Major Dilemma

This week the Nass thinks like a dog, dances in verse, and reflects on Declaration Day.

The Nassau Weekly

Volume 44, Number 6 April 3, 2022

In Print since 1979 Online at nassauweekly.com

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April 3, 2022

Masthead

Editors-in-Chief

Major Dilemma

Juju Lane Mina Quesen

Publisher Abigail Glickman

Alumni Liasion

Allie Matthias

4 6 8 10

Managing Editors

River House

Sam Bisno Sierra Stern

By Charlie Nuermberger Designed by Tong Dai and Chloe Kim

Design Editor

Nass Members Reflect on Concentration Declarations

Cathleen Weng

By Kate Lee, Katie Rohrbaugh, and Mollika Jai Singh Designed by Cathleen Weng

Senior Editors

Lauren Aung Lara Katz

Family Bones

Junior Editors

By Sierra Stern Designed by Vera Ebong and Hannah Mittleman

Lucia Brown Kate Lee Anya Miller Zoey Nell Charlie Nuermberger Alexandra Orbuch

A Trilogy of Poems About English Mountain, Tennessee

By Dylan Fox Designed by Hazel Flaherty

Art Director

15 18 20

Review of diSiac’s HEADLINES

Emma Mohrmann

By John Slaughter Designed by Cathleen Weng

Secondary Exposure

By Amaya Dressler Designed by Cathleen Weng

Art

By Ray Mateo and Hazel Flaherty Designed by Cathleen Weng

Assistant Art Director

River House Read more on page 4.

Hannah Mittleman

Head Copy Editor

Andrew White

Copy Editors

Nico Campbell Katie Rohrbaugh Bethany Villaruz

Events Editor

David Chmielewski

Audiovisual Editor

Christien Ayers

Web Editor

Jane Castleman

Social Media Chair

Mollika Jai Singh

Cover Attribution

Social Chair Hazel Flaherty

Kristiana Filipov

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Volume 44, Number 6

This Week:

Mon

Tues

Wed

Thurs

Verbatim:

4:00p ZOOM Weekday Meditation with Dean Matt Weiner

7:00p Carl A. Fields APIDA Heritage Month Kickoff

4:30p ZOOM Intersections Working Group: Race, Difference and Social Justice Lecture Series presents Prof. Sasha-Mae Eccleston 12:15p ZOOM Organizing Stories Virtual Workshop

6:00p LCA Radical Composition/ Radical Collaboration: A Conversation with Cameron Rowland and Saidiya Hartman

4:30p McCosh Maggie Nelson in Conversation with Gayle Salamon

Overheard during a Classics workshop Helpful reviewer: “I learned Latin in school.” *finger guns* Classics JP author: “That’s so funny because this is Greek.”

Overheard at Frist tables Worn-out senior after physics lab: “I don’t care about Brownian motion! It’s random and that’s all I need to know.”

Realistic junior: “That’s not true. You don’t need to know anything. 99% of people know nothing about Brownian motion and they lead happy, successful lives.”

Overheard in dorm Class-critiquing sophomore: “There’s something anticapitalist about taking my medication and washing it down with beer.”

About us:

7:00p Coffee Club Pride Open Mic Night 5:30p Louis A. Simpson Artist Conversation: Lance Twitchell and Nicholas Galanin

Fri

4:30p 185 Nassau Reading by Danielle McLaughlin

4:30p ZOOM Arts at Work - Visual Arts after College

Sat

4:30p Taplin Composers Collective Concert

8:00p Richardson Orrin Evans with the Princeton University Creative Large Ensemble

Sun

4:00p Art on Hullfish Princeton Singers: For the Beauty of the Earth

8:00p LCA Princeton Pianists Ensemble

Got Events?

Email David Chmielewski at dc70@princeton.edu with your event and why it should be featured.

For advertisements, contact Abigail Glickman at alg4@princeton.edu.

Overheard over morning grapefruit Comedic trainwreck: “It’s better to be a chill trainwreck than an un-chill trainwreck.

And some people pretend to be a trainwreck when they have their shit together. That’s the worst.”

Overheard via text Humanitarian history major: “Well, she has done nothing to me ever, but at the moment I want her to die.”

Overhead in Isolation dorms Thirsty girl: “I wanna hook up with someone this week. Oh wait, I have COVID.” Overheard at Wucox Hemingway-obsessed student: “In a way, condoms are just baby shoes.”

Nassau Weekly is Princeton University’s weekly newsmagazine and features news, op-eds, reviews, fiction, poetry and art submitted by students. Nassau Weekly is part of Princeton Broadcasting Service, the student-run operator of WPRB FM, the oldest college FM station in the country. There is no formal membership of the Nassau Weekly and all are encouraged to attend meetings and submit their writing and art.

Overheard in leftist discussion group Beleaguered former girlboss: “How do I get off the Women in Economics and Policy mailing list?”

Overheard in Whitman dining hall Confused friend: “Do you think Eisgruber is hot?”

