PALM 2018-2019

P A L

2019

PAYTON’S ART & LITERATURE MAGAZINE

palm STAFF SPONSOR: Devan Picard EDITORS-IN-CHIEF: Hanna Goldberg

Mendy Kong

STAFF: Alice Cao

Daniel Nino

Antonio Aranda Cameron Catayong Danelise Comas Van Gavia Eva Gelman Cameron Kuberski Lucia Nash

Katherine Norquist Maggie Rivera Lola Roney Magda Saliba Nathaniel Santos Anna Zavelsky

Fionn Hui Efren Ponce

Stella Roney

Ana Carpener

David Mcdermott

COVER: Christine Piolet

Fionn Hui

FIONN HUI

KATHERINE NORQUIST

Show and Tell Sometimes I fantasize about trading brains,

just for a split second, because maybe I really am Weak;

maybe the weight on my chest I’ve created

countless metaphors to describe in hopes that someone could reach

in and pick spikes from this decaying heart

(have I done it again?)

is just an unfortunate delusion. But I like to believe

that this is real, this dream.

That in the body of another, limbs would fold over and over

until they collapse onto the tile floor.

Hollow.

Can your long legs save you now?

That I could hold

their heaving body in my own, scarred arms wrapped

underneath a vision, a plan,

a bullseye tattooed onto blank tissue canvas,

and take my brain back, standing on splintering

ice, accepting defeat, always defeat, whispering “welcome home” SHIRA FRIEDMAN-PARKS

Functionality Function is a perfunctory action, and functionality tends to bore the hell out of me. The idea that certain actions can be copied and pasted without adaptation screams the presence of a lack of complete originality. There aren’t too many situations in which a different masquerading display is actually required nor do these shifts require genuine effort - my voice may play a game sometimes depending on my particular sentiment in the moment, or my fingers may fiddle with one another or my clothing to externalize my anxiety. But the world’s not convoluted, not too different to sense similarity in every instance - the expression on her face or the giggle turned laugh. So maybe functionality is not ugly in its perfunctory nature, but beautiful in its potential to foster unity. Because if we couldn’t ever use the same function across situations, we couldn’t be a singular entity, learning rather than mindlessly assimilating. Ironically, unity breeds uniqueness because we can share a common human experience despite difference, and we can dare to be ourselves around others even at the risk of misunderstanding.

And unity breeds humility, though this virtue we think weak because of its fragility, only strengthened by the knowledge that there’s a sum larger than its parts - functions that link entities lost in a sea of multiplicities. We can’t find commonalities unless we dare to act commonly, because empathy is a product of understanding, though understanding is lacking when difference creates division, which will inevitably be scaled one way or another, hopefully in our favor. And this isn’t a call to ignore that this world is populated by polymonic populations - poly- meaning many, but -mono also meaning one - one sum, many parts, made up of perfunctory functions not lost to the fierce fire of nationalism, which I guess don’t really bore the hell out of me anymore when I get over myself and look at the story and not just the snapshot.

MAGDALENA RIVERA

MENDY KONG

The cold pierced My layers of thick skin Through my armor, It tore right through without a pause.

It left me empty.

No wait, no regrets It passed, Leaving me alone in the dark hours of Morning and night After the months of climbing out of snow the sun reminded me: It presented itself in this 6 foot figure With these light brown eyes That made me melt as soon as I met them.

Who’s smile made me question the time of day, Who’s warmth and Embrace Made everything else just Wash away.

I had made it.

WINTER IS OVER. I was warm and ready to take the leap and make it known, It was my turn to experience Spring And this time I won’t just let it go.

Remember there will always be one Person ready to shine their Light and take you out of Your snow.

Be patient with time, You can’t speed up growth.

ARIANA PEREZ

LUCY WEAVER

His Eyes Like Candy

His eyes are like candy And I can’t seem to stop looking into them For I can taste the sweet strawberry licorice With every glance I take at them Damn, I feel like I’ve stepped into candyland when he’s around His hair’s like grass Not just any grass But the loose grass of a meadow on a breezy sunny day I get this urge to run my fingers through it His smile’s like a comforter Warms me in the coldest moments I get a sense of safety as it wraps around me His arms are like a bodyguard Sadly not my bodyguard But I just want to run into them And have him wrap them around me Holding me while the world shoots its arrows at me And him?

He’s like a million dollars There’s so much that I would like to do with him But I just don’t have him I’m not even sure whether I can have him ALBERT ADDO

MAGDALENA SALIBA

NATHANIEL SANTOS

sweet cheeks when cheeks were pink and sweet and static: seats spun on wheels, blissfully unaware of their own verticality. jackets were drenched in the color of sand from our paradise of deli meats and pool moccasins. tank tops were coated in the texture of tiny hands fresh from the bubble bath or the waves or the sun pool. recollections fail to vacate our minds, breaking apart from the person by which they were cultivated, so we poke at them with our sticks of melancholy and hope for resurfacing.

HANNA GOLDBERG

DANELISE COMAS

MAN’S WORLD I walk to the kitchen and immediately my dad gives me that look, he says nothing but looks at my mom and tells her with his eyes “are you gonna say something or should I?” My mother looks at me with disappointment and asks me how dare I think I could ride the train with a shirt that low and a skirt that high and my biggest problem with her comment is that she’s right How dare I forget that my body is for nothing more than a man’s pleasure and consumption, How dare I forget that if a man makes me feel uncomfortable it’s my fault for showing too much skin, How dare I forget that when a woman is raped the first thing they ask is what she was wearing They ask us how we expect respect if we’re not dressed like we deserve it, because if they see the top of my breast or too much of my legs .. what ? they’ll remember I’m not a man so I don’t deserve their respect ?

