Sarah Lawrence Review Vol. XLV

SARAH LAWRENCE REVIEW

VOLUME XLV 2023

issn : 1075-1166

COPYRIGHT © 2023, Sarah Lawrence College Student Senate. All rights reserved.

Cover art by Dariya Kozhasbay

The Sarah Lawrence Review is published annually by the students of Sarah Lawrence College. Any student, undergraduate or graduate, may apply to be on the staff. The emphasis is on current student work, although alumni and staff submissions are always welcome. All work is considered anonymously, so manuscripts should be sent with the author’s name on a separate cover. Manuscripts are not accepted during the summer. All rights revert to the author upon publication.

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SARAH LAWRENCE REVIEW

Sarah Lawrence College

1 Mead Way Bronxville NY, 10708

STAFF

EDITORS-IN-CHIEF

Berna Da’Costa

Liza Rosen

FICTION EDITORS

Maeve Aickin

Lucille Whittier

NONFICTION EDITORS

Imogen Drake

Riddhi Kuthiala

Aurora Sharp

POETRY EDITORS

Theodore Heil

Auden Hubbard

LAYOUT & VISUAL ART EDITORS

COPYEDITORS

Katherine Echeverri

Skyler Young

Abby Cohrs

Saskia Gori-Montanelli

Aleks Omylak

PUBLICITY EDITOR

CONSULTING EDITOR

Justin Liang

Jamie Lenehan

EDITORS’ NOTE

Editing the magazine this year has been a dream come true. It was humbling, synergetic, exhilarating, quiet. We sprawled out on the floor in the publication space and let the mosquitoes in, sent each other some of the most boring texts of all-time like, hey, what do you think about the two pieces I just put at the bottom of the new spreadsheet?, and we became a little delirious debating comma placement past midnight, everything was a little funny, but in the aftermath, we made something. It has been a real privilege.

The student work coming out of Sarah Lawrence is difficult to characterize—it’s incisive, strange, poignant, undaunted. It dances on its own. We think student publications are special because they showcase the work of young artists in bloom, just coming into their powers. We write, get blood on the floor, flood the house—same thing—then try to do it better.

We are interested in art because we are interested in truth and beauty. We circle it like hungry animals, dig in, let the juices drip down our chins and stick. We believe the body of work on these pages is like a beautiful meal for a skinny lion, so eat.

We owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to our contributors, our smart and sensitive editorial dream team, our writing professors, the old American Beech tree near Marshall Field, the perfect ratio of honey and lemon in a morning cup of tea, sunny winter days, and sisters. We are thankful to everyone who submitted their work to the Review. We are thankful to everyone reading it.

We hope you like this weird and beautiful thing you have in your hands. We hope you wear it out.

With reverence, solidarity, and love, Berna

and Liza Editors-in-Chief

Special thanks to Valerie Romanello, Student Senate, and Graphic Management Partners

Piper Gregoire

SOPHIE’S MONOLOGUE

It is me, I am Sophie Grégoire, the première femme, the femme de Justin Trudeau, your namesake. Before I danced on a national stage, before the feathers, and berets, and pantsuits, before I had to take my knickers from the bin, the bin of the underclothes of the femmes before me, I had my own show, I was a singer for cabaret, the marins would come from across the Atlantic just to see me dance, to hear my voice, throaty like a thrush. Even though I have the eyes of the North on me at all times, I miss being looked at with sailors’ dirt, that’s how I met my husband, before he was the Crown Prince of Canada—or so he likes to think— he was a longtime fan of my show. It hasn’t always been so easy, you see: back at boarding school, the nuns used to beat me terribly, they would lock me in a closet if—when I sang too loud, protested their beatings, or expressed my desire for fellow schoolgirls. But it’s the loose endless spirit of the Québécois-Franco-Ontarian woman, unafraid of the Catholic Church, words being sucked into her through the skin of her stomach, facing the world, and pushed back out diaphragmatically, coarse and loud, not coloratura, a Falcon, a dramatic Falcon, like in Robert le diable, these were all things I learned in my vocal studies at Schulich School of Music, my voice tightening inside of me and forcing its way out—no flexibility, not for the standard opera, but it sure contains a wild, untamed sensuality—it’s things like this that make us Québécois-Franco-Ontarian women so desirable to the rest of the world, even more so than French women, known for their spitfire attitude; if they were so willing to spit in the fire, they’d have conquered the New World, New France, and have gotten some blood on their hands, done the dirty work of the empire themselves, but they sent their brutal to Canada, leaving only the clean, meek women behind to shop at French shops and eat baked French bread, as docile and boring as any Bavarian housewife, none of the salivation of a sailor, smoking clean cigarettes that they do not inhale, no tar, riding around on trains and bicycles. The real unchained, erotic women are Québécois-Franco-Ontarian, since the pioneer spirit and past of violence and cannibalism unties them from the gender roles they heed like dogs in France, and it’s the supposed lack of knotting to this, and greater cultures of pure, limp women, that make French women so attractive, so imagine how the world will react when they meet me! Now the sailor’s knowledge is being transferred into great big computers, used for AI, drones, as weapons, so it’s only a

matter of time before, while combing through an old sailor’s memories, they’ll see me, see me dancing and singing, and sending my rugged wildhorse wildflower dragon energy for the marins to see and remember, and they’ll surely create a projection of me to show on warships for the rest of Canadian history and finally, my voice will be flexible and thin, able to hit even the highest notes, like a coloratura, and they’ll invite me to be the queen of the robot kingdom deep below the sidewalks of Montréal. I remember making snowmen as a child with my friends at the convent school, I’d take the carrot and make it his petit Jesus, just for a laugh, of course, but it was unacceptable to the nuns, and as a punishment they’d make me take the carrot and eat it, frozen hard, meant, of course, as some sort of sexual shaming device; I only remember how horribly it would hurt my teeth to bite the carrot after it had been stuck in a snowman, in negative eleven degrees, Celsius of course; one time I took too long in the shower so they sent me outside and instructed me to hold up half my hair, still in my towel, and stay there until the hair stood on its own, then Sister Alix, the tallest and strongest nun, brought her metal ruler and struck it swiftly down the side of my head, an inch from my scalp, and the hair snapped and fell off, then Sister Alix crushed it with her boot heel and dragged it back against the coarse ice, ensuring that no strand of hair was left intact, a pile of ice chips, I asked if I could cut the other half and she said no, but I did it anyway, and her punishment was to cut the broken ice hair even shorter, creating some endless misery for me where my hair could never be even and could only get shorter, the Grégoire name comes from the Pope and the Romans and Jesus, but the nuns still used their metal rulers to break my hair off, too weak to warrant an icepick, but accomplishing the same goal, and when I stick my face in ice it only turns cold and won’t turn blue until I’m close enough to death to not feel cold anymore, it barely gets cold in France, only in Canada, only Montréal is a freezing cold cultural hub, but one day I’ll stick my head into the ice and find little bits of hair, remnants of my absolute youth, and I’ll take them like supplements to keep me fertile, cyclical, complete. Before I am overtaken by the maggots. And then I’ll have been everything.

Lily “Billy” Olson EMETOPHOBIA

Madeleine Eggen

THE HIGHEST POINT IN THIS CITY IS A CRUCIFIX AND I AM LOOKING AT IT

when it’s all over, this is how I want you: sunbleached, slouching, faceless, entombed, see mary and michael with their converging tilt, he is taller still.

mother’s memory is of a sacred father where everything is still, same, barren or cigarettes. see the belly of the sun scrape the knotted sycamore, flossing light through her knobby incisors, I would like to be the inner pulp. please bury me in faded carpet furrowed against the foot of a tree with death date rubbed blankly and tangerine melting, I sent rivers through her branches. still— they’ll say it was pockmarked and hills, fool’s gold valley of starved shadows and naked stone. kicking feet so it all comes up roses.

Emma Basco

AND ALLEY CATS

Looking at myself in the mirror is a little like looking at the face of a stranger. Why does the hair fall the way it does, why does the chin dip so low and the nose arch down the middle like the back of a lazy cat. I don’t recognize myself after thirteen years, but my eyes are like the space between stars and I’ve seen those eyes before.

My mother has the face of someone who has seen many, many things. Her soul is a dragon. My father’s face is like the sun. Like a child, he glows from within. When he smiles, it shows in his eyes.

My sister, a boychild. Face of change, face of wrought and rights and wrongs disguised as rights. She has tattoos. Across her collar is a star and across her neck is bliss. Her hair is coarse and bushy and pitch, like a lion’s mane, cut short around her head. She looks like herself. I look like my mom and dad.

When I get older, I hope to become like my lion sister. Etch ink into my skin or cut my hair short. Right now, I’m just not brave enough. II.

My neighborhood is a collection of shoe boxes. In each shoe box there is a different pair of people. There are the tired and worn, the bright and new, the ones who get compliments and the ones who get stares. We have dust on our roofs and roots in our shoes.

I don’t talk to the people in the shoeboxes, because they always talk to me, and so I find friends in the neighborhood behind the alley. The houses there have pine fences tinged with sundown and cat-shaped shadows. The kids have castles for houses and planes for bikes. Charlie is one of them, and he’s a bit of a sloppy character, but I like him. He’s a pint-size king, with his own little kingdom and a homegrown crown.

Cara is thin as the horizon, like she is on the cusp of vanishing. In her world the sun only sets. Cara hides, behind doors and piles of paper and blankets of eye shadow she lays over her eyelids. Cara, constantly hiding. She lives

her life like she’s jealous of the people with ropes around their necks.

Theodora acts like a queen but looks like a mutt. She’s the oldest, but in my head, she’s just a puppy that bites and bites. Roman shakes the ground when he walks, enough that the doves on his shoulders fly away and we all scatter with them. Before Ursula moved away, she taught me to dance and ignore fairy tales.

Isabel is a name that fits the girl it belongs to like a coat too large. I renamed her Izzie because Izzie fits perfectly, like an artificial diamond into a plastic diadem. Izzie, Izzie. She’s the real princess. Izzie with the fuzzy hair, Izzie with the butterfly lashes and lips like a butterfly’s kiss. The only thing about her is that she isn’t brave. She can fake it, and I credit her for trying, but she’s training herself to be someone she’s not. She can fake it, I can’t. I’m either brave or I’m not.

