Issue 2 (Off The Record)

Letter from the Editor

Dear readers,

Fullness was not my idea. I tell you this because I do not want anyone to think I know what it means. I do not know, and this fact matters. By definition, fullness is a noun that can be constituted in three distinct ways: the state of being filled to capacity, the state of being complete or whole, and richness or intensity of flavor, sound, or color. I think to a statement provided by one of my professors:

“Significant” is a laden word in science, and for our purposes, it means that the p-value was less than 0.05. The opposite of significant is “not significant”. There are no “insignificant” differences, because the lack of difference can be highly meaningful.

This feels relevant here. The opposite of empty is not empty, but not empty does not mean I am full. The absence of fullness when not empty is highly meaningful. When Quinn Casey and I were approached with the idea of fullness as the theme for Issue 2, this persistent “unknowing” is why, without firm reason, we said yes. From all the way in Copenhagen, Denmark, Quinn says: In my months exploring areas of the unknown far from tiny Williamstown, I found certain areas almost too full. Too full of words, laughter, art, food, etc. I hope Issue 2 embraces a similar feeling of too much fullness in which the incredible creativity and humanity of student work overwhelms the reader. I know I am overwhelmed by the fullness that this publication brings to the campus I miss dearly. Before this semester started, Giulianna Bruce and I led a workshop for Exploring the Arts. There, we asked them to write their definitions of fullness on the chalkboard for five minutes, and then asked them to respond to other people’s definitions. We found that not one definition was the same, and yet, not one was fundamentally unalike.

1. To wish for nothing or to wish for less a. Is too much always a bad thing? What about too little?

2. How I felt when I realized that I had been smiling to myself for no reason; I was driving home one day.

3. Can one desire fullness without first being hollow? a. The way my stomach and head felt on a July night after drinking wine with friends.

4. The most deceptive part about the glass-half-empty/glass-half-rule paradigm is that both look exactly the same.

I write this editor’s note knowing only that fullness holds space. And so we turn, once again, to the literature and the art, which reflects this ambiguity, and refracts it into something like transcendence. The works in Issue 2 are very different from one another, and largely have nothing to do with the semantics. But fullness is there, alive and loud, in each work. You will not be able to articulate it but you will feel it, viscerally.

Yours,

Maya Jacobs ‘25, Founder and Editorial Director

Management

Founder and Editorial Director

Maya Jacobs ‘25

Editorial Director

Quinn Casey ‘25

Layout Director

Giulianna Bruce ‘25

Engagement Director

Sophie Johnson ’25

Management-at-Large

Iman Shumburo ‘24

Readers

Andy Huang ’27

Austina Xu ’27

Ava Rahman ’27

Elizabeth Cheng ’27

Erika Jing ‘27

Francesca Castellanos ‘26

Hannah Coon ‘27

John Sanchez ‘27

Karolina Kotlarz ‘27

Lily Cowles ‘27

Maira Khurana ‘27

Margo Cramer ‘26

Miranda Kimm ‘26

Mishal Powers ‘26

Olivia Majors ‘27

Phaedra Salerno ‘27

Rosario Carranza ‘27

Sophia Rothman ‘25

Layout

Emma Finley-Gillis ‘27

Julia Karp ‘26

Lily Cowles ‘27

Home is an ocean with golden kelp beds and creamy black tar, home is an ocean of salty summer fog leaving home

I bid it goodbye to fly back East, inland to purple mountains and shires

I look down at slivering fields of water chestnut below and clouds from above— steaming speckled clouds from above on cresting mountains rest woodlands in every direction without end, they sip the last drinks of summer with xylem straws, they drizzle the first whispers of autumn in helixes of coral-colored rain

by alley-side windows, September rains patter beech leaves and aluminum AC units in slushy unison, I make yellow hearts in toilet bowls, wipe heavy tears from amber irises

in the bathtub, I hold my breath and onto what I’m losing

I wade through iridescent black tops with drowned worms and drops of green leather purslane, through gentle curbside creeks of synthetic cleaners and feathery cat fur back West, I walk streets flooded with inky ash of neighbors lost homes, and hike dusty seas of yellow tinder sprinkled with morning dew I see oceans are everywhere

Theo Detweiler

Home

Julia Karp

Sometimes there’s an overture of a hum that I can’t quite place my finger on, The words that slip so carelessly from my tongue and spill onto the cracked pavement with edges that recite infinity and I spin and spin, hoping to weave the sweet smell of home, glass bottles of fireplace, and light into my soul.

Love me still, even in the place where the fearless are feared, and existence is defined as hair clips stained with dye, quilts made from promises, and crystal cubes of sugar melting in cold brew.

Therein, I forget and learn, intrigued by the intrinsic nature of reality and time, discovering that if one is terrified by the shadows of the future, your bones remain stuck in back-office cubicles and for every corner, there is a slip of serendipity waiting endlessly for an ounce of flesh and a pound of bravery.

Ellia Chiang

Adulthood

new summeryorkin

walk

Five miles on a whim. I do it for the sheer joy of doing anything at all ninety degrees in the shade minutes dripping into hours everything lazy draped over the sidewalks like silk. I see little snapshots of people through their windows as I roam June July August dripping over everything their air conditioners on full blast me walking and walking and walking until I stumble home sun-dizzy and burnt clean the day running down my fingers like the juice of a peach saying to my mother wasn’t the sunset beautiful? Doesn’t everything look pretty all melted together when the skyscrapers ooze down into Fifth and you can stand ankle deep in the reflected light?

Margo Cramer

Giulianna Bruce

I

Giulianna Bruce

GOAT MEAT

Lily Cowles

I was ten years old when my mother served me my goat for dinner. The goat wasn’t really mine—he belonged to the farm—but I thought of him as mine. I called him Todor, or more familiarly Tosho, whispered into the fold of his ear, making it twitch in recognition. Tosho had been a gift to our family from the farm next over, where they had a litter of four, and only had use for three, so Tosho, the reject, became ours. I was nervous around the new animal at first. I was only four then, and I’d never seen a goat, only the cows and pigs we raised on our farm. The day after he brought him home, my father walked out to the pasture leading me by hand and pointed out the little creature. “It’s a baby goat,” he explained. “It’s called a kid.”

The little animal and I shared a name! I was also a kid, and often addressed as such by my parents in entreaties like, “Do your chores, kid,” and “Please, kid, quiet down.” I reached out my small hand and the other kid walked up to it and butted his head against it, gently, and I felt the soft curl of his fur. Time collapsed, and I attributed instant enchantment to what was more likely a proper getting-to-know-you process, involving several meetings and gradually increasing intimacy. I cannot remember when I decided on the name, because in my memory the goat has always been Todor, the way I have always been myself, before and after Tosho’s death, though perhaps I was a different self then: a boy split between two halves.

It doesn’t make much sense to raise a male goat on a farm. He cannot produce milk. He is more useful dead than alive.

When I was young, I didn’t understand that any more than Todor did. We kept him for years, and I mistook maintenance for preservation. I didn’t think much about the future because it is hard to reflect on the future when you don’t have much of a past.

We were keeping Todor alive only to kill him at the right time, when his body was large enough, but still young enough, to be strung with tender meat.

That night, my mother put a bowl of soup down in front of me, and I ate. It was delicious. I did not realize until the next morning, when Tosho was not in his pen.

I wish I could renounce it. Some part of me still believes it was one of us or the other (was it? I chose me). His life was destroyed so I could reclaim mine in its entirety. I still love the taste of goat. My mother put a bowl of soup down in front of me. Steam was rising in curls like the shaky cursive I was practicing in school. My teacher said I was a good writer but I had to be better at penmanship because it didn’t matter if I wrote good things if no one could ever read them. The soup smelled meaty and heavy the way the animals smell at night when they’re in the barn and going to sleep, and I was hungry. It was not often we could afford meat from the butcher, and my stomach fell open with hunger and eager anticipation. I speared a piece with my fork. The fats ran together to coat my tongue with something that tasted like the opposite of hunger. I had never tasted that before: it wasn’t just the way it tasted or filled me up, it was the way it made me feel. It was like when I’m lying in bed at night going to sleep. I knew that in the barn the animals were asleep too, with their warm smell, and I was in my room, away from all of them but not missing them, feeling complete. The meat was delicious, sweet and a little sour too, like the rind of an orange, only it was red instead of white, because it was meat.

It tasted better than anything, but it didn’t taste like beef or lamb or pork or chicken. And when I thought about it I didn’t remember my father heading into town for the butcher. Truthfully, I knew. It didn’t make much sense to keep a male goat. We, Todor and me, had just been waiting. When I went out to his pen the next morning I was not so surprised to see Todor gone. I had loved Todor, as I had loved myself: at halfstrength. I did not cry out of sadness for his death but for my own relief at it. And I cried, too, for the taste of his meat. Tosho, my good friend, had finally given me all he could.

ode

Reflection on the concept of my sister an

you’re very nice, you’re the perfect height, you can be anything you like.

-Arinzé Kene

And she is grateful to be alive again

To feel feathers between her fingers

To hear the prelude of a supernova

Blowing in tumultuous gusts from a windowsill radio

Throwing her hair into a cascading solar frenzy

Under the light of glowing sticker stars

That gild the ladder attached to her new bunk bed

Like pearl necklaces perched on a shipwrecks’s ancient planks

A sunken gleam to be somehow treasured

Inside rotting wooden carcasses

Defining the ocean floor just as what it is

An alternate and alien reality melting into our own

Specks of gold to be sifted out of sand

The liquified honey hands of Dali’s painted clock

And she deserves the world

Deserves soft brass to take her through the morning

Swans trapped in her trumpet yet happy all the same

Cream-covered strawberries for every meal

A cicada’s song at the end of every summer

Hammocks cool breeze to rock her to sleep

To dream as flowers do

Blooming beyond the backdrop of reality

Till we return unimagined again

To some semblance of normalcy

A faint remembrance of sanity

In the world i deserve

And my sister has many skills at which she is best

Like how she whistles very well

Walks backwards without hesitation

Does not inch from ball-fisted noogie hell

Falls face first without hurting her feelings

And sings and dances and cries when it rains

But most impressive is her power

To make every stranger on vacation fall in love with her

Old women in particular

Who gush their hearts out at the airport

Spill secrets after food is served

Profuse affection by hotel water fountains

Unable to wake up from their silly little dementia dream

Of teapots and tempos, fancy fantasia

To know they cannot know my sister

No one can

At least not like I do

Needed to

While cleaning up our family jig-saw puzzle together

Looking at its unfnished half-fated picture

Tapestries defined by semi-woven blank space

A glitched weave best meant to be left alone

The finest pieces lost to the couch cushions of my mind

Because after all

Who wants a half finished puzzle?

Besides my sister

I’m with my sister

My sister

My

What good’s the persistence of memory

If I’m to wield it carelessly

False teeth to swallow down the lies

I’d rather try

It’s only right

With my sister, my sister

Who smiles and waves to me from across the room

Like no one else can smile

Giulianna Bruce

Jack Allan Greenfield

Mesa Country Club

Mati Rogers

Sweat dries quickly in the Colorado shade. Some of the guys pour cold water in their hats, others wipe their faces with their towels. Cal opts to take a seat on the grass, under the shade of a tree that’s just far enough away from the fairway that he doesn’t have to worry about getting hit with a stray ball. No humidity means the shade is automatically bearable, no matter how egregiously hot it is on the course. They’re waiting for the group in front of them, a team low-seeded enough to take regionals as an “opportunity for growth”, but not hopeless enough to know that they should probably be going faster. Or at least let the other teams pass them. That, he thinks, would be the polite thing for them to do. But Coach says this is a sport of patience, a mental game, so Cal resists the urge to ask him to go ask Ponderosa if they can play through. Plus, he doesn’t remember if that’s against the tournament rules or not. He decides to avoid Coach altogether and find an unmanicured spot that won’t make a grass stain on his new shorts. They’re part of the uniform, but the red-and-white striped polo with the white shorts made Cal feel like a candy striper or something, so he had asked his mom if she could at least get him a nice pair. Surprisingly, she came back with a pair of Lululemon shorts that fit him perfectly and he felt would boost his confidence on tournament days, so long as his teammates don’t see or know what the logo is. Sasha wears Lululemon. But she’s not here, so. His only concern is that if he doesn’t “take good care of his nice things”, then his mom won’t

take him to the outlet store where she bought these and let him get those sweatpants he saw a targeted ad for on Instagram. Which was insane, by the way, because he doesn’t even look at stuff like that.

It actually doesn’t surprise him that Sasha’s not here. Last time, Andy was a total dick to her when she had asked him if he was looking forward to prom with Jess. It still makes Cal mad. He said to her, “that’s none of your business”, as if she wasn’t Jess’s best friend who would be in their same prom group, riding the party bus that Cal happened to offer to pay for if Andy let him come in their group. Which he eventually did. Which reminds him, he needs to ask his mom to make sure she gets one without a stripper pole. That would make things awkward since Sasha is Coach’s actual daughter. Which is also why Andy had pissed him off so much. Coach knows better than to lump Cal in with Andy, since there are only four of them on Varsity and so they’re not that difficult to distinguish in terms of personality. But it still makes him mad, just the principle of the thing.

Coach is busy talking to Ted about God knows what, probably Easter or Notre Dame football. Having Ted around has been super nice, since Coach has a buddy and kind of lets the players do whatever in between rounds. Ted used to be Coach way back in the day, and has recently taken up showing up just for fun. Andy had said something about his wife dying, but Cal’s too afraid to ask. Knowing Ted, it would be a really, really long conversation. That, actually,

is probably what they’re talking about. Coach is a good guy like that. He looks around for Cal, and waves him over.

