Spires Intercollegiate Arts & Literary Magazine Fall 2018 Issue

SPIRES

FA L L

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Barely Woman

Taylor Pirtle Washington University in St. Louis, ’21 Digital collage

SPIRES intercollegiate arts & literary magazine

Fall 2018

Copyright 2018, Spires Magazine Volume XXIV Issue I All rights reserved. No part of this magazine may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior written permission from Spires and the author.

Critics, however, are welcome to quote brief passages by way of criticism and review. spiresmagazine@gmail.com sites.wustl.edu/spires facebook.com/spiresintercollegiatemagazine

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Table of Contents Literature 8

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Cindy Song Self-Portrait as Recycled Bottle

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Noah Hagen Make-Ahead Baked Gazebo Through Instant Messaging

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Cindy Song Learning Balance

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Vivian Holland Hardships at 18

Delaney Carlson (comme ma vie)

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Aaron de Kanter potato sack

A.J. Takata Setting Sun

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Dorothy Zhao Little White Houses Cindy Song Law of Geometry

Elissa Mullins An Ode for Pressed Flowers

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A.J. Takata How to See Double

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Cindy Song Family Dinner Before Exodus

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Delaney Carlson Letters Home

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Khanh Kim Vu Dark Matter

Art 9

Erin Noh Her

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Erin Noh Then and Now

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Hugh Hoagland Foggy Morning

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Olivia Lichterman Maion

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Hugh Hoagland Near North Riverfront, between Branch and N. Market Streets

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Essa Li From a Walk Some Time Ago

Front Cover Hugh Hoagland 4:00pm, 10/15/17, Malmö, Sweden Washington University in St. Louis, ’19 Gelatin silver print Back Cover Savannah Bustillo Dipped and Skinned Husks Washington University in St. Louis, ’18 6 Layer Screenprint

Hugh Hoagland Kosciusko, Lombard & S. 1st Street

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Staff Editors-in-chief Haley Berg Madeline Partner Literary Editor Peter Satterthwaite Art Editor Amy Chen Layout Editor Isabelle Celentano Programming Director Molly Davis Social Media Director Alli Hollender Treasurer Madeline Partner Staff Annabel Chosy Kendall Dawson Lauren Ellis Sarah Gao Jonah Goldberg Sabrina Spence

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Letter from the Editors Dear Reader, Each semester at Spires, we sit down to read through your incredible submissions of prose and poetry, fiction and non-fiction. We sort through a striking range of paintings and illustrations, photographs and sculptures. Inevitably, as our small but poignant collection of work grows and that particular season’s issue slowly unfolds, we find that common threads emerge. These commonalities stem from the surrounding political climates and sprout from topical cultural conversations. They reflect the tastes and interests of writers, artists, and readers on our own campus, and on campuses across the nation.

In this issue, we are honored to present this remarkable collection of work from our peers. We offer you narratives that negotiate the line between heritage and identity, that search amongst cultural spaces and physical places, and that examine the minutiae within human interactions. Some provide a humorous touch, a light-hearted approach to a delicate matter; others play on the edge of the surreal, questioning what it means when the humdrum of everyday life meets the fantastical. This issue offers an incredible range of artwork as students engage with perceptions, perspectives, and associations of time and place; interrogating identity through a range of playful approaches and weighty investigations.

We are privileged to present this body of work from students at both Washington University and beyond, and we hope you find this collection as poignant as we do.

Sincerely,

Haley Berg and Madeline Partner Editors-in-Chief

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Self-Portrait as Recycled Bottle stuck at melting point i sit upright late afternoon. melted plastic is never a good thing; too much softening. the stale air rising inside of me is suffocating so i inhale— no more beach days. i am already missing the waves lapping at a slight tilt against my edges, skin translucent with sifted sunlight casting rigid unfamiliar shadows against fractured wall. i am endlessly recycling yesterday in my head. i am flattening myself into two dimensions to call myself modern art, gallery silence pregnant with sound of crinkling plastic. plastic is only good for art anyway. i can only take so much pressure before i crumple, my feet rounding to catch hard fall. this barrenness is all too familiar. no more beach days.

Cindy Song Princeton University, ’22

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Her

Erin Noh Washington University in St. Louis, ’21 Gouache and color pencils

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Learning Balance I sat, balancing— on the triangular seat as Father steadied the greased handlebars, guiding the wobbling wheels forward, which kissed concrete for countless revolutions. And I counted the number of times my knees have familiarized themselves with the coolness of the metal frame, ligaments slim like a swan’s neck yet unfaltering beneath my body weight. How my body, unsure at first, slowly learned the pull between foot and gravity, freedom and gratitude. Father, I, too, learned what it means to fly with no footing, nowhere to look back to.

Like loosening screws, my fingers have let these carefree evenings filled with scraped shins and loud laughter slip past, blown away into the shadows. The path ahead beckons; it narrows to vanishing point, leaving room for just one body.

More than anything, I have learned that it is impossible to balance my own weight —without motion.

Cindy Song Princeton University, ’22

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Hardships at 18 For once, the air is like water at 10:40 PM in October– pumpkin soup, no spice– which provides a hint of suffocation to my skin as I cradle my psychology textbook, lower edge hooked in my left elbow, upper corner in my right, a single mom caressing her child west of the East Village. It’s a ten minute walk to Astor Place, five stops to home, fifty minutes of blank space in a carefully mapped day in the rat race— I like that phrase because I race like a rat through the subways each day.

