela Somers I continue unraveling myself into a woman; unlike how any mother showed me.

Nature’s percussive way can snap me out of it.

The sun sets like a door swinging closed; a familiar

fading, memory like a melody dissipating in the distance. /

We end on the hardwood looking out upside down

at the blue, the wide-open blue,

after making pink of ourselves.

I’ll try to sing and not pray ––my love wants to listen.

It’s convincing: somehow

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Issue I

I can make a better woman than the one who made me.

A good girl takes care of her own.

By Eli Hoag

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Going, Going Kaitlyn Schaffner I’m laying down braiding five feet of my hair Right on top of my head And you’re laughing at me I’m telling you I have Deja vu You say, of course You say that I do the same wicked thing every night And how could I not I’m thinking about the grown ups who owe me money And thinking that maybe I’ve only got nonsense to show for my life so far You tell me, a wasted day is still a waste even if you wrote it down before bed Sometimes I think you’re the only asshole in the world I tell you, I’m going to sleep now Good, you say, and we laugh When we wake up I get a door You get a door I get a door 28

Issue I

Then it’s coffee in the morning After we sit down I count the pages you turn in your book And I turn mine faster The coffee comes What the hell did they put on the top of this, I say This tastes like dirt, you say And we switch back I ask you if you want me to braid your hair You say why and does it look bad?

No, I say, I don’t know why I asked that I’ll just shave my head, you say Good, I say, and we laugh

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By Katia Michals

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Issue I

Silent Sufferers Alyssa Fix I was once told, fish don’t feel pain Though insensible, none cared explain So, I went ahead and cast my hook I set it deep and daren’t look I did not linger on the blood I spilt I hid my frown and stuffed my guilt But as I tossed him back to sea I wondered if he’ll ever forgive me The shoe I swung to crush the spider Missed the mark and as I eyed her I saw half her legs torn clean away I mourned the debt she had to pay But as I wept for every limb The world looked on with faces grim It’s just a bug, they said to me Dismissing all her misery As time turns again and draws hither spring I consider how all creation was made to sing However, at man’s hands, the earth cries instead Her forests bare, her creatures dead I wonder how much larger their pain would seem If we could hear the silent sufferers scream 31

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Forlorn, Seductress Jordana Treisman Lonely takes up three-quarters of my bed after ten pm. I must admit: she’s a great lay, but she never shuts up.

It’s nearing one in the morning, and she’s spread out, crucifix style, one cold foot freezing my thigh. She’s left microscopic bread crumbs in my sheets that I can’t sweep out, sharp like fiberglass, regardless of how much I wash the blankets.

I can feel her wet hair on my t-shirt, dampening the thin fabric all the way through. Her head feels so heavy on my chest that I sink, drown under her weight, though she weighs almost nothing.

Truthfully, I asked her here of my own free will – to my dingy, dark room – because in daylight, she only looked like a silhouette of herself. False advertising, I’m thinking, with my brain still trembling in the aftershocks of her dull, achy words and her tongue in my mouth.

And I know that when I wake up, she’ll be long gone, leaving the only trace of her in the deep dark imprint in my mattress. The memory foam freezes in place and waits for her inevitable return, but she waits for no one.

Lonely is a nuisance who bugs you more than any other company would. Nevertheless, you must kiss her goodnight.

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Issue I

Jaime Zeke Appel You made yogurt to pass your time.

You kept trying to make the yogurt even though you failed.

No one keeps trying at something they are bad at. You lived trying.

You bought sixty bananas each week.

You thought, wondered, knew.

You felt, fixated, fascinated.

You fed those bananas to the birds.

I watched you make me breakfast in the morning.

I watched you peel an orange in one go every time.

I listened as you explained to me how eggs get contaminated.

I resented how long everything took. I wish it could have taken longer.

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Beta Anna Sewell You bought the fish on a Friday afternoon. It was one of those days when we had nothing to do, so we would tool around in strip malls and on highways under big ugly billboards. Every semester I avoided Friday classes, and every semester I regretted it because I hated waking up with you and spending $20 on a coffee and getting nothing done all day in your 2002 Subaru Forester.

