ec ho es
spring 2021
1
barnard college • literary & arts magazine • spring 2021
2
echoes
3
Nature Morte . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . cover
Farmstand . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
Afra . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
The nurse asks me to pee in a cup, which I wasn’t expecting. . . . . . . 30
Keeping stock . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
Cece . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
Funhouse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
Fallout . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
Primary Girl . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
Sam, by Elias . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
Anna Olivia Sommer
Sadie Kramer
Meg Young
Lily Parker
Carmen Sherlock
Reaching Detention Camp #59 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 4 Lida Ehteshami
Excerpts from Keystone State . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 Eliza Jouin
Buttery Soft . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 Brigid Cromwell
Health Fruit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 Alexis Rabkin
Personal Floatation Device . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 Julia Hyman
Cordelia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 Sadie Kramer
4
Catherine Sawoski
Grace Novarr
Sadie Kramer
Sarah Marjorie Lyon Auden Barbour
Once a childhood home . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 Grace Li
Chicken Bones . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41 Dariya Subkhanberdina
Dissoloution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 Alison Siegel
f
table o contents 5
Afra Sadie Kramer
Here are the things I had: hoodies soaked with terpenes and tear-snot, grass allergies, Febreze Linen & Sky Car Air Freshener, my reflection (naked), my reflection (clothed), fingernails on the coffee table, giant words on small pages, hair tie impressions, sand between my legs, Prozac, razor burn, raspberry Smirnoff, new freckles. These days, I count my years in haircuts; that way, it’s easy to imagine the centuries passing by. On my roof, I map out the city and avoid the antelope skull perched on the railing. I gather the ashy butts and broken glass and force them into the shape of a cake for me and my roommates. I allow myself grossness; it’s different when it’s on your own terms. Last weekend, I spent the morning and afternoon flat on my mattress, sipping slowly from a cup. A gaggle of moths flapped their fuzzy wings against my ceiling as if newly hatched as the sun sank into the mouth of my window. I swept my room and did my work and didn’t think once about leaving it all behind. On my heels, the callouses have sharpened so they fit perfectly into the corners of my loafers. Each time I take a step, my feet sink further into the sole, so I stomp and stomp until I’m deep underground. Down there, I can see all the grubs, petrified tree roots, shrapnel, lost doll limbs… And when I tire from looking at everyone else’s fossils, I pocket some dirt for my pothos and return to level ground. Today, my clothes are especially soiled from the dig, so I shower for longer than usual and with hotter water. When I put on clothes, fresh from rinsing, I am a Russian doll. Cotton, skin, muscle, skeleton, and then everything else. Here are the things I have: wool socks, maroon rubber roof mats, Double Scorpio Honey, my reflection (naked), my reflection (clothed), black french press, bottled sunbeams, Olaplex, recycling piles, fingernails on the windowsill, gin, Wellbutrin, paled skin. These days, I read my old poems with horror. I decide I never saw myself for what I was. But then again, mirrors are no better than silver-backed tongues. And anyway, mostly, you don’t know what you want until it starts to leave bones at your door.
by 6
Meg Young
keeping stock
7
f by 8
Lily Parker
unhouse
HER FATHER sends her out to pick up bananas. The grocery store, a lone structure in a nearly empty lot, is an unfamiliar Canadian chain with bluetinted glass walls that force her to encounter her reflection as she passes. She takes care to avoid looking at her own face; that morning, she tried to put in contacts after rubbing hydrocortisone cream on her thigh, and her eyes shriveled up like fingers after a bath. They still haven’t stopped leaking; she can feel each individual vein pulsing thickly. Inside, all the bananas are unripe. The day before, her father took her to a pub that he had been to some time before with her mother. He told her about the pub several times on their way up, when the silences had felt too much like spaces he had to fill. She was expecting the Canadian equivalent of what it had felt like to eat bouillabaisse in a Paris cafe two summers ago: warm and exciting in its unfamiliarity, the kind of place so entrancing that she would be able to feel herself making the night into a memory to reach for later. But when they arrived, the restaurant in the pub was closed; only the bar was open, a few lone drinkers scattered around the counter. She was seventeen, and they couldn’t stay. After driving around the town for twenty minutes, they landed at the only other place open that late, a diner that served fourteen variations of grilled cheese. When they got back to the motel, it was ten-thirty. She was unaccustomed to sleeping so early, but her father fell asleep instantaneously, his body sunken and heavy on the bed next to hers. Lately, she envied this ability of his, to fall asleep so fast and so completely, a fly 9
dropping dead in midair. The blanket was pulled up past his nose. How was he able to breathe? Something was missing, something was off, but she couldn’t tell what. Only half an hour later, still awake and occupying herself by watching shapes move around beneath her eyelids, did she realize that she had been expecting her father to sleep, even now, on his side of the bed; instead, he lay in the center of the mattress. When she eventually fell asleep, it was because the image of her still father and the cracks in the wall behind him started to shiver and merge like a watery transition into a movie flashback, and she forgot where she was.