You only see it if you take a good long look at us. You see that we are not at all who we seem, and that deep down we are very, very afraid.

III.

I like to think Izzie and I are a gang. We break rules. We skate until the road ends and keep going until another begins. We get our hands dirty on the asphalt and we poison our minds with sidewalk treasure. We get drunk on energy and forget what we did in our excitement but it all tastes good. We’re only two kids, and sometimes we’re two kids and alley cats, but we know. It all ends. We know that when we go home we’ll need to wash our hands, tie our shoes, set the dinner table, sit, eat, and obey our parents. It will itch and I won’t like it, but it will happen. Because the adults say so. Because adults tell you how adults should be. And they tell you how kids should be. I don’t understand that.

To be an adult is to have a clean suit of clothing. To be taller than us. To wish us off to school and crouch in an office all day. To trim bushes, drink coffee, read newspapers with glasses halfway down the nose. To be an adult is to look down and tighten your mouth.

Adults know when to stop complaining. They know to act, they know how to talk. They know how to tell real lies. Obscure figures of dust. That is all these people are to me.

I don’t understand them. I only understood, one day, when someone I can’t remember said, to be an adult is to remember you were once a kid who got your hands dirty.

IV.

When Layla Elladinki died, I tried remembering her. I tried remem-

bering her. I tried remebering but forgot. The only thing was her eyes. Narrow, sharp like glass, green as envy herself. I thought they watched me through my window at night.

No one knew Layla until she died. No one even knew she hadn’t been dead until the night her body was carried out her front door. She had lived in the house devastated by a storm no one saw, and she had been the most damaged of all women. Broken bones and a stolen heart. Spent years curled in chains, the key hanging off her fingers.

The night she died was the night everyone knew had been coming.

I saw her as she passed into a red and blue light show, lying rigid like a plank on a stretcher. Hair like burnt candle wax. Swollen desert lips. Haunting, as though the features of her face were sketched with a pencil then erased, there then gone for good.

It was like the earth swallowed her in one gulp and she stopped breathing. I remember something passing over me. It started raining. I reached out and held Layla’s hand. Her hand was still warm, but the warmth was empty. Life had just leaked right out of her fingertips. I realized then death isn’t what people think it is. It wasn’t what I thought it was.

I wasn’t sure why the neighbors left flowers on her porch, or why everyone stopped walking on her side of the street, or why it seemed to me that even the sun didn’t disturb the boarded-up windows. It was as if we were scared. Scared of what had happened. Not sad for who had been lost.

V.

Summer appears in the clearing of smoke. Here is when I run until I lose sight of the sun and I fly off where the sidewalk ends until I land, tangled in limbs. I imagine myself with wings so long and beautiful they drag on the ground like a wedding veil. They’re powerful enough to carry me above the clouds where I can be alone.

But in summer I am tired. The days bleed together, I am scraped up. The sun drags herself across the sky, I drag myself to and from. To and from, until I can’t help but wait.

At the beginning of autumn it rains. Dusk doesn’t last as long, the clouds linger, the sun softens. I climb roofs leaving prints, I carve words into the skin of trees. I sit in the branches with Izzie as she thinks of ways she can bring the stars down to Earth and hold them in her hands. I stare into the space between, thinking of ways I can dance with them up there in their cold, glimmering world.

But in autumn I am falling. It is a red and orange world of right turns and wrong turns and ups and downs. Two steps forward and a single plummet

backward. The leaves and I sing as we fall. Fall and fall, and I can’t help but wait.

And winter comes with a whisper. One soundless white plume of breath. She holds the world on a slim white finger, and I am left with time spent alone and time wasted. Here I sit, I think. I set my thoughts free. Because they are birds who know where they’re going and never return. My mind melts, melts and washes away.

But in winter I am lonely. Here, I find a difference between alone and lonely. Here, I find that winter is the loneliest evening of the year.

And so I am left hoping for spring.

Sparrow Murray

SCHEHERAZADE AT DAWN

The garden cat saunters through the brush having captured the dark-eyed junco. Birdsong continues, leaf-scent drifts in. I cherish these mornings. Mornings like afternoons when I get to carry the world’s sadness — a little coin — everywhere I go, turning the piece over and over, concealed in my pocket, just to hold it a moment longer (a coin is easily lost) before it must be spent — a treat, a gift, transportation.

Recently I’ve been attempting to channel the voice of Scheherezade at dawn for a poem; what it was she said to the King. I keep asking myself how she did it but I don’t know if I mean: share a bed with a man like that, or find a love for him somewhere, or manage each night to unfold vital fiction from within vital, potent fiction.

Like the King I too can’t seem to discern how much of love is performance. How much of gesture is ephemera. How much is real flesh, Real. I too, dislike it: this question of Self and Other — reconciling.

Last night I almost broke the vow of chastity I didn’t make, straddling this girl in her twin bed, sharing cautious, level kisses. My failure was not knowing if it was her mouth too closed or mine too open. Too eager to consume? & if passion is as perishing as the world? In class

the professor speaks of the deliciousness in taking on persona; shifting out of oneself and into another consciousness — tangible, separate. When the poet professor calls my name I say Does this please your high pleasure? Her gaze is unbreaking, serene, fatal. (My desire acts as another means of passing judgment, of fortifying the jetty that keeps a distance, keeps a fantasy traversing the mind’s wide water.)

This was Shahriyar’s dilemma: give the woman the occasion to betray or remember that initial, smooth, impossible figure — remember Night, when every detail exists, expires, is created not again but ongoing, inconstant. To write

a poem you must write another. You must learn you take all your past lovers to bed with you. Friend, Beloved, Source of my Being, help me turn toward You… & how I’ll never quit worshiping the vast red stains on the bed linens; on my vacant, low heart.

Olivia Harrison

Part of an unfinished series of crowns

Beads, handmade chain, wire and ribbon (see page before), wire (above)

Anna Brand

THE BLUE A

I come from a long line of garden weeds, of berries picked too early and melons picked too late, lover of raspberry jam, untold stories, bees, reusable bottles, chatter in a crowded restaurant, escaping in New York City streets. I only know myself from stories: the day I laughed so hard I slammed my head on the back wall and pretended I was okay for the rest of my life. The look on their faces when I said I was going, the taste of tears and a lump of something in my throat. Before me there were hills, time and wind blew rock to pieces and created the sands in which I laid with her that night in South Carolina. I come from wicker chairs on the porch and thunder. Hands clapping and white lightning; my mom crying because of something else I did wrong. Three bats under the side roof of my rotting childhood home, I love them for eating mosquitoes and for the way that they fly, others hate them for shitting on the deck. I come from the constellations in the sky, left-wing politics, a 100-year-old banana bread recipe I’ll probably never learn. Yesterday I was everything, today I am not a single thing, and tomorrow maybe I will be something in between.

Liza Rosen

“Are you gonna do a little before we get upstairs?”

“No—no, no, no. I want to be sober for at least, like, the first half hour.”

“Okay.” Emmaline (@emmmachine) pauses. “I’m gonna.”

Emmaline’s veiny neck shoots downward and from her favorite little gray clutch she derives a palm-sized green pouch secured with a sterling silver kiss lock. She places her thumb and forefinger on the lock’s two intertwining bulbs and then slides them past one another, as if prying open somebody’s jaw.

Inside, there are several items: a Zippo lighter, rolling papers, four baggies of cocaine, three dehydrated clusters of weed, an amethyst, a Swiss Army knife, and two sprigs of rosemary. She extracts the knife and a teener of coke from the pouch and lays them both gingerly on the car’s center console. Eliora (@eliorasworld) drives a Jaguar.

“We should do acid again soon,” muses Emmaline. “It was really fun last time.”

Eliora nods.

Emmaline coils like a waning moon over the center console of Eliora’s expensive car and gets to work. Emmaline, with eyes like an overwrought baby bird, studies the scene unfolding at her hands as if she is performing surgery. The vistas always change and they never do.

She lowers her chest in an easy, familiar swoop, the tip of her nose brushing the hard plastic of her iPhone case and her nostrils contract, sucking up her favorite alkaloid like it’s air. She sits up straight and moans until the initial feeling of ecstasy collapses into perfect serenity, then she lifts and stirs her shoulders in a happy, celebratory way, her body lilting with pleasure.

“Okay, just give me one second and I’ll be ready,” says Emmaline effusively, clasping her hands together. “I feel like Kafka,” she adds, rolling her eyes into the back of her head. The two friends burst into laughter.

The Spirit Sisters depart their vehicle with a shared queenly composure. One heel on the ground and the other swooped over fluidly, two bare legs touching and a straight back tightening. They look at their feet, then the ground, then the apartment buildings above.

Across the street, a middle-aged dark-skinned woman is sitting in a mesh camping chair underneath a rainbow umbrella. A handheld fan decorated with cartoonified pink tulips flutters rapidly in front of her face.

“That looks so good, highkey,” Eliora remarks to her friend, bumping Emmaline’s shoulder with her own.

“So good,” concurs Emmaline. “I haven’t been to a fruit stand in soooo long.”

“Same, me neither.”

Both were silent. “I don’t really want to eat before this,” Eliora says finally.

“Yeah.”

Los Angeles in the summertime: jacaranda trees disrobing, black, dried gum adhered to the sidewalk, dead grass, innumerable street and sidewalk fissions, obsessively maintained front-yard shrubbery, woodchips, stucco, palm trees planted on lane dividers after much deliberation, Indian laurel fig trees, hunchbacked women pushing black laundry carts filled with everything they own, novelty frozen yogurt shops neighboring dispensaries neighboring all-organic grocery stores as expensive as God’s own tears, and undulating green hills laid regally at the bottom of the sky. People uproot their whole lives to be here.

The ladies are holding hands and wearing cowgirl boots to a party that requests its attendees emanate “alien vibes.” They are both having good hair days.

Two blocks over, homeless encampments line sidewalks like rocks on a riverbed. They are ubiquitous and still.

