Spectrum 2021 Summer Edition

SPECTRUM 2021 Summer Edition

College of Creative Studies University of California, Santa Barbara

PUBLICATION INFORMATION Poems, Prose, Scripts, and Art Copyright © their respective authors Entire contents Copyright © 2021 Spectrum Exquisite Corpse works Co-copyright © 2021 their respective authors No part of this publication (with the exception of short passages used in reviews) may be reproduced or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including but not limited to photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from Spectrum.

Prose and poems printed in size 12 Garamond font for body and footnotes, and size 13 for headers. “des cadavres exquis” was produced using images in the public domain and accessed via the Wikimedia Foundation, and one excerpt remixed from the Wellcome Trust under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.

Founded in 1957, Spectrum is a journal of literature and art published by the College of Creative Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Spectrum Summer is a new student-centric edition of Spectrum composed of art and literature by UCSB students. It was made and published over the course of Summer Session B, 2021.

For more details, visit our website: spectrum.ccs.ucsb.edu.

Our cover art is “One Foot Out” by Chace Duma.

ii // Spectrum

STAFF Editor-in-Chief // Kat Yuen Faculty Advisor // Rebbecca Brown Managing Editor // Lila Velasquez Singh Web Editor // Luc Le Copy Editors // Chloe Kerr-Stein, Levin Fetzer, Nele Ponce, Phil Arguin, Sophia Martinez Editorial Readers // Chloe Kerr-Stein, Levin Fetzer, Nele Ponce, Phil Arguin, Sophia Martinez Publishing Advisors // Kara Mae Brown

// iii

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR Once-upon-a-time, in addition to being a student-run literary journal, Spectrum also published the works of UCSB’s student writers. Of course, students have continued to have the option of submitting work—our cover artist for the past and this current edition of Spectrum is our own Chace Duma—but rare is it that our authors are from our campus.

For this special summer edition of Spectrum, we set out to change that. This summer, we set our sights solely on the artwork and literature of UCSB’s undergraduates, and found awe-striking spectra of poems to prose, photographs to paintings.

In the few weeks our submissions were open, we fielded work from over twenty majors, and are pleased to be publishing from thirteen departments. With the wide breadth of work we received, we were not only able to arrange a fulllength edition of Spectrum, but our selection process turned out quite rigorous—each piece inside is more-than-worthy of bearing our name, and I could not be more grateful to all of our contributors for making it so.

Our journal’s title is a promise of our commitment to breadth, and this edition is no exception. I am pleased beyond measure with the variety in topic and form across these pieces, from a speculative eulogy that is Marley O’Connor’s “Thanks for the Bones,” to the dizzying surrealist noir of “Ever-Rain” by Aran Ø. H., to the struggles for language of “The Mountains”

by Pierre Thibodeaux, to Megan Roni Ragone’s biting satire “We’re All Girls Here.” As you peruse our pages, I hope that you will find these works resonant as have we, but also that you will discover something nouveau and enthralling.

One such new experiment is this journal’s special feature: the Exquisite Corpse, in which we recruited the 20-21 CCS Writing Contest winners from this past year to join together in a double-blind collaborative writing mode known as a cadavre exquis. For our version, each author was given a body part to write either prose or poetry about, and then the last sentence of their work and the same prompt was sent to a second author to iv // Spectrum

be completed. The mutual uncertainty over the work of the other is what defines the exquisite corpse—as it is thought to produce work that is not just two authors’ creations in parallel, nor two writers working in lively tandem, but rather something composed by the spirit of creation itself.

As part of our commitment to highlighting the literary achievements of our local undergrads, we have also published all of the first-place winning pieces from this past year’s CCS Writing Contests. This was discussed when Spectrum’s staff first proposed publishing an edition of student work, and we are grateful to the authors for allowing us to do so.

To each and all of our contributors, thank you—we are thrilled to publish your work in our first summer edition of Spectrum. And, to our Exquisite Corpse participants, a second thank you for joining me in this experiment.

A thank you to our editorial staff, whose flexibility and speed ensured that this journal was completed in time. I hope to work with you all in the future.

And, at last, I yield my eternal gratitude to Dr. Rebbecca Brown for her unyielding optimism and encouragement over the course of this journal’s creation; and an endless thanks to Managing Editor Lila Singh for handling emails, where I could no longer.

I hope this volume is all you hope for, and more.

Kat Yuen Editor-in-Chief, Spectrum Summer Edition

// v

TABLE OF CONTENTS Special Feature: Exquisite Corpse...................................... 54 Poetry Hana Belmonte-Ryu an illiterate universe ................................................................. 32 the industry and us ................................................................... 37 Marley O’Connor Thanks for the Bones ................................................................ 50 Chace Duma meditation ................................................................................ 12 the weight of being a body ...................................................... 100 Tomas Palpallatoc My Brother and I ..................................................................... 19 Summer in Forest Grove, OR ................................................. 102 Dane Taylor Feeling Like Shite ..................................................................... 69 Pierre Thibodeaux On his knees .............................................................................. 34 The Mountains ........................................................................ 47 oology ........................................................................................ 49 Thompson Seedless .................................................................. 103 Vivian Walman-Randall Persephone ................................................................................ 76 Carson Young Body-Centered Lattice .............................................................. 30 wet rats ..................................................................................... 36 Whale Fall ............................................................................... 51 Circe Should Have Inherited The Earth .................................. 81 vi // Spectrum

Fiction Aran Ø. H. Ever-Rain ................................................................................. 96 Kyra Sullivan Petrichor ..................................................................................... 4 Carson Young Marmalade ............................................................................. 70 Nonfiction Lilly Rey Boiled Milk and Masala Skies ................................................ 20 Momma Sings With a Twisted Tongue .................................. 45 Vivian Walman-Randall Edges ......................................................................................... 13 Kat Yuen What is Passed? ........................................................................ 38 Script Megan Roni Ragone We’re All Girls Here ................................................................ 83 Art Anya Adorni Mortality’s Monthly Union ..................................................... 75 Alisa Bilyk Roan ....................................................................................... 104 The Bub Sky Sisters ................................................................................. 31 Isabella Catanzaro single occupancy ........................................................................ 33 peach raspberry tea ................................................................... 95 the lights are on but no one’s home ......................................... 101 // vii

Chace Duma One Foot Out .................................................................. Cover, 2 Marina Stoilova 7 ................................................................................................ 52 9 ............................................................................................... 44 12 ............................................................................................. 18 Contributor Bios ................................................................ 109

1 // Spectrum

ONE FOOT OUT Chace Duma CCS Writing & Literature

Duma // 2

3 // Spectrum

PETRICHOR Kyra Sullivan CCS Biology

Nobody lives in Sunspot, Arizona. The air always smells like dust after rain. It’s heavy and sweet and decaying, and it fills your nose and mouth like a gag. It always rains on the horizon, and the damp air is swept to the town like an afterthought. Nothing grows in the town. Not intentionally.

Wives work night and day to keep their meager flower boxes alive; the flowers stray over the sides, like reaching for a waterier grave before they eventually wither and decay in their dry wooden coffins. The soccer fields are artificial turf, and even that turns yellow and crispy in the heat. The sun beats down on the town through a magnifying glass, turning the inhabitants into ants. Looming silver clouds gather in the distance. The smell of rain drifts through the town, chasing a tumbleweed, and the rain itself never follows.

Nobody lives in Sunspot, Arizona. Why would they? It’s not because it’s hot and dry and the neighbors are terrible. It’s not because we’re three hours from the next town, or because there’s only one grocery store that’s only open four days a week, or because we’ve been in a severe drought for thirtytwo years. It’s because nobody ever wants to stay. Half the houses are unoccupied, and the occupied ones don’t look it.

All the storefronts on the main street are for rent or lease or perpetually going out of business. People come through and say, “What a nice little town,” and then move on to Somewhere Else. People that grew up here sell their homes and move on to Somewhere Else. Even the tumbleweeds eventually move on to Somewhere Else.

Don’t ask me why we stayed here. I can’t speak for my mother, but I didn’t get a say in the matter. No baby ever gets to pick where they live, just like they don’t get to pick their name. I wish they could, though. I would’ve picked something other than Bleu. A cheese is a terrible name for a baby, but my mother ate bleu cheese and only bleu cheese Sullivan // 4

when she was pregnant with me, and my father shrugged and said to call me “Whatever, just leave me out of it.” So I got named after a moldy cheese, and I got stuck in Sunspot, Arizona, where nobody lives.

Honestly, it’s not so bad some of the time. The desert is pretty, when it’s not so hot you can’t see past your nose. And my friends Jein-bow and Taz make for good company. We’ve been friends since we were little—it’s hard not to keep the same friends when the school only has 200 students. Back then we would go tarantula hunting every day after class, neglecting our homework for it to blow away in the wind.

Now I’m a year from graduating and we spend most of our time loitering in the Grab-n-Go parking lot, daring each other to lick the sizzling metal lampposts.

In the summer, when the heat cooks you right down to your bones and dries your tongue into jerky, we pick a porch and loiter there. Sometimes we sit on Jein-bow’s porch. It’s quiet, and there’s plenty of shade around the pots of longdead plants. Her dad is Somewhere Else, and he sends a check and a postcard every month. She reads the postcards to us sometimes, on her porch, and we dream about Somewhere Else. But her brother comes home early and screams at her until we leave. She doesn’t scream back; just withers right there on the cracked concrete steps.

Taz doesn’t even have the luxury of a porch. All they have is a hard, crusty front yard with a sad little mesquite tree, both of which are crawling with little siblings. If Taz gets caught loitering, they get saddled with watching them.

We usually end up on my porch, because it has the most shade and Mam sleeps in the afternoon. We sit out there, scuffing our bare feet against the dusted orange slats and sipping lukewarm tap water and talking about the future.

Somewhere Else. Jein-bow wants to go West, where there’s an ocean wider than the desert and bluer than the sky. I try to picture that much water covering the land and fail. All I can think of is the pool by the school. It’s perpetually closed because of the the drought. Sometimes, after school, Jeinbow and Taz and I sneak in and loiter in the empty, faded pit.

5 // Spectrum

When we were little, we’d find tarantulas hiding in the cracked walls. I’ve never seen it full of anything other than dust.

Today my porch is a refuge for all the creatures of Sunspot; the rest of the town is a shimmering mirage beyond our patch of shade. Taz looks out to the horizon, letting one leg dangle over the porch. “Looks like it’s going to rain soon,” they say.

“I hope so,” Jein-bow replies. “Finally get an end to the drought.”

“I’ve heard that one before,” I say, spitting some of the foul, gummy taste in my mouth onto the sand. The ground absorbs the moisture like Tantalus finally permitted to drink from his pool, and less than a second later there is no sign of my rain at all. “The clouds never make it out this far.”

“Maybe they will this time,” Jein-bow argued.

“You’re even stupider than I thought if you really believe that. It never rains out here.”

Jein-bow studied the dark, silvery black clouds gathering on the horizon. “That’s why I want to go Somewhere Else.

Somewhere where people actually live and it’s not hot all the time.”

“Why don’t you just go then, and quit whining about it?”

Taz asked.

Jein-bow kicked at them half-heartedly. “You know I don’t got a car.”

“I do,” I said. “I saved up and bought Mr. Barns’ car last week.”

Taz crossed their arms. “You finally fixin’ to leave?”

I shrug. “I dunno. I don’t have anywhere else to go.

Maybe it’ll just sit in the driveway until I die and Mam sells it to someone else.” It had been Mam’s idea to get the car.

Maybe I could get a job and do something with my life. Or maybe go Somewhere Else and make something of myself.

The thought of going Somewhere Else terrifies me. The thought of staying here is even worse.

“You could take us Somewhere Else,” Jein-bow suggests.

“We could all go, together.”

“Maybe.” I curl one leg up under me and watch the Sullivan // 6

distant clouds spooling upwards like wool on a spindle. “I want to see rain. Just once. That’s where I’d go.”

Jein-bow and Taz grunt their agreement. The heat makes a knife’s edge out of the porch shadow. The sunlight creeps steadily towards my foot and I pull it back into the safety of shade. My shirt plasters to my back where I lean against the porch column. I swish my mouth for any moisture and come up with only air. I spit again anyway, just to clear the salty taste of thirst.

“Let’s go,” I say, hauling myself to my feet. “Let’s go find some rain.”

Jein-bow looks up at me. “What, right now?”

“Yeah. Unless you got something better to do here.”

“I…I don’t know, Bleu,” Jein-bow hems. “My brother—” “Nah.” Taz stands, grinning like a madman. Their lips are still scabbed from the last time they licked the Grab-n-Go lamppost. “Let’s do it. Let’s go.”

Jein-bow’s eyes drift to the mountains on the horizon. A tarantula darts out from the safety of the porch’s shade, making a break for the road. “Okay,” she says quietly. “Let’s go find some rain.”

I stand, curling my toes against the burning wood. “I’ll get my keys.”

I ease the screen door closed behind me. The smell of dust competes with Mam’s: cigarette smoke, dog food, saltand-vinegar chips, sunscreen and aloe vera. They all crowd in my mouth to leave a foul, sweet taste. Worse than dust. I resist the urge to spit on the ash-covered carpet. Mam would kill me.

I stare at her, sprawled out on the couch and snoring quietly. Her fingers twitch in her sleep. The skin between her index and middle finger is calloused smooth with burns. They curl and release, like they still have a smoke between them.

The nails are chewed down, chipping the polish.

Her wispy hair is gathered into a ponytail high on her head. The dead ends stick out like branches of a barren tree.

She only puts her hair up like that when she has a boyfriend coming over. It’ll be undone by morning, thin strands 7 // Spectrum

caressing her face in place of a tender touch.

I wonder if she’ll even notice I was gone. Even so I brush a kiss against her bright red, clammy forehead. She may have named me after a cheese, but it was her favorite kind.

The keys gather dust on the counter, right where I left them a week ago. I shove them in my pocket and grab what remains of the six pack from the fridge. Mam probably won’t miss it either. The cupboard above the sink has plenty of bottles for her to choose from. Cold water sprouts from the cans as soon as I leave the house. I pull one from the pack just let the chill seep into my skin. My fingers go wonderfully numb. The rest of the pack goes to Taz, who clutches it faithfully as we pile into the car.