“Isn’t she beautiful?” you asked, holding her up to the car window. You made me drive home while you cradled the blue beta fish in your hands. You hadn’t touched me in eight days.

When we got home you dropped the fish in a round tank, sending a fishy splash onto my arm. I tried to tell you about a conversation I’d had with my mom, but you just sat there, staring at the glass.

I did my makeup slowly that night, painting my eyelashes dark blue and carving sharp wings onto my eyelids. I imagined you thinking I looked pretty at the party, and whispering in my ear and kissing me in the bathroom.

When we got to the bar I scanned the crowd for your long brown ponytail and the yellow shirt you stole from me. At the end of your favorite Bad Bunny song, I snuck away from the DJ booth and waited in the bathroom line for twenty minutes.

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Issue I

When I pushed the door open I saw my yellow shirt pressed against the mirror, and your brown ponytail in someone else’s fist. Your hands were on his body, grabbing at his bony hips.

“Agnes?” I said.

You pushed him away.

“Nora,” you said. “It’s just for fun, we’re both gay.”

He turned towards me and I could tell it was Brad from my econ 101 class. Twink. I didn’t have to pee anymore. I marched down the street, back towards campus and my dorm.

You’re not going to touch me tonight – you’re probably going to touch Brad instead, or better yet you’re going to fondle your stupid fish and maybe you’ll even use it to masturbate.

The next day I reached into the tank and grabbed the beta between my thumb and forefinger. I squeezed her wriggling body and ran to the sink. Her scales glistened as she slid into the drain.

I sat at your desk and painted my face blue and white like your fish. Afterwards, I took a long bath in my apartment.

You let yourself into the bathroom and you screamed because you didn’t know where your fish went. I ran my fingers through your hair. “It’s okay,” I whispered. “Come into the bath.”

“Why are you blue?” you laughed.

After a few months of blue face paint and long days in the bath, I woke up to sharp gills where my ribs once were. I went to campus free swim that day and spent the whole hour underwater. The lifeguard didn’t notice that I never came up for air.

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Serotonin-Norepinephrin Reuptake Inhibitor (or Sister, Tired) Zal Rimer By the evening– You have forgotten that you slept quietly.

The rain rumbles.

Down the stairs, you nod off to the kitchen we go.

One foot, two feet, no smiles heads throb: innocent, bright, amnesiac.

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Serial after David Hernandez’s “Mosul” and Adnan Syed Mia Alexander

Issue I

The Sentra is rolling, and so is the boy behind the wheel, and the wheel is made of bone, and of carbon fiber leather and Japanese plastic, and the boy is made of flesh, made of boy, and he smells like mosque, smells like weed, smells like man, and his hair is the color of exhaustcolored asphalt, like the monochrome of night. The Sentra is rolling, cracking the knuckles of the loose asphalt below its wheels, below its unlatched trunk, below its sloping hood, where the body is slumped over, stiff, and her body is jerkily bouncing, its exhaust-colored lips cracking open and slamming together as the boy shifts gears. The rolling car smudges the night sky exhaustcolored, smudges the silent bell of the full moon and the stiff spines of the trees below, lining the tonguelike road like jagged teeth. The asphalt is nightcolored under the boy from Woodlawn, under her strangled body, under the unlatched trunk, the body inside a lolling tongue, her hair peaking out between its teeth.

The trunk, hollow like the hollowness of exhaust, the hollowness of flesh, hollow like the white-knuckled hands of the boy strangling the Sentra’s rolling wheel, remembering.

The squelch of flesh. The squelch of her flesh. The flesh.

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At Dusk’s Pyre Vyom Tiwari The Moon was misty, And the Sun died bright, Burning a melted golden light She watched his blaze, In silent mourning, His ashes fell, Dead body burning And as his light dwindled to absence, She lost her pearly incandescence

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Issue I

Schrödinger’s Cat Tommy Parker

Wanted dead and alive.

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