“You look so hot right now,” Emmaline says to Eliora.

“Take a photo of me,” Eliora replies.

A joyless ritual. It seems benign, perfectly victimless. Oh.

Eliora retrieves her cell phone from Emmaline, trancelike, as if her arm is all steel and electrical wires moving through a pre-plotted, computerized gesture. Her eyes pour into the screen and through the fifty-eight live photos Emmaline just captured like she is reading instructions for how to diffuse a bomb. “I hate my knees,” she murmurs.

Emmaline and Eliora are artists, designers, models, beat-makers, fire suns with water moons. And party girls. Duh.

The ennobling hand of Instagram fame had seized Eliora and Emmaline earlier this year. The two met at their application-only performing arts high school, where Emmaline concentrated in costume design and Eliora studied photography. Together, they are the Spirit Sisters. They have their own clothing line called “Spirit Sisters.” They make crochet everything and sometimes jewelry. They make social appearances like this one on most weekend nights and usually a few days during the work week.

Tonight, Eliora is encased in a two-piece body con dress laced with real silver. She hates the way her knees and toes point at each other. Eliora has always kept her hair long. In elementary school, she was called “Dumbo.” She got her dad’s ears.

Her best friend and business partner Emmaline is wiry in many respects. Her arms and legs are always talking to each other through the old electrical network running through her capillaries. Emmaline, the preen queen. An angular, insatiable little woman with wild wheatgrass for hair. Emmaline knows everything about backcountry camping, her little sisters, and the early history of Druidism.

The ladies have a two-person vaudeville act they put on at parties. They’re entertainers. For high-stakes situations Eliora has one of those cheshire cat smiles, an unzipped jacket pocket for a mouth. Otherwise she has straight, often closed lips. Her mother says she’s an observer.

She’s “one of those girls” who “knows everything about everyone,” or, whatever, just a “crazy bitch.”

Emmaline and Eliora are destined for the rooftop patio of this one green building in West Hollywood where an Instagram acquaintance, Layla (@babys1stlobotomy) currently lives. Layla’s parties are always invite-only. You have to have at least fifteen-thousand followers to get in.

One is left to contemplate: who might be sufficiently illustrious to find themselves at a soirée like this one? The answer is not so simple. Someone who carries the severed foot of a rabbit and always has their shoulders thrown back. Someone who picks their feet up when they walk.

To attend Layla’s party, everyone must take one rattling elevator and seven flights of stairs up to the roof, to show they really want to be there. Isn’t there something so delicious about that?

But isn’t there something sad there too.

Bald thighs throbbing with overwork ascend more stairs, more stairs, more stairs, sweating. Layla’s apartment building is so ugly. Emmaline and

Eliora say nothing to each other for a few minutes. The party thrums upstairs through the ceiling. They just listen.

When they burst through the door to the roof, evening air bursts through them. A reprieve.

“Let’s get a picture together, Em.”

They bend. They extend their legs out toward the camera and prop their front-facing hips up so their back-facing hips look small.

Now, who in the world is more beautiful than the Spirit Sisters in this moment? No one. Sorry.

The rooftop: concrete, rusty railing wrapped around the perimeter, fake palm trees, a cardboard cut-out depicting a desolate, coppery Martian valley, Svedka, Smirnoff, Grey Goose, Jäger, Bailey’s, Jameson, Fireball, crystal if you know who to ask, PCP, a little bit of acid, weed, obviously, a hundred beautiful young women in technicolor, around half as many young men garbed in skintight racerbacks, striped boxers, dollar-store approximations of alien antennae, jock-straps, metal handcuffs, as a joke, and iridescent confetti strewn all over the ground. It smells like perfume, body odor, and weed.

The women are, of course, the real spectacle. And everyone knows it. The ladies know it because in middle school they practiced walking around like runway models who don’t care that they’re pretty. They would lift this newfangled ambulatory style from the perfect seclusion of their girlhood bedrooms and deposit it into their school hallways, and walk delicately from class to class like baby deer.

Now they are women, and they make it all look so easy.

Women! What do they want? Women want to hear some jokes that are actually funny. Jokes they can’t resist laughing at with their whole bodies. Women want bigger, fattier portions at fancy restaurants. Women want to swim naked in any lake in the world without consideration for microbial contaminants embedding into their labias. See?

Here is the thing about the carousing youth of Los Angeles: nobody here was extracted from their mothers’ wombs already coated in gold. It took work. To gleam and glimmer like this.

“How many, Emma, how many? This fucking girl, bro. How many do you have right now?” another Instagram acquaintance, Tyler Aiken, (@tylersde-

mons), asks in an open, jocular way.

The lengthy lady throws her head back and laughs. “It doesn’t matter. I don’t know how many. I don’t know.”

“You’re famous, bro, you’re so famous. This girl has like four-hundredkay on Insta and she makes six figures on OnlyFans every month.”

Comments from men about her OnlyFans, even ones stitched together like this to seem friendly, are very weird. They might as well just tell Emmaline that they watch her porn. She replies with an adorable little laugh and says, “Yeah, Tyler, that’s why I have a house in Venice and you live with your dad in Altadena. Don’t fucking talk about my money.”

Doja Cat begins to play. Everyone on the dance floor gyrates in a similar way, as though all of the partygoers were trained to dance by the same group of people. Their movements are highly gestural, borrowing from the way people tend to gesticulate in conversation. Everyone looks loose and a little angry. Emmaline disappears into a throng of girls to do more coke.

Eliora and Emmaline have been to many hundreds of parties together. People expect to see them at things like this. Everyone loves to see the Spirit Sisters dance.

Wendell (@wndeeeeezy) casts a wanton glance at Eliora and says, “Look who the cat dragged in.” Wendell is broad and airy. He makes lip-syncing videos and takes 35mm film photos of his friends when they’re fucked up. He looks like he did anabolic steroids to play baseball in high school. He looks like the romantic male lead in a Disney Channel original movie.

Eliora laughs and advances toward him with an even, lackadaisical swagger. She says something without thinking. The two of them have been texting for three months. Eliora refuses to publicly disclose her involvement with Wendell. She thinks he is unperceptive and not a very good photographer. “Who are you here with?” she asks, crossing her arms over her chest.

“No one,” he says, “I came to see you.” Then: “can I see your tits,” and Eliora pulls her shirt up, and it turns out there are feathers all over the place.

“Do you ever feel like you’ve forgotten how to be yourself?” Emmaline whispers to Eliora.

A pair of petrified little meat birds, looking around at their peers like what the heck am I doing here.

“Yes,” her friend whispers back. “What do you mean?”

Imagine this: you are roving around the English countryside or something and an ugly little mage materializes from behind a bush or something and says at twenty-two you can have bright, unblemished skin, a teenytiny waist and watermelon hips, and other pretty girls to coo over the way you layer your necklaces, but you will forsake your seven-year-old self every day. Imagine choosing wrong.

All of the sudden Eliora feels like her heart is too big for her body. Her breath has no room to go anywhere. She stretches an arm outward and sees a matted white wing.

Cool girls, girls who get the joke, girls who “can hang,” girls watching their lives transpire from ten feet up end up dead and cold just like everyone else. Sorry. Is that a little too morbid for a story as fun as this?

Ellie and Emma are packed head-to-toe in one of those huge industrial chicken barns in Montana or something, squinting through splintered wooden planks of walls as the sun explodes over the mountain, and day starts. Life is short, only eight weeks or so. Young chicken sells for cheap.

Dariya Kozhasbay

DEER AND TEETH PICTURE

Hazel

Lucey

ARCHIVE OF LOVE, BODIES, AND TIME— JUMBLED AS THEY ARE

I almost cried, smelling my hands that smelled like E’s mom’s Verbena soap, This holy liquified body. My cheeks: Pink from his cheap Ikea pillowcase and trying hard for orgasm.

Winter’s desiccating sun shone onto his bedside table, detailing stacks Of tiny, empty cocaine bags. I’m trying to remember what we did But it’s not coming to me.

•

It was dragged and dragged because I said Nothing Is Dragging! I’d lay swanlike on his warm chest, angry at the poetry and paralysis happening inside of me. Time is not lived without suckling the artichoke heart.

•

I figured if we had done it when we first met

Three years ago, R would have lasted

Three times longer, but then he only would have lasted

Nine seconds. Rats scurried by as I told S, technically Speaking, I’d fucked R too, and in the spirit Of explosion, that I would choose her

One million times over. It’s hard to believe

T still kissed me—E called earlier in the night

For the first time in eight months and I answered it, on speaker phone.

Acknowledge the life you spent denying the pleasure of the wind While homesteading on logic’s opaque terrain. To be what? The master of the second dimension?

I screamed into the wilderness of his mouth. Again and again, I shed denser bodies, became a spot of yellow on my collar bone and purple On the left side of my jaw. Things smaller than words Sounded into thick snow were said.

M’s eyes would glaze over after 11:00 and still magical words came Out of his mouth. I felt unworthy Of knowing all he might tell me if I asked. •

A’s lips were like bird lips and her neck almost fell out Of my hand. Her new medication was making it so she couldn’t Cum. But I hadn’t known her before, so there’s that.

• I want to believe that there’s a place where time can die That is good. Where a butterfly lands On my slapdashed desire, its violet wing Easy like a summer linen.

T was late to work every morning, frenetically jamming Burnt toast for me. I’d eat it alone on his living room couch, The light of a new day right there and breathing

Through the steam of my tea and realize it meant nothing When he wasn’t there for me to praise. It’s no longer enough Just to feel myself nurture.

• What will it take for me to pull my numb legs from our entanglement, From the delicacy of the dark blue dawn In which birdsong has begun again?

Listen to the one thing that is not confused, this massive underlayer Of pulse. That it’s massive is terrifying, and even more so— that it’s mine.

Mad Browning

“WHAT’S MAD THINKING ABOUT?”

WSLC radio show poster

Mad Browning

Mad Browning

Abby Cohrs

DISSING THE ILLUSION

Fix

Your eyes and issues with it. It is the dirty chimney rising out of the gyrating smoke, The terracotta flower pot springing from the rosemary, The tree inside the nest inside the egg, The stationary cloud.