Primary Girl Carmen Sherlock
The bananas are for day two of the car ride. He can peel them with one hand, and keep the other on the wheel. He does this frequently. Once when driving her to elementary school, he had spent too long rooting around in the center console, where he had put his breakfast bagel minutes earlier, and veered off into a ditch along the highway, totaling her mother’s Subaru. The windshield above the passenger seat shattered; she was in the back seat. Her mother called him minutes after it happened, and he, angry and sitting on his hands to stop them from trembling, had not picked up. Afterwards, she noticed how he would not eat while driving and would lock his eyes on the road ahead, even if he was hungry or wanted to talk to her. But this only lasted for a few months, because eventually the sting of the crash faded from his mind and he forgot about how scared he had been. “You still want to go on the hike?” he asks. They are two hours into the drive. The pub, open now, far behind them. “Sure.” What else were they going to do? “...” “That’s why we’re here, right?” she prompts. “That’s why we’re here.” He pauses. She knows to wait until he continues, and he does. 10
11
“Sometime last year, we were eating dinner on Mom’s bed, the one with the loud recliner. Right after they moved her into that nice big room. You remember it, how spacious it was? We had these bowls of fried white fish from the food truck outside. And you said, kind of offhand, to no one, I want to go hiking again. Like in the mountains, when we used to drive out to Virginia. And so that’s when I made these reservations. That night.” “...Oh.” His face reddens slightly in the side window. “Well, it kind of broke my heart, the way you said it.” An electric blue butterfly floats softly around a squirrel on the side of the road. The squirrel’s body is inside-out, its spine ripped out from its back, and she knows her father sees it too, though neither of them say anything. “That bed was horrible,” she says. “Sounded like death every time Mom moved.” “I know.” A cloud moves and the sun empties itself through the windshield, so bright she has to close her eyes. They pull over at a rest stop, a branch of some neglected national park. He says there is a beach, and he wants to look for sea glass. At home, he collects sea glass for the sunroom, an awkwardlyplaced octagonal structure in the back of the house that reminds her of a greenhouse without plants, with its floor-to-ceiling clear panels instead of real walls. Her father likes to string the pieces of sea glass he finds with strands of itchy twine to hang in the windows, where they perpetually spin in lazy rounds. She can sit in the rocker, stretch her legs out on the coffee table, and watch as slices of rainbow dance across her skin, fading in and out with the breeze. At night, the sunroom becomes a funhouse. The glass grows cloudy and mirrors what it sees; she can shine a light and it will flash back at her like 12
a challenge, her body multiplied eight times over, staring her down. This was fun when she was younger, before she looked like a person. Now, her body has become specific, a pencil sketch outlined in black marker: the skin around her eyes is sunken and goose-pimpled, her nose and chin sharper and more defined. She looks like her mother. And it’s her mother’s eyes that stare back at her, sixteen of them, when she turns the lights off, pupils twisting and sliding like rainbows in the daytime. They glint in the flashlight’s beam, and it’s almost rude, the way they can do this, when in reality they are dull and lifeless, unable to fully open. The worst part is that once her mother’s gone for good, the eyes are still there. She sees them in the sea glass, in the rainbows. To her father, the sunroom is just the perfect place to hang his treasures. He paces the coast, toeing the line where the sea bubbles up and spits childishly. He knows what to look for. “When we were here last time...” he trails off, and this has become a staple phrase of his, a vague reference to the time before, when he was here and she was not, before they had to navigate conversation like it might kill them, too. “I swear, when we were here last time, I found a bucket’s worth of the stuff. I mean, it was all over,” he exclaims, waving his hands. “People must be drinking up a storm, tossing every bottle into the rivers. They always say Canadians are so happy, you know, but it makes you think…” “Maybe it’s just this area,” she mutters. “It’s so dreary, and everything’s gray: the sky, the grass... Anyway, the stereotype is that they’re kind, not happy.” He stops moving, stares at the sand. A wave washes over his sneaker, and he lets it. She has never known how to take anything back. 13