What is time? My hands ache. It’s hard to count as part of the struggling workforce when you have no student loans and wear an Apple Watch to your ten-dollar-an-hour babysitting job.

Oh, won’t you pity the privileged? Yet it pains me to accidentally grab the dollar coin on my second dive into my change purse for the sad man I see on Lex and 53rd for the third time this week.

I write “homeless, $2” on my index card budget.

Vivian Holland New York University, ’21

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Then and Now

Erin Noh Washington University in St. Louis, ’21 Gouache and pencil

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potato sack a husband’s body was found at the bottom of an acrid bog on a bed of peat moss. a kitchen glowed with light from the morning news. in photographs online, his head resembled some collapsed November pumpkin. having been dried, his body resembled a brown potato sack, empty of potatoes, slid behind a refrigerator and forgotten. a widow watched a stranger’s family at Matilda Park. the family stood in potato sacks, and when the dad yelled go! the family jumped as hard as they could for the finish line. she imagined their shoes ripping through the burlap. she imagined feeding them a pumpkin pie.

Aaron de Kanter Saint Louis Community College, Meramec, ’21

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Foggy Morning

Hugh Hoagland Washington Univeristy in St. Louis, ’19 Digitized negative

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Little White Houses My mom had been the longest standing president of the Perkasie School District PTA in all of organizational history. First it was during my brother Joe’s time, then Marjorie, and now me. It had been twelve years now, and I’m still not sure what she does. What I do know is that she somehow always had the inside gossip on the other families. The PTA moms liked to congregate in our cramped living room, delivering biting comments over homemade chocolate chip cookies. They wore gold cross necklaces and cooed in soft tones that failed to hide the venom in their words.

Mom reigned supreme over these meetings—their queen in her matching merino cashmere cardigan set. She never joined in, just collected the information and relayed it back to us over family dinner. That’s how I became the first kid on the block to know that Bobby Mortick’s parents got a divorce and that Mr. Lipton embezzled money from his company. When the news that our next-door neighbor Mrs. Wendell was hosting an exchange student got out, I heard a week before everyone else. But what Mom made me swear not to tell anyone was that the exchange student wasn’t just anybody. He was Mr. Wendell’s son, dropped unexpectedly into their lives.

“Men don’t like it when they no longer can be the man,” she had explained to me after I asked her why he would cheat on Mrs. Wendell. I wasn’t too sure what she meant, but I had pretended to nod sagely along with her.

The “exchange student” came to live with the Wendell’s in September. His name was Léon, which reminded me of the lions in the nature documentaries I would watch.

It was a fitting name. He had such a voluminous shock of hair that it seemed to have a life of its own. His bedroom window was across from mine, and I could see him every night, his head poking out into the night sky. He would hold his cigarette loosely, letting the smoke spill out in a faint trickle from the window. I wanted to reach my hand out the window and ladle it up, just to feel the same air that he had breathed.

On other nights, I would see him bent over his desk—his lamp shining as my lone comrade at midnight. His spine would curve into a hunched-over “s,” and I could imagine him drumming his fingertips across the roll top desk. I am sure even those haphazard melodies sounded like Mozart. Every night I would watch Léon, admire the soft, unassuming way that he went through his routine. While he moved quietly, he was not shy or timid. I thought of him not as a boy but as man who was assured of himself enough not to have to declare it.

Every Tuesday morning, Léon would drive me to school in his beat-up gold Saab.

My mom usually would drop me off, but on Tuesdays she went into the city to go see Dr. Vernon. One time when I was younger, before Léon was around, she brought me

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with her. Dr. Vernon was a corpulent man with a drooping chin that quivered every time he spoke. My mother had let me borrow her Walkman as she spoke to the doctor for what must have been hours. It didn’t seem useful to me, but on the drive back she was calmer and didn’t honk at any cars like she did on the way there.

I much preferred Tuesday drives with Léon. He would drop me off at the middle school before going to the high school. We would roll up to the front doors blasting rap music—something my mom had banned in our house— from the cassette player.

All the other kids would watch in the drop-off line in their cooped-up minivans, forced to listen to NPR. My girl friends would tease me, asking if he was my boyfriend. Maybe one day, I said.

We had good conversations on those Tuesdays. That was the thing about Léon. He never talked to me like I was a silly kid or a little sister. I was a real adult.

“So, how do you like Perkasie,” I asked him one time.

“It is not so different from Toronto,” he told me. “People are the same no matter where I am. Though the houses here are certainly larger.”

“And how do you like the Wendell’s?”

He shrugged, “Mrs. Wendell has been very kind to me. She reminds me of my mom.”

I tried to imagine what his life would have been like in Canada. He must have been poor. My mom told me that you could tell how rich someone was by their teeth. She made sure I looked at the cashier’s teeth when we went to the McDonald’s. If you don’t study and do well in school, she said to me, that’s what your kids’ teeth are going to look like. Do you want that? I shook my head and promised I would do better in algebra.

Léon had a gap between his two front teeth, so I took it to mean he grew up without money. He must have lived in an apartment, not a townhouse like the Wendell’s.

