Tabula Rasa Fall 2017 by Tabula Rasa

Contents POETRY

The Economy of Young Love Andrew John Haas

Phases of the Moon Charlotte Force

Viens en Courant Clara Hirsch

Gregg’s Lightning Auction Sucks Grace Grim

OH(IO) Maddie Woda

Harmonic Major R.D Landau

Sonny Sam Fentress

PHOTOGRAPHY

Elisabetta Diorio

PROSE

Upper Emily Anna Mack

On Indigo Hannah Liberman

Soybeans Wells Hamilton

There’s Peace, I’m Sure Wells Hamilton

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The Economy of Young Love

the economy of young love always seems active somewhere else, jittering in real-time like a Dow hived in the hearts of the young awake in their beds, struggling in the hot clasp of its evening. but soon comes morning (morning we know is the end of young love) dew and sap and sunlight are slung over the neighborhood roofs. now boys and girls and the rest are falling into adult love like limbs sawed from a tall pine, meeting other branches and the earth below in tantrums of noise. So youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve been with a man then, Andrew John Haas Paris hears his father say to him from the dark top of the stairs in a voice like a gavel tossed from a tower window. Yes. I guess so. Well then. What was it like? outside, coins of sunlight are being minted in the trees and being spent in the hug of dusk. the economy of young love is an economy of coins, carried close to the body, in a pocket under the belly, just above the groin. Well what exactly makes it a man Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve been with? the little voice rises like steam from the bottom of the stairwell reverberant and empty like a throat. his father is gone. the economy of young love is like all economies. (economy emerges from the Greek oikonomos, which means simply the ordering of the house.) this is to say it has preconditions. firstly there must be the housemaster, asleep upstairs behind his bolted door, clenching his jaw, dreaming of order. he is at once the Icarus and Dedalus of his economy. he is at once its invisible hand and a hand compressed into a mute particle of information by its unimaginable weight.

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Fall 2017 secondly there are participants. those who enact the order, make it sport. they are at once the economy’s Dedalus and Icarus and the feeling of religion fulfilled in Icarus’s wings. they are not necessary to the economy. but they make it fun. they accommodate order into the body like any other organ and like any other organ harass it with sensation, right there in front of all the other boys in the schoolyard. clouds buzzing around the tower windows at dinnertime are parted only for a moment by a bluster that comes toppling over waterglasses. What about that sophomore girl? comes tossed from the tower. an intercession limps from the eyes of Paris’s vanished mother but the father’s face is a backlit mirror. queries move through the pane like fish. (sometimes we wonder if the tower is unoccupied. sometimes we even venture that maybe there is no housemaster, that the housemaster is just a species of participant. this reasoning is us being humane. this is of course a misapplication of terms.) the housemaster’s question comes rustling through the sleeves of the house, jingling the ornaments of order, as if the thing asked was something violent and taboo like What makes an act an economic act? the father looks toward the phantom limb he’d like an answer from. (But what can be done Paris remembers his mother once asking about questions like these? Systems we can like or dislike them. Either way it’s of no consequence to the system. What can you tell the man who’s upset himself that he can’t use his hands in the soccer game? this was just before

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Fall 2017 Paris saw his mother vanish completely like fog over bored water) so dinner slides apart and longer evenings divide the house. behind the bolted door of the housemaster in these longest evenings the economy of young love always seems active somewhere else. the coins like rain pile up and crumple on the roof. mosquitos of desire flash through the sleeping, emptied flask who is the housemaster, even now (sometimes we forget this about him). for in the crucible of dream it is fossilized desires that forge the order most deeply. in dream order is at its heaviest, its mass becoming planetary and accruing strange gravity. yet so often one mosquito comets through the pressures of the dream, with its belly of fire, bringing its disclaimer Certain instruments of ours must be formed in fire, flattened and cooled to inhuman temperatures. yes we all crawl into bed together one way or another but one of us must be the instrument of all of it and that is the biggest sacrifice.

ANDREW JOHN HAAS is a junior in Columbia College, studying English, Creative Writing, and Classics. He is originally from Jupiter, FL, and spends most of his free time on buses to and from Baltimore.

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Phases of The Moon Charlotte Force I. Lunar eclipse It was past the witching hour and the time began to cast a spell I was minding my own business, I swear— I didn’t cast this one, it was cast on me! I was just cold, because it was winter, and the stars were in Capricorn. I wanted to bundle up, have a laugh and a beer, and pass the fuck out. It had snowed and I was drunk and I had met everyone but the moon. It had snowed and the ground was sheet white and sparkled and I didn’t realize until later that it was because of the moonlight. Then all of a sudden, there I was, walking home as the sun walked into the next day. And the spell went something like this: To become supremely distracted— Line your mittens with glove warmers and lace your Guiness with Bailey’s and see the seeds that sow, and let the flowers grow and pluck them and lace them and line them up. As the purple lilac grows, and melts under your boots, and between your fingers lay a white gardenia secretly on a cotton pillow that you rest your head on and let the lilac take hold at midnight in a bed of flowing beer, coated blushing rolling out of bars, lay peonies across your heart and watch the petals start to fall.