It smells like sage on the inside. The leather brands my thighs and we all squirm to avoid melting into the seats. We don’t bother with the branding seat belts. It takes four tries to convince the engine to start. It kicks into gear with a groan like a wounded bull. Black smoke billows out the back, the makings of our own choking rainstorm.

Taz passes me a can, cracked open and hissing. The dry sour-sweet taste floods my mouth and I choke, my throat unaccustomed to moisture. Taz rolls down their window and I mirror them on my side. Jein-bow pulls back the sunroof with a stubborn grunt. We peal out of the driveway to the record-scratch of rubber on gravel. The heat inside the car and the heat outside clashes in a faint breeze. I gun the engine, and the breeze turns into a fierce wind that whips my hair and tears a laugh from my throat.

We speed west. The empty downtown storefronts throw the car’s warped reflection back at us. Taz sticks their head and shoulders out, howling a goodbye to every place we ever knew. In the empty windows they look like a wild animal. I laugh again and push the car ever faster. Empty houses stand sentry to our passing. The heat warps the school into a mirage. As we pass the pool, I swear I can see clear water spilling over the sides.

Jein-bow’s house passes us first. Dry weeds creep over the concrete steps. I slow, taking stock of the dark, spiderwebSullivan // 8

cracked windows. Her brother’s truck is in the driveway. Is her brother asleep inside on the couch? Will he notice if she doesn’t come home tonight? If she never comes home? Will he be glad to be rid of her? I know the answer to the reverse of that last question. I think again of my own mother, fast asleep on the couch. She paints a lonely picture. My heart pangs, and I am tempted to turn around and drive back home, fall to my knees in front of her and beg her forgiveness for ever thinking of leaving. Then I think of what would happen after. The long, hot days in that house. One day falling asleep on the couch and waking to bitten down, chipped nails and the smell of cigarettes and sunscreen and too many years that I can’t get back. I swallow hard and keep straight on the road.

“You want to—” I start.

“Keep driving.” Jein-bow answers before I can ask. I risk a glance in the mirror. She’s pressed into the split leather seat, a perfect imitation of the plants on her front porch. Her eyes stay fixed on the house until it’s indistinguishable from the half dozen other faded, run-down homes on her street. Only then she finally wilts.

Before we even reach Taz’s house, they tell me to slow down. They don’t have to tell me. Kids swarm out onto the street, chasing after balls and each other. When they see us coming they flock to the car like it’s an oasis. “Taz!” They shout, craning to poke their heads through the windows.

“Come play with us!”

“Sorry, guys. Can’t today.” Taz offers them an easy grin that’s as empty as Sunspot’s pool.

“Please!” the youngest begs. She’s missing a front tooth.

“Just for a little bit!”

“I’m busy. Maybe later.” Taz doesn’t look at her. Their eyes dart wildly from their siblings to the house to the road ahead.

“You’ll be back later, right?” One of the older kids asks.

He, too, is looking down the street to the horizon, where white and silver clouds kiss the distant mountaintops.

“Tell Dad…” Taz taps their fingers against the dashboard 9 // Spectrum

in a frantic rhythm. Licks their lips. “Tell Marty he’s in charge until Dad gets home.”

“You’ll be back, though.” Taz’s brother doesn’t beg, but it’s a close thing. Taz licks their lips again.

“Don’t wait up.” I know enough to recognize my cue when it’s given, and I slowly, carefully, pull the car away from the crush of children. They obediently move out of the way, but their eyes follow the car like vultures. The youngest is crying. The oldest holds her hand. I feel his gaze burning into the back of my head, hotter than the sun itself.

“Taz,” I say, when we’re out of earshot.

“I know,” they answer. Taz has no more to lose than the rest of us, not really. People leave all the time. Transience is as native to Sunspot as the sun; can hurt even more if you’re not careful. I think again of my mother. She could have left with my father, way back when. Hell, she wouldn’t’ve had to stay with him. Somewhere Else there was a whole world for her to chose from. But she chose to stay here in Sunspot, where no one lives. I could choose to stay too. And that’s the trick, isn’t it? Choosing to stay. But it wouldn’t be living. I glance back once in the rearview mirror. Taz’s siblings are just a smudge, although I can still feel them watching. I reach up to the mirror, wipe away the smudge, and focus on the rhythm of tires on the pitted, cracked pavement.

The town ends as suddenly as it started and then there is only the road before us, winding out long and black like a snake’s tongue. I down the last of the beer, lukewarm and stale, and toss the can out the window. A tumbleweed matches pace with our car, at least until I floor the gas and leave it far behind. Dust blows up a storm behind us and ahead, clouds thunder to meet us.

The first spatters of water hit the windshield like gunfire.

The car doesn’t have windshield wipers. Within seconds the world outside is a blur of black and brown. There are plants here, but even they can’t hope to soak up every drop. Rain runs down the mountain’s boulders and crevices, painting everything in vivid watercolors of red and orange. Freezing drops punch through the open windows and drench me in Sullivan // 10

goosebumps. Taz lets out a war whoop, grinning even as they soak themself in wind and rain. Jein-bow sprouts to stick her head and shoulders out the sunroof. Her smile blooms like a desert flower after rain, full of thorns. She raises a can of beer to the high and mighty gods of thunder. The downpour responds with a bolt of lightning that splits the mountains in two. The earth reaches above us like teeth. My heart pounds in my chest in time with the raging storm. I breathe in deeply and let out an unexpected laugh. The air smells like rain. Not dust or sunscreen or the lingering afterthought of rain, but rain itself. It’s fresh and crisp, and I feel as though the very act of breathing washes away a lifetime of heat and thirst. Like I’ve been baptized in cool water, and I emerge clean and light and free. The road curves up towards the sky and the horizon beyond. I drive on, grinning wild to meet the storm.

11 // Spectrum

MEDITATION Chace Duma CCS Writing & Literature

eat an apple in the lake torso half-sunk, cool water then supine on slate, sun myself and watch sparrows flit around. if birds don't worry about yesterday why should i? bodies hover nearby nectar-drunk, nose-diving into petals. if bees don't worry about tomorrow why should i? frogs skipping through curtains of sun steal 'em from the sky. i've never had what it takes to be present because it takes nothing. i'm king of always something. bounce grapes off stones for birds to enjoy. close both eyes to see with the other, rumi said. i don't know. it's just dark.

Duma // 12

EDGES Vivian Walman-Randall CCS Writing & Literature

The lagoon at my university campus is this vibrant, incredible thing. The sunlight glances off it like the blush on a young girl’s cheeks, bright and yellow and tender. It smells like salt and rot, like sulfur and algae. Pickleweed and witches' hair grasp at the edges, drinking up the saltiest of the water.

The lagoon and the land around it are a carefully crafted system: varying levels of salinity as seawater is carried in by man-made pumps to couple with the fresh water that drizzles down in rain and runoff. During rainy seasons, the two give birth to brackish water, a delicate concoction suitable for only specific species who need exactly a little of both.

Elizabeth Rush’s book Rising came to me during misty mornings in an 8 a.m. class. Through her eyes and words, I learned about ocean level rise in America, and the climate catastrophe we’re already witnessing. Walking through Jacob’s Point in Rhode Island at the beginning of the book, she reminds us that all marsh systems are edges where fresh water turns to salt. The salinity of the water in the ground continues to change like a gradient as you move further and further from the main water source. Rush writes, “Think of a tidal marsh as—like all wetlands—a transitional region where distinctions blur and the entirely wet world morphs into the almost entirely dry one. It is a liminal ribbon. An in-between.”

Without constant maintenance, the slope of the faculty lawn around the lagoon at UCSB would be a blurry wash of different marsh plants according to their varied levels of salinity resistance. But there is no room for such a liminal space where humans are concerned. Obsessed with defining edges, a path has been carved out, a clear beginning and end defined. What’s more, the UCSB lagoon is an in-between. It’s not fully natural; the pumps continue to create the salt-water concoction as the runoff from campus blends with it. But it’s also truly wild, stocked with algaes, marsh scrub, fish, and 13 // Spectrum

birds. It’s neither a part of campus nor separate. Neither isolated nor integrated.

On the weekends I’d sit on the big green lawn outside the staff building and observe the lagoon. Observation seems to denote being outside something, watching the ‘other’ from a place distinct. There is something scientific in observation.

Something that is meant to come with no bias, something that passes as impartial. For most humans, this sort of objective observation is impossible. We project onto everything: expectations, fears, anxieties, morals. By being unable to leave behind these leftovers of our humanness, we engage with a different observation: “to conform one’s action or practice to x.” To become a part of something, to integrate, to follow. And to judge the self or other that is no longer an observer, no longer a part of.

The lagoon is freckled with strikingly white birds, dipping their beaks delicately into the water. Egrets. Clicking through an online copy of A Dictionary of Zoology, I learn that egrets are a part of a family called Ardieda: wading birds with long legs and sharp beaks. The egrets I see most in Santa Barbara are the great egret and the snowy egret. The great egret is larger, smoother, and lacks the bright yellow toes of the snowy egret. Its sound is a low, gravelly croak that I have only rarely heard, if ever. Most of the time, the egrets I meet are silent, tactical, carefully picking their way through the salty water of the sloughs they inhabit. They move with a swaying motion, a front and back, and curve their neck with the most sensitive of arches, as if they feel each feather settle into its place. They are like slow dancers, like flowers rustling in the softest of breezes.

I don’t remember if I felt the connection with the egrets right away. I’m sure I saw them, just as I saw the curlews with their beaks like medical needles, long, pointy and curving, the black-necked stilts and their long, pink legs, the cormorants clumped together on the branches, just out of sight. But the egrets were different. They felt rarer. The egrets stood still in the water and I watched, enamored. Something in my spirit found them singularly sacred to my own existence. A Walman-Randall // 14

connection or a pulse, a shimmering thread winding between us, tying me to them. It’s difficult to explain, on paper, why you love something when you love it in a way that feels less like love and more like embodiment. It was as if I was handed a mirror, suddenly able to see myself and my own movement through life as I watched the deliberate movement of the egret through the lagoon.

In spring, I sat at the edges of the lagoon and observed the egret, drawing his S-shaped neck with a stubby pencil.

The sun breathed its golden exhale onto my shoulders and turned them dusty. I drew myself next to the egret, my own slight S-shape from a very minor case of scoliosis, my downy, fine hair like the white feathers.

The word purity is bright silver in my mind, the dotted “i” a perfect white highlight, like the pearl dangling from the ear of Vermeer’s perfect, unknowable woman. It’s a word I wrote around and in between for years, thinking I knew the meaning. Sitting by the lagoon, drawing in my notebook, it was a word I no longer felt so certain of. I wore a silver ring on my finger for five years of my life. I never took it off, not even to swim. When I was seventeen, when I was just beginning to feel the twist of the egret’s neck in my own body, my lover bought me a ring with a soft, creamy pearl.

Last week, in his bed, the pearl fell off. He told me he’d get it fixed, but now, I like that my finger is lighter.

Being a young woman in the twenty-first century makes all of you tight and tired. My back aches sometimes. My mother thinks that my uneven shoulders are from slouching. I tell her that I think I may have been born with the gentle dip in my spine. But I’ll never know. My back and neck do not feel strong—they feel weary, too weak to support the rest of my body. The egret’s back is confident, elegant. He holds his neck high, his ‘S’ is intentional: he was made with it.

Nobody’s ever told the egret he was wrong, because he simply cannot be. The egret did not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. My body was made before that woman who is myself ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The snake twists in an ‘S,’ like the egret’s neck, 15 // Spectrum

like my back. Egrets eat fish, but they also eat warblers, a small bird. When I read that in a field report by Penny Patton, my throat clenched, disturbed.

In seventh grade the teacher sent the boys out of the classroom and told the girls to wear sleeves and longer shorts, that we needed to protect the boys from sinful thoughts. I was twelve. I thought of Eve, naked in the garden. When I was sixteen I developed a purification ritual. The girl in the mirror felt threatening. I made promises like I was placing sandbags around the lagoon, trying to keep the water in.

At eighteen I learned the price. It came as physical pain.

As heartache. Emptiness. I walked past the lagoon, observed the egrets. Kept my distance. It rained and the path flooded.

Permaculture systems teach you to take advantage of edges, that edges are the most powerful places with the most opportunity, that we should study and learn from them. The egret inhabits an edge, the lagoon, the place where land meets water and fresh meets salt. Rush writes about ocean level rise, and the way that the saltiness of the groundwater is leeching higher and higher up, past the places where it’s been, jumbling the system and leaving the precious edges of the marshes confused and rotted. The thin line between girlhood and womanhood, between thirteen and twenty. In public school a woman put two pieces of construction paper together and ripped them apart and told me that if I lost that I would lose it all. At fourteen, I listened well. I ignored that edge until I couldn’t ignore it any longer, until I was taking hot showers every night and feeling the fresh water turn salty beneath my tears. I didn’t understand permaculture systems, then, so I was afraid. I resented and regretted. I labeled myself with ‘S.’ I wanted to ignore the groundwater. What should’ve moved and shifted and reached, what should’ve been transitory and all colors became mush, became pain, became the shattered feeling I still carry. This is what shame does to you. The salt creeps higher.

I’m trying to learn to observe myself like I observe the egret. As something that doesn’t deserve judgement. As something merely alive, merely living. With respect and Walman-Randall // 16

appreciation, with an admiration for his body and mind.

When I watch, I am gentle. When I observe, I feel love.

I think the thing that I whisper to the egret when I sit on the lawn and watch his neck, when I draw his body beside mine, is that none of this should have hurt so bad. That I should’ve been able to watch myself like I watch the egret: knowing that he is right because he must be, that his body is simple and beautiful because he is surviving and he is living and the air is so fresh around him. I observed myself at a distance, but there is no science when it’s your own body laid out on the table; there’s only the feelings. And now I observe to become part of. To become part of the lagoon the egret inhabits; to become a part of my own body for the first time in my life. You can observe religion and ritual, observe a promise you made to nobody when you were thirteen. Or you can observe the way the morning glory grows crooked out of the barbed wire fence, desperate to climb higher every day.