I wondered if his neighbors could stare into his windows, if some other girl glimpsed into his room. In my imagination, his mother—his birth mother, not Mrs. Wendell— also had lioness hair and smoked cigarettes pensively on the balcony. I wondered if she and Mrs. Wendell would have known each other had they lived in the same town. …

Watching Léon became a religion to me in the way praying was for my father.

He used to make me say my Hail Mary’s every night, the rosary beads slippery in my fingers. When I was younger, he would bring me to confession every week. He disappeared into the wooden cell. I never knew what he had to repent. His booming voice would devolve into a whisper during those hours, and I would sit staring at Jesus on the cross until he came back. As I grew older, he became too busy to take me

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to church. But still the monotonous practices of worship became ingrained into me.

Much like my father waited for the priest to give him the answers, I peered across the grass between the two houses with the same bated breath. Every night at ten, I parted the blinds on the attic window, not knowing why, but feeling the overwhelming need to do so.

At some point as fall turned into winter and my nights watching Léon became longer. A new figure joined him in the window. From the harsh lines of the silhouette, I could tell that it was Mrs. Wendell. She had a distinct posture. It was almost regal— shoulders rolled back, spine rigidly straight. Even at night, she had on her high heels, the same ones I saw her wearing on her way to work. Every time that I saw her out in the neighborhood, she would have a little black book close by that she scribbled in. I never quite knew what she was writing down in it, but I had always guessed it was a calendar of some sorts. She was a business woman, one of those progressive ladies that the PTA mothers would whisper about, and wore colorful pantsuits every day. Maybe because she was used to having to talk over men at work all the time, Mrs. Wendell also seemed to be saying something.

While Léon tended to be silent, she punctuated every action with a word. Even with the windows closed, her voice travelled across the short distance between our homes. I tried to block out the snippets of conversation, but some nights they were impossible to ignore. It tended to be when Mr. Wendell would stumble into the house, sometimes forgetting to turn the car headlights off, that her voice would reach unbearably shrill levels. Léon would be sitting, reading his book—what he read I never knew, but I am sure it was grand—and smoking a cigarette. With a sudden slam of the door, Mrs. Wendell would march in, always in impeccable makeup, always in her pantsuit.

Each time, she would yank the cigarette from him before extinguishing the smoldering butt on his hand.

I would watch this scene unfold from my third story window, imagining the soft hiss of burning flesh and wincing in pain. But even then, Léon never made a sound.

He let her scream at him until her words dissolved into frantic wails and she collapsed into a disheveled heap on the floor. After that, he would hug her, letting her dry the tears on the sleeves of his shirt.

When I told my mom about this, she just shook her head. “Every family has their secrets. Don’t go sharing what isn’t yours to tell.”

I agreed, and I did not share. This did nothing to stop my fascination with the family however. When my mom said that Mrs. Wendell had left Tupperware at our

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house after a neighborhood party, I volunteered to return it to her.

It was snowing outside—the first of the year. My boots left deep indents in the snow as I trudged along. Even the thirty-foot walk felt painful to me. By the time I reached their house, my fingers had gone numb, curled up into a tiny fist in my pocket.

Mrs. Wendell opened the door for me. She was wearing a vermilion pantsuit—a shade made more garish against the faded gray of the outside—and had her makeup all done up. Her face looked crumbly, like someone had smeared too thick a coat of paint, in the dim foyer lighting.

From behind her, I could see down the hallway and into their dining room. Léon and Mr. Wendell were sitting across from each other at the table. Léon was speaking, or at least attempting, to Mr. Wendell. He leaned forward to ask a question, and I could see Mr. Wendell shrinking back into his chair.

“I brought your Tupperware, ma’am.”

She smiled at me, perhaps because I called her ma’am. It didn’t seem like many people said that to her. Even though my dad said it was unnecessary, my mom had told me to call all women over forty-five ma’am out of respect and so I did.

“That’s so sweet of you, honey.” I could tell Mrs. Wendell was one of those people who thought kids were dumb. When she spoke, she dragged out the vowels, so that the words were almost distorted. “Would you like to come inside? I just baked cookies.”

I followed her into the house, noting how different it looked from my own. My mom had taken great care to cultivate our hallways with flecks of humanity. She hung our school photos, from kindergarten to senior year, in the very front of the house so visitors knew we were a family. The walls in the Wendell house were bare, painted an uneven shade of light beige. In some places the paint clumped a tad too heavy and in other places bits of white plaster poked out.

She brought me through the kitchen and into the dining room. Léon waved at me, causing me to blush. Mr. Wendell did not look up from the piece of grilled chicken he was cutting into cubes.

“Chocolate chip or oatmeal raisin?”

I pointed to the chocolate chip. It must have been still hot from the oven because she winced when her fingers hit the tray. She handed me a cookie. It was sad to look at. I was used to my mom’s famous cookies—the star of every bake sale. The dough here was lumpy, burnt in some places and undercooked in others. From the way she was staring at me, I could tell she wanted me to eat it in front of her and say how delicious it tasted. The cookie crumbled like sawdust in my mouth.