(Needing

Fixate on that pinprick in the distance. See how each periphery detail introduces itself. See how the shapes do not blend or stir Or twist or whir into a splatter painted canvas Of children’s carefree scribbles anymore.

Next, notice how the sky

No longer looks like that

White-hot fiery blue blur

Grumbling with an influx of Steady anger and nascent rain

Because you forgot how to conjure those storms. You cannot cook up lightning anymore.

So when you get tired of your botched hurricanes

Giving way to reluctant tornados—

Ones that spin lazily, bored of their maker, Contained in clear canteens of ex-meaning—

When you get tired of the day, dreamer––

Please feel free to let

Those renegade eyes of yours

Stretch their wings once And then

Flutter back shut.

Olivia Harrison

Rachel Wade

THE PAN

It wouldn’t go away.

Fifteen minutes he’d been scrubbing the bottom of his best pan, the indestructible steel thing he used to make his dinner every day, and it was still stained with an unsightly black residue, stuck so tightly that no amount of scrubbing seemed able to take it off. And it wasn’t the whole bottom, that was the annoying part. It was one small, exasperating spot, under any other circumstance indistinguishable from the rest of the pan, where the burnt bit just stuck.

Well, this was impossible. Agnus had been using this pan for years. He was by no means a professional chef, but he was regular enough with its cleaning and care that it had stayed pristine all this time. During its tenure in his kitchen, it had survived tomato paste, soy sauce, caramelized onions, frying grease, and even rice, back when he hadn’t had a rice cooker. Nothing touched this thing.

It had a misleading flakiness and hard little bubbles that gave the impression it would be easy to scrape off with the coarse side of a standard kitchen sponge. Nudging and prodding at it didn’t seem to do much, however, only producing, after some time, a black sludge caked deep under his nails.

Agnus sighed and knelt down to reach under his sink for the steel wool.

After searching through the subterranean depths of his cabinet, he found it, along with some heavy-duty Ajax dish soap. He returned to the sink and turned on the water, a little warmer this time. He stared out at the backyard to distract himself from his growing exasperation, but was only met with a sinking feeling as he took stock of its condition. He’d been neglecting yard work lately, and the grass was starting to stretch up and curl around his lawn chairs. There were surely legions of insects and pests out there. He had noticed ants in his pantry only yesterday. The squalid conditions didn’t even stop at his yard’s limits, as his fence was also decomposing, bent over with moss and fungus.

The deterioration of his backyard hadn’t been born entirely from laziness. He’d been dealing with another problem recently. Rats had moved into his attic.

At first, Agnus assumed the disappearing food and frayed electrical wires were byproducts of simple human carelessness. To their credit, the rats had been very quiet. It wasn’t until they’d chewed through the insulation between his bedroom ceiling and the attic that he heard their squeaking and scuttering, and by then, there were hundreds of them.

Traps weren’t a practical option and Agnus didn’t have the money for an exterminator, so he’d gone out and bought a tub of rat poison for $4.99 at the supermarket, placed it in the middle of the attic crawl space, and waited.

According to the advertisement on the back of the tub, what smelled like death to a human was apparently so tantalizing a scent to a rodent that it would have the entire colony dead in one night. The tub had delivered on this promise, but Agnus had not been prepared for the implications of the slow, painful death of an entire infestation of rats right above his bedroom ceiling.

Death by chemical neurotoxin is no quiet, pleasant affair. All night, Agnus had lain there, eyes wide open, as the rats fought to the last, stumbling about the attic, clawing the wood paneling until they had navigated into the walls and floors. After several sleepless days and nights, when the rats had finally exhausted their strength, came the horrible, desperate scratching, like the sound of steel wool. No matter how many dead or dying animals Agnus extracted, there always seemed to be one more with the tenacity to sink its little nails into the walls.

Agnus often felt he was the sort of man who things happened to, not who did things of his own accord. The rats, the lawn, and now this pan seemed to be plotting against him. Well, not this time. If he couldn’t assert control over a piece of cookware, what kind of a person was he?

He was brought out of his reverie by a sharp pain in his hand and looked down, realizing with a muted despair that there had been very little change, except for a fine cut the steel wool had made across his palm. It wasn’t bleeding, but it smarted like a papercut when he pushed against it with his thumb. Time for a new plan.

Agnus didn’t often use his dishwasher. It had come with the house, but it added fifty dollars or so to his utilities bill. This, however, was a special case.

On the top shelf of the pantry, Agnus found an almost-full package of Cascade dish pods, which he stared at doubtfully. It had been almost a year since he’d bought them. Could dish soap go bad? What did it matter if it could? Old dish soap is still dish soap. It would still clean the dishes, right? He shrugged, popped a pod in the soap slot, and began to load the dishwasher. The pan, of course, got the prime real estate in the middle of the bottom tray. It would be a waste of water and electricity if he only washed the pan, so in went his dirty plates and silverware, old coffee cups and cereal bowls strewn about the house, some tupperware from the fridge holding moldy food, and a wine glass he’d

forgotten in the bathroom. It had spilled and stained the floor and counter crimson, but that wasn’t the focus right now. Right now, he was going to run the dishwasher, and that pan was going to get what it had coming.

Glancing once more at the scum, he kicked the dishwasher shut and squinted at the blinking orange display.

DELICATES—STANDARD WASH—POWER WASH——HOT—COLD——START

A good power wash on hot should do it. He selected his settings and sat back on his heels as the washer began to whir. He wasn’t quite sure what went on in dishwashers, but he didn’t trust them much. The machine would give every dish the same choreographed treatment, but what was it? Splashing the dishes with water? Throwing some soap on them and spraying it off? This was another reason he always did his own dishes. He couldn’t trust a stupid machine with no capacity to discern if one dish had a stubborn spot clinging to the bottom of it, holding out against his best efforts, like it had a mind of its own and was using its power to enact some sort of cosmic punishment upon Agnus, despite how much he’d had to deal with lately, ambivalent to his struggles—

Agnus realized his face was so close to the dishwasher that his nose was touching the settings display, staining his vision orange. He shook himself, stood, and surveyed the overgrown backyard once more. While he was waiting and still had daylight, he might as well get that done, too. Sighing, he went to go look for his shoes.

Fifteen minutes and one pair of shoes later, Agnus was walking his mower out. It was old and rusted, handed down by the previous owners of the house, but it worked. As he bent down to pull the chord, Agnus felt his eyes drawn to the rust, which clung to the mower the same deceptively brittle way the burnt spot was stuck to the pan. The engine finally started up, and he felt his eyes flick away to glance at the kitchen window. The room was still bathed in the same orange glow from the dishwasher.

The motor stalled. Agnus sighed and bent back over. A few tugs on the chord, and finally it roared to life again. Mowing his lawn when it was this overgrown was an arduous task, and not going as well as he would have hoped. The grass was so thick that it was impossible to cut through quickly. Instead of leaving behind a flat, clean lawn, Agnus was leaving more of a chaotic hackjob, rolling over hidden branches and bushes and even dead animals that had gotten tangled in the thicket and strangled to death attempting to escape. Agnus felt a drop of sweat drip down his neck despite the cool air. He was trying his best to mind the backyard, but every few moments he had to redirect his thoughts away from the damn dishwasher.

The urge grew stronger with every passing second, settling uneasily

somewhere below his stomach. A restlessness crawled up and down his spine as the kitchen window steadily glowed brighter and stronger in the fading sunlight.

He could feel his conviction slipping as he watched the light grow more vivid. It couldn’t hurt, could it? Just to peek at the washer’s progress? Surely it wouldn’t. If it was helping, he could shut the thing and let it finish. If not, he’d be able to tell; he could just take the pan out and try something else.

On the other hand, interrupting the cleaning process was bad, right? He’d barely given the washer a chance; he should just wait and let it cycle through.

But what would it hurt, just to peek?

That thought continued to thrum at the back of his mind as he drove the mower around his yard, no longer paying attention to its course. He drove over a rock. It clanged around in the clippings bag, probably damaging the inner workings of the machine.

What would it hurt, what would it hurt…

He hit a mound of dirt, clogging the blades. They rattled in place angrily.

What would it hurt, what would it hurt…

The motor finally stalled, but Agnus was long gone, unable to control himself any longer, nearly tearing the door off its hinges as he went to check on the pan. Mud and grass accompanied him into the kitchen, and he skidded when he stopped in front of the dishwasher, filling his vision with an orange blaze so bright he had to scrabble along the counter to find his way to the handle of the door separating him from the pan.

He ripped into the washer and it screeched, billowing out a cloud of searing steam that singed his skin and turned the small kitchen humid. Agnus stared into the washer, and the sight that greeted him made the bottom of his stomach drop out.

The stain hadn’t been cleared away, it had spread. It now covered the entire bottom of the pan, dripping from where it had been tilted down, pouring black slop onto the dishwasher floor. Worst of all, the gunk had spread to the other plates, staining them a foul, smoggy grey.

Agnus picked up the pan and curled around it, rubbing at the burned material, just to find an edge, or wear through to one by force. It fought back, chafing the tips of his fingers, ripping open the cut in his palm. He moved to his knuckles and when all of those were bloody and oozing from the friction, he began to pick at the residue with his nails, absolutely convinced that the scum could simply be peeled away if he could just find that edge.

Agnus didn’t know how long he sat there, his blood staining the yellow linoleum a nauseating rusty brown. It was long enough for the light filtering through the dusty window to dim so that he was lit only by the pulsing glow of

the interrupted dishwasher. As his last nail split down the middle, pushing up a raw mass of angry flesh, a desperate wail escaped his throat. Scratching at the pan with his bloody, nail-less stubs, he set about gnawing at the scum, gnawing and licking and biting, rubbing his nose in his own mess of tears, blood, and saliva. It was his pan, his property, he controlled it, and he would not be taking this blatant disrespect lightly.

He cast his eyes around the kitchen, settling back on the sink. If water made the pan stain things black, that meant that something had to be coming off. He’d had the right idea, but the wrong execution. It was better not to trust the help of machines. This was his property; only he knew what to do with it.