The rest of the round goes smoothly, it’s just hot. Cal sort of wishes he took that caddy job his dad found for him at Meadow Hills last summer so he’d have kept in shape for the season. Carrying those bags in the heat, 36 holes per day. He would’ve been a machine. Now, he can’t keep his eyes in focus. The smell of sweat and soft push of the manicured lawns under his feet help keep him grounded in nostalgia or whatever, but only to a certain extent. By the end of the round the heat has died down a little, though he’s still exhausted, and Coach claps him on the back for making it through. The only thing that carried him through was hearing Coach on the phone with who he assumed to be Sasha, telling her who’s playing today (Cal, Sam, and no Andy), and asking if she wanted to stop by the clubhouse when they finished up. She must have said yes, because her car is right there in the parking lot, and Cal starts sweating again.

He jogs around back to check his phone, and he spots the cart girl who was on the course chatting with the cart cleaning guys by the garage. It always seems weird to Cal that they send out the cart girls during high school tournaments, because most of their tip money comes from creepy old dudes, not children who are too shy to talk to them. Coach is always the one who goes and gets the snacks, and Cal knows that’s because he thinks those guys are gross and one time Sasha asked a cart girl if they were hiring and now he can’t get over that, so he has to be super nice and polite to them. He usually grabs the team a few Gatorades and bags of sunflower seeds, that is if Cal’s mom didn’t make any snack bags before the tournament. She will almost always hire someone to make and drop off themed bags of pretzels and Ghiradelli chocolate squares, but she has yet to come to a single tournament. She didn’t do snacks today since she’s on a trip, which means there’s also not even a chance she could be in the clubhouse, waiting for him. Dad might. Cal listens to see if he can hear a loud, raucous voice coming from the clubhouse bar. He can.

The cart cleaners are smoking. Cal doesn’t bring his Juul with him to tournaments for obvious reasons, and he’s starting to wish he did. He decides he’s just desperate and headachy enough to try to go talk to them, but only once the girl leaves. She does, and Cal walks over to them, trying to act like he hasn’t

been standing there considering it for that long.

“Hey, can I bum one of those?”

“You want one of these?” The guy leaning against the garage door holds his smoking hand up a little. He’s holding an actual cigar, not a cigarette. Cal hadn’t noticed. “You sure?”

“Oh sorry, I uh...” Cal fishes for his wallet.

“No dude, we don’t want your money, just, how old are you?” The leaning guy, the one with the buzzcut and dark eyebrows, looks at his two friends who are sitting in a cart. All three of them are wearing forest-green polos and nametags. Miles. He’s looking at Hector and Davey.

“Seventeen.”

They all shrug, convinced enough, and Davey hands him one and a lighter.

“Thanks.”

“No problem.” Davey puts the box back in the basket on the back of the cart. “Is that where you found these?”

Hector starts excitedly waving his cigar around. “Yeah, someone left the box in here. It’s still half full, at least.”

“Do people leave a lot of stuff in their carts?”

“Sometimes,” Davey says, relaxing into the plasticky seat cushion. “Like what?”

Cal lights his cigar and looks for a place where he can also lean on something. This wasn’t something he knew anything about, though it makes sense. He sees people drinking and smoking on the course all the time, and his dad golfs a lot.

“Last week we found, like, twenty beer cans and half of them were unopened. People leave golf balls and stuff all the time, but we found a gold-plated ball marker and a pair of Ray- Bans like two weeks ago—”

Miles cuts Hector off, “People get drunk on the course and leave shit. They almost never come back for anything, so we just lie if they do, say we hadn’t seen anything.”

“So you get to keep the stuff you find?”

“Depends who’s working.”

Cal nods sagely, hopefully seeming like he gets it. “You guys like working here?” They all sort of eye each other. Miles answers, “Yeah, could be worse.” Davey turns in his seat. “You play in the tournament today?” Cal nods. He gestures towards Cal’s shirt, “For Jesuit?”

“Yeah, it’s my third time here.” He means

this to say he’s made the varsity team every year since Sophomore year, but he’s not confident that that came across. “I played for Mourey. We probably played against each other here, would’ve been your first regionals.”

“Oh, shit. You still play?”

Davey nods slowly. “That’s why I got this job, they let us use the facilities, practice for free.”

“That must be nice.” Cal prays to Catholic God that they didn’t see the Valley membership tag on his bag, the one that he has to show to get free smoothies.

He feels like he should tell them that he’s not a prick, like a lot of the guys they probably see walking around here on tournament days. “I only really play because my dad wants me to. It’s the only thing he’ll ever talk to me about, how he played for the same team when he went to my school but got injured before state, and how I have to get out there and make him proud. I’m not like, just out here for fun.”

Cal starts to feel like he maybe overshared a little, and the cigar tastes awful, so he pretends to get a text saying he has to get inside, taps the ash off his cigar, and says thanks. Around front, he tries his best to put it out on the sidewalk without making a noticeable mark, sticks it in his bag, and walks inside.

His heart’s still pounding by the time he gets to the bar/restaurant area, but he doesn’t have time to greet his dad and Sasha, sitting next to Coach, before his dad sees him and gets up.

“Hey hey! There he is! The man of the hour.” Something good is happening, since his dad is up and commanding attention in a good way.

“Congrats pal! We got the scores back.” Coach holds out a small trophy. It takes Cal a half-second to process what has been said and done to him just now.

“I placed?” The thought had yet to occur to him that everyone else might have done poorly, too, because of the heat. Cal takes the trophy, a golden golfer guy mid-swing, with a relieving rush of excitement.

“You came in third! Out of, what, sixty?” Checking with Coach, who nods, his dad pats him on the back. Cal lets himself smile, but tries very hard not to blush. He can’t tell if Sasha should be watching this.

He asks her, “Did Sam leave?”

“He just left, yeah. His parents had a dinner reservation, or something,” Coach answers for her.

His dad taps him on the shoulder with his Coors light can. “Hey, we should go celebrate. You

want to go get dinner somewhere?”

What Cal really wants is to stay here and order wings, but his dad actually seems pretty stoked. He should take advantage of this moment and go, even though it is just a dumb trophy.

“...art, considered in its highest vocation, is and remains for us a thing of the past. Thereby it has lost for us genuine truth and life, and has rather been transferred into our ideas instead of maintaining its earlier necessity in reality and occupying its higher place.”1

We Arrived

Too Late

Karim “Ky” Elasmi

Today, when a professor introduces their class, it is usually in order to promote a sense of urgency with respect to the material, to center and isolate the body of work thus considered as worthy of sustained consideration. In many cases a presupposition is made that the topic of the class is inherently of interest, and this is not unreasonable. It may seem ridiculous to us that a student should enroll in a class only to question why the class exists to begin with, to call it obsolete and undermine its beginning premise, no matter how much the premise strains credulity. You may imagine how students in Heidelberg and Berlin felt when the foremost philosopher of the time both anticipated and echoed just this ridiculous student, when he introduced his lecture on “the philosophy of fine art,” which he begrudgingly also called “aesthetics,” with such a statement, that “art… is and remains for us a thing of the past.” To begin with, it was certainly not the common view: at the time these lectures were given, the likes of Goethe and Schiller had already helped usher in one of the most artistically generative eras in literary history, while Hölderlin–a friend in adolescence to the philosopher–was to follow them, albeit posthumously, and Heine–profoundly influenced by the philosopher–followed thereafter. Not to mention every other kind of art besides literature and poetry, and not to mention every other country. In any case, this philosopher was Hegel, and this sentiment, it seems to me, is much more relevant now than it was in the 1820s.

We may begin by noting that this sentiment is behind much of the late-19th-century and 20thcentury literature that we occasionally uphold as an example of the opposite, as an example of radical innovation and of art’s enduring, ever-increasing possibility: in the work of Rimbaud,2 we find a poet

1 G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on Fine Art, Vol. 1, trans. T.M. Knox. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), p. 11.

2 Arthur Rimbaud, Complete Works, Selected Letters, trans. Wallace Fowlie. (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2005), pp. 371372.

who abjured all poetry after the Greeks and before Baudelaire, but who nevertheless condemned Baudelaire as “living in too artistic a world,” condemned his “form” as “trivial,” and reiterated that imperative which lies at the heart of all art which seeks to overcome Hegel’s thesis: “les inventions d’inconnu réclament des formes nouvelles” (inventions of the unknown demand new forms). Baudelaire himself, Walter Benjamin assures us, held steadfast to Hegel’s view, at least when restricted to lyric poetry:

“[Baudelaire] went so far as to proclaim as his goal ‘the creation of a cliché [poncif].’

He saw in this the condition for any future lyric poetry, and had a low opinion of those poets who were not equal to the task. … To Baudelaire, the lyric poet with his halo is antiquated.”3

Moving away from France (though not truly), we see in the work of Pound and Eliot a similar need for innovation, the imperative to make it new–but a need which is also bound up with a kind of return to the past, a return to Dante, to myth, to the tradition.

A proper relation to the tradition–the past, the historical–by way of integration offered a possible reconciliation with the Hegelian view. Finally, moving towards the latter half of the 20th-century, we see in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory the idea that we can’t even take art for granted anymore, and that degeneration is built into the logic of modern art. Hegel, whose Aesthetics stops at Romantic art, would not have been surprised to

find that we have approached, and remain steadfast, at the point where what is modern and modernist is profoundly belated, where art–the tradition–seems to us to be a thing of the past.

Which is all to say that it is worth clarifying the context of Hegel’s assertion further, since we can so clearly hear its reverberations now. Hegel makes this statement in his defense of the “scientific” study of “fine art,” which he preemptively defends from the intuitive claim that such poet who abjured all poetry after the Greeks and before Baudelaire, but who nevertheless condemned Baudelaire as “living in too artistic a world,” condemned his “form” as “trivial,” and reiterated that imperative which lies at the heart of all art which seeks to overcome Hegel’s thesis: “les inventions d’inconnu réclament des formes nouvelles”4 (inventions of the unknown demand new forms). Baudelaire himself, Walter Benjamin assures us, held steadfast to Hegel’s view, at least when restricted to lyric poetry: [Baudelaire] went so far as to proclaim as his goal ‘the creation of a cliché [poncif].’ He saw in this the condition for any future lyric poetry, and had a low opinion of those poets who were not equal to the task. … To Baudelaire, the lyric poet with his halo is antiquated.5

Moving away from France (though not truly), we see in the work of Pound and Eliot a similar need for innovation, the imperative to make it new–but a need which is also bound up with a kind of return to the past, a return to Dante, to myth, to the

tradition. A proper relation to the tradition–the past, the historical–by way of integration offered a possible reconciliation with the Hegelian view. Finally, moving towards the latter half of the 20thcentury, we see in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory the idea that we can’t even take art for granted anymore, and that degeneration is built into the logic of modern art. Hegel, whose Aesthetics stops at Romantic art, would not have been surprised to find that we have approached, and remain steadfast, at the point where what is modern and modernist is profoundly belated, where art–the tradition–seems to us to be a thing of the past.

Which is all to say that it is worth clarifying the context of Hegel’s assertion further, since we can so clearly hear its reverberations now. Hegel makes this statement in his defense of the “scientific” study of “fine art,” which he preemptively defends from the intuitive claim that such methodology is persuasive and worth retracing: …the source of works of art is the free activity of fancy which in its imaginations is itself more free than nature is. Art has at its command not only the whole wealth of natural formations in their manifold and variegated appearance; but in addition the creative imagination has power to launch out beyond them inexhaustibly in productions of its own. In face of this immeasurable fullness of fancy and its free products, it looks as if thought must lose courage to bring them completely

3 Qtd. in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Vol. 4, trans. Harry Zohn. (Cambridge: Belknap, 2006), p. 342. 2

4 Qtd. in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Vol. 4, trans. Harry Zohn. (Cambridge: Belknap, 2006), p. 342. 2

5 Lectures on Fine Art, Vol. 1, p. 5.

before itself, to criticize them, and arrange them under its universal formulae.6 Students of aesthetics are familiar with Hegel’s major points here. He is more or less summarizing the introduction to Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment, a work sometimes credited as inaugurating the autonomous discipline of aesthetics. One of Kant’s major claims, echoed here by Hegel, is the impossibility of postulating universal laws by which art can be exhaustively determined, given the panoply of empirical representations which may occasion aesthetic pleasure, as well as the fact that our pleasure is precisely occasioned by the lack of a rule (a Concept) to command our imagination. The scientific treatment of art, which would seek to find such rules, would “[remove] this means of enrichment, [destroy] it, and [carry] the Concept back to its simplicity without reality and to its shadowy abstractness.”7 Indeed, Hegel will proceed to offer a decisively unscientific exposition of art in his Aesthetics, characterized much more by his musings on Egyptian and Indian art and much less by a comprehensive, scientific system, but his justification of the study of aesthetics–which he specifically restricts to the study of fine art–is pertinent: Thus regarded, art is indeed not independent, not free, but ancillary. But what we want to consider is art which is free alike in its end and its means. Now, in this its freedom alone is fine art truly art, and it only fulfills its supreme task

6 Lectures on Fine Art, Vol. 1, p. 5.

7 Ibid., p. 6.

8 Ibid., p. 7.

9 Ibid., p. 10.

when it has placed itself in the same sphere as religion and philosophy, and when it is simply one way of bringing to our minds and expressing the Divine, the deepest interests of mankind, and the most comprehensive truths of the spirit.8