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II. Waxing crescent I cast the next spell myself. To wax the moon and find its heart—find boy who has the heart to share his. Find a stoop upon which blue irises and pink carnations grow, and memorize the key, and repeat it one hundred and twelve times. Pluck the pink and blue and mix a purple Delphinum, bind them all together and test the water and dip your toes, and dip them all in wax, one hundred and twelve times. As the candle grows, light it and wish on white heather and out it blows. I find a new wish on every street corner, and I’ve retrieved a key in the sand on the beach. I have an abundance of flowers always, and light comes to me in spades. The water was just the right temperature, and I have a hundred and twelve of everything I have to say. I’ve even collected some pieces of wisdom I’ve found along the way— Casting spells doesn’t mean you know what’ll come of them. You can only guess what you’re casting at, anyway. Finding the precise ingredients of a spell is key. Finding ready hearts is not my specialty. III. Full moon The full moon illuminates every idiosyncracy with the warmth of the sun— letting the stars fill their own glasses past full with bubbles and sparkles and ginger beer in a copper cup, and looking at the world through rose petals, in an intoxicated garden, and you can see it all, and you drink it in. The full moon casts shadows in the night, deeper than the darkest shadows of the day, reflecting the light of the sun and absorbing its warmth into the roots of the roses that rise in the rays. 5

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The sun may line up over roses just right, but as far as the full moon goes—it lasts only a night, and then it starts to wane. But the nights before and the nights right after look remarkably the same. IV. Waning gibbous I get hungry in the middle of the night, and I make myself a pot of coffee when I’m studying by moonlight, and I pour myself a cupful when my pillow doesn’t feel right. So on sleepless nights as time passes and chips away the candle melts down the day, empties the pot and wanes the flame, and burns the night and brightens the moon, as it inevitably slips away. Most nights I’d cast a spell because the moon would keep me hungry until dawn. To preserve a full moon and crystalize its heart— bake a bouquet of asters into a batch of scones and feed them to the moon. If the full moon is hidden behind the clouds— pick a bouqet of tulips of any color (of every color is most effective) and lay them on every ray and way that the moon affects your life. I’d fall asleep before I got to the next page. However, no matter what spell you cast, a waning moon always spills at the brim, never filling, only spouts, and empties within. And once a cup of moonshine is down the drain, I know, I know—it’s never the same, but starshine and sunshine aren’t to blame. And a cupfull of stars is always half full, and a cupfull of sun is all you need to grow. 6

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V. Waning crescent Some nights are dark and light holds on to the ceiling of the sky by a hook. For those nights, I have a special book. For the nights when you cry into the shoulder of a star about not being what someone needs, and a man in need comes up to you to say, “Don’t be sad,” the spell goes: If you need someone, I’m here. For the nights that flake away like pastry, when chips of the crescent moon look an awful lot like tears, but they’re awfully sweet and tempting, the spell goes: I’ve put this off for too long—can we talk? For the nights when the yellow stars fall down like golden rain in bouquets of striped carnations and crysathemums and disdain, the spell goes: Let’s go sunbathing. VI. New moon When the moon is gone, the night is awfully soft, and the day is especially bright. The moon is never full and never new for long. But the sun spins new every day, and a spin around the sun is a new year, and the spilling of sunshine is what makes flowers grow in the first place. Eight months later, when the stars are in Libra, and you’ve finally struck a balance, cast this spell:

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When the moon doesn’t spin into the New Year, and forgets to celebrate, give it a new slate, and plant a purple statice in its wake. When the sun dances into the New Year, to find some other way to shine, and leaves the moon behind, pick a sprig of gladiolus, and keep it in mind. VII. Notes On the proper practice of spellcasting: In order to grow what you don’t yet know: the spell and the stars and the sun must align. In order to grow what you’ve begun to know: your spells won’t stick unless you guess right about the rest. In order to grow what you think you know: stop thinking that. You never know all of it. In order to grow what you were wrong about: start over and figure something else out. In order to grow what you know: it’ll be so easy you won’t need to cast; the magic happens on its own. If you try and fail: try again—you never know. Sometimes flowers wilt, but sometimes they grow.

CHARLOTTE FORCE is a sophomore in Columbia College, studying medieval history. They are originally from Manhattan, and right now are probably complaining that you “can’t see the stars” because of light pollution.

