Echoes Literary and Art Magazine Barnard College Fall 2018
ARTWORK Ellen Alt…..................................................................................1,9 Maya Sibul................................................................................3, 33 Ruba Nadar................................................................................5, 31 Naomi Chang............................................................................7, 18 Sarah Huang............................................................................10, 34 Cameron Lee...........................................................................12, 20 Margaret........................................................................................21 Nia Holton-Raphael................................................................22, 25 Chloe Zhang…..............................................................................27 Trinity Reeve................................................................................30
COVER ART NAOMI CHANG
WRITING The Buck Stops (Anywhere But) Here by Tian Tran...........................2 La Sagrada Familia by Ivanna C. RodrÃguez-Rojas.........................4 To a Tuesday Being by Sarah Barlow-Ochshorn...............................8 Spring Fever by Sarah Barlow-Ochshorn......................................11 where are the wild things by Willa Cuthrell-Tuttleman..................13 For She Who Wrenches by Amy Gong Liu......................................19 Worship by Amy Gong Liu............................................................23 Her Name is California by Isabel Draper........................................26 still going by Isabella Sarnoff..........................................................28 New Jersey, Birthing Redux by Lily Sickles.....................................29 mom by Anonymous.......................................................................32 Budapest Robin by Alex Volgyesi....................................................35
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Ellen Alt
Poet crashes the car into a deer and they rhyme immediately. one form into another with the skill of lovers; the story starts there. Poet rams the car into a deer and the world watches. the detail is the vehicle, strength and sinew, rust and bone, art is made to commemorate. Poet rams into a buck and the masses pay attention. they say, let’s find it, and they do. and the masses breathe fresh air. things happen after Poet disappears. the crash is still there, vined songs of blood carved into the leather. TIAN TRAN
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“Funhouse I” by Maya Sibul
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I. EL PADRE
I feel you in the tune of the tamale lady on Saturday mornings, My blood boils with pride, with fervor… Yo también soy hija de tenochtitlan My DNA lays out before me, the mestizaje wasn’t strong enough But genetics is a son of a bitch I have to live 2,000 miles and a lifetime of pain away from you You saw me take my first steps, thank you. Father, are you proud of me? To have left you for the land of the unbrave and enslaved… To have followed a dream that became a nightmare? Please don’t hate mama for leaving, I know she misses you more. Father, tell me I’m still yours. I feel you on 16th of Septembers, On the horchata water trickling down the corners of my mouth, smiling widely I didn’t cross the border, the border crossed me Forgive me father, for I have sinned, my spanish is not as good as it used to be I carry you proudly, con el nopal en la frente, I am your seed. I hope they bury me in you, I want to rot with the cempazuchitl flower and chile verdes, that way our atoms will be one, and I will never leave again.
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II. LA MADRE
Mother, where are you? I was born face down, refusing to look around me, sparing myself from the piercing blue eyes of the Aryan men who delivered me only the hue of your blue could ever feel like home. Mother forgive me, For I too can hear the cries of my Island, echoes of silenced voices, centuries of forced resilience. Am I a fraud for not taking my waking breath inside you? This side of paradise is nothing more than hell the grass is not greener, the dream isn’t real Madre, I need you. I can hear my father crying, decades of melancholy spell out your name down his cheekbones. You are the half of me who weeps at the touch of the ocean. Yemaya kisses my skin, reminding me of our painful closeness–– 90 miles and a universe between us. What a cruel thing, this peninsula is Madre, what have they done to you? I was born silent, but I should have screamed I should have ripped my throat out with war cry, a cry in general––Injustice served to a half blood princess. My father flew north from his mother, to find freedom I had no choice but to be born in it, Motherless bastard, I have no home. I love a land who will never really be my own. I did not know I would miss something I never knew. Mother, please tell me…do you miss me too?