Dear Soraya, Love, are you okay? Do they you? I’m so worried you know. There’s lightning across the sky all night, lighting up our by the . But no rain. Anyways, you know at the store, they brought already. I pitted sour all day, the tablecloth gave us went with their juice. Promise I’ll save you jars of preserves for your return. some figs too. You know I haven’t opened a since they you. Till then, please eat well. By the way. The neighbors got an apology and a few thousand dollars. They calculate based on and and age. The worth of a ,of a human . hands shook as she opened . She took it out front and ripped it. Had to calm her before she went back in. Sorry. Didn’t mean to you. Anyways, I read some Gellhorn like you recommended. The Ground. The wife sends letters to her like I do. You know honestly I don’t read now. I’ve the books. All of them. Can’t stomach their . All those spines lined up on my shelf. How you would stand there, smelling the pages. them. They all say the same story. None tell ours. Anyways, I couldn’t , so I’m sitting by the window watcrhing it streak. Gets sometimes, so I write you letters I don’t send. I don’t mean to cause alarm. I only want the ones you open to like a hill of poppies. God... I’m thinking I must look like something lit up like this! Wish you could see it. Singing that you loved, remember, the line that went “ ”? I’m holding the just for you.
reaching detention camp
Yours,
by 14
Lida Ehteshami
#59 15
eliza “
16
Most of these images are selections from an ongoing series I am currently working on, whose working title is “Keystone State.” Through these images, I explore the rural scenery and aesthetics of my home state of Pennsylvania as a sort of foil to my other bodies of work, which typically focus on urban settings and intimate portraiture of queer subjects. These images also appear in my upcoming thesis, which puts the aforementioned concepts in conversation with one another.
”
jouin *All works are untitled.
17
18
19
20
21
buttery by
22
Brigid Cromwell
soft
“WOULD YOU like to open a brand credit card today and save 20% off your first purchase?” The words roll out of my mouth unconsciously as I remove the censors from Carol’s three pairs of leggings. She’s preoccupied answering texts from her coworkers about her upcoming business trip to San Diego and rummaging through her designer bag for her matching wallet. I know about the trip from our lengthy conversation in the fitting room, during which she divulged the details of her daughter’s messy breakup, advised me to take advantage of my youthful figure while it lasts, and debated between a “comfortable size six” and a “tight-but-inspiring size four.” By the end of her fit session, she’d amassed a pile of twenty-five garments, out of which she chose three to purchase. “Oh, is it a credit card?” She looks up from her phone for a split second. The eye contact is startling, and I stumble on my words. “Yes, it would be a credit card, but there’s no annual fee and—” “Oh, no. No, no, no. My husband would kill me if he found out I got another credit card!” She interrupts me with this unfortunate but all-too-common response, and we both laugh uncomfortably. “You know how men are,” she adds, rolling her eyes and then returning her attention to her cell phone. Strange and discomforting performances of femininity, such as this interaction with Carol, define my days at the store, urging me to retreat into the safe confines of my mind. “Your total comes to $306.77. You can insert your card whenever you’re ready.” I fold the leggings into a neat stack which I then slide into the store’s canvas bag, a crowd-pleaser among our sustainable customers. I watch her eyes light up as I present her with her purchase, and I raise my eyebrows to mimic her excitement, grateful I have a mask on to conceal my apathy. For the duration of my time with Carol, as I was fetching her trousers and debating the morality of wearing cropped garments after childbirth, I’d been fantasizing about the bag of free string cheese in the break room and calculating how much merchandise I could stuff in my backpack at the end of my shift without alerting suspicion. Carol lingers for a moment at the counter, and I wait for the closing remark, silently mouthing the words along with her under my mask. “It’s so dangerous you opened a new store here! I’m in trouble!” She laughs as she tucks her platinum card into her wallet, and for some reason, I think Carol will be okay.