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Viens en Courant

Fall 2017 I don’t speak French At least not very well But I’ll be in a garden in Normandy and Maybe you’ll hear me A

Clara Hirsch

soft whimper in broken French And amongst the topiaries and brambles and thorns I’ll maybe scratch my leg and Maybe so will you And you’ll smell sweet blood, Like yours and Come running Makes me think of how I Sell all my annotated texts back to the bookstore In hopes that someone will fall for me Through my lopsided musings In between the lines. Smell my blood, Come running I recall the time I dreamt you at my dinner table Last January when I saw your stigmata before you Hastily pulled down your sleeves And so did my mother.

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Fall 2017 So in the garden I hope that you’ll Come running, To be addressed as lover, To watch rain fall And try Intimacy And give up on Mortality Which has always plagued you and You said was your hamartia How nice it would be, I imagine if you’d just come running

CLARA HIRSCH is a sophomore in Columbia College, studying Visual Arts. They are originally from Columbus, Ohio, and enjoy sharing fragments of themselves through their art when they’re not restoring Sodom and Gomorrah with their service corps.

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Gregg’s Lightning Auction Sucks Grace Grim | First Prize Winner |

Fall 2017 A man releasing pent up frustrations from the land and from being trapped into buying an expensive steer by scrawling the truth over the urinal of the Standish, CA gas station so any other man will read it and know that, “Gregg’s Lightning Auction sucks”. Sixteen year olds passing through with their families on their way to Tahoe will read it and laugh, imagining the angry man pulling his hay-bale-marking sharpie out of his Carharts and writing these words with scrawling awkwardness. Damn Gregg’s Lighning Auction to hell for putting him in a bad situation with no room for backing out. Can’t even breed the cow because it’s not a longhorn and would ruin the herd’s pedigree. The teenager gets back into the suburban, turns on the Dr. Dre on his iphone and they’re at the rental house in Tahoe City on the shore of Lake Tahoe in a few hours. “Damn it we only get to ski four days not five. I don’t want to go cross-country skiing that other day it’s retarded.” Lol but hey remember? Gregg’s Lightning Auction sucks. haha what a tool. That guy is so pissed about spending too much money on some freaking livestock. Living in a kind of place that is just a bathroom break for most people.

GRACE GRIM is a senior in CC, studying Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. She is originally from Hood River, Oregon. Among other things, she enjoys working as a raft guide and listening to Redbone on repeat until her in-ear Beats™ blow out.

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OH(IO) Maddie Woda If this were a coal town, all our knuckles would be black but instead the sky swallows the corn elevators and everyone drinks beer before bed. No one likes each other is etched in the asphalt next to the golden rule and the assumption that homosexuality is myth— swan people, beasts. Your prosecutors haven’t even read Ovid’s Metamorphoses and yet they can see Io in their church services, women and bulls; let’s make her a heifer. O, sing of sweet Hera, Hera, didn’t you see that women are supporting women now, didn’t you read that Huff Post article on empathy? Tell your inhabitants, members of an ancient race, that they don’t need to spend their days cooking casseroles for when their husbands come in from the fields. I heard someone whispering a mile away, earth so flat it leaves no place to hide. Hera can’t control the rain, but when she does, we all flood.

MADDIE WODA is a sophomore in Columbia College, studying English and American Studies. They are originally from Columbus, Ohio, and have forthcoming or published poems in Lines + Stars, the Indianapolis Review, and others.

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Harmonic Major R.D Landau

Fall 2017 Light smudged underfoot crush crabapple halves clean into white, dividing colors by atmosphere. Spent an afternoon tumbling at sky. Hummingbirds shimmer outside the congregation toss them kosher bagel crumbs. The place repeating, like a motel corridor, walls white for waiting, or chain stitch, looped but possessing forward momentum. Why are the trees trying so hard to look casual? The sparrow of leisure waits â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;til breath expires.

R.D LANDAU is a senior at Columbia University, majoring in Gender Studies. She is originally from Berkeley and her favorite pterosaur is quetzalcoatlus.

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Sonny Sam Fentress

Fall 2017 you and your thermodynamic fortitude; me in my thermostat down, all brown from burn, from flip and toss like body-braid through foam memory it’s a fresh press—the groove is the game— and we stand in a series of tones, alone, wary of whatever’s sequential and tired of go-again’s, of days without grain (and you think to yourself, about all this and the grain, and will it ever again be this hot)

SAM FENTRESS is a junior in Columbia College studying English and Film. He’s from St. Louis, and all government is a lie.

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Upper Emily Anna Mack Three girls who went to highschool together stand against the back of an apartment building. They lean. They took the train up to Wrigley together. From the ground in the alley, the girls seem quite large, the angle from which they are meant to be seen. Yellow bottle of Chardonnay illuminated at their feet. The one in the tight skirt is me. The one in the tight skirt says We Better Finish This Quick because the concert is starting soon and I don’t Wanna Be Late To The Metro cause then they check extra heavy. True. Girls sip back and forth while the sun goes down. * The first time I went to The Metro, I was thirteen. I wore a turquoise thong which was quite the adventure. I went with girls from middle school to see a band of senior kids who played jazzy songs about the summertime, and we idolized those guys back then. We got up close to the stage and intimate. Someone dumped a beer on my head from the balcony and I was terrified my mom would smell it later. All of us were terrified at the first concert. Two years later back at The Metro, we wore high waisted shorts and grinded on the row of grown men behind us because they stuck their thumbs in our belt loops, pulled us back. We were all trashed. None of our boyfriends came with because the boys were always too broke. It was so much fun.

