THE QUARRY Literary and Visual Arts Magazine
THE QUARRY Literary and Visual Arts Magazine St. Olaf College 2016
The Quarry Staff Executive Editor
Abi Tupa
Literary Editor
Madisen Egan
Art Editor
Josh Torkelson
Layout Editor
Erika Terwilliger
Web Editor
Emma Johnson
Literature scones
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Emily Nyberg
set-theoretic difference
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Jack Bachmann
Leather and Wicker
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Jenna McKellips
December Rain
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Hannah Hilst
A Diary
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Jing Zhou
A Sestina for Sound
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Claire Jussel
December 1999
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Anna Chotlos
sunlight
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Lily Bane
Caliban
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Haley Olson
Even the Sun
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Mary McManis
The Kraken
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Anna Chotlos
Silent S
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Lily Bane
Art Illumination
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Kelly Mahaffy
Green River
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Allie Aufderheide
Untitled #1
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Jabri Whirl
Aplomado Falcon
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Holland Hardie
Wall
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Caitlin Nelson
Nighttime, Davis Mountains
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Holland Hardie
Untitled 1
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Anna Chotlos
Leaving Earth
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Kasha Prinzing
fffff
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Melissa Nyberg
Untitled
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Emily Anderson
Snow Vision
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Carina Lofgren
Cover Art: Home by Stuart Yurczyk
A Letter from the Editors A fleet of thin, glossy magazines lives on the shelves of the St. Olaf College Archives. No single spine occupies more than a centimeter of shelf space, yet together, these publications span nearly one hundred years of creative student expression on the hill. Glancing at this collection, so much appears the same from issue to issue–ink is always arranged strategically into lines of poetry, prose, paintings, and photographs. Cracking open a spine, a reader can guess with some degree of certainty that a few of these poems will mention love, and some of these paintings will depict loss. But it is here that the similarities end. In reality, each new magazine is a compilation of differences–differences in thought, differences in technique, and differences in message. Meaning is born from difference. It’s how we notice progress; it’s how we appreciate growth. As editors, we have the pleasure of seeing the range of themes that linger on the minds of St. Olaf ’s writers and artists from year to year. As we review submissions, we witness the change within creative communities and the individual artists themselves. Each publication of The Quarry represents a different St. Olaf. Each annual issue hears new voices, and each new voice takes ownership of personal experiences in divergent ways. The art and writing within the magazine before you represents the change in emotions, the progression of opinions, and the growth of community that took place on campus this year. We thank all students who submitted their work to this year’s magazine, and who seek to contribute to The Quarry’s catalogue of student expression. As you read the publication before you, we challenge our readers to reflect on the differences embodied during their time at St. Olaf. Until next time, The Quarry’s 93rd Editorial Staff
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scones
Emily Nyberg how great it would be to see something simple and unmade at its final stage// in the process one hand holds another and whispers “i’ll help” but the end can’t be calculated only approximated and reliably one hand leaves the other and more come along// one thing is for certain the number of people walking past a bakery, seeing scones baking, saying, “that smells good” without stopping to taste rosemary lemon with pop of blueberry when they’re done will continue to be more than one
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Illumination Kelly Mahaffy Photograph
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set-theoretic difference Jack Bachmann
its 12 past midnight and nick is talking about lizard people and the very certain fact. they also believe in horses that secretly run the world. they do run the world. its true. and every time the mares and stallions summit there are whispers about dogs and how they do run the world. its true. today, i saw a dog walking its owner– –i mean running its owner. it was barking on and on about mice. i couldn’t understand anything it said but, i could read its lips and it said: the secret is nobody ever knows the end of a truth.
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Green River Allie Aufderheide 8.5 x 8.5 in. Embroidery
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Leather and Wicker Jenna McKellips
There a leather sofa, worn with small impressions– etchings written in the language of time and the cave paintings of small children’s fingers. Here a wicker chair, each rope a desert– woven through with thirsty earthen cracks as the weather wore past the paint to the bone. Two chairs alongside a pane of bright glass, awaiting with warm breath, the gentle lull, the captured ether of each word, carefully chosen. I hold my breath with them, we three waiting together. It was a leather hand– maybe wicker– that held mine when I was just newly made, my hair still dandelion. One leather hand showed the crops in each quilted field. And the wicker other, the harvest of soul in the charcoal shadowing of the hollow of an eye, of a jawbone imprinted in soft paper.