17 // Spectrum

#12 Marina Stoilova Biology

Stoilova // 18

MY BROTHER AND I Tomas Palpallatoc CCS Writing & Literature

are good at being quiet.

By the time we moved out with our mother, we had forgotten that this silence was ours to take. We have lived under the same father, borrowed the same warmth, in the same awkwardness, of another family’s home.

I know that he knows how it feels to be strange and quiet, pressed into the same wallpaper behind a locked door, sharing a smile in the silent roar of a crumbling home.

19 // Spectrum

BOILED MILK AND MASALA SKIES CCS Most Excellent Narrative Prose First Place Winning Piece Lilly Rey CCS Writing & Literature

Escaping the slums was like entering a parallel universe. In many ways, it was. My world consisted of moldy floors and patches of fallen hair and beds of tangled wire and sheets.

Suddenly I was given tiles and vaccines and foods that weren’t rice. My bhai¹ and I were given a Papa with a kind smile who spoke Punjabi instead of Hindi, familiar and foreign. We were told his wife Emma was our mother and I cried at the color of her skin. I had never seen a white person before.

Everything was alien; everyone was scary. I feared the mattress I was given would swallow me whole. I thought my nausea at new foods would never end. I missed the old because the new hurt.

After our adoption, our new family wanted to show us more of India than prisons for orphans and the slums we called home for the beginning of our lives. I had never been in a car before I met them. I would cry and puke and scream to be let out. I didn’t know where they were taking me and I couldn’t feel the dirt ground beneath my toes. The new foods they forced into me sloshed in my stomach and bubbled their way out. I began to be scared of my own body.

One day, after being in the van for three excruciating hours, I started sobbing and clawing at the seat beneath me.

My bhai followed suit, always loyal. Papa sat in the front talking to the driver while his wife entertained her son. Papa’s mom, from her seat beside me, finally snapped. Putting a finger up, anger in her eyes, Grandma said in Hindi, If you don’t stop crying, we will pull over and drop you off on the road.

It felt like both a threat and opportunity. The road meant homeless and homeless meant the orphanage, the place with bars on the windows and demons disguised as nuns. I feared them and I feared her. Despite this, I stopped crying. Vomit painted my teeth for the rest of the drive. My ¹ Brother Rey // 20

bhai held my hand until I fell asleep.

Grandma gave me gifts that I never could have imagined.

Most were scary, foreign. I was afraid to reject them, scared she would reject me.

Ice cream was strange to me. I had never come across frozen food before. A green glob in a cup seemed like a trick, a test, something I had to earn. I sat obediently for the blazing sun to melt it down like curry before slurping it off the spoon, an item that carried my food better than my fingertips ever did. The metal was cold and tinged my food with silver. I enjoyed the new taste of sugar but missed the taste of my own fingertips. I drank the lukewarm liquid quietly and chewed the soggy pisata² that gathered at the bottom. Grandma berated me for playing around, for disrespecting her offering, which I didn’t understand.

I was experiencing things that felt wrong.

Something about dairy was distressing to me. Cheese felt disgraceful. Cheese was mold; it swam in bacteria. Why would I consume something that had covered my walls?

Milk felt like theft. On her family farm in Punjab, Grandma milked a cow and I asked why she was allowed to.

Papa told me the cow was okay with it and I told him to ask again. Grandma snapped at him for indulging me and gave me a cup. I didn’t want to drink something stolen because I knew what that felt like. I didn’t ask to be adopted and the cow didn’t ask to be touched. I brought her weeds and flowers plucked from the fields to apologize for Grandma’s crooked hands. Grandma scolded me for taking from the Earth. I didn’t know how to say that I was trying to give back to it.

When my bhai and I got malaria, I was secretly happy.

Papa and Emma’s home wasn’t India, but mine was. Being in a hospital meant staying in India longer. But Papa had money so we got better and they bought tickets to America. When I got malaria the second time, I thought I was being punished for leaving. India would rather me die there than lose me. I ² Pistachios 21 // Spectrum

was angry when the doctors won again. I wanted to become part of India.

Airplanes were worse than cars but I was given bags to puke in. Grandma gave me dahi³ to strengthen my health. I asked her what it was and reached for it with my hands. She hit my knuckles, thrusting a spoon towards me instead. She said it was curdled milk and I cried. She fed me dahi until I threw it back up.

Over weekends and school breaks Emma dropped me off at Grandma’s house. She said it was because I was the only female grandchild so Grandma wanted to spend more time with me. I thought it was because she didn’t like having me around.

Grandma didn’t ask to take care of a child, but she did anyway. She sat through Bambi nearly every weekend for two years, peering at the screen above her Sikh crosswords.

Sometimes she braided my hair with black yarn, like she did with her own. Sometimes she twisted our hair into buns that bulged from the wool. Make me look young, she explained. She covered her head when we walked to the playground and she held my arm while I walked across balancing beams. I was too scared to ask to hold her hand. Whenever we came home, she would pour me a tall glass of milk and make me sit at the table until I finished it. Sometimes she gave me bowls of dahi instead. At the center of the dining table was a silver platter holding salt, paper, a container of sugar, and a tub of aam ka achar4. I wanted to pour that down my throat instead, let the preserved mango juice and hot peppered oil lather my tastebuds.

I knew what it was like to be hungry, to eat dry rice and drink air. Grandma knew this. She saw the dehydrated food and tiny sippy cups of dirty water that was given only at dinner. I knew she would never let me go hungry again. I didn’t like the food but I knew not to be picky.

Her aging eyes studied my movements, watching my ³ Yogurt 4 Spicy pickled mango Rey // 22

throat clench as I choked down the substance of another’s body. I sent a prayer to the cows each time.

The glasses of milk began to increase. She wanted me to drink one with every meal so I did, but my disgust for it never went away. Milk will cleanse skin, Grandma insisted. Milk will pale you. Look, look how white I am.

I didn’t understand milk so I didn’t question it. I believed her but it scared me to drink it. She wanted me to pour something disgusting down my throat, hoping it would bubble in my stomach acid and seep through my skin. She wanted to purge me of my brownness.

Eventually she began to boil the milk, thinking it would help the taste. I didn’t know why you would boil something that was cold. Why make it cold in the first place? Why was my melted ice cream wrong but her hot milk correct?

Like chai 5, she tried explaining, but without chai.

My skin didn’t lighten, the flaws in her logic becoming too clear for her to ignore after years of milk diets. Grandma angrily moved on to lemon scrubs, placing me into the bathtub with a pile of halved lemons and salt. The lemons were the perfect sponge, capturing the crystals to deposit across my skin with sour juice. Acid cleans, she informed me, dragging the citrus down my dark knees until they glowed red. She recited Sikh prayers as she grated my skin, as if Vaheguru6 could help polish away my melanin. I struggled to comprehend what was wrong with me. I spent the first four years of my life being terrified of anyone who wasn’t brown, only for Grandma to spend the next seven trying to take my brownness away.

For my ninth birthday, Emma bought me a Bratz Doll. The dolls in America didn’t look like me and part of me thought she wanted to take my brownness away, too. I asked Papa if she wished she had a white daughter. You ask ridiculous questions, he replied.

5

Tea (masala chai is black tea boiled with water, milk, and spices) 6 God 23 // Spectrum

Grandma saw the Bratz and scoffed. After she visited her brother in India, she brought me back a doll in a Punjabi shalwar kameez7. It wasn’t dark, but it looked more like me than the Bratz. A year later, she presented me a doll in a bridal lehenga choli8. This will be you, she told me. I don’t know if she wanted me to have something that resembled me or if she wanted me to resemble it.

I didn’t understand how someone could love me and hurt me. I didn’t understand how someone could hurt me and not know it. I loved Grandma for her warmth, that was disguised in delicious meals and Indian soap operas and hated her for burning me with acids and bases.

When she gifted me Fair & Lovely9 for my eleventh birthday, I wondered for the first time how her mother raised her. Did she lose her brownness too? Was brown equal to dirty? Did Grandma want me to be clean? Was it hate or fear?

I often forget that Grandma experienced the same culture shock as me. I viewed her as an enemy when she was a victim of the First World. It was easier to think of her as evil than acknowledge that she was displaced, that she sacrificed a life to give hers to others. I wanted to hate her for what she did to me because it seemed simpler than to face what she gave up for me.

It’s embarrassing how fast the smokescreen cleared after asking her about her old life. Pre-America. She told me stories of chopping up onions carefully balanced on her knees and chasing headless chickens around on roofs. It must have been strange to catch your dinner, I said, watch it paint your walls with its DNA. Family is hungry, she shrugged.

She told me that America is too quiet. India is loud with people and America is loud with machines and it makes her lonely. She fills her house with Sikh prayers and masala chai 7

Traditional outfit consisting of a trouser (shalwar), a tunic (kameez), and a scarf (dupatta) 8 Traditional attire consisting of a long, ankle-length embroidered skirt (lehenga) and a blouse (choli) that exposes your midriff 9 Skin-bleaching cream Rey // 24

but there’s a staleness that she can never cover up.

Grandma told me about her husband, who died just months before our adoption. She told me about being fearful of an arranged marriage, how hesitancy blossomed into love.

She told me about cooking for him, caring for him, working three jobs to feed him and their three sons after he got sick.

She worked graveyard shifts at a donut shop in London, kneading dough and pretending it was roti10. The kids she took care of at the daycare loved how she always smelled of sugar. She told me it made her happy that it disguised the smell of curry. Papa and his brothers would get beat up for being foreigners while walking to school. She told me how she purposefully packed donuts in their lunches to erase their identity. They looked Indian, but they smelled English. That was survival.

Her husband dropped from 185 to 125 pounds. Heart disease, my aunt told me, because Grandma couldn’t utter the words. How cruel to damage such a kind heart. By this point, they had settled down in California, London no longer able to offer the American Dream.

When he finally lay in a hospital bed, the waiting game began. Grandma struggled with Vaheguru during this time.

There is a Vaheguru, but he don’t tell us when we die. We know what we want, we might know how we will die, but we don’t know when we start to die. The doctors don’t know either. How could they?

Grandma asked. They aren’t Vaheguru. They say one hour, maybe two. But a day goes by, and another and another.

Outside the hospital, Papa was preparing for his wedding.

He was the first in the family to not have an arranged marriage, and Grandma was angry he chose to marry a white woman. The fact that they celebrated love while she was losing hers made it worse. Her husband encouraged her to attend Papa and Emma’s wedding, so she went with a change of clothes and went right back to the hospital after.

I asked Grandma if anyone was there to take care of her.

No one should grieve alone, or fear grief alone. She nodded, tracing the gold wedding ring that still adorned her finger.

10

Thin, round flatbread

25 // Spectrum

Her brother, who worked eighty hours a week two hours away, told her, I don’t know how, but I will come. He herded the rest of the family for her, knowing she wouldn’t reach out.

Her sister brought a stack of roti and saag¹¹ at one in the morning and filled the waiting room with the smells of India.

Papa and Emma joined too, spending their honeymoon crying into cold chai and picking apart roti over hymns. Two days before her husband died, there were fifty people at the hospital praying for him.

I asked Grandma if we could make saag. I didn’t know her husband but I needed to honor him. His memory was shadowed by my adoption. I needed to thank him for his sacrifice, apologize for his loss. Part of me needed to honor her, too. I met her when she was still in the second stage of grief, my adoption delayed her chance to mourn.

Her hand patted my shoulder and she nodded. We aren’t ones to hug, but I could feel the weight of her gratitude piercing through her fingerprints.

She talked about laundry as I chopped up garlic and spinach.

Everybody laundry, I have to do all. Yesterday when I try putting in the clothes, the machine breaks. I use it so much it stops. I put so much it stops. It’s just like our body. If you put so much and load it up, you will not survive.

I wondered how much pain she’s held, how much laundry she’s folded for others and how much is wrinkled and piled of hers. I let my garlic hands fold the roti and hoped that was enough.

When I got surgery in high school, Grandma insisted on being there. I tried arguing but it was futile. I didn’t want her to take up more space in a hospital but that’s who she was.

Her grandchild was going to get knocked out and cut into and she wasn’t going to let that happen without her there.

She didn’t get wrinkles until my father died, Papa told me the morning of the surgery. ¹¹ Vegetable dish typically made by cooking down spinach or another leafy green Rey // 26

Will I give her more?

Probably.

Grandma didn’t have a phone. Technology wasn’t a part of her life before America. The absence of it was normal.

She sat silently on BART to the hospital with nothing but her purse buckles to keep her hands busy. She gave me a pat on the calf before I was wheeled away and then sat in the waiting room alone. American magazines couldn’t offer her anything and the cafeteria didn’t have her masala chai. All she had was a cushioned chair and a ticking watch.

I felt guilt as the doctors put me under. When I woke up, it was to her blurry face and a body of pain. After three doses of meds, the nurse handed me my clothes and said recovery is done at home. My anesthetic limbs couldn’t hold the material so Grandma dressed me, hooking my bra as the nurse held me up and pulling sweatpants over my goosebumped legs. My foggy brain couldn’t process embarrassment, but it was overwhelmed with shame. This was worse than her doing my laundry.

High off painkillers, I pictured her husband. I wondered how many times she sat beside his bed, adjusting his morphine and chatting with nurses. I wondered how many times she undressed and dressed him, if she stole heated blankets from doctors and piled them on him, leaving herself exposed to the hospital air. I wondered if hospitals haunted her but her love for me took precedence.

My therapist said I’m too gracious. She doesn’t think Grandma deserved my affection and that confused me. There were good parts, I insisted.

Was acceptance a survival mechanism? she asked. If you wanted, could you have escaped her?

I told her of course not. She’s our foundation. If we lose her, the family will crumble.

The family did crumble, though, even with our strong leader. When I think back to those times, when my adopted parents were arrested for domestic disputes, the legal battles and fights for custody and child support, I remember 27 // Spectrum

Grandma being integral to my survival.