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“This is delicious.” The compliment made her smile again—the smile she had when I called her ma’am at the doorstep. Even though I knew I was going to toss them, I let her wrap up three more cookies in a paper towel to take home. …

After leaving their house, I could not stop picturing the dining room table. I had assumed that every family’s dinner was like my own. We would link hands before the meal, bowing our heads down so my father could thank God for the meatloaf and green beans my mom had made. Dinners were never silent. While Mom reigned over the kitchen and her PTA squadron, dinner was my father’s domain. He was usually tired from his commute to New York, but it didn’t stop him from dominating the conversation. His voice would bellow across the table, asking me to speak louder and enunciate my words. My father could talk about anything with enthusiasm. I’m a natural-born salesman, he said. It’s my job.

I tended to tune him out. It was grown-up stuff like the news or the stocks, neither of which concerned me. Tonight though he was talking about Mr. Wendell. I stopped trying to slip the green beans into a balled-up napkin on my lap long enough to listen.

It was clear he was about to say something critical from the way his shoulders would roll back and his face relax into a half smile.

They played in our neighborhood basketball league, which was less of a basketball league and more of an excuse for them to get together on Saturday nights to drink beer. My father did not think very highly of Mr. Wendell. He didn’t like quiet men.

He found them to be weak.

Mom was urging my father to make more an effort to speak to Mr. Wendell. It was difficult for him with the marriage problems and all, she said.

Don’t we all have marriage problems, Marie? She ignored his comment, turning to ask my little brother Danny how his day was. It had been Career Day, but neither one of my parents had been able to make it. My father had been too caught up at the office, and homemaker wasn’t much of a career to present. If Mrs. Wendell were invited, I was sure she would have an interesting job to talk about.

“I don’t get it,” I announced. My father told me to speak up; he couldn’t hear me. “I don’t get it. If Mr. Wendell loves Mrs. Wendell, why are they unhappy?”

My mother sighed. “Well, sometimes love isn’t always enough.” She cast a pointed glance at my father who was suddenly fascinated by the green beans on his plate. Don’t go prying into other people’s business, she reminded me again. I nodded before heading to my room for the night.

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And I had stopped. I started shutting the blinds over my windows at night. It had been getting too much. The voices would pierce through from across the patch of grass. Voices would also float up through the wooden boards of the house—from the kitchen, to the bedrooms, all the way up to the attic where I was.

My parents had always fought. It was inevitable when two strong-minded people get together, but I had never heard them yelling until that year. Even though my father was loud, my mother tended to be more of a quiet fighter. The lower her voice got, sometimes it could go down into a whisper, the angrier she was. But now I could hear my mom screaming his name and calling him words she told me never to say.

I did not know what they were fighting about, and I tried my hardest not to find out either. They thought they were careful too, waiting until nighttime to begin. Once I learned to look for the warning signs—the twitch of my mother’s left eye or the slightest clench of my father’s fist—I saw them everywhere.

One night, when it was already past midnight and the yelling had stopped, I thought it was safe for me to go downstairs to grab a chocolate bar. Just as I was about to enter, I saw the two of them through a crack in the door. They were huddled on the tile floor, the yellow kitchen light enveloping them. My father’s head was buried in my mother’s chest, as she stroked his hair in slow rhythmic circles. She cradled him in her arms, rocking back and forth, like the swaying of a small lost boat at sea. It’s going to be okay, she told him. We’re going to be alright. He nodded, and they clutched each other tighter. It was a moment that was not meant for me to see—a moment that I did not want to see either. I ran back all three flights of stairs, back to the quiet attic where I did not have to hear my father’s muffled gasps for breath or my mother’s comforting words.

All I wanted was for my father not to have to go to New York every day, so my mother could stop going to see Dr. Vernon. She had changed from every Tuesday appointments to twice a week now. Yet there was nothing I could change. Instead, I burrowed my head beneath the paisley covers of my bed, clamping my hands over my ears. Only after all the sounds stopped would I open the window and stick my head out into the night sky.

In the beginning, I would see Léon sometimes doing the same thing. I now understood why he did it. The air was soothing. It came in one ear and whooshed out the other as if to distill all the sounds that were cooped up inside my brain. But eventually it became just me. He moved away to college in the fall, and Mr. Wendell left shortly after.

I watched it happen. It was past midnight—the rest of the street was long asleep, even the streetlights were flickering to shut their eyes—when he came out of the

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house rolling his suitcase. He packed it into the trunk of the car and sped out of the driveway without even sparing a glance back at the house. When my father told us Mr. Wendell moved into Center City with his new girlfriend, my mom shook her head and grabbed his hand as if to say I will not let this happen to us. It was not enough to stop the fighting though, which had become such a daily occurrence that it became white noise to me.

Mrs. Wendell sold the house in November. She lugged three cardboard boxes to the moving van that she rented. Everything else had been left in garbage bags on the curbside. I wondered what she had chosen to put in those boxes. Maybe they were just filled with pantsuits. Maybe they were empty. My father had offered to help, but she said she could do it by herself. Our family stood at the end of our driveway to wave her off. I had never noticed how small Mrs. Wendell was. Her head was barely visible over the U-Haul’s steering wheel.

The family that moved in after the Wendell’s chose to turn the third-floor attic into a storage room. They had two boys—both of whom were younger than I was.

When I looked over, all I could see was a raggedy couch and a pile of used lacrosse sticks. By then, I had stopped watching and listening for what happened next door.

But every so often at night when I glanced over out of habit, I would see the curtain from the old Wendell house shift back to reveal a pale face pushed up against the second-floor window pane, staring across the strip of grass.