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December Rain Hannah Hilst
I can shiver in December rain, you can whisper my nerves alive like a shiver, a whirring tongue, with breath enough to fog my glasses in an elevator on my way to your floor, through your door to hold your shoulders against the rug with teeth enough to sharpen your ear and hair enough to fall between your lips and rain through the open slice of screen. I can shiver in January wind, I can meet you at four o’clock by the bus stop delivering flour and sugars in plastic bags, a gallon of milk with a razor seam pressing red into the soft of my thumb and forefinger, cash enough for the carton of eggs, most of which will spoil, coat enough for four-thirty, for four-forty, boots to walk home before five. I can shiver on the bare of February, branches striking black on the white sky, shadows still shaving snow dunes blue, but I have woman in me and I won’t tremble enough to see you thaw in March.
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Untitled #1 Jabri Whirl Photograph
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A Diary Jing Zhou
Sunday night, I stayed at Bob’s. We shared a 13” vegetarian pizza while arguing about politics. Monday evening, I went to Wendy’s. I sat down and asked for a cup of tea. An ambulance sped by; I thought about life. Wednesday morning, I sat in the wind. For ten minutes I watched the cloudy sky in my coffee cup that nobody seemed to care. What’s today? I don’t even remember. Newspapers story-making as usual, TV shows speaking in 100 different tones. Luckily I lost my cell phone.
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Aplomado Falcon Holland Hardie
7 x 10 in. Intaglio Print and Watercolor
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A Sestina for Sound
Inspired by A.E. Stallings’ “Handbook of the Foley Artist” Claire Jussel Sound trails at the hint of breath, punctuated static and microscopic screams of mind and motion, crumpled and thrust out into the quiet, arching into uneven fractals, a crack that splinters into softness, and–crack! Hushed tones turn to blended breath exchanged as easily as radio static, voices compressed to a muffled scream. Vibrations tremble and collapse and crumple– There is no such thing but quiet; it is the gear behind the clock. Quiet is the greatest lie. It cracks loudly with every breath of the second hand–static cascades through air. Moments scream. Frustrated, the author of silence crumples paper into a crumpleing fire, consumed quietly. Sparks crack with every gasping breath. Strings stay muffled like static and seldom scream to a halt, suspended like the train’s distant scream. Lint gathers and listens on, and sound is crumpled and caged for four minutes and thirty-three seconds. Quiet sits and sound escapes like tears and laughter through the cracks. Lists and lulls of the wind’s breath are the pounding of the sea, static,
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constant as a heart: static, but volatile. It screams of change, as undulating as crumpled cotton, a sizzling softness. Quiet is the black beaten rocks. Knuckles crack through the din and enchantment of ragged breath. For breath, capture slurred static. For a scream, observe ears compiling crumpling waves. For quiet, note the space between each heartbeat’s crack.
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Wall
Caitlin Nelson 7 x 7 in. Intaglio Print
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December 1999 Anna Chotlos
When a woman thinks that her house is on fire, her instinct is at once to rush to the thing she values most. It is a perfectly overpowering impulse, and I have more than once taken advantage of it. –Sherlock Holmes, “A Scandal in Bohemia”
The day I turned six, we believed our house was on fire.
“Isthmus. Isthmus. Isthmus.” I hiss, wiggling my loose front teeth with the tip of my tongue. It is my sixth birthday, exactly seven days before Christmas Eve and fourteen days before the new millennium. While the grown-up world speculates about Y2K, I have a new favorite word. Isthmus. I inform everyone I know that the city of Madison, Wisconsin, where we live, is on an isthmus between Lake Mendota and Lake Monona. But what I am most excited about, save the possibility that Santa, Jesus, or my parents will give me a puppy, is the cake my grandma has made for me. “Can I keep her?” I ask when I see it. The doll is inserted into the center of a Bundt cake, wearing it as a poufy ball gown, iced a radiant pink up to her bust. A sweetheart neckline. “Not this one,” Grandma says, “she’s a special doll for cakes, without any legs.” I don’t quite believe such a perfect doll–brown ringlets, blue eyes, fairy–thin arms, could be incomplete. An hour before my party, my mother smells plastic burning. She checks the furnace, the microwave, the oven, then tells me: “Go put on your winter coat. Now.” I try to crawl on the floor, the way the firemen taught us to in school, but my mother drags me to my feet and makes me walk. “There’s no smoke,” she says. “You only have to crawl if there is smoke.” But I know she is afraid because she still takes my brothers and me across the street to call 911. Halfway down our driveway, I remember that my cake is still on the kitchen table and imagine the icing melting and sliding into a pink puddle. I begin to wail. “We are not going back inside for a stupid cake,” my mother says. She carries the baby and leads my four-year-old brother with her free hand. She is thinking of the photo albums and her grandmother’s hand-painted teacups.