Do you forgive her? my therapist asked.

No. Then why the compassion?

I don’t hate her anymore. But I fear that one day she’ll find out I did.

Grandma never understood my writing career. Art fields are reserved for white people, they aren’t sufficient for supporting a family, especially not an immigrant one. Part of me is glad for this because I don’t have the strength to explain my memoir to her. She has no idea that I hated her half of my life and I don’t want her to. When I visited her last Thanksgiving, I feared she could look through me, see the secrets I was exposing, the open wounds that don’t belong to just me. She’s the last person I ever want to hurt.

My family crumbled but Grandma held my bhai and me up. She housed us while our parents slept in jail cells, she hosted holidays so we always had a warm home to be in while our parents celebrated on their own, in love with the new freedom divorce gave them. She taught me to cook, giving my hands something to do that wasn’t punching walls or scratching arms. She made sure I never went hungry. She was stability when all I felt were earthquakes.

Despite this, my therapist said, You have the right to hate her.

She was stability, but she wasn’t safety.

I had a habit of cherry picking, even in our sessions. I am selective with the wrongs of the past but erase the now. I don’t know if I have the right to hate her but my therapist said I do. She provided me a home when I needed it, but she let the villains in my life into that home. She chose her own before me; she put me in danger.

Part of me wants to hate her, but I don’t know what hating her means anymore. I never had grandparents, never understood the role they played in people's lives. I had a mom and father before Emma and Papa but Grandma was her own entity. The status of grandmother was her own creation, one that I desperately latched onto. She kept me connected to my roots. She was from a different state of India but her India was something. I lost everything, but I had her, an extension Rey // 28

of my country.

She was the closest thing to home I had. I think I was the closest thing to legacy that she had.

Curry’s like the sky. Look, she pointed at some floating salt granulates, look, stars.

The jeera12 and adarak13 reminded me of the ash in Delhi.

The air that filled my lungs with smoke, that distorted the city and saturated buildings. My insides are painted with the dust and smog, a hue that I carry with me, that I refuse to forget as I breathe in America’s industrialized air. Grandma’s house smelled of jeera and dalchini14 and Linen Sky Febreze Air Freshener and the garage faintly smelled of basketball rubber.

It wasn’t always enough. She gave me a piece of India, but being with her was like living through postcards. I craved the air of the slums, festered with animal remains and polluted waters and masala and rose petals. I never understood how such dangerous things could bring me such comfort, but I knew they did.

I asked Grandma where she prefers to breathe.

Home, she replied. I always remember the smell of home.

¹² Cumin ¹³ Ginger 14 Cinnamon 29 // Spectrum

BODY-CENTERED LATTICE CCS Most Excellent Poetry First Place Winner Carson Young CCS Writing & Literature

We were people to run into In the heave of night.

Chintzy eyed boys moving in reverse, (Like thorns snared in the roving wool) Never quite making it out clean.

Geodesic lines touching wherever they meet on a sphere Each returning to the other again, again.

You can wear the oxygen while we sleep, But I’m graphite, I’m The Protagonist.

Indelicate—pulling apart the brass snaps of your coat I’ll peel your shell and eat you alive I’ll burn your hands into cold red stars.

You wonder if you will ever get to be a widow But we won’t ever get married— (So close but the particles never touch) Like time travelers caught robbing a bank, I only find you in the getaways Drinking vodka tonics and chrome Cokes.

Neil, I’ve never shot a boy in my life— I wake up sweating from dreams of hot copper jackets Clawing through your body back into the gun, I know where we end Still, I would spend the rest of our lives Pulling you from the broken cavities of shiny cars, Intersecting your arc every time.

Young // 30

SKY SISTERS The Bub Theatre

31 // Spectrum

AN ILLITERATE UNIVERSE Hana Belmonte-Ryu Psychology & Brain Sciences and Black Studies double major

1. he opens himself up to the good morning. a slight upwelling, a lift, a nudge, and we are elevated/extraterrestrial puppies, romping about among milk-lit gases and the mere illusions of stars, doused in a familiar cold/skinned raw like lemur hats, likened to pureness. we are panning in and out of this celestial glob of a universe 2. if sleep were a tree, it would be long and supple and without flowers. if the soil was my resting place, i might find that evasive unburdened sleep. if i could see through the palm of my hand i would be lost in the pixelation of my cellular being, slowblinking, gloomy as the face of a train as i muse temporarily on our mirrored ambitions, our sleights of hand, the horribleness of it all, and the weight of this green world.

3. the present pushes in on me like invisible bookends. come up to me with your head held in your hands. you’re nodding like you understand me.

4. odd that impressions are but impressions Belmonte-Ryu // 32

in black sand. (how come when someone asks you how you are, you say “tired.” because certainly you are not always tired) puppeteering myself: mostly conscious, not tired, sectioned off at the bend of a dark red elbow, or an ashy knee, pretending i can twist a cat’s cradle, lost in the twitching drug of my phantom limbs, my tongue flaccid in my mouth for once in my life. despite you being here. it’s been a minute but the universe is still here whether you pan out or not.

33 // Spectrum

SINGLE OCCUPANCY Isabella Catanzaro CCS Physics

Catanzaro // 34

ON HIS KNEES Pierre Thibodeaux CCS Physics

(i) Normal people don’t think about knees, but I’d take a knee if that’s all I could get.

It’s a form of self-denial.

My mother chews bones.

When we ate chicken she’d choose bones, gnaw at the ends, turn the knuckles about hers.

I picked breasts, thighs— she picked bones.

I don’t dream about breasts or think about thighs, I think about knees.

I’m not allowed to look at bodies or faces.

A taste will only make you hungrier. (ii) He sits with his feet on the chair and his legs against his chest and almost like drinking, I look at the light caught in the hairs on his knees, and imagine running a quiet thumb over the red part where the knobbly bone strains against skin.

He glows like a barnfire, but I’d never meet his eyes.

35 // Spectrum

WET RATS CCS Most Excellent Poetry First Place Winner Carson Young CCS Writing & Literature

the two boys the bakelite-teal surfboard tombstoning in a meringue of surf the smaller boy sparkling dark, a seal with a baseball cap soaking on slicked i bet he thought he was cool, like shaka brah and ride until you die, tony hawk on a junkster playstation, tarred body painted on four thirds millimeter, hazy hearted, barbarian. his hat was on like that. the surfboard has no leash other boy wades into the salt holding the dolphin body by the rails, the quick shock breath of very cold water and i see their skin so white see through sallow growing like bull kelp down into the silt, saltines and bumblebee tuna three nights a week, dirty and clean hair, bandit masks, welders hoods, burning through graffitied half-pipes and glassy packed pipes and i smell, off the wind, cayenne, zinc-y zinka, sweat.

Young // 36

THE INDUSTRY AND US Hana Belmonte-Ryu Psychology & Brain Sciences and Black Studies double major

in dust we rise industrious to rise for raise we bake the sun in line for what’s in store for us wing out our arms to belt out songs which warm and rise from bread to dust

37 // Spectrum

WHAT IS PASSED? CCS Most Excellent Essay Winner Kat Yuen CCS Writing & Literature

It’s the second week of class. We are going over a text that paints itself as a broad-strokes overview of queer history and theory. It was the first one I had ever read, and now I’m reading it again for this class, with heavier eyes. A classmate critiques that it is terribly white; the book mentions Stonewall, but no Marsha P. Johnson or Silvia Rivera. Foucault gets four spreads; Audre Lorde shares an illustration with three other Black lesbian writers on one of the two pages covering “black feminism.”

We take turns pointing out these omissions and issues, the class alight in shared criticism and annoyances. One person points out the use of the single way the artist draws generic “Black woman”—“When I see those features, I’m like, ‘okay, a token person of color in this illustration.’ ” Reining in the class, our professor says in discomfort and agreement, “Yeah, like I enjoy reading about Judith Butler, but I kept wondering, where’s Muñoz?” As I flip through the pages, I think of the drag queens and kings Butler wrote of—where are they? Where are the butch queens in drag? The Black butch studs and the Latinx femme queens? Why does the Mattachine Society get to be named, but not STAR House? Where, in this history of the rainbow, is all the color? || When tracing genealogies of queer and trans studies, one would be absurd to deny the importance of Black feminists.

Audre Lorde’s (1984) re-conceptualization of erotics continues to inspire new and queer(er) theoretical works (e.g.

Ela Przybylo’s 2019 book, Asexual Erotics); Kimberlé Crenshaw’s (1989) naming of intersectionality a rock stabilizing the earth of modern radical queer politics (though of course, one would be remiss to not cite the Combahee River Collective (1977) or Barbara Smith (1978), as they discussed even earlier the importance of focusing on not just women or just Black people, but rather the unique experiences of Black Yuen // 38

women). Certainly, the queer liberation / gay rights movement both owe their political-activist roots to the civil rights movement, to the language of identity-based politics born from discussions of race, and to the ongoing analyses about the impacts and necessitous solidarities between radical queer liberation and other social movements.

All of these genealogies are readily available and visible— Ellison et al. (2017) sample a wide array of queer and trans scholars discussing these histories. It would seem impossible to overlook these vast archives of Black queer scholarship and the influences of Black feminisms on queer and trans studies (and the ways in which they overlap; Lorde, Smith, the whole of the Combahee River Collective—all of these important scholars were/are Black lesbian feminist voices).

There is little new to their ideas even if they remain plenty radical, nor to this idea that “their” Black feminist theories have impacted “our” queer and trans ones.

None of this is new—and yet, upon sampling queer and trans studies, it is remarkable how invisible or overlooked these genealogies appear to be. In their reflection on Black trans studies, Ellison et al. (2017) provokingly characterize this invisibility as repression, a willful abstraction and move away from the Black roots of transgender studies. “[T]he field of transgender studies,” they lament, “seems to use this Black subject as a springboard to move toward other things, presumably white things” (162). The process of canonization has become entwined with the overlooking of race, and moreover, trans studies “always already” requires this move (163)—despite, or perhaps in spite of, trans studies alwaysalready invoking Blackness (165). Black feminism can be instrumental to the work of queer and trans scholars, but this instruction is always disavowed, allowing for misappropriations which ignore the sociopolitical realities which Black feminism requires us attend to. || In office hours, I muse with our professor about how materiality is mentioned only at the back of the book. This is a literary analysis seminar, so I approach it as a literary critic should. “What does it mean that reality and material 39 // Spectrum

consequences are relegated to the back, as simply an addendum to the story of queer studies?” What of the chosen visual dichotomy, between a stereotypical homeless person and lighthearted academics within? Why are those concerned with realism portrayed as outsiders, as opposed to our fellow theorists and activists? || To illustrate this point, it is useful to reflect on the (invisibly shared) theoretical arguments underpinning Sandy Stone’s “The Empire Strikes Back” (1992) and Cathy Cohen’s “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens” (1997). I pick these two for similarity in base argument, but divergence in extent and integration of Black feminist thought. Both argue against assimilationist tendencies, instead advocating for radical queer/trans politics which diverge from current understandings of identity categories. For Cohen, this comes from a noted recreation of binaries in queer politics, with a desire to rethink queer people’s investment in and notions of identity. Meanwhile, Stone reaches such a conclusion from dissecting mythos perpetuated about trans people, and how those mythos’ tie to capitalist modes of recognition.

Stone specifically critiques a tendency in trans narratives to acquiesce to normative gender constructs for the purposes of “passing,” which reinforces the gender binary (166–168).

As a publicly “out” trans woman, Sandy Stone acknowledges that she “could not ask…for anything more inconceivable than to forgo passing” (168), but she nonetheless argues that this “silence” should be re-envisioned: that her trans fellows and sisters should consider taking on that task, to explore the potentials of living in mixture (see 168), of living outside the “safety” of invisibility. Though she does not describe such a move as “anti-assimilationist,” it is in form: what is the writing of oneself into difference and mixture if not a rebuke of all which says that difference must be eliminated or hidden? If “passing” is an act by which one (re-)joins a binaristic system, then it is a form of assimilation, and thus deliberate non-passing is anti-assimilationist.

Similarly, Cohen questions the queer/heterosexual binary, arguing that we should not foreclose the possibility of certain Yuen // 40

hetero sexualities being outside of power just as much as non-hetero sexualities. In particular, Cohen highlights how Black people are barred from “normality,” and how an intersectional (“left”) framework for queer politics highlights the necessity of going beyond identity categories and identitycategory-based politics that simply focus on “the sexual arena” (440–444). Assimilation and asking for simple acceptance is textually the enemy (see 445); furthermore, the very categories which allow for assimilation are problematic, and one must diverge from “a monolithic understanding of heterosexuality” (452) in order “to build a…broader coalition” (453). This furthermore is critical, as the heart of Cohen’s theory and analysis, synthesizing the lived histories and academic contributions of Black people into an incisive (and still today, radical) queer politic.

Cohen’s radical reimagining of a queer coalition which reaches across to alienated (read: racialized) heterosexualities is one of many texts in queer (and trans) studies that relies on Black feminist thought. Cohen quotes extended passages from the Combahee River Collective (see 441) and Barbara Smith (see 451); in fact, she cites Black theorists (both queer and non-queer) with such frequency that Cohen’s text is functionally a liaison between “black left intellectuals” and queer studies (and a liaison with Black queer studies as well).

Certainly, the article is proof of Black feminism’s importance to queer studies—after all, Cohen’s article, a vibrantly queer text, wouldn’t exist without Black feminism.

|| A white professor suggests I define intersectionality in a creative nonfiction essay in which I engage regularly with nuanced and in-depth theoretical ideas. My essay is aimed at queer folk.

“Your audience may not be familiar with the term,” she says.

After many days, I decide against it, for the same reason I do not define ‘desexualization’ or ‘heteronormative.’ I wonder, fruitlessly, if a reader of color would have suggested the insertion. || And here is the rub: the aforementioned furthermore goes past (goes further, does more than) many queer rhetorics; and 41 // Spectrum

despairingly, this furthermore is what is gone past in many queer rhetorics. If not in name, Stone’s suggestion to forgo passing has become common, particularly with the visibilization of non-binary identities and new generations of more-visibly genderqueer people. Even the breaking down of categories which Cohen argued for has propagated in trans communities, fueled by an endless parodying and questioning of any singular or constrictive notions of gender.