That such fine art was possible is (aesthetic understood in the specifically technical sense, as relating to the science of sensation and feeling), truths which cannot be penetrated through sense alone. He offers two examples: “... there is a deeper comprehension of truth which is no longer so akin and friendly to sense as to be capable of appropriate adoption and expression in this medium. The Christian view of truth is of this kind, and, above all, the spirit of our world today, or, more particularly, of our religion and the development of our reason, appears as beyond the stage at which art is the supreme mode of our knowledge of the Absolute.”7 On the one hand, with the development of reason, our reliance on art as the thing which organizes human experience has been obviated, replaced by “universal forms, laws, duties, rights, maxims.” Art, on the other hand, has been relegated to an altogether different sphere, the sphere whose demand is a “quality of life in which the universal is not present in the form of law and maxim, but which gives the impression of being one with the senses and the feelings.”8 The task of the artist is subordinated insofar as his truth is never the highest

truth, the truth of the Absolute, which cannot be truly penetrated through the aesthetic, but merely be given as an impression; any artist that attempts to escape this fate is deluded, Hegel continues, for “...our whole spiritual culture is of such a kind that [the artist] himself stands within the world of reflection and its relations, and could not by any act of will and decision abstract himself from it; nor could he by special education or trivially clear to Hegel, as it appears, for instance, in the gods of Greece. The problem arises when we consider such truths that are not amenable to art’s aesthetic quality (aesthetic understood in the specifically technical sense, as relating to the science of sensation and feeling), truths which cannot be penetrated through sense alone. He offers two examples: “... there is a deeper comprehension of truth which is no longer so akin and friendly to sense as to be capable of appropriate adoption and expression in this medium. The Christian view of truth is of this kind, and, above all, the spirit of our world today, or, more particularly, of our religion and the development of our reason, appears as beyond the stage at which art is the supreme mode of our knowledge of the Absolute.”9 On the one hand, with the development of reason, our reliance on art as the thing which organizes human experience has been obviated, replaced by “universal forms, laws, duties, rights, maxims.” Art, on the other hand, has been relegated to an altogether different sphere, the

sphere whose demand is a “quality of life in which the universal is not present in the form of law and maxim, but which gives the impression of being one with the senses and the feelings.”10 The task of the artist is subordinated insofar as his truth is never the highest truth, the truth of the Absolute, which cannot be truly penetrated through the aesthetic, but merely be given as an impression; any artist that attempts to escape this fate is deluded, Hegel continues, for “...our whole spiritual culture is of such a kind that [the artist] himself stands within the world of reflection and its relations, and could not by any act of will and decision abstract himself from it;

10 Ibid.

11 Ibid.

nor could he by special education or removal from the relations of life contrive and organize a special solitude to replace what he has lost.”11

By his modern nature, the artist is a reflective being who, in his reflection on the selfsame nature, cannot but see that the conditions which would allow his art to penetrate into the highest sphere of the true, the spheres of religion and philosophy, are no longer possible. Standing within the world of reflection and its relations–in the fullness of fancy afforded by the imagination in its play with the empirical world and its representations–the artist cannot but sense a substantive emptiness in his art, the emptiness once filled by the presence of the Gods, who did not merely appear deceptively, but were genuinely actual in the work, were genuinely present as such. The superfluity of his work cannot be lost on him: he is embarrassed to show himself in the daytime of presence, the day which he used to populate with demonstrations of the true and the living, and which now stands bereaved, full of representations and relations which arouse only disinterested, formal pleasure, or, at best, representations which give a mere impression of the Absolute while remaining comfortably inferior to other modes of thought and representation. This account undoubtedly explains

Ainsley Ogletree

much of 19th and 20th-century sentiments on the questions of modernity, modernism, and literature more broadly, but it is still lacking. There remains, to this day, a distinctive possibility for the artist, one that is unique to his modern superfluity. Something remains which is not quite the material of the daytime of presence nor is it the old Divine. It certainly does not seem like the Absolute, and perhaps it is much closer to what Mallarmé called “la maladie d’idéalité.”12 This malady is the condition of the night, the night which follows day and which is the poet’s reprieve, though not without some difficulty. This night–tonight–is Hölderlin’s reprieve from the fullness of fancy. He formulated the matter in his last elegy, Bread and Wine, which starts thus:

Round about the city rests. The illuminated streets grow/ Quiet, and coaches rush along, adorned with torches./ Men go home to rest, filled with the day’s pleasures;/ Busy minds weigh up profit and loss contentedly/ At home. The busy marketplace comes to rest…13 The initial image is one of the dynamic fluctuations of history in the day giving way to the stillness of night. But we ought not to presume too quickly this night is the night of serenity and repose, and Hölderlin is careful in these beginning lines to still restrict himself only to those things which still bear the bright mark of day–the illuminated streets, the torch-lit coaches, and crucially, the men filled with the day’s pleasure. In every instance the poet relies on the

light of day in his representative capacity. The further encroachment of night begins to change that: and Hölderlin is careful in these beginning lines to still restrict himself only to those things which still bear the bright mark of day–the illuminated streets, the torch-lit coaches, and crucially, the men filled with the day’s pleasure. In every instance the poet relies on the light of day in his representative capacity. The further encroachment of night begins to change that: But the music of strings sounds in distant gardens:/ Perhaps lovers play there, or a lonely man thinks/ About distant friends, and about his own youth./ Rushing fountains flow by fragrant flower beds,/ Bells ring softly in the twilight air, and a watchman/ Calls out the hour, mindful of the time. We can see the way in which the night begins to deprive the poet of his bright images. His attention aptly turns to the auditory, to music far away from him, music he must be straining to hear, straining to attempt to capture. He speculates about–not without a hint of desperation–instead of merely observing as he did before, the source of these sounds. Even in the image of the fountains and the flower beds, the closest we can find to a strictly visual image, we note the insistence on other senses, the auditory in the first instance and the olfactory in the second, which subverts the visual: the poet is not quite ready to let go of day, but the watchman’s mindfulness of the time seems to begin to convince him that night has properly arrived, as he continues:

Now a breeze rises and touches the crest of the grove/ — Look how the moon, like the shadow of our earth,/ Also rises stealthily! Phantastical night comes,/ Full of stars, unconcerned probably about us —/ Astonishing night shines, a stranger among humans,/ Sadly over the mountain tops, in splendor. There are two remarkable events in these lines, the synthesis of which will explicate the problem of this poem. The first is the proper introduction of the night. Before, the poet’s surroundings were merely at rest, and eventually out of sight completely, leaving him to rely on his other senses. Now, night comes with its own shimmering light, its own astonishing brightness, but this brightness, we can tell, is of a different character to day’s brightness. The brightness of day clarifies our surroundings with respect to one another; it inspires the bustling social environment of the marketplace. Put another way, the brightness of day allows for the separation which is requisite of a social space, the separation between me and you which guarantees our ability to communicate to one another. But is not this poem itself an attempt to communicate? Surely, for how else can we explain the poet’s remarks up until now, his speculation on the source of the sounds, his desperate (impotent) portrayal of the flower beds? He is attempting to communicate something, it seems, because he feels the oncoming loss of that ability to communicate. That loss is precisely what is signaled by the night, and it leads

12 Stéphane Mallarmé, Œuvres complètes. (Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1945), p. 440. 5 13 For the rest of this paper I cite the translation of this poem by James Mitchell. I urge you to read other translations of the poem as well, like Michael Hamburger’s in the Selected Poems and Fragments, and Susan Ranson’s , and of course to read the original.

into the second remarkable event of this part: the first instance of the poet consciously referring to himself, but his self-reference is to a collective “us,” the collective which is defined by night’s indiscriminate supersession of human sociability–the night which is “unconcerned probably about us,” whose light estranges us from one another precisely by nebulously integrating us into one whole.brightness, but this brightness, we can tell, is of a different character to day’s brightness. The brightness of day clarifies our surroundings with respect to one another; it inspires the bustling social environment of the marketplace. Put another way, the brightness of day allows for the separation which is requisite of a social space, the separation between me and you which guarantees our ability to communicate to one another. But is not this poem itself an attempt to communicate? Surely, for how else can we explain the poet’s remarks up until now, his speculation on the source of the sounds, his desperate (impotent) portrayal of the flower beds? He is attempting to communicate something, it seems, because he feels the oncoming loss of that ability to communicate. That loss is precisely what is signaled by the night, and it leads into the second remarkable event of this part: the first instance of the poet consciously referring to himself, but his self-reference is to a collective “us,” the collective which is defined by night’s indiscriminate supersession of human sociability–the night which is “unconcerned probably about us,” whose light estranges us from one another precisely by nebulously integrating us into one whole.

What is remarkable about these two events is the challenge

they pose to the poem in light of the problem of presence we’ve thus considered. The poet is ousted from the daytime of presence, where his words can no longer represent the true–this much is clear to us, but what was not clear was whether or not he had a place in the night, the night which opposes day. This first stanza considers just this problem–what can the poet do in the night, if he can do nothing in the day?–and it seems to answer with resounding defeat: nothing that can separate him from anyone else. Not even the capacity for reflection which the poet (ostensibly) has during the day inheres in this night. What could this poem possibly do to rescue itself from the gleaming abyss of night, which threatens to overtake the poet and annul his existence as poet, and could that answer the question of what yet remains of art’s possibility in modernity? The remainder of the poem is a quasi-logical exercise to answer just this question. In this newfound estrangement from all others, this inseparability, the impossibility of sociability, the only thing left for the poet to describe is night itself, and this is what he undertakes to communicate next, not without predictable difficulties. First he elaborates on night’s ineffability, and claims that this ineffability is what grants night its prowess:

The kindness of exalted Night is wonderful, and no one/ Knows where she comes from, or what will emerge from her. This is why, he reasons, we must “prefer reasonable day to night,” and yet the poet can easily imagine the possibility that one might willfully brave the night’s unknowability: “occasionally a clear eye loves the shadows as

well,” and this is perfectly apt, for the clear eye that loves the shadows is precisely the poet’s eye, the eye which no longer represents truth but only shadows. Of course what he finds in the night is not merely these shadows–in fact, it is unclear if the shadows implied to be found in the night are really the same at all as the shadows of day–but the overpowering light which casts them as well. All the same, there must be a reason why the clear eye yearns to “gaze directly into the Night,” and the poet begins to speculate once again with similar reservations:

Surely it’s right to dedicate wreaths and songs to her,/ Since she is holy to those who are lost or dead, although/ She herself exists totally free in spirit, forever./ But she must grant us oblivion and holy drunkenness,/ That in the hesitating interval, in the darkness,/ There’ll be something for us to hold on to./ She must grant us flowing words, sleepless/ As lovers are, and a fuller cup, and bolder life, and/ Holy remembrance as well, to stay wakeful at night.

Here is a remarkable deduction on the poet’s part, the first step in addressing the problem posed in the first stanza: surely the night is holy only to those who have already lost the clear light of day, those who love the shadows even though they do not know, cannot seem to know, the shadows of night. If this is the case, she must grant us–those who are lost or dead–oblivion. The very thing which the poem seemed to be avoiding–the abyss of night–is now recast as the very thing which guarantees its existence. That is, we

can rephrase the poet’s argument as such: night’s holiness cannot be observed by the reasonable people who prefer the day–the representatives not only of history and presence but also the ceaseless striving for the Absolute–but may only be observed by those who are already gone from presence–the dead–or else the misguided who are no longer able to cognize day’s superiority to night, who love the shadows. From this proposition the poet has already derived a separation between him–the lost and dead–and another–the men of day. But if this separation exists, it can only be derived and sustained from the night itself, which is why oblivion is precisely what the night grants them. The argument is convincing: the poem has continued, has it not? It cannot continue without communication, so somewhere, we must have missed separation. Moreover, even more fundamentally, it cannot continue without words, and only night is there, so night must be what provides the “flowing words, sleepless / As lovers are,” a simile which strikes one as a proof of poetry’s capacity to continue in the night. In essence, this stanza asserts the illusory nature of our initial problem in this final part: “look, we thought that there could be no poetry in the night, but here, we have found its source, and even given you a simile, in case you are not yet convinced!”

The force of this argument persists over the next stanzas. It is the poet’s point of departure to further deductions of sociability, and even imperatives which characterize and justify his newly formed poetics:

… So come, let us look at what is apparent, And seek what is ours, as distant as it may be! In these lines we find not only a vindication of the lost’s love of the shadows (what is apparent), but also a retrospective vindication of the poet’s desperate portrayals of the rushing fountain and the fragrant flower bed, “as distant as [they] may be.” Moreover, the communicative power of the poem reaches its peak with this imperative. This moment of communication causes the poet’s next argumentative step:

One thing is certain: a standard always exists, at noon/ Or at midnight, common to all of us. But also/ To each of us something personal is granted;/ Everyone goes and comes where he can.

Since communication is certainly possible, as was just shown, there must be something in common between us to communicate. It would only make sense if this something in common is, or else is intimately

related to, the exact moment at which day turns into night, which is to say, the very occasion of this poem, the poem which we can read as a deduction of the possibility of sociability out of its impossibility. But given that this deduction of sociability turned on a separation between the lost and the guided, there must also be an element of individuation, the element which allows one to choose between shadow and light, to go and come where he can, and which does not force one on the path of fullness and presence, but grants him also the path of oblivion and absence. At this point the poet’s deduction has almost reached its full completion: he has demonstrated the possibility of sociability out of its ostensible impossibility in the night through the very oblivion of night, and moreover, he has connected this sociability to the occasion of the poem, the poem’s origin which now stands recast and clarified, as that universal point at which day turns to night and vice versa. The next section of the poem operates on a transposition of this temporal step to a spatial one:

Then let’s be off to the Isthmus! There, where The open sea roars at Parnassus, and the snow Shines around the Delphian cliffs,

There in the land of Olympus, on Cithaeron’s peak,/ Under the pines, amid vineyards, from which/ Thebes and Ismenos roar in the land of Cadmus./ The approaching god comes from there, and points back.