Agnus jumped up and cranked on the tap. It ran cold, then warm, then hot, but it wasn’t enough. The dishwasher had been hot. This water needed to be scalding. He continued to run the water over his hand as steam began to rise. After several minutes, he finally extracted his hand. The skin was stretched pink and tight, and when he formed it into a fist, it broke along the seams and began to ooze with blood and pus. Perfect!

In went the pan, screaming as it came into contact with the boiling water. Agnus grabbed a rag from the side of the sink and plunged both hands in, scrubbing rhythmically. The water in the pan clouded until he could no longer see the bottom. Agnus watched in horror as the water overflowed, staining the bottom of the sink the same rotten color as the dishes. His eyes crawled back to the pan, cold fear lodging in his throat as he took his hands out of the water. Sure enough, the rag he had been using was now coal black, and his hands were black and grey and brown all the way up to the elbows, mottled with unnatural shadows cast by the pulsing light of the dishwasher.

He screamed, but it was no use. He hadn’t gone hot enough. He could no longer use water, water only gave it more power. Pulling at his hair with stubby, dripping hands, he backed away from the sink until he hit the wall in the next room. What was hotter than the water? What could he possibly use that could get hot enough to...His gaze fell upon the fireplace.

There was no firewood in it, but this didn’t matter. The chair in his living room had a broken leg anyway, and he had matches.

There it was, his final refuge. With the pan in his hands, he stood before the roaring flames, compelled by their inviting light. Nothing could stain a fire. Agnus plunged the pan into the flames with both hands, and began, once more, to pick at its surface. The delicious smell of meat cooking in its own fat filled the living room. Agnus’ melted skin and roasted muscles dripped down in tender morsels from their bones, hitting the pan, sizzling and sticking there. He pulled one hand from the fire, watching it bubble and ooze, and brought it to his lips, biting down, eyes rolling back as the juices ran over his lips.

The fire celebrated with him, dancing in his eyes as he stripped the

flesh from his hand. Agnus felt himself leaning in, letting its tongues lick at his face and pull at his clothes, finally surrendering to the warmth and climbing inside the fireplace.

And as he rested, roasting in the flames of his own creation, he smiled—he had no choice, the flesh was melting from his cheeks—and felt, finally, powerful.

Maeve Aickin

VILLANELLE 1/1

When I die, you will find a resolution. There are many secret shapes of grief yet each is a ratio of pain to confusion.

Go outside. Hang your tongue and seek ablution where the sky cleaves and rain beads your brow like sweat. When I die, you will find a resolution.

Go to sleep. Relish the tender illusion of a half-life dream about my childhood pet then wake at eight impaled by pain and confusion.

Say only “yes.” Welcome the intrusion of bad sex, pasta, angels, Marx, the internet; to stay alive, you will make a resolution.

Go to church. Let the knots in you loosen. Tell the old folks a story of how we met as they tug their hearing aids in confusion.

If I had croaked first, you’d leave no challenge unmet. Instead, I sit at a desk and count up my regrets, because you are dead and there is no resolution

Berna Da’Costa

I was always a hungry girl. The doctor said that in the delivery room, I ate the light right out of my mother’s eyes and then smiled to share some with my father. I only cried in her arms. They took me home and I made a meal of their peace.

My mother seemed to stand in the kitchen all day, softly humming the hymns they sang that week at church as she walked with the cutting board to the stove, where I sat, in between the wet guts of a tomato that still glistened on her knife and blue flame. She opened the windows when the smoke and the spices started to make me cough. She showed me how to taste curry, poured a drop of it into the riverbed of her palm and raised it to my mouth. Her bangles rushed down her wrist, making a sound like clinking glass. I stuck my tongue out and pressed it flat against her skin, licking like I was trying to redraw the lines of her future so that they all pointed toward me, until my tongue was in the air and curling up to my nose. Her food was always too sweet, even though on Saturdays she didn’t sleep—I’ve seen her, her hands folded on her belly like she was lying in a coffin instead of a bed, her eyes watching mildew engulf the ceiling—so that on Sunday she was awake before the sun and the morning birds and the horn of the mailman, so that she didn’t have to wait for my father to get out of the bathroom, so that she arrived at the fish market before the other haggling wives to take her pick of the tarla, her favorite fish. She met those fish before she met God, their flesh as salty as the ocean they came from. But her food was still sweet. My mother said it was because my father likes his food sick with sugar, his meat like candy, his oil like honey. The day she got married, she tried to pack her suitcase with salt, but her mother dumped it down the toilet and told her she must honor her husband’s home now.

Those days I sat with her in the kitchen, I think I was happy. While she cooked, she fed me slices of beetroot and carrots and the tips of our fingers would turn pink and all the carrots would be gone. By the time dinner was ready, we had a frizzy halo of hair around our faces and I didn’t want to eat anything more because my stomach was already full. Then one day I woke up hollowed. I went to the kitchen when my mother wasn’t there and ate everything. Slurped ketchup straight from the packet, scraped my teeth up frozen sticks of butter, scooped up milk powder and jars of pickle. I sucked on tamarind until

my tongue burned. A box of those heavily processed sugar cookies that dry up your mouth. I devoured them by the time my mother came home and found me lapping up the sugar in between the cracks in the floor. She got down on her knees and stuck her hand in my mouth, picked out every speck of sugar like it was dirt in a scraped knee, reached further down and checked the density of my heart. I felt it lift in my chest, and I floated for a moment, floated into the space between her patience and her forgiveness, then she took her hand away and it dropped like stone.

My mother once told me that if you swallow a fish thorn, it’ll plant in your stomach and grow like a tree. I imagine that’s what my hunger would’ve looked like. Thorns poking out of my belly button, my nostrils, the tips of my fingers. Nothing else seemed to fill me up. I began to chew on the rounded edges of plastic bottles. The glue on the back of new credit cards, as good as bubblegum. Pencil grips, straws, shopping tags, the spoons from Thai restaurants because they bent easier in my mouth. The best part of a lollipop became the stick. The slow task of its obliteration let me lose focus. I pinched the tube of plastic with the front of my teeth and grinded it down until it was smooth and my jaw was sore. My mother worried, and I tried to consume that too, which tasted something like the sound of her voice telling me to be careful when I crawled to the top of the stairs and dangled my legs between the banisters so that when she found me, she found my feet first, alive to the toes, disobeying the ground. My father took pride in my magnificent appetite and hand-fed me all of his dreams. In one, I am a doctor. In another, I am the tallest kid in school. In another, I am a pilot and I fly him home whenever his parents’ garden needs to be watered. The one where he was standing in the audience with a camera was the most delicious. He liked my big eyes and the way my anger spit. He believed I was great, greater than a son, so I heaped luck and happiness into my hands and licked them clean.

And then I threw it all up. I lost enough weight that my father fed his stubbornness to the stray dogs. He became humble. He let me have my own dreams. I slept. I walked on the ground. My mother made me eat. She marinated tarla in swaths of masala and fried it in a thin pool of coconut oil. She left nothing for herself. After dinner, she peered over the frame of her reading glasses and said, show me your plate, show me you’ve digested all my labor, my sweat, even the strands of hair I lost in the process, and appreciated it in your stomach. There, at the edge, a speck of rice. Leave nothing but thorns, they’ll hurt you, but eat everything else. It is good for you. I have made it, so it is good. She told me to remember, remember the taste of the water in her womb, remember where I came from, remember I used to cry to sleep next to her, remember her hand pushing my hair away from my face, remember that I belong to her and not to the world, so I finally swallowed those words she first whispered to me when I cried for the first time

in the hospital to show her the magnitude of life she had given me. How gently her lips fed my mouth. Today I am like God, looking at the world he made, and how glad I am to see that it is good.

Micaela Francis

AFRO SPEAKS BACK

you never want to comb me / i was revered in the seventies / there were movements formed for me / now i’m constantly trapped in synthetic braids / i miss defying gravity / invincible to the whispers of the wind / my ends haven’t been trimmed in seven months / you might as well take a razor to your head / buzz me off down to the scalp / you’ll look just like your dad / bald head glistening under the flickering light bulb at Tilden Street / i hate when we go there / your Aunt Hazel makes weird comments / she says she had good hair when she was young / seems like she doesn’t think i’m good hair / i think i look pretty good (sometimes) / you know your brother’s hair is longer than yours / we should try a new oil concoction / jojoba, peppermint, lavender / please don’t put me into a bun again / remember when you used to swim / you had great diving form / i’m not scared of the water / yes i tangle and knot / thick roots / strong roots / get your fingers stuck in me / play with me / i wonder how dreadlocks would feel / maybe that’s something we should try / or Bantu knots / i miss when your mom twisted me up / no one else can touch me / i love when you wear me out / i stretch up to meet the sun / she tinges me brown /

Naomi Rottman

JOURNAL ENTRIES ON LOVE AND THE LESBIAN CHOP

I cut my ex’s hair every week with kitchen scissors and their dad’s razor. I cut slowly alongside my fingertips, I pin sections up and ensure the line of their undercut is precise. I trim it for them every week, before I texture my own bangs. It’s silly to pay for a small haircut.

I eat all of my breakfast, but I have a headache anyway. I don’t sleep well in anybody’s bed but my own, not yet. I pull their piercing eyes from deep in the back of my head, and toss them out of my window into the ocean. Splash. They have new tattoos I haven’t touched.

I sit at the bar on Long Island sipping my fifth free drink and the bartender says she needs a haircut. I say: Hey, I can cut your hair. She doesn’t believe me. I pass her a bite of lobster ravioli over the garnishes. I feel older than I used to. Hungrier. More adventurous. Less eager to prove myself.

I butter bread for people who will become good friends. The one I like is flirting with someone else, who likes me, I think. How many of us will we cram into this bed? I paint someone’s nails. I say: You should let me put cinnamon sugar on your toast for you.

I picture us laying beside each other in the grass. Crinkling bags of snacks, sucking salty residue off my fingers to flip pages of a new book. Reading so fast my breath can’t keep up, or not reading, but paying attention. Maybe to the wrong things. My hair has gotten long.