23
24
Alexis Rabkin Health Fruit
I sell overpriced women’s fitness attire Monday through Saturday. On Sunday, I rest. The store is sandwiched between an organic grocery store and a gym in an otherwise unassuming strip in the town over from mine. Our customer base is mostly upper-class middle-aged women like Carol and older women in their mid-sixties and seventies, with the occasional sprinkling of adolescents and young professionals. I took the job to help my mother save for a down payment on a new apartment after my dad started pouring gasoline down the sink. In the years since his arrest, his schizophrenia had consumed him entirely, producing walls of paranoia so impenetrable that it became impossible to communicate with him. We’d been evicted from our home when I was fourteen after he’d refused to pay the mortgage for five years, which landed us in a one-bedroom apartment on top of an Italian restaurant across from my high school. Once an accomplished jeweler and club owner, my dad now spent his days holed up in our “living room” with his jars of concoctions, his grain alcohol, and his misplaced rage. I wondered what Carol would think of my living situation. “Allison, do you smell that?” I’m knocked out of my trance by Erin, my manager, hastily approaching me and sniffing vigorously in the air. “It smells like,” she pauses and motions for me to come closer, “it smells like marijuana.” She speaks in a tone so hushed I struggle to hear her over the deafening EDM remix of Prince’s When Doves Cry playing over the speaker. It’s Friday night at 7:00 PM, and the only signs of life outside the store are sweaty gym-goers, boys corralling carts outside the grocery store, and a group of people huddled at the bus stop. “It does actually,” I say as I wipe deodorant stains off of one of the $90 sports bras Carol tried on. I feel Erin’s anxiety radiating off of her body and watch with pity as her eyes dart from side to side across the store. “I don’t think anyone notices,” I say reassuringly, but she’s already halfway out the door in search of the culprit. Three pairs of leggings, two with lace down the side and one with pockets, four sports bras, and a rain jacket. This is what I manage to steal from the backroom while Erin is outside investigating the smell. I clock out before she returns, making sure to update the backstock inventory before I go to account for my private shopping party. I can sell these for over a thousand dollars online, which is just enough for my mom to secure the apartment. “Get in the car, I don’t have all day!” I pass by Carol, with a joint dangling
25
between her pointer and middle finger, and offer a friendly nod as I make my way to the car. Michelle, my best friend, pulls up in front of the store in her 1997 Mitsubishi Galant, a car we affectionately named Roach. Roach isn’t showy or ostentatious in the traditional sense, but she certainly enjoys making an entrance. She’s loud in the “I have 200,000 miles on me and if my engine were a pair of lungs they’d have emphysema” kind of way, not the “I spent extra money on a muffler” kind of way. I duck into the passenger seat, turn up the radio, and throw my bag in the backseat. Michelle and I drive to the city every night, swerving in and out of lanes on I-95 with the windows down and the sticky summer air blowing through our sunbleached hair. We belt Pink Floyd on the radio—the radio that miraculously came back to life after lying dormant for two years—and ogle at the city skyline, which twinkles against the stratus clouds and the night sky. Every night we drive the same stretch of the highway, playing the same music, passing the same billboards advertising Jesus’s salvation, jewelers, car dealerships, and medical marijuana dispensaries, and yet, each time I feel equally as invigorated, if not more so. Perhaps it was the comforting hum of Roach’s engine or the way Michelle would drive with her eyes closed and her hands in the air, fully surrendering to the vibrations of the music. Or maybe it was the bag of $1,000 leggings sitting in the back seat, but either way, I felt alive.
Personal Flotation Device Julia Hyman
26
27
farmstand
Cordelia Sadie Kramer
Has Joyce ever told you the story of how she threw her laundry away? On Wednesdays, I walk to work along the beach, cutting back up to the main road through private streets, and hope no one is looking at the waves. Sometimes, poetry is huddling on a concrete floor by the heat of an artificial fire, Tate’s butter crunch cookie in one hand and twice bitten apple in the next as I listen for someone I know out front. A customer wishes me good morning at three o’clock in the afternoon, and I do not have the liver to correct them. Standing in the background of a tourist’s snapshot, corn sold out for the season, I will never be eighteen again, not tomorrow or the day after that, no time except for now, October 18th at 7:45 in the evening, going home with the grime of produce coating my hands, and a register only two cents off, pennies soaked in the wash, put in lukewarm water and hung out to dry.