The Isthmus clearly suggests that universal standard (midnight or noon), the point(s) separating day and night. In approaching this point, the poet is simply approaching the point which occasioned this poem, which is now more fully and appropriately thematized in the guise of holy presence. The subsequent sections continue this narrative of transposing the temporal step to the spatial one by elaborating further on the world of the Gods which guarantees the possibility of poetry. At this point, one may interject that Hölderlin has either succeeded in disproving Hegel’s argument that the poet no longer represents the true and the good, or else he is clearly claiming to have disproven Hegel’s argument, since he has clearly shown that the poet is, quite miraculously, still able to represent the true and the good through the oblivion of the night.

But Hölderlin’s poets–the lost and the dead–are not characterized by their relation to the true and the good, but by a “playful madness” which “[seizes] [them] suddenly in the holy night.” The poetry and the Gods of which his poet speaks cannot be said to be

[them] suddenly in the holy night.” The poetry and the Gods of which his poet speaks cannot be said to be the same as Hegel’s Absolute–instead, they are the poetry and Gods which are founded by the poem, in the process of the poem, as the poem’s origin. They do not exist before the poem, but they are, at the same time, the guarantee of the poem’s existence, the source from which it must have sprung.

The next stanzas reinforce this reading, as the poem’s retrospective character is revealed more and more–its looking back at its own origin–is made clearer in the poet’s narrative of just this origin: Holy Greece! Home of all the gods — so it’s true,

What once we heard when we were young?

Thus the gods enter; thus the season of the gods falls

From the shadows down to men, shaking the depths. …

At first the gods come unperceived. Children try to get

Near them. But their glory dazzles and blinds and Awakens fear. A demi-god scarcely knows the people

By name, who now approach him with gifts. But their Courage is great. Their joy fills his heart, and he hardly

Knows what to do with the offerings. He busies himself

And becomes wasteful, and unholy things almost become holy,

Which he touches with a blessing hand, foolishly and kindly.

The gods tolerate it as long as they can, and then in truth

They appear themselves. And people become accustomed

To this fortune, to the daytime, and to the sight of the manifest Ones, the faces of those formerly called the “One and All,”

The initial question– “so it’s true / What once we heard when we were young?”–refers to the time of the poem’s origin, the occasion which compelled the poet to begin writing the poem. Now, after his deduction, he can see that his endeavor had always been justified, had always been not only possible but also necessitated by the Gods. His narrative of the origin begins, appropriately, in the shadows, the shadows which the poet must have loved in order to find the Gods, and proceeds down to the men, his men, the lost and the dead. The movement of the poem’s initial stanza is recapitulated in the start of the fifth one: “At first the Gods come unperceived. Children try to get / Near them. But their glory dazzles and blinds and / Awakens fear.” This suggests, as is consistent with our reading of the poem, a correspondence between the Gods and the light of the night, the light which dazzles and blinds instead of clarifies, as in the light of day. Now, the poet’s narrative would be incomplete if it could not explain the necessity of its deduction; that is, how come this origin wasn’t immediately apparent? How come the poet couldn’t tell that sociability was always there in the holy night? This is where he introduces the demi-god, the figure which eventually bridges the gap between day and night (turning unholy things almost holy), and which eventually leads to the Gods’ actual appearance. And when the poet says that the “people become accustomed / To this fortune, to the daytime, and to the sight of the manifest / Ones, the faces of those formerly called the ‘One and All’” we can see that he has recapitulated his initial discourse in the first stanza, where he is part of the “people,” the “people” who are eventually flattened with the Gods into the “One and All,” formerly called that because the poet’s deduction restituted their true names: the Gods of Holy Greece.

That in the reconciliation between day and night through a demi-god, a figure both human and divine, there is an attendant forgetfulness of the origin, a forgetfulness which is restituted in the poem’s deduction of separation and sociability, completes the narrative of the poem. Not only has every aspect of the poem been explicated, but the poem has reached, in reflection, the highest point it could attain: its own self-justification. And this self-justification is precisely what is necessary for modern poetry to answer Hegel’s argument. The domain of (modern) poetry, then, it appears, is the domain of the night, the night where we regain the Gods we lost in forgetful morning, but which are always there, waiting for us to find them again. These Gods–holy to the lost and dead–surely deserve wreaths and songs dedicated to them, and as the poet says,

Everything must really and truly proclaim their praise. Nothing displeasing to the high ones may come to light. Idle endeavors aren’t proper for the Aether. Therefore, to stand worthily in the presence of the gods, Nations rise in splendid order and beautiful

Temples and cities are built, strong and noble, which rise Above the banks of the waters…

These nations, temples, and cities are the ones erected by the new republic of poetry, the newly autonomous domain preserved for the misguided poets who love the shadows… only there is an issue. —but where are they?

Where are the famous, flourishing cities, crowning the festival?

Thebes and Athens are fading. Don’t the weapons clash At Olympus, or golden chariots at the games? Are there

No longer wreaths to decorate the ships of Corinth? Why are the ancient holy theaters silent?

What happened to the joyful ceremonial dancing?

In the very moment when the poem is consecrated as necessary and autonomous, as having succeeded in its deduction of sociability and thereby justifying itself as essentially communicative, the origin has already disappeared; the newly consecrated domain of poetry has already vanished, having lost its origin–the night. It appears even the deduction of the poet has lost all of its force and import. In this movement from consecrated autonomy and justification, the look-back at the origin which is the night, is found the return to the poem’s initial problem, but with a difference: it is not merely that the poem has to rescue itself from the gleaming abyss of night, which threatens to annul the poet’s existence, but that the poem did rescue itself through that abyss, in oblivion and holy drunkenness, and has emerged from the other side of that abyss having completely lost itself. What happened? In this question is contained the poem’s final deduction, worth reproducing in full: But friend, we come too late. It’s true that the gods live, But up over our heads, up in a different world. They function endlessly up there, and seem to care little If we live or die, so much do they avoid us. A weak vessel cannot hold them forever; humans can Endure the fullness of the gods only at times. Therefore Life itself becomes a dream about them. But perplexity And sleep assist us: distress and night-time strengthen, Until enough heroes have grown in the bronze cradle, With hearts as strong as the gods’, as it used to be. Thundering they arise. Meanwhile I often think it is Better to stay asleep, than to exist without companions, Just waiting it out, not knowing what to do or say In the meantime. What use are poets in times of need? But you’ll say they’re like holy priests of the wine god, Moving from land to land in the holy night.

The poet returns to the essential step in his first deduction: the existence of a universal standard–midnight or noon–which dictates the turn from day to night and vice versa. In the first line, the poet recalls his initial transposition between time and space: the temporal step between day and night was substituted for by the Isthmus between the divine and worldly. This return to that transposition radically recasts the poem’s understanding of its origin: we come too late; the universal standard by which we are able to communicate is gone, and it was never the origin of the poem in the first place. Yes, there is a separation between night and day, and moreover, there is a separation between night and its misguided inhabitants (the Gods do live), but to the extent that it is impossible to determine the boundaries of this separation (impossible to tell which point occasioned

BUT THE POEM HAS REACHED, IN REFLECTION, THE HIGHEST POINT IT COULD ATTAIN: ITS OWN SELF-JUSTIFICATION

the poem, which point functions as origin), it is the consummate separation. The more that one inspects it, the more one finds oneself hemmed in by its threshold, the threshold marked by the indifference of the Gods, or equivalently, the exalted night light which blinds. At times we may attempt to gaze directly into this night, to poetically represent it, and we may even convince ourselves that we have reached, if not the point where we can represent the true and the good, then, at least, merely the point where we are seized by a playful madness which compels us to honor the Gods, but “[a] weak vessel cannot hold them forever.” Eventually, sleep compels us to forget this movement by which the origin displaces itself and is lost forever, by compelling us to forget the effect of night’s oblivion on poetry: the effect which gives it its origin in the same breath that it takes it away. “Meanwhile I often think it is / Better to stay asleep, than to exist without companions, / Just waiting it out, not knowing what to do or say / In the meantime.” Concomitant with this loss of the origin is the loss of sociability which the poet subsequently laments, which he wishes he could sleep away until the next time it becomes possible to write his poem again, not knowing what to do or say. But here we have, imperceptibly, already found our way back.

“What use are poets in times of need? / But you’ll say they’re like holy priests of the wine god, / Moving from land to land in the holy night.” In returning to the essential step of his first deduction, the step which annulled the possibility of sociability and communication in the poem, the poet in fact manages to deduce the social. This is clear in his initial declaration: friend, we come too late, and even clearer when he utters I for the first time in the whole poem, and absolutely clearest when he openly communicates about the impossibility of communication with a You, a you which responds, a you which restores the poem’s origin contingently. It is almost as if the claim being advanced on the part of the poet is that in order to think sociability, we must first truly and earnestly think the impossibility of poetry, the impossibility which is kept at bay by this You, the You which, for lack of a better description,

gives the poet something to do. And is this answer not already consistent with the poem’s origin? The poem’s origin–the desperate striving to poetically represent anything in the encroaching night, the fading reliance on daylight–is exactly aligned with the notion of the poet as wandering from land to land, without a home to return to, the home which would be the origin, but which is always displaced in the movement of poetry from consecrated autonomy to unbounded loss. But this impossibility of communication is ultimately undermined by the You which responds, and who is this you? It is none other than you, of course, the you which has read this poem and has recognized its straining, its deductive struggle for existence, the absence it holds up in the face of presence, the emptiness it comes up with in the face of fullness. In this communicative step the poem reaches outwards into the night of estrangement, no longer relying on necessity but on the hope of an encounter, and it finds a You, a you which is constituted by the fact of reading the poem, but which at the same time constitutes the poem, constitutes the poem’s origin, the origin which is always being displaced, wandering from land to land in the holy night. You came and promised a return to the poem, an eventual return to fullness of the Gods endurable only at times. And when the poet speaks of the fact that

The choir of gods left some gifts behind, as a sign/ Of their presence and eventual return, which we/ May appreciate in our human fashion, as we used to.

We can imagine that he is speaking precisely of You, the You which constitutes his “I,” the “I” which is able to lament the absence of the Gods and the empty glory of night without companionship. Thus the work of poetry is the work of remembrance and lamentation of this absence, but it is simultaneously the work of intimacy between a You and an I which, in their reciprocal relation to one another, show the merely contingent possibility of the social, of the reconciliation between day and night, between night and the strangers it produces.

And so when the poet speaks in the final stanza of Christ’s reconciliation of day and night, we rightly believe him, though it is not necessary. And when he speaks of the wreath of ivy, “the trace of the fugitive gods” which sustains “those who must live in their absence,” the inadequate origin which displaces itself in retrospection, and which is then returned to itself by the intimacy of having become a conversation between a You and an I, we rightly believe him, though it is not necessary. And when he speaks of us as “heartless shadows” until we are recognized as belonging, we rightly believe him, though it is not necessary. And when he speaks of the “smile” which “shines out from / The imprisoned soul,” we rightly see him, in the meantime, sleeping, waiting, for the chance encounter, the sign from the Gods–from night–that You have come, though you may never come.

Bread is the fruit of the earth, yet it’s blessed also by light.

The pleasure of wine comes from the thundering god.

We remember the gods thereby, those who were once With us, and who’ll return when the time is right.

Thus poets sing of the wine god in earnest, and their Ringing praises of the old one aren’t devised in vain.

The remarkable thing is that this contingent possibility is realized in the poem: it is the very possibility of reading it.

Shaving Molly’s Head

Esther Eboh

She came into the salon at a quarter to five. I noticed her hair first.

My mother would say it was the hairdresser in me. Before those sad eyes, before the outrageous outfit, before that ten-car pile up of a face, before anything else, it was the hair. Don’t get me wrong, I most definitely took the time to notice the other things too. It was impossible not to wonder after what tornado had blown through her life and spit her out in my salon. But the hair. Her hair. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.

Split ends dyed fading shades of plum violet and grassy green and flaming fuschia and butter yellow. It was shorter on the sides but all grown out like crazy. Windblown by the frigid December air outside and reaching out behind her like hands outstretched save for a few defiant chunks. All connected to jet black, half fried straight roots. I wouldn’t have known that it was once curly if it weren’t for the tight coils of new growth leading into dead and done for ends.

I was sitting at the counter, trying to ignore the chatter of the regulars and go over the books, when she walked in the door. The little gold bell above the door rang and, reflexively, I looked up. Right into her eyes. Like the eyes of a character plucked from some Tim Burton joint, they were big and buggy. Deep set, swimming in sunken sockets and bordered by dark, burdensome droops below.

The pupils were soupy, if that makes any sense; a murky shroud over burnt sienna irises. Molly’s eyes were kind. But so tired and, again, unbelievably sad.

The girl moved so quickly and quietly in these chunky Demonia platforms—huge and black, done up with platinum clasps and looking like anvils tied to her ankles. She was up close to the counter in the blink of an eye. And she watched me, expectantly, subdued, a bit awkward.

Mouth dry and throat sticky, I spoke first. “N-name?”

She seemed surprised. A few seconds passed before she answered. “Molly.”

“Molly who?’ I replied, though she appeared as if she wasn’t all that sure of the answer.

She exhaled, choosing her answer carefully. “Just Molly.”