It was so much fun to drink. That’s all I remember now: duct taping my boobs together so the guy at 711 would sell me Raspberry Smirnoff. Everyone around the corner cheering when I came out with a shopping bag. Rip off the duct tape and toss it on the street. I remember everyone cheering. Sometimes we slept on the wet grass. That can only last for one summer though, when you’re too young to work and too scared to make out with anybody sober. One summer: skinny girl meets a skinny boy named Ben who is a stoner but since weed makes her cough and forget things, she drinks a bottle of cooking sherry to keep up when there’s nothing left. I don’t think much of her. Stoner Ben and I started fighting once high school started because I was too afraid to do acid. He wasn’t. He wrote songs and recorded them in his room. I don’t know how he made them sound so full, like four real men playing instruments. Mostly they were sad songs, which is what I liked about him. He had one called Mcflurries For Dinner Every Night and it had a basic melody, mostly acoustic guitar, with a chorus that went like I Can Get You High But I’m a Downer which always got stuck in my head. Ben gave me the song the night before we started high school (on a silver CD) along with a pink plastic daisy barrette that he found in the park. The 21

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last line of the song goes Neon Stutter… It’ll Be Sad For Ever and Ever and Ever and Ever. I thought that was so hot. One time I dragged Stoner Ben’s pale body home through the daylit alleys because he drank too much and threw up as soon as he told me he loved me. I had made him drink enough to tell me he loved me, I had said Come On, Kill It With Me. He hated that, he always said I’m Never Drinking Again. A lot of boys are stoners. That makes things hard because they get so moody. (I don’t smoke weed.) When I was fourteen, my best friend Alli and I made a tally-mark chart called The Adventure of Emily and Alli: Weeks In a Row We Got T’d. I wanted to get to fifty because I could. So I did and I beat her easily. The rules were you only get a tally if you got drunk on both Friday and Saturday, and once during the week. That was how I made sure things stayed so interesting, because I refuse to drink alone. (Even now.) Naturally I kept meeting people and falling in love is easy when you’re drunk all the time. It’s simply a matter of watching someone’s ruddy fingers struggle with a lighter in the cold. Also because I’m drawn to Pyromaniacs, who isn’t. There was Vincent from the good neighborhood. We were sixteen. My best friend Lily and I were in that shoplifting phase so we had good merlot. The three of us heaved a green dumpster toward the wrought-iron fence around the community pool. Midnight or so. Fat flies buzzed from the lid into our faces. Vincent clamped his freckled hands to-

gether to hoist us up. It was Labor Day. I said Come On Guys We Gotta Sneak Into The Pool, It’s Labor Day! (When Lily’s body glistens on the top of the tall fence, I hate myself and Xavier’s wide eyes.) I left my bra hanging from a handle of the dumpster. Our mouths stayed purple all night, even in the deep blue of twelve feet. Wet and shivering, the three of us took turns on the diving board. Xavier lit a sparkler that was left over from July, he tossed it up so it twirled once through the air and then fizzled into the shallow end. I mumbled something about being so glorious or chlorinated. So I’m afraid to do acid. Also I’ve never smoked a cigarette before. Jack says I Don’t Know How You Meet People Without Smoking. I shrug and ask him to pass his keychain with the bottle opener attached. Red Stripe. We’re in his bed drinking Red Stripe and doing small bumps of cocaine every fifteen minutes or so. It’s either the summer after high school and the coke is left over from prom or it’s winter break back from college and the coke is leftover from Thanksgiving. Doing coke with Jack was always hard because it makes my heart beat real fast. We get into fights when we do it too many days in a row. The fights always go something like Why Didn’t You Call Me Back Yesterday… You Know How I Get… You Need To Call Me Back When I Call You… Calm Down… I Can’t Stop Thinking About Rebecca… I Want To… Do You Think I’m Pretty. Rebecca was my best friend when I was fifteen. She was sexy and innocent. 22