Such cannot be said for much of Cohen’s critiques, nor for the concepts from Black feminism from which she builds.

Intersectionality? Marginalization of Black heterosexualities?

The false nature of the strict queer/heterosexual dichotomy?

These are conversations happening, but rarely breaking into the queer mainstream—and moreover, seem to fare little better in queer academia.

|| Within my own writing, I am self-conscious to the politics of citation. To whom am I turning for wisdom? Why? Whose words am I attributing? Whose am I using, and am forgetting to give their due? I am careful to save articles and papers now, PDF copy and note them, but who will catch me if I err? Gazing upon the page, I wrack my thoughts for whose insights echo in my head now. I will not rest until I find them again. But what about the ones gone completely from my mind? What of the knowledge I’ve never read, hidden by books and pedagogies and my own imperfect research un/intentionally shaped around and by the “norm”? || Black feminism continues to contribute to queer and trans studies, the work of Black feminists always pertinent to queer politics and frameworks. As said at the outset, that is undeniable. Unfortunately, there is a difference between what is contributed and what takes hold; these genealogies live on, but there seems an invisible division within the family. No matter how enmeshed queer studies is proven to be with Black feminist studies, no matter how many texts expressly connect and weave them together, no matter how much work arises out of an explicit overlap and middle-space—in spite of all this, the roots are continually passed as marginal, as if Yuen // 42

the thicket could have arisen and could survive without them.

Returning to Stone and Black trans studies: certain ideas have taken hold, but as Ellison et al. worried, it is unclear the extent to which race is recognized, the extent to which the impact of Blackness and Black people’s contributions are considered. Stone engages with the white supremacist need “to preserve ‘pure’ gender identity” in dominant narratives about trans people (see 158), but elided in her discussion is the root anxiety of miscegenation, the racial subtext of defending “purity.” What is lost in this maneuver? How many other places of absence are there in queer and trans rhetorics?

Of all the ideas which can be traced back to Black feminists’ theories, maybe this is the most important aspect for queer theory: the necessity of reflecting back and asking, what has been passed over? And, from there: How might we finally recognize what has already been here, but repressed?

Works Cited Cohen, Cathy J. “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?” GLQ, vol. 3, 1997, 437–465.

Combahee River Collective. “The Combahee River Collective Statement.” Home Girls. Ed. Barbara Smith. Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1983, 272–282.

Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.” University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1989, 139–168.

Ellison, Treva, et al. “We Got Issues: Toward a Black Trans*/ Studies.” TSQ, vol. 4, no. 2, 2017, 162–169.

Lorde, Audre. “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.”

Sister Outsider. Ten Speed Press, 1984, 53–59.

Przybylo, Ela. Asexual Erotics. Ohio State UP, 2019.

Smith, Barbara. “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism.” The Radical Teacher, no. 7, 1978, 20–27.

Stone, Sandy. “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttransexual Manifesto.” Camera Obscura, vol. 10, no. 2, 1992, 150–176.

43 // Spectrum

#9 Marina Stoilova Biology

Stoilova // 44

MOMMA SINGS WITH A TWISTED TONGUE Lilly Rey CCS Writing & Literature

I remember soft hums and Hindi lullabies laced with gentle reminders that I was home. Your arms always felt safe and your words felt safer when they wafted around me, filling the humid air with tunes of slumber and care. When you died, bhai rocked me in his lap and petted my head.

Sometimes he sang Hindi rhymes and recited prayers. Hindi was smooth on his tongue just like yours. I tried mimicking it because I thought if I spoke like you then I would get you back.

We were adopted by a man that spoke differently. Some of his words sounded like yours but his sentences were foreign. He sang me Punjabi lullabies but I still remembered yours. His Punjabi was similar and alien, a mangled language that I was given like an inheritance.

Hindi melted into Punjabi on my baby tongue and I was given a Sikh bracelet even though I didn’t think you were.

Sikh prayers uttered in Punjabi were preached to me at sunrise and I missed the lull of your Hindi at sunset. Bhai started speaking to me in Punjabi and he made it sound beautiful. I think it’s because he had your accent.

My adoptive mother taught me English and my peers hated my accent. I screamed alien when I echoed your voice and I didn’t understand how America could criticize a language that taught me love. I spoke my identity and I was proud of my country and I was proud of you because you taught me the dialects of home.

But the white kids at school said that because I didn’t speak like them I wouldn’t ever be like them. Hindi became foreign on my lips. My ears hummed with warmth when watching Bollywood movies and soap operas with grandma because your words were back in my space. But grandma spoke to me in Punjabi and it was a constant reminder that you were gone.

45 // Spectrum

I understand Hindi because I would never forgive myself if I lost it. Losing the language means losing a part of you and I think I would lose a part of me, too. I can’t get myself to speak it, though. Sometimes when I try and it’s not the practiced lullabies of my childhood I mix it up with Punjabi and I feel like I betrayed you. I wish I could speak Hindi as beautifully as you had.

I recite your lullabies in poems when I miss you. I remember your voice like a distant memory but your words are always familiar. I honor your songs with pride; India proudly beating in my heart at the poetry slam of white faces.

I am filled with warmth as your voice echoes through me even though it’s twisted to my American audience.

Rey // 46

THE MOUNTAINS Pierre Thibodeaux CCS Physics

I’m arguing with my mother and she bides her tongue, silence speaking somewhere on either side of her mouth.

She thinks she knows better than me, but it doesn’t matter if she’s right.

There’s a barrier between us, etched in a language I don’t understand of a country I do not belong to.

Talking to Ahma on the phone, she teaches me a couple words.

She tells me about anything I want: the mystical mountains and green, green, green— she speaks to me and I do not respond.

Taiwanese was made for the trees and a voice, lilting, tracing too much to care about the price of potato chips.

I dream about a land more magic than here.

Mother complains about how they greet each other.

Have you eaten?

That’s just the way she says it, with a furrowed expression, sharp and crunchy, but at least she speaks the language.

I don’t speak Taiwanese, but arguing with your mother can be done in English.

We do it all the time.

47 // Spectrum

Have you eaten? and she bides her tongue, silence speaking too much to care about how they greet each other, talking to Ahma on the phone in a language I don’t understand.

Taiwanese was made for arguing with your mother about the price of potato chips and green, green, green.

Mother complains, She thinks she knows better than me.

There is a barrier between us, etched, sharp and crunchy, on either side of her mouth.

But at least she speaks the language.

Somewhere more magic than here, she teaches me a couple words We do it all the time.

I’m arguing with my mother; I don't speak Taiwanese, but she tells me about anything I want can be done in English.

That’s just the way she says it.

But it doesn’t matter if she’s right.

She speaks to me and I do not respond; I dream about a land with a furrowed expression, the trees and a voice lilting, tracing the mystical mountains of a country I do not belong to.

Thibodeaux // 48

OOLOGY

Ahma called to say that I made kimchi incorrectly and that no one in Taiwan thinks my mother’s Facebook photos look appetizing. Mother only hung up the phone. She still cuts her calcium pills in half and takes them twice, even though I keep telling her that Ahma has no pharmaceutical experience and seriously, that's-not-how-that-works-anyway.

At lunch, I take a bunch of eggs, the ones Ahma boiled with lo ba, braised pork. Sweetly praised with star-anise, allspiced and souped up, I finger a wet one out of the tupperware with care to find mold flecks behind old eggs, little white nose-hairs. Spoiled. I grab a knife to appendix the offending bits but Mother upends them into the trash bin.

“It’s just eggs.”

I study them, the umber sheaf underneath the plastic garbage ruffles, the forgotten clutch, tea-sotted and mottled, mold rotting them from the outside, hiding the golden yolk, now wasteland in a basket. The way they purl together like dinosaur egg fossils, too deficient to ossify, fragile like fresh faces and filiation. How we brood.

49 // Spectrum

THANKS FOR THE BONES Marley O’Connor CCS Biology

Embedded in sand, I nearly mistook her for a rotten log.

I smell her before I see her.

She was not made of twisted wood, but twisted hide draped over bone. A female northern elephant seal, who washed up here picked clean of flesh.

With my shirt pulled over my nose and a colleague by my side we decide what is worth scavenging—these vertebrae look nice is that a scapula? And this—a pelvis, half-buried.

The ribs are already disarticulated. I carry as many as I can hauled in buckets over dunes and hills, scraped clean and boiled in enzyme bleach that bubbles and froths as the fatty marrow becomes broth.

I have no way of knowing how she passed.

I can’t test for domoic acid, I don’t know if she ate fish fattened on neurotoxic algae, but I am grateful for her leftovers.

Maybe she was in the breeding colonies the Channel Islands, or Morro Bay raising pups. Basking on rocks, sea spray misting my fur, rhythmic crashing of waves.

Diving deep below, further, further, catching sardines and anchovies until I’m full.

I return to the water, but my head hurts. Things are fuzzier.

My mouth is wet with saliva I can’t swallow.

I don’t wake up

O’Connor // 50

WHALE FALL CCS Most Excellent Poetry First Place Winner Carson Young CCS Writing & Literature

My sickest winter yet, cold water trickled From my ears, soaking my star printed sheets.

My beard grew past my knees, I developed hypothermia.

I woke each night with a trench ripping into me, With bone marrow light as cauliflower on my tongue, Infected knuckles and foaming red eyes.

Nested in my hospital bed we watched David Attenborough ocean documentaries Until the blue light poured us into sleep.

Tender-bellied sharks stalked the orca babe till She was separated from her mother.

They devoured her tongue and left the body.

I wanted to excavate the infecting entities inside me, Take a spoon and scoop out the delirium that prized My dorsal fin spine splitting my skin like damp silk.

A rage began a frenzy in me, thousands of serrated teeth Demanded to know why I had spent years collapsed on Bathroom floors, riding out heart attacks, drowning in my jeans.

I imagined ripping out my IV’s, walking back into real life To taste the fury of vitality, like Coca-Cola or a kiss. The hunger to, like all dead, sick, or fantastic things, Crash against the bedrock like a tambourine and Bounce off in a blinding spray of sparks that Illuminates strange creatures never before seen.

51 // Spectrum

#7 Marina Stoilova Biology

Stoilova // 52

EXQUISITE CORPSE Special Feature

TABLE OF CONTENTS Poetry HEAD Michelle Dalarossa & Vivian Walman-Randall .................. 58 PALM/HAND Celine Pun & Amelia Rodriguez ............................................ 59 joint piece // JOINT Pierre Thibodeaux & Carson Young ....................................... 57 CHEST Jordan Finley & Michelle Dalarossa ...................................... 61 i cannot make this better // HIP Carson Young & Kat Yuen ...................................................... 62 qu’en jambes // THIGH Kat Yuen & Pierre Thibodeaux .............................................. 63 SOLE Amelia Rodriguez & Celine Pun ............................................ 67 Prose HAND/PALM Elaina Smolin & Hannah Z. Morley .................................... 60 RIB Vivian Walman-Randall & Resh Grewal ............................. 62 Sent Away // GUT Hannah Z. Morley & Jordan Finley ...................................... 63 LEGS Resh Grewal & Elaina Smolin ............................................... 66 Contributor Bios ................................................................ 109 55 // Spectrum

HEAD ..............................

Michelle Dalarossa & Vivian Walman-Randall

RIB ....................................

Vivian Walman-Randall & Resh Grewal

HIP .....................

............. CHEST Jordan Finley & Michelle Dalarossa

........ GUT Hannah Z. Morley & Jordan Finley

Carson Young & Kat Yuen

PALM ..................

Celine Pun & Amelia Rodriguez

JOINT ............

Pierre Thibodeaux & Carson Young

......... HAND Elaina Smolin & Hannah Z. Morley ......... THIGH Kat Yuen & Pierre Thibodeaux

LEGS ........................

Resh Grewal & Elaina Smolin

............ SOLE Amelia Rodriguez & Celine Pun

fig. 1. “des cadavres exquis”

Exquisite Corpse // 56

JOINT PIECE Pierre Thibodeaux AND Carson Young CCS Physics AND CCS Writing & Literature

even before she had dagger digits not a nick like my knobby knuckles but tendril little licks of fire from a lighter she liked they were unblunted sharp as scent and a tendency to burn but besides the lighter was just for show for the first time I watched as she tenderly rolled those fluvial fingers The coelacanth with night blue scales, fat gobs of white gold poured from the teeth, and us wavering at the edge of the great, green deep, Neither willing to take the drink, come up from the muck.

She’s silt before the pearl, darkly ungraceful math, the proteins of the nail fray.

Take care to press broken knuckles to the threadbare bones, webbed toes.

To the heave, the salt, the bitter bite of need.

57 // Spectrum

HEAD Michelle Dalarossa AND Vivian Walman-Randall Communication & Global Studies AND CCS Writing & Literature

At once transient and recurring, contradicting and convincing, As fickle in their stay, as they are free in their flight, They ribbit and they linger, at the edge of my discerning, Like the wind in the canyon, Leaving yesterday ajar, Thoughts to the head as emotions are to the heart.

The heart is to the feet Feet are to the Earth A reminder to my Fleeting Head Pulling me upside down “You are having a moment Of being fully present -” An exquisite Acceptance

Exquisite Corpse // 58

PALM/HAND Celine Pun AND Amelia Rodriguez CCS Writing & Literature

our hands came pandemic bleached never tasted backcountry but we carried the same forty pounds, the same dirt under fingernails scraping relief in sweat and nicked welts our fingers swelled too like cancerous Jeffrey pines pulsing for the gated Mammoth waters but they told us past the smoke, they feared our foreign fingers may ignite forest fires as if they never aimed to clutch the world in a fist me, I will keep my hands flat and open, feeding horses from yellowtops and holly that grow out of my palms

59 // Spectrum

HAND/PALM Elaina Smolin AND Hannah Z. Morley CCS Writing & Literature

I used to stare at people’s hands, my eyes flickering over them like flames. I memorized the ridges of their knuckles, surveyed landscapes of worn calluses and amaranthine veins, traced the rivers of worn lines, birthmarks, and paper cuts— my version of palm-reading. I studied: the curve of their fingers, the minuscule hairs, the crescents of their cuticles, fingernail colors—some carefully painted, others naturally a brittle yellow. Then, your hands—tanned skin tightly folded over joints, hardened grooves on the palms, torn hangnails, simultaneously coarse yet delicate. Coincidence or causation, I stopped looking at other people’s hands after yours.