28
by
Catherine Sawoski 29
First the blood, shooting like an autumn leaf, maroon through the plastic tubing and into the wall. Lie down if you feel lightheaded. Well, how do I know if I’m light headed? But I lie on the paper and stare into the fluorescence. What makes this September? How do I know I’m eighteen? How do I know I didn’t just faint? The blood on the wall, trapped in crystal. The blood in my body which will someday stop rushing. The trees burning down. The world slowly dying, me slowly dying too. There’s only so much I can give. The sky like an autumn leaf, orange into the air. My grandfather died of complications with diabetes and Dr. Kim will call later today with the results of the blood test and I’m lying down, killing the world with each breath I exhale. But first… but first the plastic cup. The porcelain floor and sink. I unwrap the skirt from my legs, peel the fishnets from my calves like I did for the last boy that fucked me. Slowly dying through fluid. Here you go. Are you feeling better? Yes. Is this enough? Yes. Dr. Kim will call later today with the results. My brother picks me up and we drive home down the boulevard, littered golden with fallen leaves. by
Grace Novarr
30
Cece Sadie Kramer
the nurse asks me to pee in a cup, which I wasn’t expecting
31
fallout by 32
Sarah Marjorie Lyon
ON THE FIRST of February 2003, the Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated while yawning back into the atmosphere, killing all seven crew members on board. By the time Ground Control knew about the craft’s dire fate, all they could do was sit back, pray emptily, and watch their colleagues crumbling on the monitor. At 2pm that day, George W. Bush addressed the nation with a solemn lump in his throat (which may or may not have been a morsel of well-done steak from the previous evening). “I’m afraid our brave minds at NASA misunderestimated the risks of this space flight,” he lamented. “But I truly believe that someday, man and space can coexist peacefully.” The Disaster scattered debris across the southeastern United States, sprinkling shreds of life over the steaming hot dish of western Louisiana, east Texas, and southwest Arkansas. And as the sonic boom faded out, the rainstorm began. Streaked with purple luminescence, the sky vomited bones, hunks of metal, patches of genetic material. The stuff of space plummeted to the Earth at 16,000 kilometers per hour.
33
They set up the largest ground search ever done to sift through the remains. Shipfuls of astronauts, hundreds of FBI employees and tens of thousands of hands and feet flocked to Texas to take part in the recovery effort. Columbia had all kinds of organisms on board, part of research into how creatures from fish to bees to spiders would react to zero gravity, so there were pieces of life that managed to survive the disintegration of everything. Worms were found still alive and writhing, enclosed in petri dishes stuck inside an aluminum canister. Some moss also lived to tell the tale. State and local authorities advised people not to touch anything they found, warning that anyone who dared could face criminal charges. They warned of ionic radiation and scanned searchers’ insides with a strange machine called a GeigerMüller counter, which some locals looked upon with suspicion, thinking it some sort of top-secret government weapon. Of course, all the fear-mongering in the world couldn’t stop some Texans from auctioning off debris on eBay for upwards of ten grand. Eventually, NASA recovered about 40% of the orbiter. 84,000 pieces were plucked from 2.3 million acres of land. Men in space suits sterilized the specimens, assigning a serial number to each morsel and reassembling it all on a giant grid. Thousands of hands got to work putting the body back together, plank by plank like the ship of Theseus. But these efforts still left 60% of Columbia wedged in the mud. Tangled in the Big Thicket, coursing through restless minds, she dwelled in the silent lapses in friendly conversation. The sludge of what happened here bubbled in all the ambries and pantries and armoires and fields and marriage beds of East Texas and her neighbors. In the months and years that followed, all sorts of people found all sorts of remnants of the Big Disaster. Crumbs of a body here, fragments of an engine there. A vacuum-sealed orb of freeze-dried spaghetti charred nestled next to a dogwood tree, which one glowing child ate as a dare; a wedding ring, a golden tooth. The flotsam and jetsam of life and space. Glimmering with radiation and mystery, the pieces were too holy to be put in a museum, so many of them were hidden. In basements and cupboards and swamps, they developed lives of their own. Locks of hair from the first Indian woman to see the world from the outside shed all over the tri-state area, strands worming their way into bowls of soup, glasses of milk,