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Irreplaceable objects. “We will get you another cake exactly like that one if something happens to it.” “I don’t want a new cake! I want my cake!” Then I remember my goldfish, Princess, trapped in her twenty-five gallon aquarium and picture the water boiling like a pot of spaghetti. She is not the dog I wanted, but she is alive and technically my responsibility, so I stop whining about the cake and start on my fish. “Princess is going to die and it’s all your fault!” I scream. “Anna, the aquarium is too heavy to lift. We can’t save the fish.” Mom leaves the three of us in our neighbor Greg’s living room while she goes back across the street to talk to the firemen. I demand that she make the firemen save my fish and also my cake. The boys press their noses to Greg’s picture window to watch the fire truck and the police car. I fret. The firefighters are wearing bulky fireproof suits with reflective strips and oxygen tanks. My dad comes home from work early. The day I turn six, we learn that in certain electrical fires, the flames can stay inside the walls. [For years, I will wake from dreams that my bedroom walls are burning, flames hidden. I will run the back of my hand (the most sensitive part) along the drywall, expecting it to feel warm as skin, as blacktop in August, as the range on the stove.] The day I turn six, the firefighters do not find fire in our walls. After forty-five minutes of scanning with X-Ray goggles that remind my mother of Star Trek, my father and the firefighters notice that the new built-in space heater in the basement has been turned on and one improperly connected wire melted. The firefighter kneels in front of us. “Did one of you kids turn on the heater downstairs?” he asks. We all shake our heads no. In the end, we blame the baby. My youngest brother probably crawled between the futon and the wall in the basement and accidentally caught the heater’s knob on his diaper. I still get to have my birthday party. My cake survived to be eaten, though my disappointment with the single peg, like a golf tee, below the doll’s hips overshadows any memory of the cake’s taste. My goldfish, Princess, lived for twelve more years and died the day I graduated from high school.
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What do you save when your house isn’t on fire? When I make the photo display for my grandma’s memorial service, I find a black and white Polaroid of a little girl standing next to a pile of wrapped presents and a cake. Her bangs are cut straight, an inch above her eyebrows. She rests her hands on the edge of the white tablecloth, eyes closed as if she’s praying. I recognize the legless doll set in the cake. I do not recognize my mother.
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Nighttime, Davis Mountains Holland Hardie
11 x 7 in. Intaglio Print
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sunlight Lily Bane
Each day yawns like a genesis, ribs ripped from heaving chests with bloody tenderness. Trees laden with ripe bodies, the fruit drips its juices in crystalline drops of honey. The nectar and blood mingles, creating pools of sunrise paint palettes meant to color the sky. I stand as lone witness of the carnage and growth, of savage beauty. Stars sacrifice their bodies for new worlds; golden flecks move with explosive dancing into the core of a blue planet– where one morning, a girl will write a poem and the sunlight will be true.
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Untitled 1 Anna Chotlos
22 x 30 in. Ink, Watercolor, and Foil on Paper
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Caliban
Haley Olson 1. Every morning I have. Woken up to hear nothing but. Waves and occasionally. A bird call that is not a spirit any longer. Their footprints still mar the white sand. But the waves and I. Have been washing them away. One at a time. 2. All this time I could not. Breathe like the others perhaps. It was from walking so close. To the ground breaths always. Came in gasps hitching as though. A rope was pulling at my lungs. But today a crack of thunder. Not of Prospero but nature-made shook the isle. And I stood to watch the sea swallow the rocks. Breathing in the seawater with huge gulps. This island is mine and the proof. Is in my lungs. 3. There was a bird that they had left. In its cage (I think it may. Have been a sparrow) it had. Been beating its wings frantically against the golden bars. I reached in and watched. As it tried to fly away I waited. Until it was silent. Then snapped its neck crimson blood. Running down my hand.