I never imagined myself as a puzzle piece before I met you. In fact, I still consider myself a whole person.

But even still, being with you burned out all the fire I had left inside of me. It’s time for me to light a new match and move on.

Exquisite Corpse // 60

CHEST Jordan Finley AND Michelle Dalarossa CCS Writing & Literature AND Communication & Global Studies

puffed pushed up binded scarred cage for heart beats aches X marks the spot for secrets and love man’s favorite part of me no matter what I wear Tell me— Would it make a difference?

In the subdued blue of last light, with a thin veneer of threads and stitches covering the smooth exterior of skin and sinews, the chest becomes the last defense the heart keeps from a first caress

61 // Spectrum

RIBS Vivian Walman-Randall AND Resh Grewal CCS Writing & Literature

There are not enough empty places.

The topmost layer of leaves, dipped in a candy red as anthocyanin and chlorophyll commingle. Tantalizing. That is the way I would describe the world as I rush past it, clutching some pearl of desire in the folds of my palm. This feeling is in between my ribs, on the right side, a tightness. A breeze floods through my living room late in the afternoon, dark and murmuring. I could sob. The brilliance of the mediocre sunset, the absentminded beauty of perpetuity. Divinity, flooding through the Earth. I am merely a pilgrim, come to a holy place.

I’m searching for them.

Sometimes I lose myself in the valleys of his spine and find myself in the dust on his collarbones.

Thumbprints hike over the canyons of his sides mapping every inch so I can find my way back.

Exquisite Corpse // 62

SENT AWAY // GUT Hannah Z. Morley AND Jordan Finley CCS Writing & Literature

Don’t trust my gut, It lies.

To me, To the mirror, To those who offer support…

All bad ideas disguise themselves at first.

To me, Possession was the answer.

Inviting someone else in would let me off the hook.

I could shake away all responsibilities if my body was under new management.

I handed over the keys.

As I tripped away, retreating to the corners of my mind, my gut filled with oil.

When you kissed me, the flame poured down my throat, and set me ablaze.

Your eyes are factories, sparkling with smog.

I think of you; belly burns as bright as my cheeks.

63 // Spectrum

I CANNOT MAKE THIS BETTER // HIPS Carson Young AND Kat Yuen CCS Writing & Literature

i don’t have it, the fix, the globe pearl on the tongue; bezoar gems hidden warm in the vault of the body. christ, you’re ink blue with mud— more babygirl than angel or the shadow of the valley. still, i’m seeing things, faces, in the glass of an anaphylactic night; a house on fire, skulking black smoke thins, and there, a twin pair iliac crests boring through the loam. sunk down, spade invasions of the earth, of siblings, unbound by blood than mind— -over-body, than will you enforce this mirroring? my mind is a sink, sallow like your hips, like this earth. bore me, we may be twins again. So we may Entwine again. Pivot, twin. Lose the plot and lay beside me, hip to hip, so tight my sockets fuse again with yours, returned to the womb.

Exquisite Corpse // 64

QU’EN JAMBES // THIGHS Kat Yuen AND Pierre Thibodeaux CCS Writing & Literature AND CCS Physics

Like those of chickens, hens’ harvested treasures stored, vested in fats for broth-making I render the parts worst when in myself I cannot trim like my mother eliminates fat from skin and musculature toned to befit what is beauty, valued and loved, my partners have been so soft with fat that I tight-grip, a roast bone-in thigh clotted-cream in complexion white-knuckle fingerprints leave inverse scars, perfectly plum kisses where the dowsing-rods cross I press in a pastry-paunch, pallid peach-blossoms papered together with paste sag beneath a summer swelter skin is prison, pythagorean where flawed, clawed tigers pounce and prism, and I raw, like how I peel

65 // Spectrum

LEGS Resh Grewal AND Elaina Smolin CCS Writing & Literature

A race car, a rodent’s tail, a ship set to sail, a silver whistle, a black cat, and a gumball machine.

I find dice, a ball, some shells, and rope. I wonder if they purposefully remove random objects so the player can’t win. I wonder if the manufacturers knew the poster would be on hospital ceilings instead of children’s classrooms. I try to find the ship as the doctor spreads my legs beneath the medical sheet. She holds my hand after as I cry and try not to break hers, pantless in Urgent Care on a Tuesday afternoon.

I should be crying about my leg; I mean, it’s broken, bruised, and possibly soon-to-be amputated, but I’m mourning my pants. Cut off for examination, my old-school, brown corduroy Levi’s were shredded. I’d haggled with a thirteen-year-old Depop seller for weeks, only for some nurse with bleached blonde tips to destroy them- and not in a cool, artfully-ripped way. I prayed; if there was a higher power, they’d have to let me keep my leg. My pants were already destroyed; what more could they want? Although, on second thought, there was little use for my legs sans vintage Levi’s.

Exquisite Corpse // 66

SOLE Amelia Rodriguez AND Celine Pun CCS Writing & Literature

Found winged shoes but can’t fly the power lines to seize them. You think water wants to get me alone?

Listen: my heel’s wide open. You can be the arrow or one who smooths the way. The same fish is called sandal or tongue depending on language. Walking or talking, sole still drown in air.

At ocean’s edge, isopods, little revenges, all that’s beneath me, burrowing into something the shade of my skin. but I watch you turn black and blue, clipped wings, and soggy tissues you strip the socks I gifted flightless, you trample grass and cement the wrinkles soften the flowers beg you to smell them you grow fifteen years younger the kelp flies scurry from your tar caked steps you want to taste the second star and I chase the ghost of your footsteps in the sand.

67 // Spectrum

Exquisite Corpse // 68

FEELING LIKE SHITE Dane Taylor Film and Media Studies

I am just not here.

There are no sharp edges to my expression.

My nose, leveled smooth, Matching the elevation of my wax lips.

Pupils stopped down, peering through pinholes.

The tarnished, copper threads of the iris, Twisted, pulled taut, barely staying strong.

As I make no grand attempt to abstract, There’s a chill burn across my ears, An acidic tinge atop my throat.

Words do come out, toppling and crashing, Wrung out from my gut, and heaved.

I can’t stand to look down at what I’ve said.

There are no attempts, only sulk.

My world is flat and simple, And it’ll stay that way until my face melts off.

69 // Spectrum

MARMALADE Brancart Prize Winner Carson Young CCS Writing & Literature

Let’s play the game where we all fall in love with a dead person.

Where none of us can remember what it was like when I could climb the stairs on my own. Mama calls the neighborhood boys in to lift me from the bed into the car and we drive and drive and drive. There’s blood in my lungs and grime on my teeth. There’s my dress hiding the broken places hashed out over both thighs. We stop at a red light. Ahead of us is an ambulance and for the first time in my life, I can see inside. I watch the paramedics place an oxygen mask on an old man’s blue face. We have the same wrinkles. The same cyanotic huffing to our chests where our bones rip through.

The cab of the ambulance spills warm light into the dark like a fish tank. I feel myself rise from the seatbelt, the vinyl going slack against my skeleton as I slip out into the night and swim into the moving box aquarium to float above the old man. My hair, nearly all gone, tangles and flows with the current. A school of goldfish swim by and nibble on the paramedic’s ear.

Let’s pretend my mother’s tallow hand did not jostle my knee and pull my bone bag back into the car where the heater sputtered weakly.

That the light did not change and the ambulance was never an aquarium at all and the old man is not in pain and I am not a disappointment. That the night is beautiful and I am forgiven.

Mama pulls away as the light turns green. The old man and I are not going to the same hospital. I hope to meet him in other, farther pools of light. We drive on into the dark through lines of convenience stores leaking neon and freon.

Gutter punks my age gather in the parking lots puff-puffpassing and huffing till their mouths are stained silver. We pass a billboard that says, “I was completely convinced of the futility of science and arithmetic.”

The emergency room’s light makes me wilt. I cling to my clavicles as mama wheels me in. We wait. Under my stained purple sweatshirt, my furry body shivers. My bones knit Young // 70

themselves closer together, trying to leech heat from my organs. My liver does not care to share. A nurse calls me back behind a partition to question me about my Reason For Visit.

Mama wheels me over to him. She does not leave this time. If she leaves, I will start lying. He asks me if I have hurt myself recently. I say yes. I tell him my body is a vascular plant with tubes of xylem and phloem running all throughout. The tricky part is figuring out which tubes are carrying the sugar and which are carrying the water. I’ve been trying to cut out the phloem for years. Sometimes I miss. I’m the reason rhyniophytes went extinct. I tell him the sugar veins are making me fat, fat, fat. That simply won’t do. Mama sighs.

The nurse types this all into his big computer then switches topics.

He takes my vitals. He uses a child’s blood pressure cuff. I love that it is so small. I like the way it squeezes me. The blood pressure machine isn’t afraid of breaking me. It trusts my arms to stay unsnapped. They admit me into the Bad At Eating Unit for Very Special Girls and Boys. My roommate has been here for two months. She likes to talk. Listening to her is like rain on a window, I tune in and out but always am comforted by the sound. Mama leaves me with a duffle bag of clothes that the staff searched. I dig out my pajamas. My roommate sees my body and is horrified and impressed.

Other sick people recognize the dedication it took to become this ill.

She asks, What happened to you?

I say, I wanted to become Joan of Arc on fire. I wanted to be holy.

When the nurses stick the yellow Fall Risk Socks on me is when I decide to pretend there are worse things in the world than having to eat marmalade on toast each morning at breakfast. I don’t like yellow. It makes my bruises look garish.

I take a small bite and remember I never liked oranges. I eat the whole thing and smile a wide, crumby smile at the nurses.The nurses take notice and press gold star stickers to my cheeks. I get the overwhelming urge to cling to their scrubs, to let them gather me up into their arms and have 71 // Spectrum

them comb their fingers through my thinning hair and say, Yes, pretty girl, yes. So good. You are so good. I imagine being a NICU baby in an incubator, swaddled warm and worried over, touched only through glass and gloves. Spoon fed.

Prayed over.

The nurses pour me a cup of apple juice. Now drink this.

I no longer feel like a Catholic fasting girl. I go and cry big orange peel tears into my yellow Fall Risk Blanket. My roommate sits with me and rubs my back.

Juice is just so hard, I say tearfully. I don’t want to fill my sugar veins.

My roommate is quiet for once. We are all having bad days at the same time.

I want to whisper to her, let's play the game where… let’s pretend… but no words come to me. We sit in our own gentle rain and let clouds brew in the dayroom.

My therapist lets me put my socked feet up on the couch.

I’m still wearing the yellow Fall Risk socks. She also lets me sit in silence if I want to. I don’t like to share secrets with her like I do with the other kids in the dayroom. The tricks of the trade, the shortcuts, our dirty get sick quick schemes, if we let those slip, we’ll be thrown to the sharks. I’m so scared of being eaten alive.

My therapist asks, How are you feeling today?

Fine. Cold.

My therapist says, Let’s do something different today.

Okay.

Let’s pretend you are both you and your mother. Let’s have that conversation.

I say nothing, but think of my mother. Her long, silver hair and baggy stained denim. Her woman’s body that held me in every way you can hold a person and fed me until I decided I never wanted to eat again. She has blue paint under her fingernails that looks like dirt but never is. She’s not afraid of a mess, which I always thought was good, considering she had me…

Okay, I say finally.

Young // 72

Is there anything you want to say to your mother, my therapist asks me.

I take a shallow breath. I feel my ribcage expand. I know what that would look like if I were peering down into a mirror.

Mama, I start, Were you afraid I was going to die when you brought me here?

Good, my therapist says, because she has to.

I look at myself as my mother, at my rice paper skin and spider hands. My eyes are flat now, my head swims and tips. I look at myself as a baby that maybe I carried, maybe I loved, and fed, and warmed, and soothed, and rocked.

I’m afraid for you all the time, I say finally.

The dayroom is full of warm light and shin-high water. I sit on the floor and focus on growing. Girls and boys bring pillows from their room to sit on because their bones ache.

They bring cross-stitch, books, art projects. Nurses splash through hourly, pulling kids out by the roots for EKGs or orthostatics. It is those quiet moments I like best: when we all forget we are a group of liars purging out of our g-tubes and putting coins in our socks at the weigh-ins. We can be forgiven. Just like the night I drifted into the ambulance. It was so beautiful my body remembered it loved me. My body is a fool.

I say this out loud. My body is a fool.

Why, the boy next to me asks. His teeth are rotten.

It keeps letting me lie to it.

I say this and everyone laughs at my foolish body for believing I could love it enough to save it. I still can’t climb stairs on my own. None of this is funny. I don’t say this to the other kids focusing on growing their bodies amongst the mangroves in the dayroom swamp. I don’t say anything else for the rest of the day. In group that evening, we write secrets on pieces of paper that are then read aloud.

“Nothing’s killed me yet and I’m so terrified that nothing ever will.”

“I don’t know how to love something gently. How to keep from devouring it whole with teeth and fingernails and mania. It’s barbaric 73 // Spectrum

but I am so hungry.”

“I feel like I’ve been mourning myself all my life.”

“I’ll bring this temple down on our heads if they make me eat split pea soup one more time.”

We all laugh at that one. Sometimes, we have to decide dying is funny.

Let’s play the game where for one night there are no rules.

What, says one girl. There are always rules. No, not this time.

There are no police, no nurses, no calories. What would you do?

We press together in a circle on the floor of my room, all sitting or laying with pillows under our butts or hips. We are huddled in blankets. It is the saddest slumber party ever. Or it's a seance and the only people who showed up are the ghosts. The lamp on the nightstand has a pillowcase over it for mood. Feet are helplessly twitching. Water is being compulsively drunk. We are all incapably ourselves when no one else is watching.