Offended lesbian: *pause* “I’m gay.”

Overheard outside McCosh Eating club president: “I don’t think I’m a himbo?”

A friend who knows better: “Honey, if you have to ask.”

Overheard in lecture History professor: “Chiang Kaishek would not be very happy if he found out that historians are calling his style of suit the Mao suit.”

Overheard in LCA Paper-writing sophomore: “Yeah, so basically my thesis is that all white men just want to be back in the womb.”

White man: “You figured us out!”

Overheard on iMessage Staunch Marxist: “Should I pay my taxes?”

Overheard in Applebee’s COS Senior: “Joseph Kony was misunderstood.”

Overheard on iMessage Unfunny sophomore: “I’m stoned.”

Unamused respondent: “Cool.”

Unfunny sophomore: “As in, I’m in Stone. Firestone Library.”

Submit to Verbatim Email thenassauweekly@gmail.com

Read us: nassauweekly.com Contact us:

thenassauweekly@gmail.com Instagram & Twitter: @nassauweekly

Join us:

We meet on Mondays and Thursdays at 5pm in Bloomberg 044

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Volume 44, Number 6 PAGE DESIGN BY TONG DAI ARTWORK BY CHLOE KIM

RIVER HOUSE “What will we do in this nightmare pastoral, now that we have woken up.”

By CHARLIE NUERMBERGER

Dream 3

T

he damselfly from the river visits her six times. The first time, it comes scuttling with its three-pronged tail between its legs. The second, the fly is dormant and speaks to her in its sleep. The third time, it is blue. The fourth, it vows to kill itself. The fifth, it apologizes. This is the sixth time. The damselfly, still blue and now beautiful, says, “I am the river, and you must kill your husband.” She sits in the jewelweed and scrapes crusts of blood from her ears. It says again, “You must kill your husband.”

So she does. I am sleeping inside the river house, in our bed; she holds our fish knife in her left hand, and she cuts across my throat.

The whole night is bloody.

Those windows, which look to the great flowering dogwood, are open; she commits this act in the valley.

The river, the damselfly, stand audience to this entire act. A deep, buggy chitter reverberates through the house like a scream, and the moonlight catches the pink bones of my neck.

She quarters me. She buries my left arm beneath the linoleum of the kitchen. Our dog is hungry, and she feeds it my right arm. She buries my left leg in the river shoal but it washes downstream the next week. The world around us is also hungry, so she tosses my right leg among the wineberry and kudzu. She places my head in a cardboard box. I forgot to say that she has been fasting for the past six days.

She is shaking.

The damselfly returns in the morning, when the blood has been cleaned, and takes the cardboard box. That spring, there are

seven big rainstorms. They shake our river house, and at one point, she thinks, “This will all come collapsing down on top of me.” But it doesn’t: the foundation holds. Our river house is built on silt, the pliant whispers of two people living in the city, and the river. The rainfall soon slips into the kind of soft green constant that makes you think you could build something on this ground.

Soon though, the sun processes from the East, and it is summer again. The box has returned to the porch. The dog sniffs it. Inside, she finds a dozen apple seeds and our sweet baby boy. He is plump and red and has shaggy hair like me. I forgot to say that this deal was deliberated on the third visit of the damselfly.

We name the boy John. This is the story we tell our little baby son when he asks for it.

I The

first

thing

you

should know about our river house is that when she and I wake up on our first morning, we are pierced by the light through the shoulder, the knee, the elbow, all our joints. The light clasps us together with millions of white pins. It nearly burns us up. In the city, we never used to sleep with the windows open, and we still, of course, ensure the screen is closed to keep out mosquitoes and flies. In this moment though, our immolation, we are martyrs instantaneously. Oh, us.

We have fled the city and its security for these terrible, folding valleys: these terrible, folding sheets that hide us from the annihilating light. What will we do in this nightmare pastoral, now that we have woken up.

The second thing you should know is that this house was her parents’, or grandparents’. She had never visited her before, as a child, she tells me. This is important: remember

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Volume 44, Number 6

she wasn’t exposed to this transcendental privilege as a child.

From the bed, I rehearse our way here, across yellow carpet and wood paneling, until I am sure I won’t get lost. I walk my way through each room until I start remembering things that seem to have happened decades ago, in the bathroom, on the porch. She says, “This house is an anachronism.” The river brings things here, and they linger. Lying down and looking west, inexplicably, you can still see the slouching screen door, loose from one hinge.

You should know that this is real love. Before I met her, I would string girls along. I was horrible–I was a dog. We speak about this when we are drunk off gas station wine that we bought with the change in her wallet, and we are smoking

crumpled menthols in the same porch chair. We say, “You were horrible.” The sun recesses while I tell the horrible stories to the jackin-the-pulpit off the porch: stories about the city. I tell those little-boy plants about the horrible breakup outside the brunch place on Easter. In the room we fill with our books, I tell viburnum out the window about dating two friends, one after another. I am offering up all the parts of me for eating. I take a cut, maybe the fat below my ribs, and eat it myself because I am still a little bit horrible, and it tastes good. She laughs at these stories and eats because she knows it tastes good, and maybe, she is a little bit scared of my horribleness. She hopes by eating it one day it will all be gone, and I will be skinnier.