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III. LA HIJA
Of maple trees and viceroy cigarette ash, I rose––a modern day phoenix. First generation testimony, product of migrant blood, dreams, and sweat Comment une personne aime-t-elle un endroit qu’elle ne connaît pas? How can I love a stranger, I do not belong. Why did you deport my parents? I hate you sometimes. I wish I weren’t your daughter. Why be the daughter of the tundra––– when I am of the valley of tenochtitlan, of the caribbean sea, of warmth I have many mothers. And you did not raise me, or hold me, or picked me up after I fell–– You did not wipe my tears from heartbreak, and I owe you nothing. You are not special, you are oppressive. Montreal, the city of a hundred steeples, city of French Colonial decadence, Home of poutine, bonjours, and I suppose, of me. Mother says I should forgive you, Father, begs for me to want you, But I do not crave your cold. Maybe one day we can learn to love each other again.
IVANNA C. RODRÍGUEZ-ROJAS
Ruba Nadar
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LEFT “Senses” by Naomi Chang
Hi there rude mass of squelch and sheen –– how are you? The fall air suits your struggle, sludging down the side walk with the leaves you carnified soul consumeconsumeconsume yourself today! You glorious morpheme, lean into the newborn light and let skin slough onto concrete Today is yours, sweet body to explode! Into hot shards of mercury/metal/air You got the resurrection you wished for, spit and pigeons and all. SARAH BARLOW-OCHSHORN 8
“Le Vésinet” by Ellen Alt
RIGHT “summer colors” by Sarah Huang
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Hives hot and alive like strawberries growing wild Itching seeds unexpected thighs turned flushed garden, bumps sprouting all too fast Hives hot like love was, like kissing on benadryl A spill of lip hip-pink dull buzz in swollen ears That anti histamine lovin i speak truth through haze sing an alphabet out of laughter In bed, i wake up with splotchy legs a headache hungover from an unswelling, a fall skin left lonesome
SARAH BARLOW-OCHSHORN 11
“pink tile” by Cameron Lee
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WILLA CUTHRELL-TUTTLEMAN
W
hen I was around four or five years old, Mom signed me up for a Chinese language and cultural immersion course. I’m adopted and she wanted me to stay in touch with my roots. I remember copying down countless Chinese characters, focused more on their shape than what they actually meant, and I remember in Traditional Dance flopping around like I was injured, unable to hold up the long red silk ribbons with my thin arms, and I remember the teacher, Miss Fei, a woman of about sixty, who sounded angry even though she was just telling me that I wasn’t lifting my leg high enough or that I was on the wrong side of the stage. She colored her lipstick outside the lines. When I started coming home in tears, Mom picked me up for the final time on a Tuesday and stayed after the other parents left. I don’t know what she said to Miss Fei; I just hid behind Mom’s legs the entire time and I never had to go back. I was better at drawing class, with Lucia and her husband Diego, a couple that held classes in their small apartment on the lower west side. They helped me with wobbly lines, with wrong proportions. They said I 13
should try drawing something other than dogs and cats. Dad would take me and my sister and my mom to his parents’ house for the holidays. The house smelled of rose soap or perfume or baby powder when there wasn’t cooking, and of fish or crackers or something burning mixed with rose soap or baby powder when there was cooking. We never visited when there wasn’t a party so I remember the house as always being too full of people. I didn’t like my cousins. They made me nervous and they were all old and adult (probably in their mid-teens or late teens or even early twenties, but back then it was all the same to me). They would say something and when I’d respond, they would start laughing hysterically even though I can’t remember what I could’ve said that would’ve been that funny. At my uncle’s wedding in Niagara Falls, one of them made me pose with a martini glass filled with water so they could take pictures, and she gave me her driver’s license to hold up. I was eight or nine years old at the time and had asked the bartender for a martini glass filled with water, because I got the idea of a water martini from a children’s book series I was reading at the time, and I wanted to try it. When they were done taking pictures, they urged me to go around the wedding party and start telling all the adults that I was drunk. I was old enough then to understand this joke and why it was funny, even if I didn’t think it was. My parents called me ‘sweet pea’ or ‘beauty queen’ or ‘wild thing.’ I was all of those things when we were alone together, but I wasn’t any of those things around other people, like the people Mom and Dad brought over to the house for dinner or parties, who wanted so badly for me to like them when it was still too early for me to consciously bestow liking onto someone. If an adult tried to talk to me when my parents weren’t with me, I would cry, or I would bark at them, or I would crawl under the table or run behind Dad’s legs. I hated sitting stiff for hours on Mom or Dad’s lap at huge tables with people who were supposedly my family but who I didn’t actually know, who laughed at things that weren’t funny and snapped pictures of me holding fake drinks for social media. Great Aunt Marie (I didn’t know her name was Marie at the time, or that she was my great aunt, or what a great aunt even was) told 14
my mom at the end of one of those dinners that I was a “simply beautiful Chinese baby” and that she and her husband had always wanted to go to China and get such a beautiful Chinese baby for themselves. I don’t remember much of this interaction but after that Mom was tight-lipped and angry and wouldn’t talk to Dad the whole car ride home. I liked Hawaii more, where Mom’s side of the family lived: grandma and grandpa had an apartment in Honolulu, which was tiny and had wall-to-wall carpeting and two fans as air conditioning. On that side of the family, my cousins and I would play for hours in that apartment and eat Cheetos and watch Lilo & Stitch on the small television. Uncle Bobby would drive us in his car, with broken air conditioning and sand in between the car seats. He’d drive us to the beach or the movies, or to the aquarium, and I would spend hours staring at the fish and dolphins and eels, wanting to live there with them. School was hard when it first began. Alex had light hair and his legs were skinny and he was always sweaty and I loved him. I didn’t understand why others teased and whispered about it like it was a big secret, because it wasn’t a secret; I made sure of that. I told him I loved him every day, out loud in class and after class in person and in between classes and in the nurse’s office when he got a bloody nose (I offered to go with him) and even to his Mom when she came to pick him up. I had been and continued to be a late bloomer, only instead of breasts and acne and periods, it was shame and reserve and embarrassment that were slow to develop. This extended to other things, because when Alex told me I had a mustache, I hit him in the mouth and almost made him swallow one of his loose teeth. The girl he liked was freckled and had milkwhite skin, and when she sat in front of me in class, I cut bits of her hair with the scissors meant for making collages of our family trees. At home, I went into the bathroom and locked the door and plucked out the fine dark hairs above my upper lip, one by one, with my stubby fingernails. I was in there for a long time and Dad finally threatened to call the police or the super if I kept refusing to open the door. Sometimes when I’d come home I’d hide in Dad’s suitcase in his closet, because I liked hearing my parents panic and 15
call for me, and I liked being the one to make that all go away. In science class, I ended up writing ‘Chinese’ in the dominant allele section of the handout chart we were given for an exercise on genetics. Ms. Peterson had to pull me aside to tell me that Chinese wasn’t an allele, and when I told her I was adopted, she looked uncomfortable and asked me if I’d like to work on another homework assignment instead or if I could help her out by going to the art studio and getting construction paper and scissors for the rest of the kids to use for their projects. My partner Victoria raised her hand and looked straight at me and said that she felt bad for people who didn’t know what their parents looked like. Your fake parents are evil for taking you away from your real parents, she told me after class. When I went home that night, I thought about another version of myself—one that I often thought about—a taller, older, beautiful, angry, sex-having, pill-popping, cigarette-smoking, eyeliner-wearing Willa, who wasn’t afraid of anything—she could tell people to go fuck themselves who needed to go fuck themselves, and she could do it with the ease of telling them that their backpack was unzipped or that their shoelaces were untied. And I imagined that Willa walking up to Victoria and saying to her: Listen, cunt. I am adopted. I am fucking Princess Kaguya and I was born under a full moon. I was germinated