I’d steal a car and go to Vegas, says a boy.

But you aren’t old enough to drink or gamble, reminds a girl.

Good thing there are no rules, says a boy.

One girl says, I’d never eat again, at the same time another says, I’d never stop eating. I love them for their sickness’s honesty.

I say, I think it is for the best that there are rules.

Everyone nods, feeling a little small and unsafe under their flannel blankets.

The next morning I think of those girls as I slowly munch my way through my toast and marmalade.

I pretend there are scarier things than breakfast.

Young // 74

MORTALITY’S MONTHLY UNION Anya Adorni Art - Studio

75 // Spectrum

PERSEPHONE Richardson Poetry Prize Winner Vivian Walman-Randall CCS Writing & Literature

MIRAGE Drunk on sunshine lust lost In a memory faded into The tea leaves I Don’t look into your eyes lest I forget Their mirage The hours between our elbows, Our eyelids, our hips Afternoon tears my eyes red From fighting we’d Make love in your bedSheets until sundown Edge of the ocean edge Of my sanity you Put your hand on my thigh like These are simple Trespasses you pledge Devotion to my lips Tumbling into the dark Parts backwards trying Your fingers straining my voice Unravelling don’t Touch me I’m forbidden Fruit and you’re just Adam Seduced by my Hand-me-down lies I sleep on a mattress Empty of remembrance my Walman-Randall // 76

Legs bare under my Nightdress and I try at Comfort It’s warm on the brown Carpet; a leftover feeling Here and now I smell Your sweat turning sweetness sour You turn on the shower drown out my Crying wash me in cold Water like I’m grapes In the summer

TOO YOUNG I am still so Fresh and young I am Persephone tender It’s just springtime still half-owned by My mother she tells me Go to my room I feel the emptiness inside My uterus a haunting awareness What could be An unnamed Creature unwritten There’s blood in the Bathtub and it is of My body reminding me of my Mortality / Fertility The ache The clawing and then the 77 // Spectrum

Opened passion-fruit Blossom filled with Pollen A mystery to Him as I Still am I dare not ask Baby-be-made Dare not long for the Nausea and the doctor bills dare not Imagine laying on green grass-sweet Clover blooming yellow Full of virgin life

ASK NOT FOR SYMPATHY Ask not for sympathy Only given you— The defeat of reckless rose-vine reaching Too high and Hungry It’s unnecessary Tell your heartbreak To fuck off I’m older now I must learn how to Drop the stone By the side of the river

Walman-Randall // 78

DESOLATE If there is a name for this feeling It is desolate I have arrived at the shores of a place I never should’ve come to Alone And naked A sick feeling in my esophagus Creeping into my eyes Making them blurry Hungry I sit in the porcelain basin of my bathtub I put my feet in the hot stream I look to the closed door Imagine someone there Seeing me For the first time Turn back and imagine you Seeing me For the hundredth Wouldn’t it be simpler if you could fuck me You feel like a ghost A piece of bamboo Thin and papery Nothing There is nothing for you to say to me And I don’t want to be that girl I talk about you like it can shield me from a feeling I’m afraid of A feeling I don’t want to write down That I wonder what he feels like 79 // Spectrum

I shouldn’t see myself as trapped Did I eat the pomegranate Too early I am too hungry For someone whose mouth is sewn shut

Walman-Randall // 80

CIRCE SHOULD HAVE INHERITED THE EARTH CCS Most Excellent Poetry First Place Winner Carson Young CCS Writing & Literature

When you first saw the deep sea body, the curled and dreaming blue body with softening of shank box knees, guttural. (that’s what you said).

The way cave wolves blister apart in their hunt.

You dreamed of touching, tearing the dripping golden caul.

Don't look at me like you are hungry, the room prickling with the smell of bleach and over fried onions.

You're three times my age and you can't remember your phone number.

But you still call me Pinball Wizard, Van Halen, eyeing the clean titanium leashes that cottonmouth kinksters walk their rent boys on, calling Where are you going dressed like that?

Does your mother know where you are?

I’m shot through your bones.

Like the crumbling blue chrome of your cobalt hip, the bloody pulp.

Malignant, satelliting so deep the surgeons will never excise me out.

You’ll die gently, with the sun at your back 81 // Spectrum

in an oncology ward in malibu filled with wilting violets.

I’ll drive past for years and never stop seeing your window as an unblinking eye.

I won’t sit bedside—a nymphet in black.

I’m going to shave my head and leave my sideburns wisped.

I’m going to rob you, violently, the way bodies pillage themselves. for a handful of copper pennies glossing in the dark.

Young // 82

We’re All Girls Here by Megan Roni Ragone English and Theatre double major

CHARACTERS Flopsy - 16, knows she is beautiful Tubby - 16, wants to be beautiful Bam Bam - 17, Jingles' friend Jingles - 17, that bitch SETTING A public high school girl's bathroom TIME During first period 83 // Spectrum

SCENE ONE A high school girl's bathroom.

It's gross.

Flopsy is doing her makeup in the mirror that doesn't exist.

Tubby is throwing something into the toilet in the stall she locked herself in.

We cannot see either of their faces.

PLOONK. Flopsy is putting on lipstick. Like a lot. Round and round she goes.

But then she runs out.

FLOPSY Do you have any lipstick? I'm out.

PLOONK. FLOPSY (CONT'D) Come on, just a little, I'm almost done.

PLOONK. FLOPSY (CONT'D) I know you have some, you have mine actually. The one I gave you.

PLOONK. FLOPSY (CONT'D) Tubby?

PLOONK. FLOPSY (CONT'D) You okay?

Beat.

FLOPSY (CONT'D) Tubby?

Ragone // 84

PLOONK. Flopsy tries to open the stall door, but she can't.

TUBBY I hate my nose.

PLOONK. FLOPSY Stop it, Tubs.

PLOONK. TUBBY I hate my nose.

PLOONK. FLOPSY Oh my god, here we go.

PLOONK. TUBBY I hate my nose.

PLOONK. FLOPSY Hey, no, for real, you gotta stop that.

Tubby stops to think about it.

PLOONK. FLOPSY (CONT'D) No, seriously, you're gonna clog the toilet.

PLOONK. FLOPSY (CONT'D) Come on, open the door.

PLOONK. Flopsy crawls under the door. Tubby doesn't seem fazed by this.

85 // Spectrum

FLOPSY (CONT'D) Give me that.

Flopsy takes the bag. What is in it? It just looks like red puff balls.

By god, they ARE red puff balls.

FLOPSY (CONT'D) If you don't want them, fine, but don't just waste them.

Flopsy puts one on herself. Transformation complete.

She turns facing out.

Clown.

She's a fucking clown.

TUBBY They look good on you. Everything looks good on you.

FLOPSY That's not true.

That red wig I tried last Tuesday?

Trash.

I looked like I was gonna sell hamburgers out of my dad's minivan.

TUBBY Everything looks good on you.

Tubby turns around now. She is also a clown, but unlike Flopsy, she has no nose on. And she also has a single tear painted on her face.

FLOPSY Maybe.

But that's not cuz I look good in everything. You just gotta pretend it does.

No one cares about how good you Ragone // 86

actually look. They only care about how you think you look. Like look. If I look ridiculous and I think that, that's when you say something. But say I wear the exact same thing but I KNOW I look good, then who gives a fuck?

TUBBY That's stupid.

FLOPSY Yeah.

Most of high school is.

It's true though.

Flopsy takes some toilet paper and fashions herself a scarf.

She KNOWS she looks good.

FLOPSY (CONT'D) Look. Do whatever you want. But you're not gonna get a boyfriend without one of these.

Flopsy gestures to the bag of bright red foam noses in her hand.

TUBBY Those things are shit.

FLOPSY Only if you think they are.

If you don't wear it though everyone's gonna think you're a freak.

You'd be better off dropping dead than showing up in public without a nose.

It'd probably be better if you did.

Then at least people would think you have some dignity.

Flopsy grabs a toilet seat cover and makes it into a hat.

Jingles and Bam Bam enter the bathroom.

87 // Spectrum

They go straight to the mirror.

JINGLES Hee hee.

BAM BAM Here, let me fix your makeup.

Jingles giggles while Bam Bam makes her look good again.

In the process, Jingles' nose falls off. She shrieks and covers her bare nose quickly.

JINGLES Bam Bam!! What did you do!!

BAM BAM I'm sorry wait hold on!

Bam Bam goes to pick it up, but it's wet and soggy now from the floor.

JINGLES Nuh uh, no way you're putting THAT on my face.

BAM BAM Why is this floor always wet?

JINGLES Fix it!

Panicked Bam Bam looks around--she goes to the hand dryer and puts the nose under it.

WUUSHHHH. JINGLES (CONT'D) Ew! That doesn't CLEAN it. Stupid bitch.

BAM BAM (shouting) Does anyone in here have an extra nose??

Ragone // 88

JINGLES Bam Bam! BAM BAM What?? We're all girls! I'm sure anyone in here would understand.

FLOPSY Here, I got one.

Flopsy is about to leave the stall, when-FLOPSY (CONT'D) (whispering to Tubby) This is your last one, are you sure you don't wan't it?

Tubby nods.

FLOPSY (CONT'D) (whispering) Your funeral.

Flopsy leaves the stall and gives the final nose to Bam Bam. BAM BAM Oh my god Flopsy you are my HERO you hear that my hero I would could just kiss you right now.

FLOPSY (gesturing to her lips) Don't smudge the lipstick.

JINGLES Bitch. You look so good. Doesn't she look so good?

BAM BAM Yeah, you look SO good. What's your secret?

89 // Spectrum

FLOPSY No secret. Just do. Thanks. Enjoy the nose.

After one last mirror inspection, Flopsy leaves.

FLOPSY (CONT'D) (calling out as she leaves) Bye Tubby, see you in class.

JINGLES Tubby?? Hey girl!

BAM BAM Hey Tubs!

TUBBY Hey. BAM BAM You okay?

TUBBY Yeah, just uh, stomach ache.

BAM BAM Oh. Gross. Sorry.

Tubby flushes all the noses down the toilet.

She walks out to wash her hands.

Bam Bam and Jingles look at her, clearly judging her noseless face.

They do that stupid teenage girl thing--look at one another, say "see that?" with their big eyes, then smile back at Tubby.

JINGLES Oh my god, um, here, take this-Jingles nudges Bam Bam to give Tubby the dirty nose.

Ragone // 90

TUBBY Oh, no, um, thank you, no thank you.

JINGLES ...

BAM BAM ...

JINGLES .....

BAM BAM .....

JINGLES .........

BAM BAM .........

TUBBY Uh, okay, um thanks.

Tubby takes the nose and puts it on. It's still a little wet.

JINGLES Hope you feel better.

BAM BAM Yeah, you look like shit.

JINGLES Well byeee.

BAM BAM Bye guuurll.

Jingles and Bam Bam leave.

Tubby grabs the nose and throws it onto the floor.

91 // Spectrum

Tubby looks in the mirror. She turns on the sink and rushes her hands under the warm water.

She splashes it into her face, causing her makeup to run.

She sees her face in the mirror.

She scrubs and scrubs until all that remains is the small amount on the eyelid that never really goes away.

Tubby dries her face and smiles.

Bam Bam runs back in.

BAM BAM (CONT'D) (calling from outside) Tubby, are you still in there, I forgot my-Bam Bam enters.

BAM BAM (CONT'D) Oh my GOD TUBBY WHAT HAPPENED!?????

Bam Bam springs into action.

Bam Bam throws her purse to the ground and dumps out all of her makeup. ...

It's still going... ...

There's a lot in here...

Okay. Done.

BAM BAM (CONT'D) I'll text Ruffles and Snoots--they'll know what to do, wait should I call 911 first? I should call 911 first right??

Ragone // 92

TUBBY No! No, don't do any of that, I'm fine I promise.

BAM BAM You don't look fine you look HORRIBLE just HORRIBLE!! Oh my god what happened!!

TUBBY I did it to myself--I didn't-BAM BAM YOU DID THIS TO YOURSELF??

That's it, we're going to the counselor this is bigger than all of us, right after Snoots fixes your-TUBBY Stop! It's okay! You don't need to do anything.

BAM BAM You're clearly in distress, I can't NOT-TUBBY I'm fine! Just leave!

Please.

Please, I'm fine, just--okay?

Please.

I promise.

BAM BAM ...

I'm getting the nurse.

Bam Bam runs out, leaving her bag of makeup.

Tubby looks down at all the makeup surrounding her.

She kicks it a little with her foot.

93 // Spectrum

She picks up a white paint and is about to put it on-She stops.

She looks at herself--she takes in a deep breath.

She smiles.

TUBBY (to herself in the mirror) I KNOW I look good.

Blackout.

Ragone // 94

PEACH RASPBERRY TEA Isabella Catanzaro CCS Physics

95 // Spectrum

EVER-RAIN Aran Ø. H. CCS Writing & Literature and Biopsychology double major

1 cup of coffee, please.

It had rained for the second time that night. Droplets still clung onto my trench coat and my fedora had become damp.

2 A.M. Close to closing time.

The hands of my watch were lost, so I had to ask the lady at the counter about the time. I seemed to have woken her up from a nap when I came in.

3 pictures of Jane D _ _, all in sepia.

I had laid them out on the table again. Each image had been scathed: the likely aftermath of someone’s jagged, psychotic knife swings, perfect scrapes that didn’t tear through the images, but across them. Everything but the pupils.

4 letters missing: one that I was going to send her yesterday. Another that she had written for me just before the incident. Two others not yet put down on paper.

I drank half my coffee. The rain continued to pelt against the window. Then I took out a couple quarters and left them Ø. H. // 96

on the table. Just as I got up, the lights at Sally’s started to fade. The neon blue letters of Balb_a Mot_l deepened behind the dew and night-covered windowpane. All the indoor lights died out, and I didn’t see the counter-lady again before everything went black. A lone car came into the empty parking lot, its headlights intermingling with the sign’s neon blue.