TABULA RASA We met in algebraclass and she used to sleep with Jack while his dad was sick. (I introduced them. I was so jealous.) She used to sleep on my couch on weekends and once I taught her how to hold liquor, she taught me how to steal it. She said Pretend You’re Tying Your Shoe. Rebecca and I went everywhere together. We used to wear matching black bras and sit on the low branches during daytimes at the park and write poems in our math notebooks about nighttime. During nights too hot to sleep, Rebecca and I sometimes laid close when the room felt choked with her smoke. We suckled on water bottles-full and made jokes like Goodnight Moonshine. When she lost her mind, Jack and I decided it was not our fault: Rebecca got mean. Then she came to school without her hair and lost her mind right there in film class, in front of us and the teacher even. Jack and I could never touch each other, no matter how drunk we get. Every time we come close, we just end up talking. Sometimes it got so bad we did bumps just to keep talking. We talked rabid about everything: the babysitter he had as a kid who moved to Brazil, how his sister is like his dad but he isn’t, and how Vincent is going to set himself on fire one day. Often we talked about how all the good painters we know are totally miserable and how happy a thing it is that I am Still Okay And Healthy. Jack was one of those types who had his first existential crisis at age 9. Hopeless. We talked until we salivated. Years later, far from home and up high in mountains (Big Sur if you can believe it), we did

Fall 2017 shrooms. I don’t have to tell you how we were gone, speaking neon visions. The mountains got cold in the dark, even though it was June, so we laid in a car. We shivered against each other and shook until there was nothing left to say and we still don’t talk. When you’re young, boys always want to tell girls all about tripping: how they died and came back covered in spiders. Came back better. The boys are so wise with their thumbs in your belt loops. I always found that traumatizing. Shrooms are one pretty thing but just the word acid just makes me sick. Rebecca loved acid. To be fair, she was always a downer: the first addict. She drank just to get hungry enough to eat. Jack used to say She Fucked Just To Hate A Person. I always hated experimenting with leaving Chicago or in general (Just A Beer, Please). A professor at college told me I have an excellent recall considering all the booze in my stories. I said Thank You! I’m very careful. Returning home from college for the summer, I made sure I had two jobs. * When I sip water at The Metro in my tight skirt for only a single moment my heart feels full. I say Is This Drugged? And Lily says Yes Of Course It Is. She still wears the same perfume she wore in high school which is something like amber so I breathe in when her mouth is by my ear so her neck is by my mouth. I like molly for that single moment of closure, I always have. (Not like drinking at all, which marches forward and drips.) The girls make frequent trips to bathroom 23

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because the concert is fun but overwhelming in moments. Alli says I Miss Acid Rap, For Real Though. After the concert, I go to 711 down the street. I buy a chocolate chip cookie and Hennessey. Then I’m back behind the Metro and peeing in the alley, when a silhouette emerges from the dark. It’s walking a bicycle so I’m not scared. I pull my thong up. The shape says my name as a question but I can’t see its face. Its voice is still the same though, squeaky. I say Ben? And first love steps into streetlamp light. There must have been mist too. He says What a Coincidence To See You Here. He has a light beard now. We walk together and finish the Hennessey which I admit to him I bought just because I liked the words: A Chocolate Chip Cookie Dipped In Hennessy. He says I Missed That About You. He says I Like Your Skirt. He asks about everyone we used to get high with and I

say Vincent Is Doing Really Well, He’s Going To Be an Engineer. The two of us walk all night, laughing and pointing out where we used to go down on eachother (the river path, behind the lattice under the brown house, a diner roof, etc.) and Man Weren’t We Such Bad Kids. Sun comes up. When we make out now, it’s so romantic like a hex. Then he calls me the wrong name so I smack him which is splendid too because I’ve always dreamed of smacking Stoner Ben. I say Why’d You Leave Me Back Then and with his sweet voice he says To Be Totally Honest When You Passed Out Drunk At The Movies It Was A Total Turnoff. I remember that fat blue bump on my head. How Stoner Ben left me on a bench outside the theater. It was warm enough to. He kisses my neck. The thing about being an alcoholic is that if you’re not careful, you could forget.

EMILY ANNA MACK is a sophomore in Columbia College studying creative writing. She is originally from Chicago which is a crazy place to be from.

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On Indigo Hannah Liberman Bob Dylan, Billie Holiday, and Jerry Garcia were the only musicians that the four of us could ever willingly agree on. Papa’s idea was that we would drive through the whole of Spain, visiting as many towns as we possibly could in as much or as little time as was needed. So, for three months, we lugged through the Spanish terrain in our ugly, indigo car, Billie, Dylan, and the Dead looping on the radio, Mama’s thin hair whipping in the salty wind leaking through her open window, Brother smiling lopsided and sickly, his juvenile eyes glinting blue in the golden, speckled sunshine, Papa clutching the wheel and Mama’s hand, Mama humming along with closed eyelids. “ And it’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall…”

HANNAH LIBERMAN is a sophomore in Columbia College, studying Political Science and History(?). She is originally from Durango, Colorado and enjoys climbing mountains and sleeping in the desert, playing guitar and singing folk songs, and reading and writing non-fiction.