34
Sam, by Elias
Auden Barbour 35
Sam, by Elias Auden Barbour
36
wells and estuaries, tip jars and Coca Cola bottles. Toenail by toenail, cell by cell, the disintegrated astronauts reintegrated themselves into the terrain. A ninety-year-old man at the VA nursing home near Shreveport lost his last remaining tooth chewing on a Granny Smith apple, only to find a tooth embedded within the apple core: a canine that once belonged to Mission Specialist Laurel Clark. At that exact instant, 225 miles away, an eleven-year-old girl living outside of Fort Worth lost her last milk tooth, only to find another golden-capped canine of Laurel Clark’s shining brightly between the tomato plants. The whereabouts of Clark’s lower two canines remain unknown. The pinky finger of Israel’s first astronaut traced the Texas-Louisiana state line with holy precision. The wandering digit was finally found in Palestine, TX, lying idly in front of Anderson County Courthouse. An overwhelmed lawyer on his way to lose a case stuffed the pinky in his briefcase, planning to use it to scare his step-daughter. Soon, the inhabitants of Palestine started finding pages of the spaceman’s diary in fields all around the area. Farmers and their wives ran their fingers over the Hebrew alphabet like braille, wondering what these cosmic inscriptions could mean. The pages had exploded, burned, frozen in the atmosphere, baked in the sun, swum in the rain, been feasted on by hungry insects and rodents bewildered by the taste of ink. These celestial Dead Sea scrolls had been attacked by Earth’s cruel elements and organisms and yet here they were. Fried, eternal, tattered but still breathing. It wasn’t long until people started to see things, to hear things. Well-behaved children stopped behaving. Stay-at-home moms left home and stopped mothering. Dogs began acting more like people, and vice versa. The cosmonauts sent secret messages through the television, crops, the Swiss chard and lima beans, the refrigerator magnets and the alphabet soup. Whole towns were lobotomized. Then there was the ghost town of Belgrade – or Biloxi as the Siouan-speaking natives once called it – just west of the Sabine River, where nobody thought to look. The only thing left there was a cemetery and wispy antebellum memories. It was the kind of place only a bored tweaker with a bicycle might think to wander through. And that’s just who found it: twenty-something Matthew Davies, a kindly and freshly unemployed soul with thirteen botanical tattoos, thirty-three days clean and sober, and zero intention of staying that way. He had pitch-black hair, olive skin and milky green eyes, features he inherited from his Welsh ancestors although, like most
37
people where he grew up, he had no idea where he came from. His parents named him after Saint Matthew, one of Jesus’ apostles and the patron saint of tax-collectors, because they wanted him to be one of those people who care about Jesus but also about money. Neither of those really played out, though. Remember, this was a few years before the state of Texas banned the sale of large quantities of pseudoephedrine, back when we were smack in the middle of an ice storm that fatally crystallized within the bloated capillaries and veins of Desert Storm vets and newly jobless manufacturing workers all over the area. Matthew was one of them, but younger and less jaded than most; he knew that his life was part of this whole bigger thing and was intent on finding out exactly what that was. Methamphetamine was nothing but a detour for him, he claimed. He said again and again that he hated the stuff, but this was a lie. In truth, there was nothing he loved more than the feeling of his mind cracking open and the sweet warm stuff drooling out, sublimating his neuroses into a thundering bloom. It was a realm where he did not have to be perceived, but could just exist beautifully, like a pearl or an amoeba. But now, he’d finally given in and decided to “try exercise.” That was all anyone had told him for years: “you should try exercise.” He eventually came to the conclusion that endorphins were a cruel myth, but started riding his bike for hours every day, almost out of spite. He did this so that when the next person asked him “have you tried exercise?” he’d be able to point at his bulging calves and rock-hard quadriceps and grin. Nice try. When Matthew stumbled upon the heart, he was on one of those endless bike rides. Body burning, legs spaghetti strapped to the wind, he felt the blood peering through his eyes and spilling out onto the plains. The Pine Curtain swung open and the entire Gulf Coastal Plain was bleached pink. The Sabine River was five hundred miles of pure bubblegum petroleum, a glittering brine swelling into the contours of the earth. This was Deep East Texas. The bald cypresses made him cry. If you saw their achy, dislocated knees and weary bark stretching upwards to infinity it would make you cry, too. Natives used them to build homes and boats for the living, coffins and drums for the dead. Now, the roots cling to the dirt with an existential fear. Matthew cried all the time, especially after the Accident happened. The sonic boom resonated through all six feet of him, and he couldn’t stop it echoing off