5 seconds left until the sands pour in.

I blinked and everything had been dipped in animated heaps of sand pouring in from all directions. The counterlady was gone. The black of the night turned into the same soft and warm brown that was in my coffee cup, and now the sky had a solid, steep ceiling blocking out its own outer reaches. The ceiling had an even darker, more chocolatey brown than the sky itself did. From behind the window, I could see large and perfect circles on the underside of its sky, out of which rivers of sands streamed downward like the endless and slowest flow inside of an hourglass. The lights from the car in the parking lot were now dead, and its blank license plate loosely hung from the front. Its tires were getting smothered deeper and deeper by the singing, sifting sands pouring all over it. There was no driver behind the wheel.

6 blinks, then peace of mind.

Heavier taps of the sand swarmed against the window panes. The rainfall from before was sandfall now, some of the pieces dense and hail-like. Many of the droplets turned into amalgams of connected sands as a soft and hazel sandstorm began to brew itself. Within it, whiffs of the floating desert’s soil continued to drift, scatter, become invisible, and 97 // Spectrum

disintegrate.

7 taps of sandfall knocking on the door.

I heard them from behind me. I grabbed the pictures, now entirely browned, and tucked them into the pocket of my coat. The cup of coffee slowly skidded across the table until it fell and broke against the rising grains.

8 deformed beings sculpt themselves in the spreading mounds.

The flood of the dunes continued to ravage and obscure.

The letters from the neon sign had all already been engulfed by them, and now my right foot was magnetized by the particles gathering around it. A crowd of long arms made from and out of the sands had latched onto my foot and dragged me down onto my stomach and across the roughness of the floor. The sand-creatures had their bottom halves submerged in the grounds’ dunes entirely, but their upper halves were exposed and perfectly molded in the shape of a human silhouette. Each wailed out withered, muffled screams like a ghastly blow of wind with a slight crackle and muteness attached to it. The chord their alien cries had struck fractured every chunk of the diner and the car outside into their airsuspended broken pieces, as if everything had been turned into an unglued puzzle locked in three dimensions. A simple undoing could have put the shattered pieces of every material thing back into its original, intact self in an instant. But the contrary happened: the fractured pieces began to oscillate vertically in place, at first slowly, then with imperceptible rapidity. The floor, the sands, the arms, the tables, the streams, the brokenness of the sky, the pictures, the letters, the car outside, the winds, everything within the confines of existence’s possibility but the sky’s ceiling had been cast into a Ø. H. // 98

state of impossibly rapid movement. I could no longer see anything’s former identity. Everything looked blurred, an acceleration of itself with a deep and dark ringed crevice carved into them, a faulty portrait of Bacon’s put into epileptic motion. Tremors were born by the earth, my right leg, and the sand-creatures still trying to drag them. I could feel myself getting pulled further in. The last thing I saw before my fingernails gave up their scrape across the halfsand half-tile floor at Sally’s were the cracks forming in the still ceiling of the sky. Then I was engulfed entirely. Every corner of my skin felt the harshness of sand embracing it, a pitch-dark sea of coarse sand that one could not see or feel anything in. I was sure of my drowning until I found myself led elsewhere when my eyelids came loose. It was a perfectly flat and white ground stretched out in all directions. In the flatness there was nothing. It was just me and the sand falling from my body and making piles where I was standing. The atmosphere above was a much darker brown than before, a fiery, burnt gradient of it spread out over into monsoon-like air. Closer to the floor, the brown was softer, but farther up it was brooding and deeper, a twilight of its various smoky shades. Chaotic arrays of clouds and constellations stared back from above: striking, unglowing grains of dark brown imitating the dimmest stars. I took out the pictures again, putting them up against the stars’ side.

The floor disintegrated. Its white fragments, the burnished sky, and the stars’ grainy imitators within it, and I, their brief observer, all fell into descent. The sand-licked twilight materialized into an ocean falling towards the face of the earth waiting to flood the continents the instant they collided with the heart of the landing that sang again for us far below. I saw the motel and diner close in as I neared it.

Then I saw the car, Jane D. crying behind the wheel as the lights turned back on again.

99 // Spectrum

THE WEIGHT OF BEING A BODY Chace Duma CCS Writing & Literature

is infinite. not oneeighttwo like the scale says. that number gets me claustrophobic. went to the beach to breathe got mouthfuls of sand picked them off my tongue grain by grain. tried the ocean forgot my gills brought old lungs like an idiot now can’t sleep with the fish cus i float to the top bobbing, bobbing sucking sun through a straw just to spit it out.

Duma // 100

THE LIGHTS ARE ON BUT NO ONE’S HOME Isabella Catanzaro CCS Physics

101 // Spectrum

SUMMER IN FOREST GROVE, OR Tomas Palpalloc CCS Writing & Literature

With my back against the uncut wood headboard we pinched together on the hottest day of the year, I smell morning, dense and alive feathered trees and gasping aeroplanes.

Later that afternoon, laid out in the perspiration knees kissing your kitchen tile, a streak of grease down my forearm as I split screws from our one box fan you dance towards me, laughing with the sort of sunkissed happiness that begs to be shared, I meet you fingers outstretched as we turn drenched in

Palpalloc // 102

THOMPSON SEEDLESS Pierre Thibodeaux CCS Physics

The waxy bloom on the outside, Sultana, like something settled, a dust on the annals, your contact lens, lambskin or latex and tannic, tantalizingly green and green and handsome, Sultana, Harmonia’s vasculum, the compact, the crisp, the vitreous body, Sultana, seaglass pearl, green and green veins winding through a dance, a vacuous cant.

I can’t understand, Sultana, this unanimity, the way the light pans through not lime and pear but green and green, Sultana.

Concordant.

103 // Spectrum

ROAN Alisa Bilyk Environmental Studies

Bilyk // 104

105 // Spectrum

CONTRIBUTOR BIOS Anya Adorni's oil paintings traverse the world of female empowerment through examining why the female body is objectified, controlled, and hyper-sexualized, with or without clothing. Anya can be contacted on her website anyaadorniart.com.

Hana Belmonte-Ryu is a third-year student double majoring in Psychology & Brain Sciences and Black Studies from San Diego, California.

Alisa Bilyk is a recreational photographer that aims to capture moments she finds beautiful. She was born in Ukraine, but grew up in suburban California, and so tries to find a place where those two identities intersect in their view of the world and, primarily, the environment. Alisa can be found on Instagram at @bokchoybilyk.

The Bub thinks expression is key in living, just as much as growing, listening, and showing humility. We live too short of a time to be scared, and if we are, what better place to voice it than in the world of art?

Isabella Catanzaro is a third-year CCS Physics major. Isabella is passionate about both art and experimental physics, hoping to eventually continue their physics education past the undergraduate level.

Marley O'Connor is a fourth-year CCS Biology major and science education minor focused in ecology and entomology.

They are an amateur poet, but enjoy writing about the morbidly beautiful.

Chace Duma is a CCS Writing & Literature major who loves to write about nature, the world, and being an anxious person residing in the two.

Contributors // 106

Aran Ø. H. is a photographer, visual artist, poet, and writer who writes in the self-coined genre of gothic-romantic psychosurrealism. He made mind-bending storytelling his ambition after watching filmmaker David Lynch's cult classic show Twin Peaks, what he considers to be the biggest influence on his artistic identity. Aran's maximalist approach can be attributed to several notable influences, including avant-garde fashion, art-house cinema, Persian mythologies, synesthesiainducing music, surrealist artists, psychology, medicine, and space. He hopes to establish an eclectic arts circle when he returns to UCSB in the fall.

Tomas Palpallatoc is a fourth-year Sociology and CCS Writing and Literature major. His work focuses on memories of eggs cracking on kitchen tile and how the sound of Reeboks going down stairs reminds him of car crashes. During college, he found his love for spoken word and written poetry. When he is not having a crisis on figuring out how to turn either of his degrees into something that will pay his rent, Tomas spends his time watching subpar romantic comedies on Netflix, and trying his hardest to finally bake a good loaf of bread.

Megan Roni Ragone is a new transfer student to UCSB. They're studying English and Theatre, and their true passion lies within playwriting. Roni can be found on Instagram at @mrragone.

Lilly Rey is a young writer who explores the grey areas of childhood, family, and trauma in a variety of artistic mediums.

Marina Stoilova enjoys making sketches on and off campus.

Particularly of things that aren't quite intended landmarks, but nonetheless stand out for some reason. Marina can be found on Instagram at @marinara_stoviola.

Kyra Sullivan is in their fourth year at UCSB, where they study behavioral ecology. In their free time, they read and write science fiction with great enthusiasm, and hope to someday 107 // Spectrum

publish an anthology of their work.

Dane Taylor loves art, anything and everything related to it.

While he focuses in motion pictures, he's dabbled in photography, graphic design, and music production. While learning to write songs, Dane grew a taste for poetry. He can be found on Instagram at either @danedansk and @makeadent.us.

Pierre Thibodeaux is a physics major who dabbles with the pen. He is concerned with issues of transience and multiplicity of identity. He likes to study the stars and is trying to learn kpop dances. He has previously been a recipient of a CCS Writing Award for Narrative Prose. Pierre can be found on Instagram at @pierrethibodeaux.

Vivian Walman-Randall is completing her degree in Writing and Literature through the College of Creative Studies, and pursuing a minor in Art History. Vivian self-identifies as a nature writer, and explores themes of femininity through narratives and poetry that incorporate and illustrate the natural world. She can be found at vivianwalmanrandall.com.

Carson Young grew up in Northern California and moved to Monterey as a teenager. From vampires to satellites, Carson invokes the mystical and the mundane. He is a fourth-year CCS W&L student and is writing a book of poetry tentatively named “Lanugo.” It will interrogate the visceral surrealism of eating disorders, transition, catholicism, and the intimate cosmic fabric of queer love. Post-graduation, Carson is planning on applying to graduate-level programs offering an MFA or PhD in writing studies.

Kat Yuen is a fourth-year Writing & Literature student with a minor in LGBTQ+ Studies and a lot of quirks stemming from her Chinese-American background. He is mainly known for his creative writing about asexuality, but can also be found going off on tangents about Death, gender, and her novel.

You can contact Kat on Twitter at @gayerdryad.

Contributors // 108

EXQUISITE CORPSE CONTRIBUTORS Michelle Dalarossa is a recent UCSB graduate with degrees in Communication and Global Studies and minors in French and Translation Studies. Her passion for writing and language motivated her undergraduate studies and sparked an interest in the nuances of self-expression. Much of her poetry concerns quotidian life and follows a stream-of-consciousness approach, aiming to evoke emotions and reflections from sketches of dayto-day moments. After spending a year abroad in Lyon, France, she became fascinated with cross-cultural communication and immersion, and will relocate to northern France in the fall to pursue an English teaching position for the 21-22 school year.

Michelle can be found in Instagram at @michelledlrss.

Jordan Marie Finley is a 20 year old writer from San Diego, California. She is continuing her studies at Stanford University.

Jordan is an alumni of the Gabler Promise Scholars Writing Program at UCSB, where she wrote her first book, Hail Mary.

She has written and produced 3 plays so far. Jordan is grateful for and going to miss the writing community at UCSB deeply.

Resh Grewal is a Writing and Literature major in the College of Creative Studies at the University of California Santa Barbara. She focuses on narrative prose and is passionate about realistic fiction and creative nonfiction of all lengths, and occasionally dabbles in lyricism. The majority of her writing explores dark or underrepresented themes, such as trauma, mental illness, and the experiences of minority groups. Resh can be found on Instagram at @reshgrewal.

Hannah Z. Morley is an emerging young writer known for her fiction, nonfiction, and original musicals. Morley is a recent graduate of the University of California, Santa Barbara’s College of Creative Studies. Check out more of her work at hannahzmorley.com!

109 // Spectrum

Celine Pun (she/hers) is a Chinese-Vietnamese American storyteller, hailing from Los Angeles. She studies Writing and Literature and Environmental Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara and enjoys exploring the intersection of cultural identities in outdoor recreation and food. Celine can be found at celinepun.com.

Amelia Rodriguez is a poet and journalist from the Coachella Valley in California. She earned her B.A. in Writing & Literature at UC Santa Barbara's College of Creative Studies.

She hopes to someday win at the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament. Amelia can be found on Instagram at @goodmorningamelia.

Elaina Smolin is a second-year in the College of Creative Studies’ Writing and Literature program. Last spring, she placed second in the 2021 CCS Most Excellent Narrative Prose writing competition for her piece, “This Is An Ad for Vans.”

When not attempting to write, she enjoys long walks on the beach—among other cliches. Elaina can be found on Instagram at @elaina.smolin.

Pierre Thibodeaux is a physics major who dabbles with the pen. He is concerned with issues of transience and multiplicity of identity. He likes to study the stars and is trying to learn kpop dances. He has previously been a recipient of a CCS Writing Award for Narrative Prose. Pierre can be found on Instagram at @pierrethibodeaux.

Vivian Walman-Randall is an undergraduate at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is completing her degree in Creative Writing and Literature through the College of Creative Studies, and pursuing a minor in Art History.

Vivian self-identifies as a nature writer, and explores themes of femininity through narratives and poetry that incorporate and illustrate the natural world. Vivian can be found at vivianwalmanrandall.com.

Contributors // 110

Carson Young grew up in Northern California and moved to Monterey as a teenager. From vampires to satellites, Carson invokes the mystical and the mundane. He is a fourth-year CCS W&L student and is writing a book of poetry tentatively named “Lanugo.” It will interrogate the visceral surrealism of eating disorders, transition, catholicism, and the intimate cosmic fabric of queer love. Post-graduation, Carson is planning on applying to graduate-level programs offering an MFA or PhD in writing studies.

Kat Yuen is a fourth-year Writing & Literature student with a minor in LGBTQ+ Studies and a lot of quirks stemming from her Chinese-American background. He is mainly known for his creative writing about asexuality, but can also be found going off on tangents about Death, gender, and her novel.

You can contact Kat on Twitter at @gayerdryad.

111 // Spectrum

// 112