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Soybeans Wells Hamilton If it hadn’t been for that gray dying light, I wouldn’t have gone at all. Which is to say—the fractured shade through venetian blinds convinced me below the skin as to how a stranger’s funeral might be marginally preferable to my own marital bed. “The service is today,” I whispered to her ear and Carolina nodded. All our conversations now are cave mouths and adits and the hull of meaning is concealed at drippy depths beneath the shale. Our bitterest nights orbit frequently around fragment shards of “Well. Maybe.” and “If you think so, ok.” Telepathy has been its own strain of wedding band, and I’ll be in the grocers alone sometimes, listening to her think softly through my head. She rolled back into the bedsheets and sighed. Three days had passed on a box-spring mattress. The air in November has been increasingly inhospitable. Our own lacunae fumes in the upstairs, growing thicker, and I vaguely expect stalagmites to begin their formation on our ceiling from the sulfuric clouds of us. I rise for the dresser. I imagine there are corporate hominids in the skyscraped jungle, where an agent of Men’s Warehouse tracks down a car trader in the saintless wilderness, shoots him, skins him of his threads and this is my funeral suit, hanging in the dresser closet, empty except for me.

“You look nice,” she murmurs. Which is to say—the real look is concealed. Which is to say—looks can be deceiving. I nailed an iron staircase to the side of my father’s house when he died. I cut a door in the upstairs wall and moved my wife inside it. I split the lower house into two halves and rented the rooms out to desperate families. A landlord is a cancer, and we would listen to the warbling quarrels and infant wails beneath our battered floorboards, rising up like stalactites in the night. I open the upstairs door of our bedroom and walk down the wet iron staircase out to where our car waits parked in the street. The rented families in the rented rooms are quiet with the quiet of the morning. It’s a perfect day for a funeral. I haven’t talked to Kenny since the wedding. Kenny’s brother died in a fireball on the I24 in the grill of a Pepperidge Farm™ delivery truck he hit head on while driving drunk on the wrong side of the highway. The casket will be closed today for obvious reasons. Kenny was not a good friend of mine, but he was still in town in July and so I invited him to the wedding. Carolina in her white dress said: “Kenny is one of those,” and I nodded. Which is to say— Kenny never left our town. Which is to say—Kenny (and his brother) displaced the dull ache of nowhereland by souping 26

Fall 2017

TABULA RASA up outrageous car parts and drag racing alone through backroads and midnight state highways. The Bank foreclosed on a mortgage it should have never approved, and Kenny’s brother’s home imploded. Which lead to drinking. And divorce. And drinking. And I said to Carolina: “It’s a shame,” and she nodded. Which is to say—I will never again eat a Chessman cookie without nausea. Which is to say—would you love me still without my father’s house? And the warmth in her nod said finally: “yes, yes, one thousand times, yes.” At the funeral, Kenny’s brother’s street racing club wears gaudy matching jackets but Kenny does not. The racing club looks dour, even through heavy piercings, even through face tattoos. Kenny’s family wears cheap dark fabric and pours sharp glances on the crown of his ex-wife’s golden head. The preacher is extolling: we should not be asking why (our loved ones take themselves from us) but how. How even interstate fire balls are sewn with care into the folds of God’s great Love. And how many angels can dance on the fender of a Pepperidge Farm™ delivery truck? I sit on the lectern side near the front and watch the back of Kenny’s neck for signs of collapse. The organ moans dolefully in scheduled intervals and how many times in life do we find ourselves uselessly waiting for the conclusion of minor events? At least in the dying gray light, the alpha and the omega consume one another as spiders do in the sweet of invisible hollows. Maybe I’m here now to see how

things can still find their ways to end. “Please pick up eggs,” Carolina thinks. Which is to say—we should probably eat. Which is to say—eating is the only thing we’ll ever need to do. When the service tapers, I watch the cars drain slowly from the sanctuary’s parking lot beneath the heavy abscess of rain. Kenny’s brother will not be buried today. Kenny shares a cigarette with his grieving mother who wears a grainy veil and dark green tennis shoes. He notices me where I stand on the pavement and walks over. He thanks me for coming. He wraps his dull arms around me and says: “You’re a good one, Paul. Will you drive me home?” Which is to say—I cannot be alone inside that crumbling trailer. Which is to say—my brother and I drove together but I was racing on the right side of the highway and him on the wrong and I will never be able to touch a steering wheel ever again. Kenny keeps his eyes shut as we drive. We say nothing. Kenny lives in a small trailer near the outskirts on the fringes of a soybean farm. He helps with the planting and with the harvest. I follow him inside his crumbling trailer where the pealing posters show fast cars and the sink drips and the dishes pile up like cairns in the dimness. We drink Wild Turkey from novelty glasses and he talks about his brother in tangent phrases that bend around a hollow tableau of man who never existed, ill repeated, and he cries. On the third glass of Wild Turkey, he turns violent and speaks in bullet phrases about The Bank. He’s really going to stick it to ‘em. He’s really going to 27