Okay. Cool. “Well, Just Molly. What can I do you for?” She said she wanted a shave. The whole head. All of it. Gone. But insisted that we wait until everyone else was gone. Also okay. Definitely not weird or terrifying. Not one to turn away a customer and taken aback by this strange girl, I agreed. And so we waited. A few more late afternoon stragglers come in. I unfurl the last curler from Clarissa’s usual wash and set, retwist Ebony’s greying waist length locs, carefully clip Nayely’s curls for her biweekly deva cut. In and out the women come and go. I primp and preen and prep, speeding from station

to station, chair to chair with a speed that only muscle memory could provide. Molly sits on a long plush bench waiting, bouncing her leg anxiously. She yanks at an especially short piece of hair at the front of her forehead. It’s the only bit that’s fully curly. The whole time, I can’t stop thinking, I’m about to get murdered. She’s probably an escaped convict from Arkham Asylum. A menace from Azkaban or Alcatraz, somewhere where they don’t have hairdressers or clippers, period. A crazed slime creature formed from a toxic vat of expired hair dye. A supervillain wizard serial killer who saw my photo in the paper ten years ago and vowed that she would find me.

My hands are shaking a good deal more than a hairdresser’s should as I spread light, foamy mousse over Little Dalia’s box braids. The cold of it calms me down by a hair. It’s over an hour after closing now but I always take my time with Dalia because I know she doesn’t like to rush. Only 13 and here all alone, her anxiety can get bad if she feels pressured. I squeeze her shoulders as she gets up, not really wanting her to leave. Say what you will, but I don’t want to be left alone with what came from Goo Lagoon. Dalia tips me generously; something that’ll go towards my growing earring collection, I’m sure. I let out a breath I hadn’t known I was holding in. Then, I turn to Molly. She’s already staring at me when I go to look. “Ready?”

No, she is not. When she

stands, she is a mess of tics and fidgeting. She pulls desperately at the torn fishnets she wears beneath a neon green pleated skirt. The toe of her boots tap the linoleum tiling anxiously again and again. As anxious as I’ve made myself, I know that the client comes first. And this client looks just as uncomfortable as I feel. “I know that we’re… shaving your head tonight but how about a wash first?”

As if she’d taken in the same breath that I had let out, she exhales, everything in her body letting go with it. “Yes. That would be… good.” She follows me through to the rear of the salon where the backwash units are. I place a cushion on the seat and she slides in. Hesitantly, she lets her neck lay in the low curve of the sink. I pick up my nicest smelling shampoo and my most heavy duty conditioner. Since it’s all about to go, I avoid any protein treatments or luxury items.

Turning on the nozzle, I ease the warm water onto her scalp, a little on the nape of her neck and slowly upwards, trying to avoid any wincing. I know it works because I can see her relax. When the water hits her hair, the roots curl up tight as a spring while the dead tips stay bone straight. “You’re good at your job, you know,” she tells me. I notice people are most talkative under the water. They like not hearing their own voice as much. She continues. “You comfort people. All skillful and sure and silent.”

I would thank her, as I’m told is customary with compliments, but I feel compelled to say more. I don’t know what I expect to say but it’s nothing like what I end up with. Dumping shampoo onto her dark roots and

massaging with my fingertips, I blurt “I have to be.” God, what does that even mean?

What she divulges next makes my stressing subside in a way that is just as unexpected. “I guess you do.” She whispers this like a close to the chest secret. I notice how soft and low her voice is. Even when she said her name earlier it was like she was telling me something no one else knew. Molly.

Just Molly. Now pinky promise not to tell. I feel my dark brown ears get hot. I’d love to thank her now.

Molly smiles like she already knows, revealing a wide gap between her front teeth that is positively bewitching. I run the conditioner through her ends. We talk a little more. No real questions. I tell her about myself, or, rather, the business, though I couldn’t tell you the difference between the two.

“My mother worked here under my grandmother way, way back when it was called Teala’s Place. She took over when my grandmother passed, and had me organizing hot oil treatment bottles and sweeping floors since I could walk.” Molly nods, closing her eyes against the water’s warm spray. Conditioner time. “It was renamed Tanisha’s once she passed. Mom gave it to me in the end. At 19, I was running the place all by myself.” Now, we were award winning, always busy, and woefully underappreciated. I’m quiet for a little. Contemplative. Grieving a bit, too. In a moment of what I wish I didn’t call weakness, I breathe out a strangled sigh. “It’s hard. God, is it hard.” Molly listens closely, eyes still shut. Doesn’t tell me much of anything. Just listening. It’s nice. More water to rinse and then a clean cotton towel to dry before I’m pulling her up out of the

seat by her bony wrists. She stands before me now, truly a vision of… something, and I peer quizzically into her sweetly intense eyes. She has just as many questions for me hidden deep within them as I have for her. Instead of steering her towards the styling chairs, I bring her, along with my hair shears and clippers, to the bench where she waited for me. I perch on the edge, seating her on the floor between my knees. It’s time. The main event has finally arrived, after hours of waiting.

“Ready now?“ I ask her, out of habit. She replies with “Why not in the chairs?”

“I figured you’d be more comfortable here. Is this okay?” Almost too fast, she utters a yes and I’m off to the races. I’m honestly excited to get started. Though this salon can feel like a prison sometimes, this was what I loved most. It was like meditation, like microdosing tabs of peace with Buddha and the universe divine on a lazy Sunday. I tell Molly all of this, like thinking out loud. She’s humming in agreement as I run jojoba oil through her hair. My fingers are slightly slick when I slip them into the shears, my paintbrush poised at my canvas. It is time to begin.

The dead, dyed ends are what goes first and it is as if I’ve opened the floodgates. She’s telling me practically everything. Every single strand that falls to the ground is another waterfall of words spilling from desperately lachrymose lips, like she had been waiting for this very moment to let it all loose. Snip, snip, snip. Like my mom used to say when I was having a tough time, Molly had had a day. A life, really. She and her family had grown up in a little farm

town in Oklahoma. The only black family in her neighborhood, she was on thin ice since diapers. Every day was like walking on eggshells. But she did alright. Until she was caught. “The reverend’s daughter and I in our senior year. She was… extraordinary. Being with her was like hot sauce on your tongue and fire in your belly.” Colorful.

Some boys found them, swapping secrets and stories and something more in the backseat of her Impala. Told the entire school, the entire town. Everyone. “They busted her car up ‘till it was this heap of metal and glass. Burned everything my family owned and threw rocks through our windows, screaming that I had hell to pay. Before we knew it, everyone we had ever known had turned on us. By morning next she—” Molly stops. Her chest is heaving. Nearly all of the dead hair is on the floor, leaving the tight, curly, uneven new growth still in her head. I don’t know if she can keep going.

Gingerly, I put my hands on her shoulder. Sitting between my legs, criss-cross-applesauce, she leans to the side to lay her head on my inner thigh and squeezes her eyes shut. Molly keeps going.

“They say she drowned herself in the pond. Dropped her cardigan and Mary Janes on the mushy grass and walked right straight in until the water covered her head. Every soul for miles blamed me.” My heart hurts for her familiarly, like the dull ache of an old bruise. “I… I kinda felt like it was my fault, too. Like I had dirtied her. Poisoned her. Pushed her to it. How fucked up is that?” Her mother told her she was made up wrong. “‘Disgusting,’ she called me, when I begged for her help.” Her little siblings hated her guts.

Her father was practically the one leading the angry mob. No more friends, no more family. She’d been traveling the country for years now. Run out of town! she declares halfheartedly, almost amused. She balls her hands into fists in her lap. “Isn’t that just so typical?” And running ever since. Never in one place for too long or with one person too much. Early today, her van broke down 5 miles outside of town and, sitting in a broken down heap of metal under the blazing sun in the heavy silence, she realized something. She was so tired of running. Was anyone even chasing her anymore?

“And so I came here. Believe it or not, I read about this place in the paper, like, ten years ago.” Huh. Go figure. “Could hardly remember the name but I remembered enough to get me here. Not before a long while of ‘soul searching.’” She says that her hair had gone through a lot of phases in that process. I can absolutely tell. It had been touched and teased, pulled and pressed, colored and creased by many a lady in its day. Gone were her impossible to tame curls. Sayonara, 4c hair. Say hello to heat damage. “I’ve never cut it all off before, though. Came close. Shaved the sides once. Straight down the middle by accident another time. Little bald spots on a dare. Never all off. My hair was her favorite thing about me. She used to say that–” Molly is practically sobbing now, but so quiet and inconsequentially that I know this isn’t the first time she’s cried like this. Shoulders shaking and face stained with tears. Silent.

“Hey, girly, look at me.” I hold her chin lightly, turning her gaze to meet mine. “It’s okay. You don’t have to if you don’t want to.”

I haven’t been clipping for some time now. I got close enough to the scalp with the scissors but I didn’t want the buzzing of the clippers to disturb her.

She takes in air fast, pressing her palms into her eyes. “No, no, I want to. I feel like I need to.” Okay. Without further prompting, she keeps sprinting towards the finish line. And I let her.

“She used to say that, even in the hugest, loudest, angriest crowd in the world, my hair would give me away. She liked to… go away for long periods of time. Staying for a month, disappearing for twice that. Her parents were ready to change the locks on her. When she came back, she’d pretend I was unrecognizable. But with hair like mine… Molly could always find her way back to me. As much as I’ve changed it, the hair is all I have left of her.” I drop to the ground to throw my arms around her. Pull her close. As if we’ve done this a million and one times before, she turns and rises in one fluid motion to match me. We embrace each other and I feel her cheek against mine. We stay that way for a good, long moment. Two broken girls sitting on the cold floor in the dead of night.

I break the silence, my heart so full of love for this girl that it scares me. “Do you still want that shave?” She considers this, runs her hand over the short, short curls that remain. It’s all an inky, Stygian black spotted with some faded color and halfway bleached bits. “It looks good. You could leave it just like this if you wanted.”

She closes her eyes. Listens to the air around us. “I read a story once. The Ship of Theseus,” she whispers in that low way of hers.

“Have you heard of it?”

“Yes. Yes, I think I’ve heard it before.” She opens her eyes now, comes up close to my face. “Tell it to me. Please.” Her eyelashes are low, heavy on her lids like a velvet curtain. They highlight the eyebags resting on her cheeks, emphasized under the fluorescent light. “Of course.”

“One day, the warrior Theseus docked his famous ship in Athens harbor, coming off of an incredible victory in battle.” Molly, this unknown girl in my grandmother’s salon stands up unsteadily, reaching her hand out to me below. I take it, let her pull me to my feet. “The people of Athens rejoiced, hailing him as a great hero of legend. For years after

that day, the grand boat was kept in the harbor as a museum piece, so that they might always remember the hero’s feats.” She leads me to the styling chair. Takes a seat on the matte black patent leather.

“As decades passed, the wooden boards that made it up began to rot. No matter. The people would replace them again and again to preserve this piece of their history.” The girl looks into the mirror, past herself and into my eyes as I come to sit on a tall, periwinkle stool behind her. “For generations they went on like that. Reinstating pieces, fine tuning what had fallen, until every original piece of the ship had eventually been replaced.”

She’s looking at me so intently that I’m afraid I’ll break into pieces right then and there. I can hardly find the words to finish.

“The greatest philosophers in history still ask one another the same question. Is it still the same ship that first docked in Athens generations ago?” The room is silent. The little digital clock that I keep at my station signals a solemn 11PM. She looks down at her hands. Clenches them into fists. Relaxes. Eyes back to me. “Shave every last bit.”

I do. And I find myself discovering even more about her yet.

I start with those sides, ready to rid her of the grown out boundaries of her scalp. From

On the floor of my shop, she cracked herself open and, from the runny, flaxen colored yolk, she would find new life. Maybe I would, too.

the nape of her neck to her temples, I push the layers of hair off like nothing. Every new cluster of curls that tumbles delicately to the floor is pulling back a curtain. I can’t help but gasp when I see it.

An intricate, interlocking twist of tattoos is revealed on the head before me. Like an explosion of music given physical form, they coat every open piece of bare scalp faster than I can find it. Briefly, the way that each part of the piece extends openly and effortlessly into the next pretty form, reminds me of one of my clients who came in for a blowout on her wedding day, her arms covered in reddishbrown henna. But this. This is

different. So urgent and so desperate and so much that it is far, far different. Every line is loud and long, done up in pitch black ink with a few fading colorful accents. It looks unfinished in more ways than one, like she had one artist start it and 27 different ones try to finish it off with a flourish. I keep pressing and clipping and shaving and it is my turn to be out of breath. It looks like it felt incredible. It looks like it hurt. It looks absolutely insane.

Molly, or whatever her real name is, asked me to shave every last bit. And when I do, she is a woman reborn. Done now, I dust her ink covered scalp off and press a warm towel to her neck. Her bald head shines under the light, the tattoos making it look more like a delicate headpiece than dark skin exposed to the elements. On the floor of my shop, she cracked herself open and, from the runny, flaxen colored yolk, she would find new life. Maybe I would, too.

On a whim, with so little thought that it makes me a little dizzy, I touch the clippers to the right side of my head and run it straight to the back. I do the same on the left. Cut it as close as I can with my practiced fingers. My own kinky coils join hers on the floor. My head feels lighter already.

The girl looks shocked when she stands and I see a small

far too tired to comprehend now.

“How do you feel, Tallulah?” The helvetica name from her captivating skull. She’s nonplussed, which pleases me briefly, but recovers quickly.

“Like a whole new ship, Maia.” she offers. “Nowhere near as meticulously preserved, though.” This girl. She cannot stop surprising me. Most everyone called me Tanisha. It was the name on the sign and I never liked to fight it. Let my mother’s legacy live on and all that. But in the corner of the mirror at my station, drawn in black marker, was the name my mother gave me. Maia.