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4. She said. There are thousands of words. For blue like azure indigo teal. Today and every day the sky is endless. Cloudless and oppressive. Blending into the waves and the rocks and the sand. Blue blue sometimes fading. Into pale gray and filthy white. While the sky is raging and. The trees are twisting–from inside. The hut I can see them in the storm. The sky is not black. As Prospero had claimed it to be. It is the darkest blue. You could ever imagine. 5. Beautiful world! Beautiful island! Beautiful freshwater creeks slick with silvery fish! Beautiful hot sun beating down! Beautiful barren trees call to the heavens! Beautiful trinkets still hung from the branches! Beautiful island devoid of magic! Beautiful biting stinging insects crawling beneath my feet! Beautiful brush hiding secret tunnels to nowhere! Beautiful mud and silt! Beautiful island ruled by this monster! Beautiful monster, crudely drawn and described with fear! Beautiful, accursed monster! O, beautiful king! 6. Having built a raft. I pushed off the rocks and paddled out to sea. Dipping my hands. In the deep water eventually unable to grasp seaweed or fish. Looking behind me the island. Was painted on the horizon in tiny flecks. I stood and shouted and suddenly.
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The ocean rolled up from under me. I remember the scream but nothing else. And when I awoke Providence Divine be damned. I was on shore again. Cursing spitting up salt. 7. I have set about tearing down the cell. Hauling away the logs one by one. Using them to make a fire. I still do see them sometimes. He is grand looking out over the island. He raises his staff and then–he is gone. (I have not burnt it yet). She is running along the shore singing. Twirling and making her father laugh. I look for her as I always did. And then she fades into the forest. Sometimes I believe that she was the spirit. The sparks fly from the new wood. I watch the embers when they land on my arm. And I do not brush them away.
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Leaving Earth Kasha Prinzing
22 x 30 in. India Ink and Colored Pencil
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fffff
Melissa Nyberg 6.5 x 11 in. Mixed Media
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Even the Sun Mary McManis
Even the sun became an ocean when it fell at your feet weeping, a puddle of salt too deep to swim.
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Untitled
Emily Anderson 5 x 7 in. Monoprint
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The Kraken Anna Chotlos
At this depth, everything is the same color black Rain’s sawing holes through our roof made of water and I still don’t want to talk to anyone but you We are too big for little things but too big for anything to be little In cities of houses of ships filled with sand I’m listening behind the closed lips of doors Are you dreaming? Now the aphelion, only closer remains. We are too big for little things but too big for anything to be little Time is not a love story. Love is not a time machine. We are too big for little things but too big for anything to be little.
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Silent S Lily Bane
Your heart thumps in iambs through our chests, skips to trochees when I slide my fingers over your ocean– dig ridges into the plateau with which you breathe. The water’s surface tension bends and crashes into waves; my cheek fights playfully with the roughness of a sweater that smells like cigarettes and microbrew. There are moments when I think that your lips should live on the crease of my inner thigh, as you look up at me with doe eyes like projection slides flitting between desire and hesitation. We had a killer conversation that night but it would be okay if we didn’t speak again because we left notes on each other’s spinal chords. Hopping the fence left no circles of scar tissue; where the barbed wire clung to me, I laughed away unscathed. You have made me start to think that art in inappropriate places, isn’t always vandalism.
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Snow Vision Carina Lofgren Photograph
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The Quarry is an annual publication by the students of St. Olaf College. All correspondence should be addressed to: Executive Editor, The Quarry St. Olaf College 1500 St. Olaf Avenue Northfield, MN 55057 All works of the authors in this issue are protected by a Creative Commons Lisence. Š 2016, The Authors and Artists. Some rights reserved. Authors and artists retain the copyright to their works. Without otherwise limiting the rights reserved under copyright, the works published herein are licensed under Creative Commons AttributionNonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licenses. For information on uses permitted under this license, visit: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
Printed by Engage, Northfield MN
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ST. OLAF COLLEGE 2016