You must be thinking she is a cannibal, an ogress.

Consider it a shortcoming of my own storytelling: she is good. If I told you she was horrible, it would be a lie. She paints pictures, and they are good too. Even that first morning, her fingers are still spattered with white primer up to the knuckles. We have escaped, and I am resting within her goodness as if I’m sleeping there. Even a million years from this moment, I would tell her, “You are golden; you are good,” as the shale of our bones grinds into itself. I looked at her skin in the light, and we were fossils. It was all so bright that I closed my eyes and remained in the hot world of the afterimage. The river house disappears for the moment. That morning, when the morning light pinned us together, and we were martyrs, I knew she was good in a deep, throbbing part of me.

lamp.”

II I say this much: “Do you know where we put the lamp?” It is dark now; we have recessed from more pressing diurnal activity outside the house. The sheets across the bed are twisted and contorted from the morning. We can hear the wind from off the river and a barn owl from the collapsed shed to the South.

“Which lamp?” She leans over a cardboard box, one labeled for the kitchen.

“The lamp for the bedside table. The one my mom got.”

She looks up. We are speaking across three different doorways. I can see her silhouetted by the orange light from the porch and another light from a lamp on the floor. Her body is stringy and real. We are both sweating. “I didn’t know your mom got us a

“For the bedside table.”

“I don’t remember that.”

“I don’t remember where we packed it.” You would think this is funny: I am insistent that the lamp exists, like the goodwill of my mother is dependent on it.

“If you can’t find it, it probably isn’t here.” She slumps over the kitchen box. We are both tired, and some cut of me wants to do nothing but take her up in my arms and go to sleep in those light-pierced sheets.

Trust me, this is real love.

“You could try looking in the basement. I threw some of the boxes down there to clear things up,” she says.

I slip past her, through those doorways,

CONTINUED ON PAGE 13

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April 3, 2022

PAGE DESIGN BY CATHLEEN WENG

Nass Members Reflect on Concentration Declarations

I

t’s declaration season.

Choosing a concentration can be thrilling, boring, or incredibly stressful. As sophomores and some first-years decide which departments to enter for the rest of their time at Princeton, we asked a couple of Nass members to reflect on the path they took to declaring and the meaning of their department.

Kate Lee I came into Princeton obnoxiously sure in my choice to be an English major. “I’m just one of those people,” I used to say, “who chose their major in seventh grade and never looked back.” At a STEMheavy public high school, my choice of literature was how I’d defined and differentiated myself. But after a year at Princeton, I quickly found everyone seemed to like books, and the ego boost of being special wasn’t enough to keep me tied to a concentration.

Even after that realization, I stuck with English because of some preconceived notion that it was a flexible

department that was more concerned with contemporary issues than other literature and language majors. But a serious look at the department quickly revealed that it would most likely narrow, and pigeonhole, my interests rather than allow me to really explore questions of identity. I was sitting there with an intended English major and a French minor and an increasing desire to incorporate my mother tongue, Korean, into my studies. Choosing Comparative Literature was perhaps the easiest and most natural decision I’ve made at Princeton.

Katie Rohrbaugh I decided that I would major in history during my sophomore year of high school. I enjoyed learning about the world—especially the Classical era— and figured history was broad enough to encompass most if not all my interests. With this reasoning in mind, I kind of floated through the history department until this semester, where I really came to understand how history differed both from other departments and from my previous understanding of it from high school.

Practically speaking, I can now study abroad for two semesters, and in countries that aren’t just English-speaking: one of the biggest factors in my decision. I can incorporate Asian American Studies or Creative Writing into my departmental track. Most importantly, I feel like Comparative Literature has expanded my academic possibilities, has given me choice. For that, I’m excited and grateful.

For a few months, I wasn’t sure how or why I ended up where I was academically, other than by a (somewhat) arbitrary decision I had made four years prior. However, through experimentation with classes from other departments, I’ve discovered that my congruence with the history department stems not from my enjoyment of historical material per se, but rather the way that material is gathered and analyzed through historical methodologies. A history paper is not a politics

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nor anthropology nor classics nor ENV paper. This seems quite obvious at first glance, but I don’t think the distinction meant anything to me until—startlingly—very recently.

Going forward, I’m excited to see where the department leads me.

Mollika Jai Singh My ex-boyfriend once (only a little unfairly) called the intended concentration on my Princeton application “White People Studies.” The truth is I never really considered Classics—I had just written a damn good application essay about my high school Latin teacher and thought a matching intended concentration would help me get in.