Dorothy Zhao Princeton University, ’21

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Maion

Olivia Lichterman University of Tennesee, ’19 Pastel, acrylic, ink on canvas

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Law of Geometry

Inspired by Joan Miro’s “The Birth of the World” (1925) In the beginning God created rain. In the beginning a balloon bloomed to life, red and foreign like a storm.

Everything was messy grays and murky yellows like a mother’s regret or the reeds along a still pond, bodies bending to untamed winds.

In the distance the dark figures mourn for something far away, or long ago, or anything that’s familiar.

They love geometry because it’s clean like a shadow, comforting like motherhood. As a kite unfolds above the child’s face, the rain deluges a bird in the pond. Flight is only flight when there is a destination, a target to shoot at in the cacophony of neverending parallels. When the balloon reaches vanishing point, all the birds will fly home— a surprise collision, a linear rebirth, a migration.

Cindy Song Princeton University, ’21

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How to See Double 1. Watch your grandmother’s funeral. Play it back, again, and again. See how the lines in her skin carve canyons and expose her bones, how much the body shrinks under a nursing home diet. Look at her throat; listen to the distant echoes of a language you cannot speak.

2. Follow her veins. Trace them 2,000 miles to Rohwer, Arkansas, where they contort into a perfect barbed wire rectangle. Glace at yellow faces, desert wastes, an endless sea of watch towers that stretch past the horizon. Play baseball under the light of stars and searchlights.

3. Listen to your great grandfather, how he left his family in Japan before the war began. Touch the grooves on his face where sea salt slashed, the calluses on his hands where he picked sugar cane, remnants of a life you only think you understand.

4. Sit in a restaurant across the ocean and read the Tokyo Nichi Nichi Shimbun.

Two smiling soldiers with katanas in hand, a friendly beheading contest. Set Nanjing alight, watch people dance in flaming clothes, never think about your cousin in an internment camp.

5. Cram the two halves of your family together like puzzle pieces from different boxes. Flip a coin and decide whether today you’re Japanese or American, but never both at the same time.

6. Swallow gallons of calligraphy ink. Pump it through your arteries with pounding palpitations, search for your mother tongue in your intestines.

7. Retch. Feel a black void of oil swirl in your stomach. Heat, red hot kamikaze flames diving up your esophagus, a rising sun choking your throat, shattering your teeth, grinding the bone to dust, until your lips drop an atom bomb onto your own home. Onto your family you don’t know, onto a place you could have been born in if not for one, simple change.

8. Feel the reverberations rattle every cell in your nerves, a boy with a samurai helmet too large and too loose over his cherry blossoming hair, a sword so heavy he stands lopsided when he wants to stand at attention.

9. Don’t know if you’re supposed to cry at your grandmother’s death or remain stoic.

If your father loved your grandmother so much, why are his eyes like desert wastes?

10. Scatter the atomic ashes on two continents, two countries, one body. Bury your grandmother in Rose Hills Cemetery, on a plot by the road, one she chose because it’s easy to visit. Read a tombstone with a name and nothing more. No camps, no divorce, no war. Cover her name with flowers until their petals fall and the breeze sweeps them over the hill.

A.J. Takata

Washington University in St. Louis, ’22

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Family Dinner Before Exodus I hate nightfall because it reminds me of a fish in a frozen pond— suffocation with no morning, Beijing with no mother.

No exit, even to surrender.

The palace would burn before a finger was laid on it.

Last summer, I tried to flavor myself— salt the tongue until it shriveled dry, until the body was white and pliant and boneless.

Maybe mother was giving me a warning in the shape of a red bean pastry, which I didn’t understand until I was missing a tongue.

I wish to breathe again from beneath the rubble, see the lanterns in the sky

celebrating the hero’s return— the hero, whose face I do not recognize until it is my own

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and the streets are singing red and Beijing is rumbling.

Noise so low you could mistake it for thunder.

Cindy Song Princeton University, ’22

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Near North Riverfront, between Branch and N. Market Streets Hugh Hoagland Washington University in St. Louis, ’19 Digitized negative

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Letters Home In tiny dotted line after tiny dotted line, rows of white marble crosses and Stars of David replace the apple trees that belong in this fruit orchard outside of Margraten.

At the sight of so many bodies – 17,740 soldiers, the trees had gasped,

fallen to their knees, and

hurled their guts downward.

Everyone in Margraten could smell the death.

Laid to rest in Plot A, Row 1, Grave 1: John David Singer, Jr., a 25-year-old infantryman, replaced the first fallen tree.

He is missing his essentials –

a pack of Kools,

a bar of soap,

the letters home.

Delaney Carlson Princeton University, ’19

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From a Walk Some Time Ago Essa Li Harvard University, ’19 Composite Photograph

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Kosciusko, Lombard & S. 1st Street Hugh Hoagland Washington University in St. Louis, ’19 Digitized negative

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Death

Erin Noh Washington University in St. Louis,’21 Watercolor., colored pencils, gouache

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Dark Matter Frozen in shock, I stared down at my uneaten bowl of rice as my mother sat in front of me, a single plate of boiled fish on the table between us. She had never snapped at me before, but, for the first time today, she did. Coming back from a full day of classes, I grumbled about how little food there was. I expected a complex excuse, a sincere apology, or at least a logical explanation, but instead I got a surprise. She abruptly put down her utensils, took a brief but deep breath, and said, in a voice that was soft yet filled the room with its weight and severity: “Khanh, I am tired. Stop complaining.”