I stand in my mint shoebox of a room, with a flooding shower and a microwave with fingerling potatoes in it. I fiddle with my sneakers on the train. I’m late for class. I’m holding myself higher and sitting wider. I feel better. Call me sometime. It would be a nice surprise.

Tula Campan

Lucia

Marra

ONE SEASON IN INWOOD, NEW YORK

For half of the summer months, my air conditioner was leaking tons of water. So much water that the wooden floors are now warped underneath my window. July made me turn it on anyway. Then I decided to wedge a towel underneath it. Then I ruined most of my towels. I asked advice from people I know. My friend at work told me that it happens to her unit when it’s overworked. She’ll turn it off for a few hours and it’ll be fine. I feigned like I was receiving good news, but deep down, I knew that I wasn’t gonna have the same luck.

I finally decided I could live without it. Besides, it wasn’t that hard: getting home at four in the morning, ripping off my clothes and passing out in a steamy, stale apartment, waking in a pool of sweat and realizing it’s almost time to leave again. Outside feels like tepid water. Whenever I walk on the swollen, uneven panels underneath my air conditioner, I think to myself: “I’m leaving in a couple months. Who cares. This apartment is a piece of shit anyway.”

On most mornings I only leave myself time for a few errands. I haul large loads down the block and past the bodega, where the men outside have leered at young women in the same way for almost five years. They’re still there when I walk back to dry my clothes and back again to pick them up. The heat from the pile is dry and hot. When I’m almost out of time I run to the cleaners then to the train, only leaving myself two minutes because I know that’s exactly how long it takes me if I sprint. If I have time to walk there leisurely, I feel lucky and reward myself with seltzer from the corner store. It seems I’m increasingly impatient with every passing month.

When I get off at Fulton street, I step off of the crowded A train and into what feels like a sauna where all the humans are made of garbage. On my way to work I cross giant intersections and small corridors. Through large heaps and piles of rat-infested god-knows-what that mutate into mountainous piles at night. When I turn the corner onto Pearl Street, a four-story gust of fryer grease and meat fat wash over me for about ten seconds. I’ve come to know this corner well and now hold my breath before it arrives. Everything seems more revolting in the suffocating heat. Even things I find amusing make me cringe, like the

snake shaped calzones all coiled up in the window of the pizzeria. I walk into the smoke shop to buy a vape since I can’t smoke on the 64th floor.

The elevator is already tight when I get in. One person is holding a tray of about thirty quails, all shiny and stuffed, with their legs bound together, almost like they’re going to pop. I hate that I’m surrounded by death so I breathe in deeply, close my eyes, and try not to look. We stop in the basement and another load of people pushes us further toward the back of the elevator. The quails are now being held way up above our heads. A chef’s voice from the back says sardonically: “At least if the elevator gets stuck, we’ll all get salmonella.”

As I run around for the next nine hours aiming to please a fussy FiDi clientele, I pray for thunder and rain. It brings everyone inside. Now the rain is a personal act of terror, carried out to ruin their evening and their Gucci shoes. This gives me a smattering of personal enjoyment. Sometimes I’ll go back outside with no one there and watch the water make all the expensive tables and chairs look glum and useless. Clouds cover the tops of some buildings and there’s a threat of thunder you can sense from the purple hue of the sky. The warm mist blazes through the cold rain. Everything is quiet and it’s just me and the pitter patter for a few moments.

Today is sticky and humid. The kind of weather that begs for chaos. The worst weather to sit with your thoughts. Today I had the most thoughts to sit with. The same ones, circling and sticking, springing around in my brain. It’s too crowded up there. I can’t wait for winter, when the cold will encompass all my feelings and freeze over most of my problems. The razor sharp wind is gonna slash my face and getting warm will be the only necessity. I try not to think of the other stuff, sludging home through the night slush, alone.

K. Annie Bingham

INTERTIDAL WET DREAM

Watercolors, 6x6 inches

K. Annie Bingham

THE NIGHT IS THE PORTAL, THE EXCUSE, THE BLANKIE, THE CLOAK Encounters In Quarantine, Nepal

Unwanted viscera doggy-bagged, dogs in packs, tobacco packets in the puddles of late monsoon: all that rose from the streets and saturated my body when I stepped through the night again. When I returned to my cot I couldn’t shake the presence of someone blue jabbing into my side, all cheekbones and wrist-knuckles, someone infuriatingly unconscious cresting my unrestable body. When I am restless, this is who I wrestle with. My cot felt so hard I must have slid onto the floor, but it pinched under me still, reverberating with my heat, compressing the hardwood floor below me and the hardwood within the cotton sack of me, my piecey bones, which I think would creak if unmuffled. At some point, the clock stopped ticking.

I’m a little cat again. When I see the little cats, I don’t feel so bad about also pacing, sitting, tilting my ears towards the stovetop, waiting for milk. Man Bahadur (Brave Soul) asked me if I wanted milk and I lied and said I didn’t.

My next guest was a writer. He hovered above and to the left of my horizontality, gesticulating through his teeth. He must have been clenching his eyebrows together to manifest blood flow in his third eye, or let it merge into a monobrow. I could see his long, thin fingers: waxy moons at the base of each nail bed. I knew him from a video on my laptop. In the video his voice was so soft I thought he was pretend—pretending like disjointed flower petals all sitting there on the base, waiting to be picked whole and flutter into pieces. The lengths of his fingers served as stilts from which the crown of each could preach. The fingertips wobbled with height and caught themselves periodically on the glass between us. While the writer glowed across the screen, the bugs splayed still.

Brennan

I have been trying to articulate why being at the restaurant was when we were most like family. Why when we got home, our lives stopped overlapping. Trees that crowded the backroads turned a spritely green and froze over again, and on particularly windy nights we had to take the long route, martyred branches sheathing our way home. With you, everything has a reason.

Year after year in your blue Toyota, we took the winding roads too fast, imagining a world where we lived in one of the mansions on the lake. When I set the table now, it is with a sense of pride. I know, despite common sense, that the fork goes on the left and the knife goes on the right. We’d discussed the incongruity of this many times on the slow Sunday drive to work.

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I was nine when you first taught me there was a place for everything, an order: placemat, creased paper napkin to the right, utensils laid in a neat row on top, a vessel for accompanying liquidation at four settings. We did this every night. At the time, trivets were of the essence—we brought everything to the table. Starch, veg, salad dressing, salt and pepper, and a green glass bottle for you.

I took the tops off for you. I collected the shiny omens and bound them into a coaster. The syrupy hot glue coated my fingertips with a slight sting and I took great satisfaction in peeling it off. I gave you the coaster for Christmas. I wondered if it was proof that we could see each other.

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Our nightly congregation was a gamble—as if there were landmines in the mashed potatoes. You sat at the head of the table in your infinite solitude as we spun out chaos. My mother insisted we pray before eating. My sister’s rapid speech shortened to fractured sentences once she realized it was safer that way. Forks flew across your grandfather’s handmade napkin holder. I tapped my nails repeatedly against my water glass, hoping you’d let me excuse myself without finishing my mushy carrots. You and I would sit for hours, stomachs full on

on a stubborn refusal to compromise. For better or worse, I was your mirror.

As we aged, we stopped bringing food to the table. We left everything in the kitchen to streamline the cleanup. Shared meals got quicker, rarer, and more volatile. I ripped my hair out between soggy gasps for air and you told me it was bad etiquette.

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At the restaurant it was different. Behind the line, we made efficiency out of the chaos, in all of its familiar and familial forms. Sometimes, I fear I’ll be pouring myself into the pleasures of strangers for the rest of my life, and so your fate will become my own. Or maybe I am more afraid of what happens if I stop. Who are we if not mise en place and meat temperatures and sushi mats?

The final summer I spent tucked into the corner of that industrial kitchen, a mistake was death. The grill left scabbed burns on my wrists. Melted butter from sautée pans was endlessly forged into my pores. I could hear the sound of the ticket machine printing morse code into my dreams. When I was out to eat, I had to stop myself from standing at attention when I heard a bell from the kitchen.

You thought I should know better. I knew what you taught me. How to grill a burger to a mouth-watering medium rare: focus on your voice, memorize how long five minutes takes, even when it’s forever, keep the sweat from my forehead contained by a tight bandana, always have backups, tuck my knuckles in before making the first cut.

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We ran the soft-shell crab special in July. We held them over the sink wearing latex gloves and sunk dull scissors into their faces. All the ruined eyes looked up at me blankly from their stainless steel limbo. The bartender filled a plastic quart container with soapy beer from the tap. We added flour and dunked the crabs in one by one, tapping the excess mixture off of limbs like wet sand from fingers.

When I sacrificed them to the fryolator, I thought I could hear them screaming. It was, technically, the fervent rejection of their water-filled bellies to the bubbling ochre.

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Hot oil spattered my exposed wrists. I swallowed my own internal waters with stoicism. My station was always searing alive, but I carried on, meticulously cutting turkey clubs into quarters and garnishing entrees with fresh herbs as puckering remnants of heat bubbled beneath my skin. Your guidance to run the blisters under cool water came exacted and even. Your hands never

stopped moving with precision as you spoke.

I noticed there was a solidarity in our forearms, the way our flesh was imbued with deep pinks. We must have shared a secret revel in how our scars defined us. Tethered by those badges of honor, the way they proved our type of damage was hard won.

Samantha Nochimson

NOODLE BOWLS

Linocut print on cloth

Vi Kreifels

“I EAT THE RASPBERRIES OFF OF MY FINGERS SO THEY FEEL LOVED”

Acrylic on canvas, 24x30 inches

Maria Cecconello

SAUDADE

My best friend splits me a peach with her thumb as a parting gift, sits me In the bathtub and washes my hair, Divides it into two braids and I sleep with damp skin, Coddles me to sleep one last time.

Know my love is a bird splattered across a windshield, Hollow bones splintered and shattered But she lets me talk and talk over song bridges and party games, Finds beauty even where most everything is ugly and twisted and fragile

Drove us around the sunlit late afternoon before I left Past the landfill that used to be our school and the tidepool that used to be ocean, Sea withdrawing with warming

She walks around my room after I go and splits my things up in boxes Stakes claim on records and lace trims and coalesced nail polish

I listen to the song she loves, that she first showed to me On my living room floor while we tore into yellowtail and cuttlefish Then rewatch the movie that makes her cry every time, Makes her think of endings and tenderness

I cry in my college library like I’m watching it with her, She watches it alone in a different hemisphere.