My original considerations were, of course, the unholy trinity of A.B. degrees: SPIA,

Politics, and Econ. I figured having a foundational knowledge of why the system I wanted to work in or around (the U.S. government) is the awful way it is would be useful. Cue Western Humanities Sequence. For a class that aims to “stimulate plural perspectives,” it was tragically disappointing to someone seeking to look critically at the Western intellectual tradition.

Learning that a former WHUM star student found herself unable to work on philosophy of race despite being in the Philosophy department—and ended up in African American Studies—I went searching: I cold emailed the only Desi woman I could find on the AAS website’s student section. On Zoom, she told me that she gave up on SPIA and Politics because she didn’t want to only have an education in

resistance.

Resistance is an important skill, but I should be able to save my resisting for working with SPEAR or Princeton Mutual Aid, not explaining to my classmates why the existence of people like me is just as important as that of people like them. Realizing I want to focus on reading and writing creative nonfiction about South Asian American women, I thought English might be the department to do it in. To be brief, a glance at its course offerings and visit to the recent department open house confirmed that English would not cut it.

If there is any department on campus that takes the literature of the people of color in the U.S. seriously, it’s African American Studies. I desperately need to be taken seriously.

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April 3, 2022 PAGE DESIGN BY VERA EBONG ARTWORK BY HANNAH MITTLEMAN

n o family b A fiction piece reflecting on how to cope with impending loss.

By SIERRA STERN

S

kylar didn’t know why Mom was chewing her knuckle like that.

It was her nervous thing.

Dad’s: scratching his head so bad that it snowed.

Alice’s: pawing at her hair like some kind of cat. The cat’s: hiding from Alice.

Mom was on the couch.

She took a pillow in her lap, caressed it, babbled to it in barely-there-babyspeak, and Skylar wanted to say, The cat’s just behind you, Mom, perched on the hard backing of the sofa.

s e

If Dad were home, he’d touch the spot on her temple that brought Mom back from automatic. Mom’s skin deflected Skylar’s spindly kid fingers, had that waxy carrot-skin quality that his young hands didn’t have enough ridges to hold onto.

When Mom died, Skylar would want a statue of her.

One time they went to the Wax Figure Museum and Skylar had asked if Mom was famous enough to get one.

I don’t want to be wax, Mom had said.

What about when she was dead?

Mom gave him the worst look. She took that week off work.

Dad came into their room that night. Alice was asleep already. You could

hear the reedy whistle of her breathing.

That stuff’s not funny, said Dad. Mom takes it hard.

But it wasn’t funny to Skylar. He wanted Mom around always. He vowed to replace the whole family with wax as they went, would start now with airdry clay and be onto wax before mom’s carrot skin went wrinkly. He would almost certainly be the last to go; Alice was two minutes older.

You’re back, said Skylar. Mom was pulling her computer onto her lap. She looked at him, cyber-bright slices of teal overlaid on her pupils: Just thinking, hon.

It was an old machine, predating either of the twins. Every few years

Mom would take it to an electronics person and get its coppery technoguts extracted and replaced with the newest hardware. It was by far the oldest appliance in their house, a shineless and clattering black slab.

Mom’s fingers lashed against the keyboard, her frenzied taps collapsing the peace of the living room like the violent clicks of a wall clock.

Skylar watched her cradle the warm thing that wasn’t him. He thought about crushing it against the wall. Take that, older brother.

Skylar’s whole body twitched with guilt.

Mom looked over. Cold, babe?

The city couldn’t snow, so instead it got blue

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Volume 44, Number 6

outside, or green, if it was smoky out. The heater was expensive to use, so the blueness soaked through the walls and at a certain time of morning Skylar could see his breath indoors. They shuffled over the hardwood with blankets pinched around their faces. Huddled, conspired over a pot of hot chocolate like a coven of nesting dolls. Mom insisted on real chocolate and fake milk.

Or they went sailing.

The ocean, a half hour west, was getting closer by the year, but the king-sized was just upstairs, and so they dreamed up a flood to fill the master bedroom with perilous green water and cuddled like shivering stowaways. Once Dad had said, But what about

provisions?, and Sky had declared the bedroom temporarily unflooded in order to run downstairs for a box of water crackers and the dish of softened butter. Now it was tradition to take Sunday breakfast on the water.

It was also customary for Sky to throw himself overboard at least twice, and whoever was least situated (usually Alice, who liked to mirror the cat and twist herself into a skinny coil at the foot of the bed) would thrust a pillow into the sea and pull the writhing boy to safety.

Some of Mom’s friends had thrown their newborn children into backyard swimming pools until they thrashed well enough to float - trial by chlorine - but Mom had chosen

the only house in the entire neighborhood without one. Their yard was silt and rock, with gummy green plants like dinosaur spikes. Water-notfire would be the death of California, Mom insisted. It was swallowing up the world, already having taken finicky bites out of the Everglades and New Orleans that pushed Uncle Cameron more northerly with every new lease. His latest apartment was in Baton Rouge.