My eyes are locked on hers when I let her know “Me too.” She takes hold of my hands; my fingers are cold as ice in her warmth. “Thank you.” she asseverates softly. “Thank you, thank you, Jesus H. Christ, thank you.” Her voice is full of gratitude and joy and everything that ever was. Oh my God, I should be thanking her! “It was my pleasure.” I look around the room. Hair, puddles of soapy water, and more are littered all throughout the salon.“I don’t suppose you’re interested in helping me clean up, are you?”, unhinged and hyper aware of the air around us. She

Then she laughs, loud, full, and long with eyes that practically gleam. This picture of beauty, of express joy is so earnest it makes me feel a touch lightheaded. I have to laugh with her, like a compulsion deep within me. She’s catching her breath now, choking out words where she can. Off-balance with just how happy she is right now, taken aback by

you perform Blackness

you perform Blackness in the way you allow sunlight in, your skin merely solid air that heats and heats, too. your heart is a stone. you cup it in your hands. your body is basking. the warmed bed of the back of your neck could sleep the whole world. the simple thing. a dark nape bright with sweat and heat. how the sun has kissed it a thousand times. for thousands of years. and never gets tired of the color, of the taste, of the feeling. this is Blackness.

you perform Blackness in the way you invisiblize yourself in rooms full of people that would be burdened by your full presence. you perform the removal of your Blackness from the equation of how this conversation is going to go, or how that interaction is going to feel. you perform the harboring of responsibility of heaviness, knowing how much knowing you hold, knowing how unknown your knowing is to those who assure they know or try to know. this is Blackness.

and you perform Blackness in the way you watch your mother absentmindedly twisting her hair the same way her mother wore it, watch her peeling the stone smooth skin of a mango an ocean away from the tree she grew up beside, watch her smile break into a laugh like a run, her nose stretching across her face without apology, her dark eyes always beautiful to you. watch her dance and dance and dance, the music coloring her in more than you thought possible, filling her up and soaking her skin and pouring out by way of rhythm, by way of joy, by way of spirit. this is Blackness.

Ethan Richmond

Gissel Gomez

The Roanoke Reformatory for Half-Dead Girls

Audrey Kelly

Somewhere deep in the underbelly of the American continent, in a state that reeked of sun-scorched chapels, sluicing marshes, and decaying Americana, that was known to have spread its earthen legs and birthed the nation—but had seemingly left the crying thing to rot in its early infancy—there was a place called The Roanoke Reformatory for Half-Dead Girls. At least, that is what the girls called it.

To the rest of the world, this age-old establishment was known as The Roanoke Reformatory for Troubled Young Ladies. Despite what its official designation might suggest, this institution would not open its ornate gates for just any troubled teenage girl. The Roanoke Reformatory solely housed—for it did not ever claim to be a home— girls who’d survived impossibly close brushes with death (be it by their own hand, someone else’s, or that of fate): girls whose hearts had stopped and then, miraculously and inexplicably, resumed their fickle beating.

Nestled on the edge of an overgrown salt marsh a few miles south of the Blue Ridge Mountains, the stone walls of the Reformatory sheltered girls who’d been stabbed, burned, starved, and poisoned. One could wander its halls and come upon girls whose hearts had been stopped by lovesickness, rat poison, hurricanes, betrayal, cyanide, and kitchen knives.

To the rest of the Roanoke population, the Reformatory was

Elizabeth Cheng

a place to be respected from a sound distance. They simply went about their days, casting their eyes to the ground whenever they happened upon a girl whose eyes betrayed her association with that institution. It was not that they feared the place—no, no, it was really so unfortunate, the poor things, they were so troubled, they required pity and commiseration (but certainly no hope of finding husbands for them, I’m afraid!)—but rather that they were most content when they could forget its existence. And so the people of Roanoke lived in tranquility, and the Reformatory remained as it had for centuries, its goings-on shrouded by marshland and the misshapen bodies of trees.

As Ophelia stood before the Reformatory gates, she felt little beyond anger. Anger at her mother and father, who had sent her to this far-flung place under the guise of wanting to “cure her,” presumably of her distaste for life (among other things). But she had heard the hushed whispers, seen the parishioners’ weighted glances at her bandaged wrists. She knew it was not a cure her parents sought. And if it was her disappearance they wished for, who was she to deny them?

Once a member of the Reformatory staff had directed her to the room where she would be staying (a plain affair with yellowing white walls, a low stone ceiling, and a narrow bed that seemed to perpetually remain in shadow despite facing the room’s sole window), another staff member, a round-faced woman with a faraway look in her yellow eyes, led Ophelia down a long, dimly-lit corridor. As she attempted to keep pace, Ophelia’s nostrils tickled at the

strange miscellany of smells: wet soil and dust, a subtle chemical scent (bleach perhaps?), a bittersweet citrusy tang that she tentatively identified as the smell of secrets, and another, more unnerving scent, redolent of spoiled milk and wilted violets that she could only conclude was the smell of death.

As they finally arrived before a tall wooden door—painted blood-red, a design choice that struck her as being in poor taste— the woman stopped and turned to her, those uncanny yellow eyes fixing her with an expression she could not quite place. The woman opened her mouth as though to say something, but seemed to think better of it, and nodded at Ophelia once before turning away.

“Good luck,” she whispered, so quickly and quietly that Ophelia wondered whether she’d imagined it.

She did not want to be in this unfamiliar place, with its stone walls and smell of death. She ran her fingers over the twin scars on her wrists which were still purple and jagged, identical strips of angry ribbed skin.

Her movements felt like those of one moving through water. She walked into a large room where she was confronted with six girls of varying ages wearing varying expressions of disinterest, annoyance, boredom, and outright contempt. They were scattered across the space, muted splotches of color dappling the white-walled room, like a lackluster still life featuring a cast of exotic, sullen birds. While a few remained standing, shifting their weight from one leg to the other, some were lying on the ottoman at the center of the room—upholstered with

crimson velvet which tapered off into gold-painted legs, a rather extravagant item in an otherwise drab space—while a few others could be seen languidly leaning against the walls, hips touching, clinging to one another in a way that felt at once habitual, thoughtless, and deeply sensual. They all possessed the same eerie and expectant stillness, like creatures caught in limbo, awaiting the velvet knuckles of perdition.

They introduced themselves. There was Mary, a fidgety fey girl with silver-blonde hair and a thin lavender scarf around her neck—the yellow-eyed woman would later tell Ophelia she had never once seen her without it—which concealed a thick ring of yellowing bruises. These were the marks of the noose from which she had been found hanging three weeks prior (she was resuscitated by a hopeful young nurse after flatlining for nearly five minutes, a feat the latter described as nothing short of miraculous).

Then there was Annabel, a dark-haired girl with androgynous features arranged in an expression of feigned disinterest. Her former paramour had attempted to slaughter her with a meat cleaver over a month before after stumbling upon her writhing in orgasm, her back arched in a way that made her appear almost alien as her pale limbs intertwined with those of her close friend (the blade had sliced clean through her spleen and left lung and missed her heart by an inch; over a minute after she had been declared dead, she had taken an impossible shaky breath).

Annabel was flanked by Elizabeth, a willowy girl with pale skin and hazel eyes whose mother had slipped rat poison into her

morning coffee after she glimpsed Elizabeth’s father touching her one night in the copse of trees behind their home (Elizabeth’s heart had resumed beating several minutes after she was pronounced dead, and none of the medical professionals had had the slightest idea how). Elizabeth and Annabel were arm in arm, their bodies pressed into each other with the casual intimacy of those who have seen the other laid bare.

Adaliah was sprawled on the ottoman, her sharp features radiating contempt. She had moss-green eyes, dark brown skin, and a scar that ran along the front of her neck. She and her lover had slit their throats together, determined to escape what they felt was a cruel, unjust world (she was dead for ten minutes, her body nearly exsanguinated, before she was saved by a miraculous blood transfusion; her lover had not been so lucky).

They were all oddly arresting, like heat lightning and hurricanes. Ophelia found that once she looked at them, it was difficult to look away.

- So, you’re the new halfdead girl? said Annabel.

Ophelia observed that when she spoke, all the girls’ gazes seemed to shift towards her, as though her speech exerted some sort of magnetic pull.

- I guess.

- What’s your cause? Annabel spoke with a kind of wry humor, as though she could anticipate what any person was going to say and was already prepared to mock them for it.

- My cause?

- You know, your cause of death. The reason you ended up in here. This isn’t exactly finishing

school. Ophelia had to resist the urge to run her fingers over her scars again, a gesture that had become a kind of self-soothing habit.

- Does it matter? We’re all still here, aren’t we?

- Yes, unfortunately, said Mary, eliciting a laugh from some of the others.

- Of course it matters.

You still died, even if you didn’t stay dead. Annabel spoke sharply, ignoring Mary’s remark. Ophelia noticed that she was standing slightly in front of Elizabeth, a vulnerable, protective gesture. She felt strangely moved.

- Well, I’d rather not say. Anyway, aren’t we here to leave behind thoughts of death and rekindle our passion for living?

This was verbatim from the Reformatory’s mission statement— bleak even in its attempt at being aspirational—but she was fairly certain none of the girls picked up on this.

- Yes, and then we’ll all link arms and sing kumbaya, said Annabel dryly. Whatever. We’ll see you later, new girl.

And then they all swiftly drifted out of the room, leaving behind an odor of damp earth and Ophelia wondering whether they’d been there at all.

Ophelia had become disillusioned with religion a long time ago. Even as a child, solemn and watchful, she had seen through the grandiose stained-glass veneer of the preacher’s words. She was struck by the hypocrisy of it all, the cruelty of a supposedly ever-loving, all-forgiving deity who sought its followers’ devotion through the promise of eternal burning.

She’d tried her best to keep up the pretense of faith for her mother and father, falling to her knees in prayer each night, play-acting the role of dutiful, demure daughter. But over the years, the facade had begun to slip: as adolescence coiled and curled inside her, she shed the pink fleshy rind of girlhood, revealing something rough and red. She became hot-headed and sharptongued, the quiet watchfulness of her girl-self forgotten. Despite her contempt for biblical doctrine, she often caught herself thinking of crucifixion, the sensuous violence of a body sprawled out and bleeding, head thrown back, lips parted. She wondered how different torment and rapture could really be.

Her mother and father grew increasingly resigned, reticently reconciling themselves to the changeling they felt had subsumed their sweet, pious daughter. Ophelia continued to wear her rosary—a silver heirloom bedecked with fake rubies to represent the Virgin’s blood—and joined them at mass each Sunday, and that was enough to placate them. But every so often, she caught her mother’s eyes on her, full of sorrow and terrible longing, and Ophelia realized that she was mourning—mourning the girl she wished her daughter would be, a gauzy, sacred figment. There was a wishfulness in her mother’s eyes—as though she hoped that with enough faith, she could transubstantiate her daughter into someone else. * * *

The sun was the hazy reddish-orange color of stained glass as the girls sauntered across the marsh, Ophelia trailing a few

They had all emerged from an afternoon session of supervised study. They were reading some insipid parable about a young girl who’d nearly drowned in the creek by her family home. Roused by her tragic brush with death, she’d become a dutiful churchgoer and found her calling, imbued with a new appreciation for life. As they took turns reading chapters aloud per the instruction of their tutor, Ophelia had to suppress a scoff. The Reformatory’s curriculum was so utterly unsubtle.

Once the clock struck four and the tutor told them they were free to go, the girls began a solemn procession to the marsh, their bodies not unlike a murder of crows. Ophelia elected to follow them against her better judgment.

She was crouching amongst some reeds at the edge of the marsh, admiring a snow-white heron that had just landed, when she heard a sharp cry. She rose to see the girls surrounding Elizabeth, who was clutching her hand as though in pain. She caught a glint of crimson, the telltale gleam of blood blooming on pale skin.

The other girls had been foraging for wild mushrooms, on their hands and knees in the damp brown earth, when Elizabeth had cut her palm on some nettles. Ophelia contemplated helping Elizabeth staunch the bleeding, perhaps earning an appreciative glance. But before she could, Annabel tenderly stroked the girl’s bleeding palm and then leant forward and pressed her lips to the gash, as though kissing the wound. From where she stood, Ophelia almost believed that Annabel was kissing the wound, gently pressing her lips to the torn skin. But she

quickly realized that she was mistaken, and had to repress a shudder. Annabel was sucking the blood, lapping at it with fervor. The other girls looked on, seemingly unaffected. Mary ran her tongue over her lips.

When Annabel was finished, she lifted her head. Her soft mouth was wet with blood.

It had been the summer of her eighteenth year when Ophelia began to take notice of Evangeline, a neighboring girl who went to her family’s church.

Things had progressed slowly, at first. A lingering glance during mass, a blush, a chaste brushing of knees during the joint family dinners that became habitual once the respective families discerned their daughters’ fondness for each other. But soon that ceased to satisfy them. Ophelia ached with want, and it was everything she could do not to tug Evangeline into her bedroom and show her exactly what images had been playing out under her eyelids during dinner.

One evening, the two had slunk off to the woods behind the church to drink from a stolen decanter of communion wine.

Evangeline’s lips were stained a rich plum color, her cheeks flushed. Amber sunlight sifted through the tree canopy, dappling their bodies with gilded leafy patterns. They were laughing and passing the container back and forth, taking turns sipping. Ophelia had never had alcohol before—save the singular sips during communion— and her thoughts felt pleasantly soft.

She thought that Evangeline looked radiant, and told her so.

Soon, they were hip to hip, faces scarcely separated by the space of a breath, the wine forgotten. She could smell the wine on Evangeline’s breath, the vanilla of her perfume, the slightly sour scent of her sweat. And then they were kissing, imbibing the other’s winesoaked lips, tasting consecrated tongues.

Twilight fell on the wood as their kissing grew deeper, hungrier. She felt her heart beating between her legs. She removed her dress, then Evangeline’s, letting their clothing and undergarments fall into a heap in the damp moss. There was a clink, the sound of metal touching metal, as the girls’ rosaries tangled.