Just two short sentences with a handful of words, but they scarred me. I had always known her as a woman of gentle touches and soft words, but, that night, I realized I didn’t know her at all. I almost wished she had said more.

Virginia Woolf came close to identifying this feeling in her book Moments of Being, when she described her mother as “a general presence rather than a particular person” because she was living “so completely in [her mother’s] atmosphere that [she] never got far enough away from her to see her as a person.” When I read this line five years after that dinner, it left a vague tugging of realization in my stomach. Throughout my childhood, no matter where I was in my house, I could always feel my mother – her breath, her smell, her touch, her atmosphere, her being – as a presence so vast that it was hard to condense into a single body. I, like Woolf, had yet to attempt to separate her, the person, from mother, the concept. I didn’t realize (or chose to forget) that she was also a wife, a daughter, a sister, a friend, and, in those rare moments when she was alone, an individual. As any child might, I selfishly wanted my mother to be just my mother and nothing else, but her other identities – stories that she had lived for three decades before I even came into existence – sometimes seeped through the walls of time and manifested itself in words and actions that strayed from normalcy – actions that would shock me, confuse me, but, most importantly, fascinate me.

A story that enchanted me to the point of obsession was one of how her family, with thirteen children, all starving and desperate from living on one sweet potato a day, had given up their home in Saigon, their lives, jobs, education, honor, and identity, to mount a small wooden hand-paddled boat at the quietest hour of the night to set out for another land – anywhere but Saigon. The boat carried my mother, her brothers and sisters away from the capital of South Vietnam to the open ocean. Or at least, that was where it intended to go, because it never made it. Just as my mother thought she saw a glimpse of that new future, she heard gunshots and screams, and saw people in her boat diving into the water, trying to swim to catch up with the other boats already ahead. My mother, barely out of her teens, tried to follow, but she was too late. Held

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and dragged back onto land, she only watched silently, as the other boats carried her three brothers – the only three who made it – along to the open waters. What could she have said to them? Wait for me? Come back? My mother could only hope, through closed eyelids that held back speechless tears, that whatever her three brothers would see in the New World, she could imagine it vicariously through them too.

The boat was too small. It did not have enough space to carry my mother’s tremendous life ambitions and confident future, full of promises that she could never have imagined would be broken. So the boat caved in and gave her ambitions, along with her story and her honor, to the River, who quickly drowned it under layers and layers of rich silt, while my mother, along with many others who suffered the same fate, was detained in jail in Saigon for two years. She had finished her third year in college, but, for the rest of her life, she would never be allowed to go back to school to receive her diploma.

She told me all of this – her hunger, her escape, her arrest, her broken dreams, her detainment, and her struggle to keep her head high – when I was already eighteen, in little more than fifteen short sentences. As she recounted this anecdote for the first and last time, she held my gaze unblinkingly, until I, crushed under the weight of it all, looked down at my hands uncomfortably. She said to me, in a contemplative but not regretful tone: “I was just like you once, you know. I had so many ambitions, to graduate, to get a good job, to make a fortune, to be someone. But when I was caught, I knew it was all over.”

After her release, she managed to find a job at a small company. On a business trip, she met my father, and they married two years later. “Your mother had to face many problems with my family, and solve them elegantly, so as to continue to exist.” That was the word he used – “exist”. For four years as he worked towards his doctorate in France, she waited for him, living in his house with his family instead of her own.

However, despite all the challenges she had to face, I have seen my mother cry only three times: at her mother’s funeral, at her father’s, and the other time when I was five.

It was a week day. I was dreading being woken up for school, pretending to sleep in the bedroom that my parents, sister, and I shared, but I was drawn completely out of slumber by footsteps and sobbing fits coming up the stairs. I shielded my eyes with an arm and peeked from underneath to see my parents sitting by the window, the morning sunlight landing on the back of their heads, making it hard to see their faces.

I suddenly felt a pinch on my arm and, turning discreetly, found my ten-year-old sister, from underneath her pillow, asking me what was going on with eyes that already knew the answer. I gave her a quick, desperate glance, and turned back to find my mother,

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her face unrecognizably contorted, muscles pulling up and down in unexpected places, bawling something to my father through downturned lips, of which I only caught “your mother” and “I can’t do this anymore,” and my father by her side, patting her back in short, awkward strokes, but offering no other acts of solace. I was proud to have witnessed this rare moment of my mother’s weakness because it was progress in my understanding of this woman whose shadow saturated my life. But I was also ashamed because it felt private, like having caught her unaware in the changing room.

Despite these novel feelings, I still woke up the next day to my mother’s soft hand and a glass of warm milk, like I would every other day.

My days started like this for the first fifteen years of my life. My birth, along with some difficulties at work, had persuaded my mother to become a housewife in her mid-thirties, to direct all her attention to her two daughters. Her life was reduced to the size of our house, and it has remained so until now. Before I left home to study abroad, I bought her many books, trying to help her find a pastime and hoping to share my passion for reading. However, my mother doesn’t believe in poetry and literature, and if you had lived through a war—nightly bombings, political propaganda, interrupted education, perpetual fear, national famine, and imprisonment—you wouldn’t either. She reads books the way she does chores: systematically, one page after another, with her full-rim glasses so small they barely cover her eyes, until, five pages in, she puts down the book and moves onto the next task.