Alice could swim; she’d learnt at a friend’s house.

She was content to be the rescuer, who missed out on the extremely tickle-forward version of CPR administered to the rescue-ee, but earned a proud look from Dad. Mom, who should have

been great at playing pretend, was dead weight onboard. She would slump against Dad and perpetually reach for things—a pillow, Sky, the crackers—until everything on the boat was gathered into a massive heaving lump against the headboard, except for the cat and Alice, whose bodies were warm knots a comforter’s-length away.

Mom always reached for Alice last.

Al? Alice anticipated her smothering embrace. Like a coal mine, or a factory fire. Dad and Sky ran cold and clammy, but Mom burned hot. Her goodnight kiss left a sizzling welt on Alice’s temple.

CONTINUED ON PAGE 16

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PAGE DESIGN BY HAZEL FLAHERTY ARTWORK BY HAZEL FLAHERTY

“The cemetery pointed the old Dutch pharaohs / Toward their heaven.”

By DYLAN FOX

Fox Cemetery

Volume 44, Number 6

(2021) The place was, unfortunately cinematic.

Sat on a stumpy, sharp Old hill that made the Low, ancient mountain Look like Everest in my viewfinder.

It was an old mountain, Older than organs and legs, Than the God or People This burying ground Was dedicated to.

I could never film there.

A Trilogy of Poems

The beauty was too Artificial, too Intentionally and politically placed Into the broad, epic valley.

The cemetery pointed the old Dutch pharaohs Toward their heaven.

About English Mountain, Tennessee

Toward the rising sun Which peaked over The mountain as I Set up my camera And checked focus My ass faced the dead, And I tried to imagine this place Before death.

But everything dies Even the mountain Even the unreadable gravestones.

Even God, who came over On a ship and got drowned at Jamestown.

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(1787)

Muddy Creek

The stale stench of smoke Hangs on the air Like the Christ’s thin, ghostly shroud.

There is no fire visible To the eye.

Only the feeling of it In your bones as you recall Like a flash, Your morning in The hazy dawn Denuding the crust Of the land newly won with your hands, And your fist, and your guns, And the meandering diction of your brother.

You feel the fire, again, In the spider thin bones of your hands As the ax whops into the space between Your shoulder blades.

And you go down hard like an Oak. Face in the stinking mud.

Leather sock on your shoulder.

Your head is pulled back by two hands.

Hands you shook a year ago.

His hand The man’s hand brings The flint blade to your hairline And skins it like a potato.

He felt it, then, In his bones As he bled out into the muddy creek.

With the hazy, dirty, meandering fall wind Around his exposed skull.

With the young man holding the Rag of hair in his hand And looking proud and angry and sad.

He felt it then That he had made some mistake But knew not where the path had forked To bring him here.

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Volume 44, Number 6 PAGE DESIGN BY HAZEL FLAHERTY ARTWORK BY HAZEL FLAHERTY

English Mountain

(1787) You wake up into a Foreign sunrise where even The morning star is misaligned.

Much easier than a Dutch winter; The frost has just turned to dew.

You spend these days shaving Fields and forests from the land.

In the beginning, You could scarcely see the Sun for the thick, tall trees.

But now, as you start your race Against the sun, You look up and see the piercing eye Peak up over the unnamed mountain.

As you dig and pull A bit of prose comes To your illiterate head.

I’ve seen the future before, When all my children will find This land natural and pure.

Your hoe whacks down Into the bleeding clay.

You start the Next line in the dirt.

You pull the hoe back To reveal the worms and grubs Boiling under the greasy grass.

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Volume 44, Number 6 PAGE DESIGN BY TONG DAI

RIVER HOUSE

ARTWORK BY CHLOE KIM

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 5

down the hardwood steps.

The basement is cooler.

Light from an incandescent bulb shatters across the cinder-block walls and the camel crickets on the ground. There are so many camel crickets you would think they had inherited our river house. This world here looks barren. We speak now, not through doorways, but instead the floor.

“Where in the basement?” I holler.

“The back room, to the left,” she answers, also hollering. I didn’t know we had a back room. Seven locks hold the door to its frame, and each one appears older than the last, until the twisted screws of one ancient latch almost disintegrate when I lift it.

This successive unlocking feels like transgression, like I am breaching a space I should not know exists.

When, at last, I unlock the final lock, the door is loosed from its frame. It takes time to disobey. The incandescent bulb projects a rectangle of light into this back room, and a camel cricket hops from where the light doesn’t reach. I squint, and the electric light catches the corner of a single cardboard box. I drag it into where the light breaks across the basement.

The box mostly contains framed photos of our city friends and knickknacks like paintings, porcelain frogs, and pinned butterflies that don’t live in this area, but near the bottom, I find the lamp my mother got us, which feels dustier than it should. I have found the lamp, but I linger for a moment.