Her hands roved over Evangeline’s body, tracing the soft contours of her stomach, the sharp swell of her hip bones. When she clasped the girl’s breasts with her hands, running her thumbs over the hard nipples, each of them let out a low moan. Ophelia thought, not for the first time, of crucifixion. She let her hands and knees sink into the wet, dark soil and offered herself to Evangeline. It was then, with her mouth full of her, that Ophelia knew she was in love.

At mass—Ophelia had believed the Reformatory to be a secular institution, so why the girls were required to attend mass three times a week, she did not know— Ophelia willed herself to listen to the priest’s sermon and to not pay mind to the girls, who were seated in a pew several rows behind her. They were wild and unruly things, cackling while the priest attempted to lead them in holy song and openly mocking him as he feebly preached about the Virgin Mary, the Holy Spirit, and the necessity

of confession.

- There’s no way your precious Mary was a virgin. She should’ve just admitted she fucked Joseph. Then maybe we’d have been spared all this boredom, whispered Annabel, her beautiful features contorted in a snarl.

The priest gave her a look for whispering. Despite this attempt at sternness, Ophelia noticed that his hands shook.

When all he received from Annabel was a contemptuous smile and a sly forgive me, Father, the priest sighed, defeated, and resumed his sermon. As he droned on, Ophelia thought of Evangeline and the taste of wine on her lips. The wonder of her smile— sly yet brimming with repressed mirth, as though daring its recipient to ask her what she was smiling about. Her cruelty in Ophelia’s bedroom, the razorsharpness of her words.

Then she thought of Annabel’s lips dripping with blood. The way Adaliah and Mary looked at one another, eyes roving, perpetually pressed against each other, sitting so close their thighs touched. The shrillness of Annabel’s laugh, a terrifying and mesmerizing sound. She could no longer register the priest’s words at all. * * *

When she saw the fawn limping through the marsh, her first thought was that it would not survive. With its speckled russet body, its large guileless eyes, the furred whiteness of its ears. Something so small and fragile, already damaged by the world, did not belong in this place, where every soft-seeming thing had teeth if one looked closely.

She was fleetingly reminded of Evangeline, the way her brown eyes widened when Ophelia lowered her head between her thighs, the disarming fragility of her naked body, speckled with freckles like the fawn’s with spots.

She stood on the edge of the marsh for a long time that day, watching the creature stagger shakily across the wetlands.

The marsh and its creatures would swallow it whole and spit out its bones.

* * *

The day of Evangeline’s betrayal, Ophelia had planned to tell her a handful of words that would not change much, she knew—they spent every waking moment together, had exchanged the sort of secrets that they’d only ever whispered to themselves as they lay in their beds, in the dark. It was mutually

understood that they belonged to each other in a kind of ineffable, metaphysical way, that their connection was one that existed beyond language itself. Her love for Evangeline was the closest she’d ever felt to believing in the sacred. And yet, she wanted to be able to confidently say it, without a shadow of doubt—that she was Evangeline’s and Evangeline was hers. That she not only loved her, but was loved by her. It was an unnerving thing, to know that another person held her heart in her hands and could do with it what they wished, could do as Evangeline had done that one afternoon—peel away all the rind and then drag her fingernails along Ophelia’s insides, puncturing the sweet, sticky fruit.

It was a bleak and dreary afternoon, and she had just emerged from church, where she had reluctantly gone to receive confession, after much pleading from her mother. There had been something deliciously wicked about the act of withholding, of running her tongue over the outline of her sinful secrets and swallowing them despite the request that she speak them into forgiveness.

She had just let the white-washed doors close behind her when she heard something from the back of the church. She carefully picked her way through the tall, unruly grass towards the plot of land behind the chapel. It was there that she saw them, bodies entangled between two gravestones. A man Ophelia distantly recognized from mass and Evangeline. Evangeline’s long white skirt—one of Ophelia’s favorites, a garment Evangeline had worn on several occasions just for her—bunched around her waist, allowing the man to more easily move inside her while she moaned, her head thrown back with

Neither of them had heard Ophelia approach, and she resented Evangeline all the more for it, for being so careless in her betrayal.

She heard blood rushing in her ears. Before she could bite her tongue, she spoke.

- Evangeline.

She tried to speak in an even tone, but her voice shook. She willed her breathing to slow, but she continued to inhale in short, staccato bursts. She forced herself to turn and walk away. Once out of their sight, she began to run and did not stop until she reached home.

edge of the woods, sheltered by the shadow of a large oak tree. The others had seen it as well and were furtively creeping towards it.

The downpour slowed and the fawn continued to graze, its soft white tail moving back and forth. All the while, the girls gathered around it until their bodies formed a circle, as though to protect it. Annabel stepped forward and slipped something out of the satchel she was carrying. In one fluid motion, she watched as Annabel lifted the knife above her head and struck the deer in the neck.

Ophelia cried out. Annabel’s head whipped toward her and Ophelia saw her expression

spleen and began to tear into it with her teeth. Elizabeth held the pale pink coil of the intestines in her hands.

But it was Annabel who frightened Ophelia most of all: laughing as she sucked and licked and gnawed on the fawn’s heart, her chin dripping, her brown eyes wild. She imagined Annabel— brown eyes cool and hard as steel— bent over her own limp, eviscerated body, hungrily digging through her entrails, hands steady as she seized what she had been looking for: the throbbing, piteous mass of her heart. Annabel would glance conspiratorially at the other girls before sinking her teeth into it, her teeth working furiously through the

To passerby they might have resembled a pastoral idyll of girlhood. But if those same passerby had lingered, they would have wished they had not.

The girls’ laughter rang out as they frolicked across the marsh, oblivious to the heavy rain. To passersby they might have resembled a pastoral idyll of girlhood, girls who wore pink ribbons and gossamer dresses and were not at all acquainted with death or the depraved secrets hidden between other girls’ thighs. But if these same passersby had lingered, perhaps hoping to witness more chaste frolicking—or, for the more filthy-minded, some sort of erotic spectacle, a forbidden kiss— they would have wished they had not.

Ophelia was trying in vain to read the same book she’d been perusing for weeks when she saw the limping fawn—the same one she’d seen a few days prior—at the

shift. She realized that Annabel was smiling.

As bright red blood spurted from the fawn’s neck, the panicked agitation of its limbs grew less frantic, more slurred. Ophelia knew it was only a matter of time before the poor thing bled out, but her body felt pinned in place, paralyzed with something deeper than fear.

She watched as Annabel dragged the knife down the deer’s abdomen, slicing it open. As the entrails spilled out like glossy garlands, the girls descended upon them with preternatural speed. Mary gleefully dug her hands into the deer’s abdominal cavity, brimming with blood and sinew, broke a bone from its ribcage, and began to gnaw on it. Adaliah, hands wet to her wrists, seized the

accusation disguised as a question. Ophelia had willed her voice to remain even, to not divulge the pathetic, quivering thrum of her heart.

- It doesn’t matter because even if I didn’t, I still would’ve done what I did.

Evangeline finally turned her gaze toward Ophelia.

- You think my parents would let me marry you? she continued. Do you think yours would? We can’t keep pretending, Ophelia. This was never going to work. It was make-believe. Child’s play. She spoke those last words like something sour she’d needed to spit out because she couldn’t bear the taste.

- Make-believe? Child’s play? Ophelia scoffed. I was going to tell you I loved you. I do love you. I want to spend the rest of my days with you. She heard her voice rising despite herself, but she could not bring herself to care.

tough, wet flesh. She would gnaw and tear and chew until nothing remained. Nothing but the weight of Ophelia inside Annabel, one body subsumed by another. She felt her body convulse and threw up into the moss at her feet. She cast aside her book and ran to the Reformatory, faster than she had ever run before. * * *

- I thought you didn’t like men that way.

They were in Ophelia’s bedroom. She was standing above Evangeline, who sat on the edge of her bed and refused to meet her eyes.

- Maybe I do. But it doesn’t matter.

- What do you mean it doesn’t matter? It was an

a nurse noticed one of her eyes flutter.

Then, they told her that she was to be sent to the Reformatory, and that was that. For a moment, she contemplated telling them everything—about Evangeline, the crucifixion, a crux of pleasure and pain, like so many other things. She held her tongue.

Nearly two weeks had elapsed since Ophelia had watched the girls kill the fawn in the marsh, and she was lying in bed. In spite of herself, she was thinking of Annabel, brown eyes luminous as she licked Elizabeth’s blood from her palm.

She’d just begun to drift off when she heard the rustle of paper sliding across hardwood. She drowsily rose and crossed the room. A note had been slipped underneath her door. It read: Midnight. Thirteen days from today. Clearing in the woods. Ritual.

- Stop, Evangeline said, anger lacing her tone.

- Do you not love me? Ophelia’s voice cracked. She felt swollen with shame.

- It doesn’t matter. Stop. * * *

She could only remember the week that followed in fragments. A broken mirror. Glistening shards of glass. The ruby-red beads of a rosary—or perhaps it had been her blood. She was not sure. Yes, blood. So much blood.

And then darkness. * * *

When she awoke in the hospital, her mother and father were seated solemnly by the edge of her bed, hands clasped together as if in prayer.

They told her that she had died for seven minutes when

her eyes drifting towards the window, as though in wait.

The days bled into one another like menstrual blood soaking through cotton undergarments until the night of the ritual. As the moon rose over the inky ridges of the mountains, she let the doors of her dormitory close softly behind her and crept quietly through the halls, then outside along the path to the forest. She walked with the molten moonlight illuminating her calves and bare feet, white flesh speckled with red where the underbrush and thorns cut into it. When she came upon a break in the trees and the silence of the wood was broken by a rustling and whispering, so quiet it could almost be mistaken for wind, she knew she’d come to the right place. She crouched and watched.

Rather than a signature, it was sealed with a red flower made using a pattern of bloody fingerprints. Ophelia wondered if the girls knew just how unoriginal they were, how apparent their selfmythologizing was. The limping fawn surfaced in her mind, the sight of its eviscerated body, the glossy pink length of its intestines, the bulging, overripe mass of its heart. She did not know what sort of foul thing they planned to do in the woods, but she knew she wanted no part in it.

And yet, as she lay in bed afterward, pretending to peruse the existential philosophy book she’d taken from the Reformatory library—she was of the opinion that anyone capable of imagining Sisyphus happy was deluding themselves—she repeatedly caught

Six of the girls, all clothed in identical white nightgowns, were gathered in a circle beneath the pearlescent glow of the moon. In the moonlight and shadows they bore an uncanny resemblance to one another: wraith-like creatures with sunken, bone-white faces and nightgowns that brushed the forest floor and undulated in the wind, giving them the appearance of ghosts.

They shared a gaze, too: vacant, far-off, as though already somewhere else. At the center of the circle lay a blanket upon which a miscellany of items had been arranged: six pomegranates, six candles, and six serrated knives— all stolen from the Reformatory kitchen. They seemed spectral, hollowed-out creatures who had been substituted for their former selves. They were no longer halfdead girls: they seemed entirely void

of life, so much so that she was convinced that if she approached one of them and placed two fingers on the soft spot below the ear, she would find no pulse, no tell-tale beating of blood.

For a while they simply stood there. Then after what seemed like hours, Annabel began to recite an incantation. Whether it was some ancient wiccan tongue or a dialect of the girls’ own devising was difficult to discern. The girls began to walk towards one another, tightening the circle until they were kneeling before the pomegranates, the candles, and the knives, which gleamed faintly in the moonlight. Then, as though they were a singular organism, or separate organisms guided by a same entity, they took hold of the pomegranates and slit them open with the knives, bright red juices spurting and soaking into their moon-white nightgowns.

* * *

- What are you thinking about?

Ophelia felt strangely vulnerable, like the flesh beneath a wound—pink and raw and new—but Evangeline was distant, indecipherable. Evangeline had just made her come for the first time, and the two were lying side by side in her bed, unclothed. She’d simply

Now she looked at Ophelia bemusedly, her brows furrowed. It was the look one might give a child who asked something foolish.

- What am I thinking about? As in, at this very moment?

Annoyance had begun to creep into her voice. This response wounded her, but she did her best to conceal this, to appear unfazed. She was acutely aware of the bareness of Evangeline’s skin, its warmth and dampness. - Yeah, I guess. I mean…you just made me come, Evangeline.

Evangeline scoffed at this. - Haven’t you made yourself come before? How is this any different?

She felt her heart plummet. She wondered if it was possible to die immediately after an orgasm, if such a thing had ever occurred before. If pleasure was necessarily followed by punishment.

- It’s really not that big a deal, Ophelia. Stop looking at me like that.

As the crescent moon continued to rise in the black sky, they became beasts. They began to ravage the pomegranates, tearing into them with teeth and tongues, the wet seeds and innards coating their lips, their teeth, their hands, dripping down their chins. They then cut into one another’s palms with the knives, and girl feasted upon girl as one lifted the other’s hand to her mouth and sucked the gushing blood fervently, hungrily, from milky white palms.

Girl-blood and pomegranate were indistinguishable as the dark red wetness coated the girls’ faces and hands and arms and nightgowns. When this ceased to satisfy them, they tore into one another’s mangled palms with glowing white

canines, chewing and swallowing strips of wet pink flesh, gnawing on finger bones. They ate with primal lust and a strange, oxymoronic tenderness; they were hungry, so very hungry, as though they hadn’t eaten in weeks and would never eat again. They began to speak too, not words but feral utterances, savage sounds unbound by the restraints of language. They groaned and howled and moaned, sounds of rapture and torment, sounds that might slip from the lips of the tortured or those in the throes of orgasm.

As the minutes passed, they quieted. The moon fell steadily lower until just above the mountains, its silvered cheek resting against the earthen ridges for a moment before continuing its descent.