At home we’d sleep in the same bed

Open windows letting in the bugs and the moist summer air Here, with my boots I sweep in the cold and crushed leaves, mud, ice Spend my time in cold brick hallways and spiral staircases, Unwinding every pattern I’ve fallen into

The word for this feeling only exists in our language and That makes it all hurt more, somehow.

We migrate apart under changing weather

Patchwork of songs on the radio that we loved at thirteen

Words now blurry and scattered

Sprout into different trees in separate states

The couch where we loved and laughed and cried collects

Dust at the crossroads down the street, Home is a building up in smoke

All my memories are buried in debris, makeshift stages and bleachers that don’t exist Soot clings to my skin like a souvenir

Shiny rental offices and artisanal coffee shops grow tall over a carcass

Nothing but concrete the grasslands we grew up in

Georgianna Besse

SIMPLE MATTER OF DEATH Micron and ink pens

Madeleine Eggen

PENCIL POEM

between a buttered spoon and half measure I tell her that change is the human condition and my hands are never in the right place. she’s washing and that’s real love. I think it is easier to type it because you don’t have to face the marks you made, plus cruel looks much kinder in pencil. let’s kiss in the front basket of a bicycle or much too late, dry mornings turn damp elbows and a blueberry buckle, folded summer jeans that billow behind me.

I am a very good woman who was an even better girl with a virginal pen, these pages, I hate you so we paint chapters on the wall. lately I have knelt against the earth, both of us wet, in my morning cup I ask for a coincidence. see us bare-bodied on the dead rooftop garden, a dangling secret and felted breath that carry in from the creek, we brush noses, grandmother clogs. late afternoon is winter magic that stretches thick black wool shadows, a breathing life curling in on itself and I am her gray-winged messenger, lying until wake.

Fronia Kemper

LEMON DROPS

When my brother and I go to the hospital, we walk the halls like models practicing their runway poses. We walk the halls like middle aged women who jog with little pink weights, and we chat about our imaginary teenage sons who vape at school, spend all their time in their rooms, and don’t talk to us. We get in the elevator and push all the buttons.

We go to the hospital gift shop. We try on pairs of reading glasses. We try on hats. He tries on a puffy black hat that makes him look like a train conductor. When I take a photo of him wearing it, it makes him look like a train conductor who does not want his photo taken. I have a thing about lip balm. I like the ones they sell at the hospital. They smell like grapefruit and the good ones are soft. The bad ones are waxy and taste like strong honey.

I have a thing about lip gloss too. I buy several. Glittery, pink, gritty, and chemical. They come in fun containers shaped like fruit. One looks like a hard plastic cherry. Another is apple-shaped, and that one tastes really sweet. You have to put it on with your fingers.

My brother drags me to the cafeteria and we pick out gumbo, cornbread, pizza, sushi, chocolate cake, chocolate pudding, chocolate chip cookies, Dr. Pepper, iced tea: sweet, iced tea: unsweet (by accident), and sometimes a few bags of chips. We try it all, and make faces, and I remember how Mom said, it’s a hospital, the food shouldn’t be good, it isn’t the most important thing. It’s not the priority here. Maybe I wish the hospital was a restaurant instead.

Sometimes we save the iced teas for walking. They come in plastic bottles, slippery with condensation, a bit square. We walk with them in our hands, pumping them like little pink weights. We call each other Darlene. We discuss the PTA.

Sometimes we go to the skybridge and look out the big windows. We see the sky, and the brown buildings. Other hospitals, all around us. A sea of hospitals. An army of hospitals. It doesn’t feel like there’s anyone inside of them. It doesn’t feel like anyone is in our hospital either. We brush he says. Then he sees what we’ve done and curses loudly, then rushes out again. Once he’s gone

we burst out laughing. I want to run after him and hit him. I want to run after him and fall on my knees.

We have a photoshoot. We are models, in the hospital. I take pictures of my brother with the statues of the children outside. The children are supposed to be playing, but they’re so still that they look scared. My brother pretends he’s talking to them. He daps them up. He takes pictures of me on the suitcase trolleys (the hospital has them, like it’s a hotel or something). I’m wearing my white dress with little red flowers on it. I post the pictures on Instagram and my friends tell me I look hot.

We go to the giftshop again. My brother looks through the socks. He buys cool socks, popcorn socks. They are striped red and white, like a bag of popcorn, and they have the word POPCORN up and down the sides. I buy a bag of lemon drops. They’re not for me. I consider buying a tiny sewing kit. That would be for me. I don’t buy it.

There’s a Starbucks, but it’s always closed. We walk past it. I say, hey, what if that was open? He says, yeah, what if it was?

Sometimes we sneak down hallways we aren’t supposed to see. It isn’t really on purpose. We get lost. Then the walls are yellow instead of white, and plastic sheets, or plywood, cover the doorways. Sometimes it’s an unfinished hallway, with the plastic and the plywood, but sometimes it’s just empty. It doesn’t feel like a part of the hospital. It doesn’t feel like the place where you go to get better. It feels like the place where something has already died, and now it remains, lingering. My brother always wants to look around, get into it. Usually, we split.

We go to the cafeteria again. I drag him there. He says no, I don’t wanna, but he follows me. Earlier was lunch. Now, we eat dinner. Dinner is always smaller. We remember lunch, and are not eager to repeat it.

By now, we are bored. We sit in the middle of the floor. We make the doctors and nurses and patients walk around us. We sigh, like we can’t believe this is the hospital, this is all there is to do here.

This is how my brother and I go to the hospital.

When Dad goes to the hospital, he sits in bed and watches baseball on television. He wears a blue gown over his clothes. He eats a fruit cup. When he tries to sleep, doctors come in and wake him up and ask him questions, or someone places an IV wrong and gets blood all over the sheets, or he can’t sleep because his stomach hurts, or he can’t sleep because he’s infected this time, or he can’t sleep because his head is cold, or he can sleep, and he does, and he wakes up to a bag of lemon drops on his tray table, looking at him forlornly, all yellow and small.

This is how Dad goes to the hospital. We’ve all got it down pretty good.

Kate Williams

KIDS AND THE CAMPOSANTO

WE WERE KIDS

Back then, the air was smoother and colors were brighter. Long before right and wrong were canyons carved away by experiences, back when we were still drawing conclusions with sticks in the sand. Then––way back then––we did not waste our breath on work.

We fought over serving sizes of ice cream and gave our mom headaches. We ran until our lungs burned and danced to The Boomtown Rats half-naked on table tops. We were a bunch of billy goats: mean, dirty, and funny-looking.

Everything was not enough. Not enough tastes, not enough hugs, not enough love. We were a litter of puppies howling for a mother who’d been bred too many times to be able to tell our screams apart.

We waged wars in the woods. We fought dirty. We threw pinecones and mud and the occasional treacherous stone. We lapped at our open wounds, swallowed blood, stuck our cherry red tongues out at each other, we looked like wild animals.

We made finger paint masterpieces and popped tar bubbles until our hands and feet turned black. We made mosaics from broken chalk. We played Hunger Games, Monopoly, Charades, Crazy Eights, 54-Card Pickup. We bought fake cigarettes to puff on and pretended to be PI’s, like in a Prairie Home Companion.

We loved our mom with all of our beings. We loved her smell, the way her jacket retained the cold winter air and froze our tiny faces when we buried them in her stomach to snort up her perfume. We loved her hair, her voice, the way she wrapped herself around us. We were safer on her lap than any other place on Earth, and we gazed at her belly with nostalgia and longing.

We wanted to crawl back into her, we wanted to be always with her, we wanted her to sit on the end of our beds and read us bedtime stories. We wanted all of her, all of the time, all alone, all to ourselves. We shared these wants like we shared life, we knew how soft our neediness made us, so we mocked each other for it.

We spoke broken, we said things wrong, we shouted instead of talking. We ran on our hands and knees, bore our bony spines toward the sun. We

chased cars, hooted and hollered after them while pounding on our naked chests. We had no inside, we lived on the outside, and we used our voices accordingly.

We got dirt under our fingernails from digging holes in search of treasure and killed gods with our bare hands. Our naked bodies were everything we needed: finger forks, palm goblets, bony elbow bludgeons, teeth like daggers, long toe grabbers—we knew how to adapt.

We drew up maps, declared territories under our names, christened ourselves kings of everything. We owned the world as we knew it. We cut ties, disowned one another, we watered down our blood. We made peace.

We were witches, librarians, warlocks, heroes, firefighters, villains, astronauts, monsters, teachers, angels, rogues, ruffians, riff-raffs, we were misbehaving. We were acting out, running late, almost done, doing well, doing bad, being loud, playing rough, dirtying up, we were children.

On summer afternoons, we were sticky from the humidity, angry from the heat, suffocating from boredom. We became bandits, a handful of thieves rifling through our mom’s purse for pocket change. We’d steal silver coins still cold from the shadowy corners of her leather tote and stuff them deep into our pockets with deep-seated shame and anxious excitement.

We’d take out Dad’s bike, the nice bike, one of us perching on the handlebars, one of us dangling off the back, one of us pedaling the impossible weight, and two of us jogging alongside. We’d sing made-up songs, tell each other stories, and pretend we were pilgrims.

We overstayed our welcome in the drugstore that still sold penny candy. We’d touch everything, soak up the A/C, and ask to try ice cream we couldn’t afford. We’d sit on the floor and count our loot, we’d promise never to loot again, we’d cross our fingers and our bare toes.

We’d stretch eight nickels, three dimes, sixteen pennies, and two shiny silver quarters into Twizzler ropes, Swedish Fish, and Now & Laters. We got grabby with our treasure, we said thank you to the judgy shop clerk because we were thieves with good manners. We sat outside and divided it all up, we were vultures, and we cried when we got less.

We’d bike back home, loud and happy with pinkish cheeks from the sun and mouths agape, smacking our sugar-laced lips together.