The dust released from the back room coils against the darkness. I reenter the room as if its churning is an entreaty. I couldn’t tell you why I do this. At this point, my eyes have adjusted, and I make out a further object in the left corner of the smaller room. It isn’t hidden. My breath curls around my lips and against the stagnant air of the back room. Like the lock, this object seems to dissolve when I reach for it.

It is a doll, and time in the basement has eaten it up.

At one point, it was a boy.

Tufts of matted hair cling to its scalp; poorly-crafted eyes glisten. The doll is hers, this I know almost by smell. She had painted over the most faded parts as a child: a red ring around the lips, a blush to the cheeks.

I return to our river house, with a hand around the neck of the doll. She puts a kettle on the stove burner. “This is yours,” I say, tossing the doll onto the formica counter. I realize that I forgot the lamp in

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Volume 44, Number 6

PAGE DESIGN BY CATHLEEN WENG ARTWORK BY EMMA MOHRMANN

the basement.

“What is that?”

“It’s your doll. I found it in the basement.”

She is exasperated and clicks her fingernails against the countertop.

“How is it my doll?”

“This house was your parents’ or grandparents’. You must have lost it down in the basement sometime. I don’t know.”

“I had never visited here as a child.” I press my tongue to the back of my teeth and look away from

her. She approaches me and holds my hand after a beat.

“Let’s forget it. Can we just figure this out in the morning? Let’s get to bed,” she says. “Let’s just go to bed,” and we do. We return to the folds of the sheets left unoccupied since that morning so long before this discovery of the doll and these accusations of being places we haven’t been. I hold her.

The tea kettle on the stovetop begins whistling through our empty river house, so we remove

ourselves one more time, drink mugs of tea in the dark in the bed and leave the cups on the floor because we haven’t unpacked the bedside table yet.

Dream 4 Our dog is singing to me, and I know this is a dream

because we put her down before cancer ate her up three months ago. It seems strange that our dog never even visited the river house.

The river seems to accompany her folk blues with

the gentle percussion of a the fat belly of the river. The kingfisher call and its inex- water moves past my waist orable, full-bodied current. and my groin, except it is Sometimes, I think, when made of the sheets of our we sleep in our bed, and bed. Things on the eroding all the little animals sleep bank seem to move past in their holes, and even the me. The world appears to trees dream briefly, the riv- amount to something. er stops moving. I think if I could speak with the river, To be continued on April and it could listen to me, 10…

I could convince it to stop for just one moment. A conversation would be too easy though.

Even a million years from this My dog is singing moment, Charlie Nuermberger folk blues while I stand in would tell the Nassau Weekly, “You are golden; you are good.”

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April 3, 2022 PAGE DESIGN BY CATHLEEN WENG

Review of diSiac’s HEADLINES 5 On pointed pedestals revolution stands, Pressing into the earth with ballet flats, A heady weight, a pen poised Spilling steady ink into A papyrus eternally unfurling.

6 Colors soar, sounds burst, And all around us busts fall A thundering pulpit wrings out ancient dust, Glinting in the golden curtain Gleaming out in light fog, Melting and mingling to humming bass.

7 Ass-pressed and feet-kissed, the stage Hardens a pool of sweat, shimmering An inked sea from bodies for bodies, Freedom’s liquidity, spoken from dancer’s pen, A thunderbolt shot from booming speaker-brow, Olympian majesty alights the scene Soothing the enthrallingly electric.

8 Like an arrow flying through atom-streams of old, Our flying dancer leaps over crumbling column, And with easeful step ignites its material Into a sparking, effervescent lantern Held in the hurtling air by nature’s murmur, A breath gentler than words, whispering True beauty and freedom - in ecstasy, In theater, in time.

A poetic assessment of a student dance group.

By JOHN SLAUGHTER

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Volume 44, Number 6

PAGE DESIGN BY VERA EBONG ARTWORK BY HANNAH MITTLEMAN

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 9

Years later, when Mom was gone, memories of her would turn the air jelly-thick.

Meow meow, Alice would say, letting her down gently, and Mom would lower the blazing wands of her arms, and Skylar would wriggle through from under her armpit to sit in the throne of her lap.

The sizzle of steam.

The computer set aside, Skylar sat on Mom’s legs with skinny arms around her neck. He loved the way their breath would sync.

Loved when Mom would turn him around and grab his feet. She would look him in the eyes and ask, What do you think of this idea? Except the idea was a story. He’d sit and listen and then say, That’s good, Mom, or, I don’t love that idea, Mom. The best part of Mom’s books were the acknowledgements.

He imagined himself a rockstar calling out to a crowd. Thanks for coming out, everybody! This one goes out to Mom and Dad! Thanks so much for raising me! This next one is for my sister, Alice! And the last one is for you, cat!

We love you, Sky! Sign our eyeballs! We’re so proud of you! Meow.

Sometimes when Mom put out a book, she let him sign the inside covers of a few in thick black Sharpie.

Just last week he’d signatured several dozen

presale copies of Mom’s newest.

Dear Reader: This book is really good. Best wishes.