Although my mother doesn’t believe in literature, nor does she meditate or recite mantras, she still strongly believes in Buddha’s teaching of karma, the cause-andeffect concept. However, fear of karma is not why she donates once a month to the local hospital. It is not why she bought food for our neighbors when they couldn’t afford to feed themselves. It is not why she paid for a stranger’s daughter’s college tuition. It is not why she built a library in one of the poorest villages in Southern Vietnam. Karma is not the reason—it is an excuse. Because when my father’s sisters asked why she didn’t buy meat only to save money to give to strangers, she couldn’t make them understand that these poor people could use those ten dollars better than we could. Instead, she smiled reluctantly and said: “Someday, my kids will receive what I have given away.” However, her daughters, no matter how precious to her, are not the primary reason. She does these things simply because she wants to, because they are right, but she uses selfishness to be more relatable, telling people that she helps others only to help her family and herself.

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I have grown up surrounded by her generosity, but she has also often said to me: “You can’t help others unless you help yourself first”, meaning by the route of education.

My parents had continually encouraged me in all my intellectual attempts, in spite of gender norms in Vietnam. Thus emboldened by this false sense of security, at sixteen I came home from my boarding school in Connecticut, where I learned about the feminist movement, and regurgitated reasons why a woman should not be subjected to social criticisms for satisfying her desires. My parents, generally quiet people, were even quieter during that dinner. When my soliloquy ended, my father turned on the TV. A few days later, as my mother was driving me on the back of her thirty-year-old Honda Cub motorbike, she reminded me that our family was Vietnamese and told me not to forget “our ways”. “Your purity is your value.” – she said, emphasizing “value” – “If you were a boy, it would be different, but you’re not.” For a while, I simply wondered in silence whether I had seen this exact scene and heard these exact words in a Vietnamese movie before. I thought that my gender had never determined what she expected of me, that she had raised me to never be denied anything in life. Why had she stoked my faith in gender equality and in my own abilities, only to douse it in ice water eighteen years later? If my parents didn’t want to believe in my ability to transcend social standards, then how could I believe in myself ?

I wanted to convey all of this to my mother, but all that I could muster as a response was: “Why can’t I have sex?” She took this as a protest, and became even more defensive. Every day afterwards, instead of saying good night before bed, she would say to me: “Promise me you won’t lose your value. Promise me?” She would stroke my cheek and look into my eyes with those almond-shaped ones that I did not inherit. Although my intention was not to defy her, I almost wanted to in that moment, if only to relish rebelling for the first time. I wanted to cry, to scream, to beg her to release me from her influences, to make her let me find myself before taking the floor away and flipping the truth upside down. But of course, I did no such thing. Her soft fingertips could heal all my wounds, bring tears to my eyes, and, most importantly, make me relinquish. On the third night, I couldn’t stand being torn between two states of being, one rebellious and one submissive, so I gave in and chose the latter, the well-trodden path. I promised her that I would be the model virgin of a girl that she thought society wanted me to be.

Growing up sheltered in her presence, I was both protected and suffocated by her aura of perfection. In the house, she was not contradicted by my father and definitely not by my meek, obedient sister. If I by some miracle managed to find a flaw in her

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ways, she would smoothly play the authority card, saying that she was the mother who raised me so I had no business disputing her, and I would believe it—just like that, just like when she told me to promise her and I did. In the end, she always got what she wanted, and I would submit, crawling back to her with my head low and my tail between my legs, moaning “I’m sorry” and begging for forgiveness. Even now, living more than 8000 miles away from her, I still jump when men touch me because she had taught me to fear what would come after that. I have become afraid of, even disgusted by not only others because they wanted to touch me, but also myself because I wanted to let them.

Her insistence on being right equaled tyranny, but it was so fundamental to our family structure, buried so deep in the earth upon which we built our house, that I didn’t know how to even begin questioning her authority. I remember the exact moment of manic joy when, at eighteen, I realized that, in this America of democracy, her tyranny was considered a crime. I realized that I had the complete freedom not to be what she wanted me to be. That my opinion mattered as much as hers. That my life was mine, not hers. That she was, after all, not perfect. But there was no difference between knowing and not knowing because my knowledge did not control my actions—she did. This dawn of understanding did not spark any brilliant ideas for a revolution. I simply shelved this epiphany, quietly congratulating myself, but otherwise letting life go on as it may. I still dutifully called her twice a day as she requested, still asked for her opinions on what to say, and still took her advice on what to do. Because I understood one thing about my family: that the presence that is my mother is to our family structure what dark matter is to the universe. She holds and binds us together; she fills the gaps in space and adds weights to make sure our lives, like galaxies, don’t fly apart; she isn’t affected by light because she herself is a source of unrivaled brilliance; she is the hand, invisible but invincible, behind us, her puppets and subjects. We involuntarily gravitate towards her, yet we can’t trace her to a single point at any given time because her presence surrounds us, disorients us but also guides us; she seems to be everywhere and nowhere at once. Her tyranny is thus justified: we could not survive without her, in the same way electrons could not orbit the nucleus and planets could not orbit the sun without dark matter. She is right, has always been, and will forever be. One does not simply question divinity.