So I change But when I walk out the house I hear the whistle of a man and I remember, how dare I forget ? it doesn’t matter what I’m wearing.. They still catcall me just to laugh with their friends and remind me that no matter what I wear this is still their world, And in our heads we think f--k you but instead we say thank you because we are trained to God forbid we say f--k you because if we say f--k you then he might f--k you and then they’ll ask “well…... what were you wearing?”

DANELISE COMAS

ALICE CAO

CAMERON CATAYONG

swimming

DANIEL NINO

lessons

when you were shorter they taught you to swim to hold your breath and flutter kick to float and backstroke you used pool noodles and kickboards and they saved you when you strayed too far you are taller now and your water wrinkled tippy-toes reach farther it takes less work to clear the pool yet sometimes you still feel your head sink lower your limbs become tired they ask why you pretend to drown as if growing up gave you gills as if the life preserver is not sunken they act like you can look inside yourself and the water will recede but swimming lessons aren’t enough to weather a riptide STELLA RONEY

LOLA RONEY

bodies press around you though none of them have a name you are { } too you are two square feet and one hand gripping a pole as the train lurches train is { } too train is the hot breath under a city which tacks your lips back from your teeth in a perpetual growl sucks air in short spasms you ascend steps coated in urine you feel the whine of sirens above you downtown the skyscrapers are canines jutting from diseased gums you wish to stand alone atop one and bite the sky blue cannot describe it so you plunge your face back towards pavement watch your converse play leapfrog as they squish slushy salt imagine how nameless you are {

}

you are two swinging feet and two hands and the train is gone from below you

clark & division, 7:51a.m.

KATHERINE NORQUIST

ALICE CAO

PUT ART HERE

Counting.

Accountant counting the days til winter becomes spring and spring becomes happy.

Calendar grows when a snowflake falls, vitamin D seems to be handed out in rations.

Elongated shadows, like feelings, come and go with the sun’s path.

Glassy eyes, her eyes, glazed by the hardship of sleeping- glazed donuts.

Images of better times sit in back pockets: jumping rope on playgrounds- but that was ten years ago.

Kitchen with the smell of burning butter Ladle with batter, she wears his t-shirt making pancakes- but this is ten years from now.

Now her kitchen smells of brewing coffee and poems about love that left a quarter way before they could be finished.

Report just in: 1 month until the return of spring and smiling, but there isn’t a sign that she’ll ever complete the love poemunless that sign is the advice of friends.

Valentine’s in two days said the accountant, would you please just let it go? Gone.

Xerox machines make copies Yolks crack open, the camera zooms out and life returns to normal.

ANNA ZAVELSKEY

To Avoid Burning My Tongue After I pour the boiling water into a white mug, after its insides turn colors like witchcraft, and I pull the metal tea leaf strainer out and toss it aside, into the trash, I take an ice cube from the blue tray in the freezer and let it fall into my drink, and I watch, intently, as it shrinks, as bubbles form around it, sparkling, as it becomes the size of a crumbled tea leaf floating at the surface, then smaller.

Then nothing. It has been swallowed in its entirety. Water consumed by water consumed by me, impatient. And I can’t help but wonder when water will consume me, as well.

SHIRA FRIEDMAN-PARKS

VAN GAVIA

Birthday i wish that my fingernails could grow as long as the stems of the orchids that my mother collects. her bathroom is lined with her dying orchids -white, yellow -- she saves them. she tells me to make a wish as i blow out my candles, and i wish for fingernails.

HANNA GOLDBERG

MENDY KONG

MENDY KONG

DANELISE COMAS

Dusk.

It’s intellectual devastation for everybody to avoid emotional commitment. Yet she still wears her long hair soft and blue against her bloodless face, still stands, separating the intellect from the emotional, envisioning them as two separate entities, as if she can work without taking a moment to enjoy her work, or she can laugh without thinking too hard about it.

Let the dusk come swallow-winged, let it rupture the dichotomy between night and day, and let it become a project or a prospect, either mathematical or mysterious, and god forbid it ever be an intersection between the two, especially when she’d then have to determine exactly what the X and Y coordinates of that intersection are, although there’s probably another formula for that. Some days she wished all fantasies could be formulaic, at least because they’d have the benefit of being predictable, but then she also wished other days that dusk could simply be described as a magnificent waterfall of warmth, a shade of evening, a murky type of daylight rather than several hours dictated by the solar elevation and angle.

But she began to learn that you cannot complete any type of work without caring, and just as dusk somehow had the power to create a contradiction in the dichotomy of night and day, intellect and emotion were a separation only in definition, and the attempt to separate the two took enough energy - more kinetic energy - than she wished to use. They were a false dichotomy, and bled together beautifully, like the pastel shades of oncoming evening. Their differences were easier to conquer that she’d first imagined - and maybe one day - she reasoned - her emotion would drive her intellect and - she felt - that her intellect would subsequently instruct her emotion, creating a pastel waterfall of warmth on a coordinate graph for her to plot precision and passion, too disorderly to just be evaluated scientifically, yet too scientific to just be appreciated artistically.

MAGDALENA RIVERA

EVA GELMAN

EVA GELMAN