(That’s how Dad signed emails.)

Then Skylar’s signature.

His name inside a cloud.

Will they be sad it’s not you, he asked. Even better, she said. It’s you.

Skylar imagined doing the same thing years from now for his own work. Did artists sign their work — Obviously. There was a print in the dining room by Chagal, and Skylar knew that somehow, so he had to have read it. He didn’t even know who Chagal was. In Skylar’s mind, he was a bearded man, Dadaged but also extremely old, with a white horse’s body covered in faint Dalmation-y spots.

That day in art class, Skylar had drawn sunsets.

The elementary school campus, built for fifteen hundred, had taken two thousand kids the year Dad graduated. Now there were just over a thousand, and dozens more families were lost each year to migration. Alice’s kindergarten best friend lived in Vancouver now. She sent videos that made Alice miss snow she’d never touched (sand-soft, and probably not half as cold as people said).

Built on the border of two contrasting suburbs, the school followed a rule of halves – demographically split between drastic degrees of wealth

and whiteness. Not so, anymore. The southern suburb was hollowing out, leaving spacious turn-of-century homes perpetually For Sale.

Dad had done college in Boston. There, the sun was ice white, setting gold. It set over the skyline, smirking at the Atlantic, who was not yet bold enough to bite back. This, Skylar could not imagine. Here in his native West, the setting sun and the advancing ocean were a unified governing body, and the sun was always fox red. When the sun fell, pink rays bluified the hard brown hills of their neighborhood, and the waxy reptilian plants glowed brown.

Dad came downstairs.

Do you need me to pick up the dry cleaning?

Shit. I need my brown suit.

Skylar covered his ears in protest. He was averse to the vernacular of adulthood, had sworn not to wield those words ever.

Yup. So, dry cleaning?

Why does Mom need her brown suit? asked Skylar.

Sky, Mom sounded pained. My book.

Oh! Dad shouted up at Alice.

He hated driving alone, and Skylar hated leaving Mom. Alice kept her eyes on the moon.

Car time with Dad was precious. Between the two of them, Mom and Dad

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Volume 44, Number 6

knew everything, but Dad knew all the stuff that Alice actually wanted to know.

Mom: myths, calculus, and grammar rules. Jason captained the Argo, and this clause needs commas, and how to solve an integral. Dad: Hebrew, whistling, and movies. Listed in ascending order of interestingness, obviously.

Don’t be stupid, Alice.

Interestingness is not a word.

Stop lying!

Mom doesn’t sound like that.

Mom makes up words all the time.

If Shakespeare did it, then it’s good enough for me! And good use of ascending.

Then hugs, probably.

Then a kiss. Obsessed, much? So unlike Dad, who was cool, and touched fists with her to say goodbye, and always knew when she didn’t feel like being kissed on the top of her head. Plus, when he said I love you in Hebrew, it sounded almost ironic from all the hckh-ing in his throat.

Hckh! Loving you? Sick!

Don’t make me vomit!

She practiced on the cat. Hckh! Hckh! Don’t run away! Scaredy cat!

Xenophobe!

Besides the moon, the sky was blank. Alice could count the number of times she’d seen stars on just one hand, but the memory burned so vivid she could project that ideal cosmos onto the sky wherever she was. Mom knew the constellations, and Alice wondered why she’d learned

them if she’d lived her whole life in the polluted desert-city badlands.

Are we gonna move? asked Alice.

Why would we move?

The air’s bad.

It’s just like that.

Homeless people are dying.

He frowned, didn’t say it, but the thought hung there between them: It’s just like that, too.

Stop reading Mom’s emails.

Uncle Cameron wanted them to move, all of them. North. Louisiana was where Mom’s side was buried. Dad’s side was here, on the underside of a giant Jewish cemetery on the sunny slant of a hill that was electric green with illegally-watered grass. Alice thought about water breaking over the headstones until the lawns choked in mud. She pictured the family bones lost to the ocean.

They pulled into the dry cleaners, and Alice waited in the car. When Dad came back, Alice asked to keep the suit in her lap.

Mom needed her brown suit. This was all Alice needed to anchor herself.

How could that special suit, lined pink with beautiful calico buttons, coexist with the end times.

And neon signs and men selling flowers at the mouth of the freeway– things she had always known, that she couldn’t leave for fear of fearing the future.

Dad asked if she wanted to stop for ice cream, but

Mom’s suit was heavy in Alice’s lap.

Mom wrote books for teenagers. Alice and Sky weren’t allowed to read them. Dad called them heavy, which meant there was death and potentially swears. When Alice thought of Mom her mind split. Mom rocked and creaked and disappeared; she was warm and solid and eternal. When Alice thought of Mom, she always envisioned a golden disc tucked in her hair, and her skin a bit more copper than it really was.

Alice stared down Dad’s cheek.

I don’t want to move.

If they moved, Mom would wither. She was always walking in between raindrops and gray skies made her old. All through winter, she could hardly lift a fork.