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get ‘em good. “Alright, Kenny. Alright.” Three hours later, I’m stumbling out the doorway and Kenny says: “Buddy of mine has a moving biz. Please believe me, Paul. Please believe me.” “Alright, Kenny. Alright.” I drive the winded road back home with my hand slurred across the steering wheel. The mist out here is clean and the sky hangs open. I slosh into the all-night market close to home. I paw through the aisles and find the eggs where they gather together in their freezer. There are Milano cookies near the register. I pay in cash and go back home. Carolina rises from the boxspring mattress, and I undo my tie. She takes the eggs from me and swivels towards our stove. She sprays the pan and cracks the eggs and fries them like an expert. “How was the service?” she asks. I say: “I’m worried about Kenny,” and she nods. Her hands work the spatula and flips over the eggs. I think of

Kenny’s brain in the narrow trailer and how a fried egg never turns back into yolk. I have spent so much time in this room that I can no longer believe in human beings outside of myself and Carolina and even that distinction seems arbitrary and obtuse. The gray light has been bled dry into blackness and I say: “Someone should really check in on him,” and she nods. Which is to say—nitrate levels are extremely important in the cultivation of soybeans and the use of ammonium nitrate fertilizers is routinely common. Which is to say—high performance racing fuels utilize pnictogen hydride in unreasonably unstable quantities. Which is to say—between fifteen and twenty 55gallon drums can fit comfortably in the back of a standard moving van, which can typically park its fender right up to The Bank’s front door. Which is to say—Kenny will relearn how to drive, but only once more.

HANNAH LIBERMAN is a Senior in Columbia College, studying EALAC and American Studies. They are originally from Nashville.

TABULA RASA

Fall 2017

There’s Peace, I’m Sure Wells Hamilton | Second Prize Winner | It was the era for me of an endless walking, self-obsession and the same five albums played on insouciant repeat. A famous author in a letter framed in a one-room museum quipped on about how writers in New York are like mealworms in a glass jar, crawling around in the black dirt of each other forever. The implication follows as to what the mealworms eat when the black dirt has all been chewed through, and maybe not this exactly, but the feeling endures, especially on Sunday afternoons in the trash of old zines and the same five albums played on insouciant repeat. I had been living with Sam for three months in his dead uncle’s loft while the estate waited to settle. The aunt who wound up with the deed was in no rush to sell in harsh markets and so Sam and I lingered rent-free with a doorman and nowhere to go and nowhere to be and not yet forced to pull any permanent triggers on the various barrels of oblique future leveled to an iris. I can’t say Sam and his dead uncle and that loft weighed too heavy on the gravity fabric of that fall, more so—these truths could only serve as the whale-bone ribcage for whatever leviathan had swallowed that time and that place altogether and whole. I should stop writing like this. I should stop using words like “insouci-

ant” and “leviathan” and try to relearn how a story is told without parlor tricks. When there’s no one to impress because this story does need to be told, but it doesn’t need to be written. I don’t want to show what happened then because all the images hurt, but I need someone to know who isn’t Sam in the early morning darkness because if I don’t, I’m afraid my head will slowly explode. I thought the stories of a post-industrial New England town where the factories vanished and the people lost hope all needed to be told. I thought the stories of disaffected, love-dead, college-educated youths all needed to be told. I thought a lot of the stories from my life all needed to be told but none of those stories have ever made me feel like I would stay awake forever if I didn’t tell them. So I was walking a lot. It wasn’t the era of an endless walking, I was just walking a lot because I didn’t have anything else to do. It listened to the same five albums over and over because I liked them and thought they were good. I felt bad about New York then because I didn’t know what I was doing with my life and I didn’t really want to be alive and writing felt a lot easier than working behind a desk or going back to school. I didn’t think about Sam and his situation all that much because things had always 29

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worked out for me and worked out for us and I assumed that they always would until they didn’t and that would be ok too. I walked uptown mostly because uptown is quiet. The cars honk less and drive slower and the people are much like the cars. I can’t say exactly where I was standing, because I don’t want anyone going to the spot where I stood and checking the pavement like I probably would if I was the one having read this and not the one having lived it. None of the five albums are particularly loud, but the music and the walking always thinned out the streets around me and made the sidewalks seem half-real. The people on the streets weren’t real either because I didn’t know them and they weren’t me. I always walked alone for a very long time in a haze until the slowly haze lifted and then I took the subway back to Sam’s loft. I was six paces away when his body hit the pavement. I didn’t realize it was a child at first. I didn’t realize anything at first. I don’t know for how long the music continued to play in my ear even after the child hit the pavement. A woman who had not been real before became real on the sidewalk on the other side of the mangled body. She shrieked and wore a thin scarf and fell to her knees and had wrinkled skin and her fingers hovered over the child’s corpse because she didn’t know how to touch something so broken. The teeth scattered on the pavement like rice dropped in the kitchen. The bones did not break all at once and