38
the walls of his mind. He cried about history and home most of all. He cried about turpentine camps and oil refineries and sharecroppers and boarded up sawmills. He cried about the Caddo language, whose last speakers were buried in cypress boxes under the ground. He cried about the cities hidden beneath other cities, fish strangled by plastic six-pack yokes, and the pressed flowers his grandmother had left him (the only inheritance she had to give), tucked into a book he still had yet to open. One giant potter’s field, he thought. That’s all America is. He cried about government surveillance and CCTV. He cried about the 1943 Bengal Famine, the Great Hunger in Ireland, the AIDS epidemic, the thousands of Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany that the U.S. government turned away, and all the other times whole peoples had died and nobody with the power to save them even cared. Mostly, though, he cried about the destruction of the Earth, and was terribly ashamed to count himself a member of the human race. His latest stint in rehab was incited by an incident of public humiliation at the Texas Blueberry Festival in Nacogdoches wherein he gorged himself on funnel cake and blueberry wine and wandered inebriated through the crowds and vendors, sobbing about the industrial revolution and impending climate catastrophe: What did we do? What in the world did we do? His doctor, a tiny Polish lady, called these patterns of thinking “delusional paranoia” and “ecological despair.” In response, he cited Conrad and Schneider’s Deviance and Medicalization as proof that he was completely fine and screamed a cordial fuck you and your cardigans on the way out. And now here he was, in the heart of Deep East Texas. He pedaled and pedaled till he reached the skeleton of Belgrade where, drained of energy, he disintegrated. He woke a few hours later to find the heart of astronaut Mike Anderson lying against the spokes of his bike and staring at him through its glistening ventricles. His low-aperture eyes were clicking in and out of focus when he spotted what looked like a gummy glob of raw meat, blood-red and pulsating. Nobody believed him when he swore that the heart was still beating when he found it. They called him crazy, scribbled incredulously on prescription pads, giggled into their mashed potatoes at the wild kid with marvelous delusions. They rolled their eyes, scoffed, their minds clanged shut... but he knew what he saw.
39
by Dariya
Subkhanberdina
chicken bones Grace Li Once a childhood home
40
Last night I ate the dinner my mama made me and watched her upset again I think by something my father hadn’t said. Playing at being grown, suckling on leftover chicken breast bone and making ourselves sick with sweet and heavy-handed, my father’s America red wine, no one caught the tucked in ridges of her spine give in, and when she tried to rest her head on my shoulder I shied and shrunk away, blind high on my own pain for I can’t ever let hers be bigger than mine, and she is meant to be strong and get up in the morning to love, forget, set the breakfast table. I think I can’t figure it out, how to love a boy good and right, because when I make love I cut so deep to the bone I’m afraid if I ever have daughters, it’ll be so lonely I’ll float away. I’ve been growing out my hair and unloaded the dishwasher yesterday again, but at home each day is long, and I still watch it go down the showerdrain, and today and tomorrow, the day after, the dishwasher’s already full, I have to unload it all over again, skipping dinner to lay myself down on the cold bathroom tile and feel wet fingers flutter down the white hairs on my stomach.
41
Alison Siegel
EDITORS-IN-CHIEF Claire Adler & Aliyah Simon-Felix
Dissolution
editorial board SUMBISSIONS DIRECTORS Mathilde Nielsen & Lucy Narva LAYOUT & DESIGN DIRECTOR Arianna Shooshani LAYOUT & DESIGN ASSISTANT Mary Best TREASURER Ruchi Shah WEBMASTER Sophia Jao SOCIAL MEDIA COORDINATOR Oliver Nandakumar EVENTS COORDINATOR Amy Zhang
reading & arts panel Jessenia Puma Willa Neubauer Marie Papazian Bonny Yi Quan Hanna Dobroszycki
42
Toby Shore Raunak Lally Sarah Kopyto Maria Hellenbrand
43
SUPPORTED IN PART BY THE ARTS INITIATIVE AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY. 44
45
46