We won’t move, Dad assured Alice.

I like our house.

So do I. She said okay and crossed her arms, like a deal was closed.

When they got home Mom was at the door, putting off heat. Alice stepped into her arms. She let herself get so hot she went cold.

Sierra Stern set over the skyline, smirking at the Nassau Weekly, who was not yet bold enough to bite back.

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Volume 44, Number 6 PAGE DESIGN BY CATHLEEN WENG

SECONDARY EXPOSURE “Whatever the master could offer, it would represent just one millionth of the dog’s unreciprocated love.”

By AMAYA DRESSLER

A

televisual haze suffused the downstairs hallway.

This soporific sensation did indeed initiate within the television. The channel always died after the last midnight rerun of Star Trek concluded, leaving its trademark colorless, static slate. But the remaining illusion could only be attributed to the rainbow-tinted bong leaning against the torn leather couch—the bong’s obvious contents gone, having already inebriated the faculties of one unexceptional master and, by secondary exposure, his dog.

This Star Trek episode had been a good one. Though the master had gotten too high too fast to make any sense of it, his dog was still mentally present enough to ponder the

episode’s deeper implications.

It ended with Spock giving some climactic, sober espousal on the nature of attention. The dog did not know what, exactly, attention was, but he surmised that it was a wholly consuming affair.

Think, for example, of the hound/squirrel dynamic.

Attention there was not something to bark about. Should the hound be fast enough, strong enough—if he just wanted it enough—he could claim that squirrel’s attention in a pinch.

The dog’s master, however, was a different story. For the master, attention was not an animal affair. By this definition, whatever attention the dog gave to the master could not be invested back upon the dog. It was the dog’s job to supply the master with his wants and desires. But what, if anything, the master truly wanted—this not even Spock could answer.

Yet Spock defined attention differently. He drew a line between mere attention, and

recognition. The dog felt utterly ignorant—ignored, even, for his misunderstanding. After all, the dog was a dog. Never, he thought, would he possess Spock’s cunning. His master, always, would have the right answer. When the dog’s feeble mind could not keep up the pace, then the dog, always, would be punished. But the dog was unaware that not even his master, not even when sober, could comprehend the attention which Spock described.

Indeed, not even Spock had gotten it right. In reality, the gap between mere attention and recognition constituted a world of difference.

Midway through the dog’s contemplation, the master engaged the minimal muscle required to smack his dangling foot against the dog’s forehead and eyelids. Unbeknownst to the dog, this was actually the master’s code for ‘I want attention,’ but this method was minimally more efficient than actually saying the words out loud.

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PAGE DESIGN BY CATHLEEN WENG

lIt always startled the dog, who had lost the last remainder of his eyesight years ago, but it worked—without fail, the dog understood immediately the exact type of attention his master desired. By sniff alone, the dog navigated the smokeclogged basement to his master. His lungs burned as he located his master’s finger, his wet nose dribbling over the master’s oversized Hawaiian t-shirt. The dog began by giving his master precisely that form of attention which he would like in return, one day.

He licked each finger individually, for this is a dog’s most coveted display of affection. The master grumbled something, but his dialect had always remained hopelessly indecipherable to the dog. This was not for a misunderstanding of human speech—the dog understood English, even Klingon, plenty well. Rather, in twelve years of ownership, the master had so sparsely spoken to the dog as to have never managed a common lingua franca between the two. In the past three years, the

master had given the dog about two full, maryj-scented words— both expletives. This, however, did not alter the abundance of love and (were either of the two to comprehend the term), recognition, which the dog had and will continue to sacrifice devoutly to his master.

The dog knew he must stop soon. The master would pinch the dog’s tongue when the dog’s version of love became unpleasant to him. The dog, then, would stop licking, wiping the remaining slobber (and other unpleasant substances) from his master’s hand. He would proceed with the master’s preferred version of attention and emotional comfort: the dog’s warmth. This required a balancing act on the dog’s part: he must lean against his master with precisely enough pressure as to provide a sense of intimacy, but not so hard as to risk his master’s anger, which was easy to rile.

This was not a fair relationship. There was a black, soul-draining abyss where reciprocity should have been. The

dog could sense this. But he hoped that, one day, if he could give his master just enough of his burden, perhaps just then the master would give something back. Whatever the master could offer, it would represent just one millionth of the dog’s unreciprocated love. Yet this hope was the very flesh and blood which drove that poor, skeletal dog every day, with his aching lungs and arthritic joints, to stand up and give to his master just one more time.

One day, if he performed his duty just right, just one time, the master would open his eyes.

Perhaps, the master would even look at the dog. The master would even … and this is all the dog really wants … he could even smile, in return. The master would smile in return.

Amaya Dressler did not know what, exactly, the Nassau Weekly was, but she surmised that it was a wholly consuming affair.

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April 3, 2022 PAGE DESIGN BY CATHLEEN WENG

RAY MATEO HAZEL FLAHERTY