As the girls grew conscious of their mangled bodies, they began to howl. Their pained cries echoed throughout the empty forest, cutting through the velvet dark. But these cries were different from the ones that the girls had uttered during the ritual: they were devastatingly human.

Once the cries had softened, submerging her like well-water, Ophelia began to walk. She walked along the path with its thorns and underbrush, her feet instinctively finding the footprints she had left a few hours prior in the dark. She walked until she reached the Reformatory gates and the winding stone corridors. Then her room, shrouded in darkness and shadow-shaped secrets despite the lightening sky outside. As dawn ran its amber tongue over the Reformatory, Ophelia slipped her hand between her legs and moaned.

infraction

fingers pressing putty onto newspaper peeling back a pancake of ink and dust swinging legs and humming lips her fingers pulling something about a shooting suspects swirled twisted into a pink candy cane ringing out clots in bleeding words

the phylogeny of a sunday etymology of an obituary does something come from nothing or from something else? i wonder if the silicone knows what it holds can the rain understand that it’s sad? nails pressed into polymer syrup stories sticky guilt winding still blurring nouns and whereabouts 11am

somewhere between almost and never

Xan McKenna

Sophie Johnson

You must have children

Of your own flesh and blood

You must have a family

That’s what your mama wants

That’s what you told me

You want

You like women

Born women

Die women

Love as women

You are normal

You want someone normal

Your definition

Of normal

Others’ definition

Of normal

So, what am I to you?

Because I am not normal

Not normal to you

Not normal to others

I am not a woman

Not born a woman

Not a woman to you for you

No child will ever

Grow within me

Not the child you want

Not the child this world wants

So, why do you lay next to me

Why do you make love to me

Why do you talk so sweetly

Why do you make me laugh

Why do you act as though

I am what you look for

As though

I can be what you look for

When in truth

I am just a mistress

That’s what you told me

When I clung to your chest

Listened to your beating heart

Hoping I was there somewhere

mistress

I am a boy who’s not really a boy

Dressed pretty

Put some lipstick on

Act sexy

And I just might be

Womanly

Womanly enough

For you to be rough

For you to stay tough

I am not normal

But I am liminal enough

For you to say

You are still normal

You may lie next to me

Saying I’m pretty

But you’ll support

Those who condemn me

You will wish your child

Never be like me

You may be with me now

Talk with me now

Laugh with me now

But I know

You’ll grow cold

You’ll grow distant

Just when I start to fall for you

You’ll grow on to find someone

Who’s not a pretense

Who’s really what you want

You’ll either erase me

Or keep me still on a leash

Giving just enough

So I’m deluded I may be enough

I can’t say what’s more cruel

To be hurt deeply by your silence

Without a trace or word

Or to chase after a prize

Dangled over me

Like a dog jumping to get

A piece of meat

Dangled over its head

Until it lays to rest

Forever

I am a mistress

Good for sex

But not even for sex sex

Good for a good time

But not even for a good time

I try to tell myself

I am not a mistress

I deserve more than being a shadow

I am more than my body

I am not a tool for your pleasure

That I can escape you and find something

With more meaning

That I am not responsible for your

Delusions or obsessions

Or hypocrisy

With normalcy

But when I am alone

Thousands of miles and thousands of days from you

And I miss you

And I want you

And I know that I’ll never be with you

I can’t help but wonder

If I was cut out to be

Truly a mistress

Retrograde

Andy Huang

And then he breathed his last. A sterile stagnant breath drawn like swirling silk from wilting lungs. Gasping slightly—the shock of being alive, aware, again. No more oblivion. His life folds over itself and in a pleated moment he turns in his sleep and wakes in the same position. Knotted thoughts grasp at the edges, reaching over each other, feeling for a dream that never happened, and then recede, resigned, as life bleeds back in (sees itself out) through yawning eyes, impulse crossing retina to cortex (flushed back out through a pair of articulated nervous straws). Inverse implosion of visual stimuli as the hippocampus deplicates to expose a mass of memories that creep in and climb up the walls of reconstituted consciousness. They are pressed together too tightly to breathe, inundating one another (actually it is exodus; they are scampering out, fleeing as the ceiling comes down after them, the flatline chasing close behind). He is bursting at the gyri but he cannot dam the deluge: these are far more memories than he will have remembered having. My head is about to—

The pressure fills and wanes. Then the memories congeal into convenient little memetic packets that he can recognize and pick up and turn over, line up and inhale. They escort themselves out, moonwalking, one at a time, before he realizes that he is leaking and then he reaches for them but they are lost in unarchived headspace (retrieval for assessment). He reaches for the nearest one before it can slip away:

1. Lucy is holding my hand, squeezing in time with my failing heart. She will be my daughter one day. It will be cancer, and it will be a long time coming — for my mother, for me, though not for Lucy. I will have started palliative weeks ago. Then the pain will come back.

Lucy will have everything I’ve left behind. She will have had everything I left behind. The portraits of me with Gabriel— some candid, some costumed, in a haphazard collection of picture frames along the bedroom wall. The Prius with a busted

bumper and stained seats. The carved wooden cat paperweight which reminded me of Ralph and Angie before her. Twenty-four generic brand crayons in a drawer nobody ever ended up using. Gabriel’s silver anniversary necklace on sale at Costco. Whatever is left in those boxes in the shed that I couldn’t bring myself to throw out.

He wonders whether whatever is left will be worth leaving in the first place.

At the funeral, I will speak as though I have shared a life when we haven’t even met. I will no longer sit on the porch and squint at the crossword with only the creaking porch swing to stave off silence; Gabriel will wake up and the dementia will slowly slink back into the background of our lives, and we will stare longingly, yearning for a life we will live: thirty nine years and eleven months, a happy marriage. There will be more funerals and all the people I will remember will be lifted from the ground by pallbearers and the mortuaries will refund exorbitant charges for embalming and slowly I will reconstruct the person I will become through evening walks and over coffee, gossipping about our children and their children and anticipating what it will be like to be a child and wondering whether the child will be satisfied with who we are today.

2. I will sit with Michael in my lap, rocking him to sleep to the sound of midnight television static while Lucy stares blankly at the in-flight television with no headphones on a business flight to Seattle. The fridge will be covered with scribbled characters I won’t recognize. Michael will take them down and the lines will lengthen into crayons gripped roughly in grubby hands.

Before long the doctors will walk Michael back in and Lucy will cry, and her husband will be there to hold her hand. They will divorce, but then they will forget that they ever argued over whether it was right to bruise Michael over stealing Kit-Kats from the pantry just after Halloween. Then I will be walking Lucy back in a white dress that dragged the wind along, and she will be smiling.

He remembers how all the memories that bore weighty misery before he lived them are born when he does. How all the memories that will remind him of better times will expire at the onset. How all the memories trickle out slowly, and he cannot keep them from passing through his memory like water through a sieve.

Lucy will come down before her graduation to hug me, and I will tell her to do better than I will have. She will cry because she still remembers what I will be, but at least she understands. When she gets younger, she will forget.

I will sit alone in silence in the front seat before Lucy slams the car door and storms off to cry with Gabriel. We will shout at each other before Lucy rolls her eyes and tells me that yes, she did adjust the rearview mirror, before I remind her to do so. I will think that she takes life too unseriously.

I will hit Lucy for the first and last and only time. I will have promised to never hit her again, and I will not. Lucy will leave. We will have unchosen her, before Gabriel and I agree to adopt.

3. I will start working as a materials manager, a job I have worked at for thirty years. I will flunk the interview but it doesn’t matter, because I have all of the necessary qualifications and thirty years of experience. And then I will become unemployed for the rest of my life.

I will realize I am loved while stroking Angie as Gabriel brings me an empty plate, and the peach cobbler will linger on our tongues before forming in perfect squares which return to the oven with the scent of cinnamon and adoration. I will have proposed at sunset over Yellowstone. We will go on dates in my secondhand Prius, and we will almost drown in the Grand Canyon and the car will break down in Yosemite. And then I will meet Gabriel for the last (first) time studying at the library, and then I will be alone.

4. I will go to prom without a date, and homecoming, and I will wonder why today is worse than tomorrow. I will go home and avoid my dad and stay up reading by the window under the light of a distant street lamp. I will go to sleep content to be alone and then wake up the morning before, half-rested, semi-unconscious, and drag myself back from high school.

5. I will stumble between crowds in junior high on the way to lunch from whatever club, parsing the room for a table with free seats among people who knew who I was even as I try to figure out who I am. I will blank out as my math teacher siphons the buried concept of algebra from the background of my mind, mindlessly lining up pencils. I will wonder whether I will leave behind a life worth living.

6. I will remember memories I wanted to and chose to forget. I will remember jokes that didn’t land and lies that buried themselves deep in my gut. Nacreous memories extracted by the procession of time. The core was never formed: it was always there, and always will be.

7. I will experience the first memory of my dad for the rest of my life and it will color our relationship until then. I will stop kneeling and I will simply stand there, feet sinking into the floor as I endure his shouting. And then finally my mother will return, and then everything will be right because I will not know how to live any other way.

8. I will even recover memories lost to the rest of my life. I will remember for only a day the feeling of standing for the last time and forget how to speak.

I will hear my name for the first time and take my first breath.

As the sterile stagnance expels itself from crumpling alveoli he will breathe his penultimate and his heart will slowly find its voice again, and then it will learn to talk and never stop for a breath for sixty years. And the memories of his life will flash before his eyes (and he will breathe his first).

untitled

their lives are grounded in verse, prose: the light, the dirt, the sunken roots of gardens. their bodies are in His image: two figures, waltzing over stone carved for them. the picture of beauty, the final draft of the form.

my bones and tissue can be found drained of my likeness, lying on a stretcher of their construction.

i have been medicalized, summed up to the tools taken to my split skin.

they say i am ill. they say i denounce the gift to me from earth. but here i am:

it is no gift to be an object of knowledge for those who do not want to see you.

i am sacred, just as they are. my family is hidden in the liminal space of water, saturating soil and feeding all of natural being. there is nothing surgical about souls: there are only the marks they leave on our surface that push us towards ambiguity, an existence tucked beyond a mere exterior.

Emery Dunbar

ver • di • gris

noun

abrightbluish-greenencrustationorpatinaformedoncopperorbrassbyatmospheric oxidation,consistingof basiccoppercarbonate.

Old Enough to Have Lived Too Much

In a perpetual state of almost overflowing; Aren’t fountains beautiful? So stretched with The fluidity of motion. Futile.

Continuously being completed

In the same way. The water kisses the edge; You dip your toes. Only to discover a depthless place. The gleaming surface absorbs

All the excess being poured in.

Until it rains & an ocean is

Born out of a teacup. An everything suspended

Before it spills—

Arianna Barzacanos

Karolina Kotlarz

Giulianna Bruce

Seven Ways of Looking at Empty Glass

I

I could feel the pointed glare of the sun as he watched me spend all day indoors. I detested the feeling of his judgment on my skin: the way it made me squint my eyes, the way it burned. His warm glow no longer enticed me. Petulant as a child, I shut the blinds of my bedroom window—now he can’t see me. He can’t see me now. I’m too embarrassed to be seen by him when I’m like this.

II

In physics, net force is defined as the sum of all forces acting upon an object. When an object has two equal forces acting upon it, the net force is zero— neither force prevails. When your body—an object, naturally—has its mind pulling in one direction and its heart pulling in another, both with equal exertions of work, the net force is zero. Your body is stagnant; the classic double-bind leaves you unmoving. Emotional paralysis.

III

“Lest my mind dwell too much upon its ills.” - Ovid

IV

The other day I saw a boy pop a wheelie as he crossed North Miami Avenue. He flew like Phaethon across the asphalt, drunk on a heady kind of fearlessness that I will never know. A few weeks later, while I was driving home from Surfside, I found that I was gently smiling to myself for no particular reason. It made me think of the woman I saw dancing in the water at the beach right off of Rickenbacker Causeway, on the way to Key Biscayne. “Dream” by Al Green was playing.

V

I am planting in my own garden the flowers I wanted to send to your house, but didn’t. It’s been refreshing to care about myself in this deliberate of a manner. I’m noticing the tenderness with which I regard my skin underneath my fingertips. I try to replicate that gentleness in the new encounters I have.

VI

Hydrophobicity describes the chemical tendency of many nonpolar molecules to repel water. “The Lotus Effect” is one particular case: when water comes into contact with the Sacred Lotus, Nelumbo nucifera, the water forms into little droplets that easily roll off the Lotus leaf, leaving the surface dry. I’ve been working on becoming more like the Sacred Lotus. Rather than piercing stabs, memories now slide like spherical beads off my back. And yet, I seem to forget how present the past often is.

VII

The most deceptive part of the whole glass-half-full and glass-half-empty paradigm is that they both look exactly the same. You can’t pour from an empty cup.

Giulianna Bruce

fullness

Letter from the Layout Director

Friends,

The idea of fullness came to me from a place of hollowness. I immediately began racking my brain for other potential themes for this issue of Off the Record—ironically, I felt that fullness was not enough. And yet, it followed me everywhere I went. fullness fullness fullness. I found myself looking for fullness in everything I saw: angel numbers, lipstick-stained watermelon, the tattoo on my inner left arm. And as I continued to notice these things, I noticed a change withim myself, a filling up of the hollowness once so oppressive.

I hope that this second issue of Off the Record, this meditation on the concept of fullness, can find you well. I implore you to allow the art and writing throughout these pages to broaden your ideas about what it means to be full. So go ahead, fill up your plate. It’s an all you can eat buffet—I hope you’re hungry.

Warmly,

Giulianna Bruce ‘25, Layout Director