the sound was not one thick sound but a series of rapid snappings that happened in a collapsed second between two songs. The child’s skull popped open and the woman’s right clog and knee both sidled around brain matter as she dropped to the ground. One eyeball was covered by the pavement, but the other shot free and hung from a red string of muscle fiber down across the boy’s shattered cheekbone. I didn’t want to write that but I felt like I had to. I didn’t want to describe his teeth like rice dropped in the kitchen but Sam dropped rice in the kitchen sometimes and I can’t escape all these scattered teeth and how they were not permanent teeth but the small white baby teeth that were small like white rice on the sidewalk in the orange glow of the evening streetlamps. The woman in the scarf and the age-old skin called the police and blubbered but I didn’t hear her blubber so the music must have still been playing. She stared up at me from above the bloody child and her eyes were blue and wide and wet and her mouth was open. Her scream had drawn in other people who were now existing and they began to form a ring around the body and I must have taken out my headphones then because I heard them all and the men who cursed and folded their hands above their heads and the women who covered their mouths and cursed on their fingers. The police cars showed up quickly and uniformed men pushed the circle back and no one checked the body’s neck for a pulse. I watched ev 30

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Fall 2017

It was the era for me of an endless walking, self-obsession and the same five albums played on insouciant repeat. A famous author in a letter framed in a one-room museum quipped on about how writers in New York are like mealworms in a glass jar, crawling around in the black dirt of each other forever. The implication follows as to what the mealworms eat when the black dirt has all been chewed through, and maybe not this exactly, but the feeling endures, especially on Sunday afternoons in the trash of old zines and the same five albums played on insouciant repeat. I had been living with Sam for three months in his dead uncle’s loft while the estate waited to settle. The aunt who wound up with the deed was in no rush to sell in harsh markets and so Sam and I lingered rent-free with a doorman and nowhere to go and nowhere to be and not yet forced to pull any permanent triggers on the various barrels of oblique future leveled to an iris. I can’t say Sam and his dead uncle and that loft weighed too heavy on the gravity fabric of that fall, more so—these truths could only serve as the whale-bone ribcage for whatever leviathan had swallowed that time and that place altogether and whole. I should stop writing like this. I should stop using words like “insouciant” and “leviathan” and try to relearn how a story is told without parlor tricks.

When there’s no one to impress because this story does need to be told, but it doesn’t need to be written. I don’t want to show what happened then because all the images hurt, but I need someone to know who isn’t Sam in the early morning darkness because if I don’t, I’m afraid my head will slowly explode. I thought the stories of a post-industrial New England town where the factories vanished and the people lost hope all needed to be told. I thought the stories of disaffected, love-dead, college-educated youths all needed to be told. I thought a lot of the stories from my life all needed to be told but none of those stories have ever made me feel like I would stay awake forever if I didn’t tell them. So I was walking a lot. It wasn’t the era of an endless walking, I was just walking a lot because I didn’t have anything else to do. I listened to the same five albums over and over because I liked them and thought they were good. I felt bad about New York then because I didn’t know what I was doing with my life and I didn’t really want to be alive and writing felt a lot easier than working behind a desk or going back to school. I didn’t think about Sam and his situation all that much because things had always worked out for me and worked out for us and I assumed that they always would until they didn’t and that would be ok too.

WELLS HAMILTON, is a Senior in Columbia College, studying EALAC and American Studies. They are originally from Nashville.

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Fall 2017

TABULA RASA Mission Statement To write is to immortalise the thoughts that we have as ink on paper; to try and make verbal the pain, love, joy, happiness and sadness that affects us as humans every day. Writing involves relinquishing the privacy of one’s innermost thoughts and feelings, in this way forcing us to confront those emotions and allow them to be real. No writer can expect to write greatness by chance, but they must instead strive towards this, muddling through their ideas to carve out something that is powerful, and can make others understand the emotions that they, themselves, feel. It is through a focus on the particular that writing can evoke the sentiment of a generation, and through that same process that literature crystallizes. Sometimes it’s the nuanced portrait of an individual, sometimes it’s when “every flower seems to burn by itself,” but by whatever means it manifests, it’s through that direct treatment of the world around us, sparing no superfluous word, that allows writing to walk off the page incarnate. Through writing, we are, for a moment, elsewhere. We recognize the value of literature in taking us to this place, and seek to cultivate this introspection through the works we publish. The mission of Tabula Rasa is to focus on the particular; to search in earnest for good writing, and to find art that is truly different in its originality or literary merit. Tabula Rasa seeks those who put ink to paper, and challenges all writers to make us feel. We look to be moved, and actively seek art that is able to stop us in our tracks, for a moment suspending the material world. Write, share your writing with others, revise that writing, and send your prose, poetry, or visual arts to submit.tabularasa@gmail. com - we look forward to it. “We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.” - Anaïs Nin