Khanh Kim Vu Princeton University, ’20

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Barking Mad

Sara Lull Ringling College of Art and Design, ’20 Digital Media

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Make-Ahead Baked Gazebo Through Instant Messageing Step 1: Assemble the Base Frame Preheat an oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.

Spray a 9 by 13-inch baking dish with cooking spray.

Step 2: Level and Secure the Base Start the conversation casually; If the person has a band-related username, you might say: “Hey, cool name. Did you see those guys when they last came to town?”

Pour the beaten eggs into the prepared baking dish.

Bake in the preheated oven until they set and are no longer runny, 8 to 10 minutes.

Joke.

Step 8: Attach the Main Roof Rafters Step 9: Attach the Short Roof Rafters Use cheeky emoticons; If you’re getting a good response, heat things up!

This is called “being smooth” Butter the cut sides of the croissants.

Try to stay tongue-in-cheek with your remarks.

Top each sandwich with two slices of ham and a slice of Colby-Jack cheese.

Step 12: Shingle the Roof Place the croissant tops on top of the sandwiches, Wrap each sandwich well with plastic wrap, Place the sandwiches onto a baking sheet, Freeze until solid, About 3 hours.

Step 13: Cover the Roof Seams Step 14: Attach the Cupola

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While the message “Goodnight.” is somewhat plain and uninspiring, “Goodnight. ;)” can carry the subtle connotation that you’ll be thinking about them.

Store frozen.

Noah Hagen Washington University in St. Louis, ’20

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(comme ma vie) it’s spring and I feel that feeling that life messy that things hectic that get up go that happenings too much that heat overwhelm that universe beckons calls that analysis must that body hurt but cannot stop cannot address cannot think that be alone on a lake that take a rowboat that float

Delaney Carlson\ Princeton University, ’19

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Metropolis I and II

Ashley Zhu Washington University in St. Louis, ’22 Pen and ink

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Meditation

Vivian Holland New York University, ’21 Photography

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Setting Sun She carried Uncle out of the house in three pieces, Left him by the side of the road.

Carry what we can on our backs, The blankets and kimonos, Tied up and taken to the shore.

Children on the boat play with the leaflets, Scatter them to the breeze, Drifting to the ocean like petals.

Above, bombers crawl over the city; And drag their flaming tails behind them.

Silhouettes disappear in the light, The people in the fire are dancing.

We watch the rising sun set faster and faster until the city burns redder than our flag, Until we feel the heat of a kamikaze in his seat, Cruiser in his sight.

Come We’ll hold each other’s eyes and turn away from the flash.

The water will carry us to America, Tonight we’ll sleep to the grind of shattered teeth, Cast the man from Hiroshima into the waves.

One morning, land will appear before us, Rear its maw open and glinting.

It welcomes us with miles of barbed wire veins, Internment deserts, eyes burned cherry blossom.

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The soldiers take us into the Camp Manzanar and lock the gate behind us. There, we watch, and listen for The crack of a baseball deep into the badlands of my grandmother Going Going Gone

A.J. Takata Washington University in St. Louis, ’22

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Untitled

Rosa Jang Washington University in St. Louis, ’19 Lithograph

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An Ode for Pressed Flowers i.

The contraption I fashion to expedite your desiccation resembles, too much, some medieval tool of torture: all washers and wingnuts and long, blunt screws.

But I paint the plywood planks with lemon-butter yellows, and pine-lime greens (colors with which you are duly familiar) in the hope that they will be a comfort to you, as you pass out of the third dimension, and into the second. ii.

My roommate keeps fake lilies on the kitchen table.

They are not real lilies in the way that a laugh-track is not real laughter. iii.

Forgive me.

I do not know all your names.

The row of delicate purple buds, barely sprouted; the confused cluster of candy-red blossoms; the yellow starburst with the thick brown crux, side by side, face-down, snug between wax paper and wood.

iv.

Every several days—to rescue you from the indignity of mold— I replace your wrappings, peel and scrap the old ones, clotted with nectar;

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by and by, I will nestle your parched silhouettes in westerly windows, where you’ll float in the flare like photographs of loved ones, frozen mid-laugh. v.

I think, sometimes, it is you who have embalmed me— that I am the mummy, curled and thirsty— and you can’t possibly imagine what I need my brain for, anymore.

Elissa Mullins Washington University in St. Louis, ’20

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This publication was designed by Madeline Partner and Isabelle Celentano; set into type digitally at Washington University in St. Louis; and printed and bound at Bookmobile, in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

The type face is Adobe Caslon Pro, designed by Carol Twombly. Caslon was originally designed by William Caslon.

Spires accepts submissions from undergraduate students around the world. Works were evaluated individually and anonymously. Spires is published biannually and distributed free of charge to the Washington Univeristy community at the end of each semester. All undergraduate art, poetry, prose, drama, song lyric, and digital media submissions (including video and sound art) are welcome for evaluation.

Special thanks to Washington University Student Union; Missourian Publishing Company; and the authors, poets, and artists who submitted.

For more creative content including new media, video, and digital artwork, visit our website.

Submit your original work: spiresmagazine@gmail.com View past issues and additional artwork: spires.wustl.edu Stay in the loop: facebook.com/spiresintercollegiatemagazine

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Impression 13 Essa Li Harvard University, ’19 Digital photography