We’d contemplate Christmas lists, Halloween costumes, Lord of the Flies, what it would be like if we were rich and had our own rooms. We’d call dibs on seats in the car, push, shove, scratch, and squeal, we’d hit each other and claim ownership over each other’s ideas. We’d cry together, make amends, and swear on pinky fingers. We broke oaths.

We wrote plays, drew pictures, made movies, designed outfits, sang songs, started empires. We were sons of sailors. We lied, we stole, we cursed, we

made crude jokes, we resorted to violence.

Sometimes, we’d be overlooked. Sometimes, we’d be convicted of crimes we didn’t commit. We’d get punished: spankings, lashings, wooden spoons on open palms. We’d shriek and sob and wail and sink into embarrassment. We’d fight back for each other, take blame, share penances. We were young then, real young.

We held our breath when things got bad. When Mom got quiet, when Dad got red and his eyes got bulgy. We liked it best when he had rum, when he had us place our tiny feet in his palms so he could lift us up into the sky. We soared like Jesus on the cross, our arms outstretched, our smiles so wide we feared we’d rip open at the seams.

On hazy mornings when it was warm enough to go barefoot, we’d make fairy houses out of twigs and rocks with moss roofs, and we would never wash our hands before breakfast, even when we saw deer droppings. We ate like we were proud of it, quick and fast and loud. We spilled cups, we knocked over trays, we put our elbows on the table and shared toothbrushes.

We made boats from beer cans and twine. We sunk battleships and broke bones. We made bandaids from cobwebs and saved up box tops. We started fires with magnifying glasses. We opened our eyes underwater even though it burned. We doggy-paddled, drowned each other, made mud pies, carved pumpkins, and cooked the seeds with olive oil and salt.

And when we limped back home from afternoons spent doing things we shouldn’t have been doing, our mother still loved us with her entire being. We basked in the warmth of her undying, unfaltering, unconditional love and knew that if there was a God, he was made in her image.

We borrowed cups of sugar, used neighbors’ phones to call our mom and ask her when she was coming home, and walked down to the end of our lane to wait for her. We dreamed of her smell and her smile while we sang songs and taunted our monstrous shadows. We made trees into urinals and picked apples, peaches, pears, and mulberries. We ate honeysuckle, plain popcorn, and generic brand popsicles.

We got sunburns, more freckles, and natural highlights. We shared secrets, names, stories, and clothes. We held hands, cuddled after nightmares, clung to each other when it was cold, clutched our sweaty-sticky-dirty hands together in a long daisy chain to cross the street together, each one of us looking in different directions for oncoming cars.

Our shoes had holes, our hands were dirty, our smiles were semi-toothless, our legs maps of bruises and cuts, our arms covered in mosquito bites, our hair scented with soil and crowned with sticks, our knees knobby, our fingers cold to the touch, our hearts overflowing with everything.

We were happy, we were mad, we were sick, we were lost, we were funny, we were sad, we were kids.

MOTHERHOOD

Kayla Martinez

Flower petals and acrylic on canvas

Summer evenings on the back deck, my dad chips golf balls to his mini green Black Keys, Born Ruffians, Bob Marley: three little birds. Two little bats sleep upside along the roof of my house, as the sun sets they glide over our heads, dropping down to us like fallen leaves. Mom said there were billions of raspberries in the garden today. I shove handfuls in my mouth, bright warm red, my lips bloody sap. The white pitbull used to chase the golf balls down the grass. The brown one sat on the edge of the deck and barked her encouragements forward Too old, too tired and too fat to participate. I can still hear their phantom barks, and if I squint my eyes just enough I can see wagging tails peeking around corner walls. Dad loved those dogs, mom secretly loved them more. I told them when the dogs died I would probably die too, but I didn’t. I said it again when autumn came, but the trees died instead. Mom picked zucchinis from the garden and made zucchini bread. Dad said the Jets are gonna do better this season, And I’m feeling optimistic because I’m gonna be twenty-one next month. Twenty-one things I’m thankful for:

Zucchini bread.

CONTRIBUTORS’ BIOS

Emma Basco is a junior studying literature and writing. Originally from Sacramento, California, she is a writer, poet, avid reader, amateur artist, cat lover, hobby photographer, beginner crocheter, and recent fan of horror movies.

Georgianna Besse is a freshman who is interested in studying character design, creative writing, and Chinese. Some of her favorite things are the 2011 film Rango, the cheesecake brownies from Barb, and wasting her precious time playing Gacha Games.

K. Annie Bingham, class of 2023, is an artist of many sorts, and an ecological being. Curious about waste and rebirth, cohabitation, and the vibrancy of our inner eyelids, guts, dreams, et cetera.

Anna Brand is a junior, an athlete, and a self-proclaimed poet. She enjoys time outside, being with friends, and sushi dinners.

Eliya Brennan is a senior. After graduating, she plans to pursue a career in writing for TV. She is passionate about finding affordable housing in New York City, food & wine, and existentialism.

Mad Browning is a sophomore studying art history. They are the co-chair of Stitch & Bitch, SLC’s fiber arts club, and an avid grain elevator enthusiast.

Tula Campman is a sophomore. She is a multidisciplinary explorer in all areas, obsessed with creating new mediums by combining former traditional art forms.

Maria Cecconello, class of 2025, does science and sometimes writes silly little poems.

Madeleine Eggen is always picking things up off of the ground. Technically studying writing or doing little crafts depending on the day.

Micaela Francis is a senior studying literature and writing. She is a lover of beach days, afrobeats, and Toni Morrison.

Piper Gregoire is a freshman and please don’t leave me.

Olivia Harrison is a sophomore and an interdisciplinary visual artist.

Fronia Kemper enjoys writing magical realism, strange plays, absurdist poetry, and deeply personal essays. She also speaks a little Russian, plays a little piano, and drinks a little orange juice every single day. She chooses to write because people are beautiful and they won’t always accept the truth of that, but you can tell them when you write about them.

Vi Kreifels is a second-year enjoying making silly art full-time.

Dariya Kozhasbay is an artist and a good one at that, she can say that much. She is from Kazakhstan and she is nineteen. She is a sophomore, class of 2025, at Sarah Lawrence, where she keeps taking literature classes.

Hazel Lucey is a post-disciplinary artist and yogi whose heart beats for magenta, turquoise, and sunrise yellow pastels. At this moment, she’s probably laughing at her own furrowed brow as she tries to find one more noodle in a bowl of foggy vegetable broth.

Lucia Marra is a New Jersey native, resident of Sunnyside, Queens, and a senior at Sarah Lawrence College. In the past four years, her studies have led her through the fields of literature, geography, anthropology, photography, and creative writing.

Kayla Martinez is a junior who studies many disciplines within the creative arts. She has written several novels and a children’s book. She hopes to become an animator and write graphic novels after graduation.

Sparrow Murray is a third-year. Alongside her poetic practice, Sparrow studies art history, 20th century literature, and performance studies. She once had to confront a friend and say: “How could you disregard leaf morphology like this?”

Samantha Nochimson is a senior studying visual arts and literature. She was always told not to play with her food, but she still does.

Lily “Billy” Olson is a sophomore currently taking the course “Artists’ Books.” They love horror movies, comic books, and their cat, Bruce. Lily plans to make a career in film studies, curation, and preservation.

Naomi Rottman is a senior with bartending, server, and barista experience hoping she finds a bearable job postgrad. She is from Washington State, and studied writing and acting at Sarah Lawrence, an inspired decision.

Tessa “Tes” Schut is a freshman at Sarah Lawrence, which is a big change from her childhood growing up in the backwoods of rural Maryland. Tes is a middle child and has four other siblings who give her more than enough material to write about. Tes loves the simpler things in life: Phoebe Bridgers, the dark, complaining, shitty Kindle Unlimited erotica, vodka, shitposting, run-on sentences, and her mommy.

Rachel Wade is a sophomore studying writing and history. Her favorite things to write are comedy, horror, and comedic horror. She plans to spend this summer interning at Colombia and learning how to make better blintzes.

Kate Williams is a graduating senior of the Class of 2023, with concentrations in photography and the humanities.

Maeve Aickin is a sophomore and a fiction editor at the Review. Her ambitions include writing an Andrea Long Chu-style profile of Andrea Long Chu and deleting her Twitter account.

Abby Cohrs is a sophomore and a copyeditor for the Review concentrating in creative writing and literature. She will be studying abroad next year at Oxford. She likes birds.

Berna Da’Costa is a graduating senior who can’t get the smell of papaya out of her bag. Her ankles click. She’s written more interesting sentences. Wish her luck.

Imogen Drake is a first-year and a nonfiction editor for the Review.

Katherine Echeverri is a first-year student and an editor for the Review. She loves mid century architecture, orange segments, and being carefree.

Saskia Gori-Montanelli is a freshman and a copyeditor for the Review. She has her moments.

Theodore Heil is a sophomore and a poetry editor for the Review studying poetry and art history. He loves oranges, telling people he is from Pennsylvania, and taking long naps in the sun.

Auden Hubbard is a junior and a poetry editor for the Review. She enjoys art, strawberries, and brick buildings, and she plans to continue writing for as long as she is a human being who can do so.

Riddhi Kuthiala is a sophomore. Hopes to live, read, write and edit in New York City for the rest of her life.

Jamie Lenehan is a graduating senior and consulting fiction editor on the Review. She studies literature and will forever like books more than people (with the exception of Taylor Swift.)

Justin Liang is a sophomore and a multidisciplinary artist.

Aleks Omylak is a sophomore and a copyeditor for the Review studying creative writing and literature. She enjoys writing, dance, and collecting earrings.

Liza Rosen is a graduating senior from Southern California. She has been characterized as “chill” by other summer camp counselors and “a very industrious baby” by her beautiful mother.

Aurora Sharp is a first-year nonfiction editor for the Review. Her free time is full of podcasts, audiobooks, and art.

Lucille Whittier is a junior studying writing and literature. This is her first year working on the Review and she is very excited!

Skyler Young is a second-year student and a visual editor for the Review. He loves fungi, plants, and making 3D digital art.