inside of a budding flower and that’s where my parents found me. I am the baby found mysteriously on the doorstep. I am the predestined Greek hero with unknown origins. My parents are my real parents and they’re better and smarter than your parents, and I am smarter and prettier and better than you in every way at everything that you could ever possibly do or love, and I’ll laugh as loud as I want and I’ll also take up as much space as I want thank you very much and you will bow down to me and lick my shoes, and if you have a problem with that, I will fight you every day after school, because I can, because you’re little and I’m big, and I will win every time. But I didn’t end up doing any of that. I sat in the corner and filled out a Phylogenetic tree and waited for class to be over. Barbara Ann was a mother at school who threw parties for Chinese New Year, and my parents would take me every February 16
to her high-ceiling Soho apartment where kids drank egg-drop soup and cracked fortune cookies bought from Whole Foods or Food Emporium. Rose was my best friend, and she and I would hide under the table and read each other our lucky numbers while kids ran around in rooms they weren’t supposed to run around in and pulled each other’s hair—Jasons and Jacobs and Jareds and Adams and Andrews and Abes and Emilys and Lauras and Sophias and Olivias and Samanthas and Hannahs and Annas, who mashed Peking duck with their pasty fingers and pushed them in each other’s faces. And at the end of the party, a huge dancing paper dragon, puppeted by the underpaid waitstaff. Probably sometime and somewhere, I thought, this dragon was revered and respected, but here, in this downtown New York City apartment with wood floors and enormous glass windows and tacky red tablecloths and adults with matching wine glasses, this puppet was a monster with googly eyes and a mouth too wide with teeth too big. On the car ride home, Mom and Dad would ask if I had fun, and every time I’d say that I did, without knowing if what I felt at the party was what fun was supposed to feel like. It took me a long time to be able to sleep alone. I’d wiggle in the space between my parents when they’d fallen asleep, but Dad is a light sleeper and would usually wake up even before I made it under the covers. If I was older, he’d move to the couch because he couldn’t sleep in a cramped bed, and if I was younger, he’d sometimes stay up with me and we’d mix together all the Stonyfield yogurt we had in the fridge until we created a giant bowl of lavender goop. We’d eat it with granola while stacking colored blocks or playing The Memory Game, and we did this until the sun came up. The early dark blue sky would soothe my anxiety and I’d fall asleep on the couch while Dad sat by my feet, reading the news on his laptop. In the mornings, Mom would let me lay over her lap in bed while she slid bobby pins into my hair. If she saw wax in my ear, she’d tell me to hold still, and while she dug around in my ear I’d ask her about the girl who sang the song that went ‘I’m like a bird I don’t want to fly away.’ She’d always tell me the name, and I’d always forget, because I didn’t much care about the name of the 17
singer as much as where she lived, if Mom knew her in person, if she was sad, if she was fictional, or if she was young or old or if she had parents. Mom and I would share toast, shedding crumbs all over the bed while I asked her other questions, like if it was possible to move things with your eyes, what the word ‘fuck’ meant (which was a word printed on one of her CDs), if angels existed or if she could tell me the story about when she and Dad got me from Nanchang. When she’d give me an answer that wasn’t whole enough or right enough or interesting enough, I’d get angry. If she didn’t have work, we’d spend all day in bed together, and I’d keep asking her questions. Sometimes I’d lay out all the jewelry from her jewelry box on the bed, and I’d go down the line and give names to each piece—this one’s Lucky, this one’s Dull, this one’s Hole, this one’s Blobby, this one’s Bobby, this one’s Angular, this one’s Circle. It went until late afternoon. Mom taught me to laugh and shout and say ‘I’m angry’ when I was angry and ‘I’m in love’ when I was in love and ‘I’m confused’ when I was confused and ‘I’m beautiful’ when I was beautiful and ‘I’m sad’ when I was sad and ‘I’m joyful’ when I was joyful and ‘I’m home’ when I was home.
Naomi Chang
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FOR SHE WHO WRENCHES
Not necessarily apart or together; perhaps directionality doesn’t matter, perhaps Matter, held in her hands, dispels origins, conjures a path out of a plane. Math is simple: human translation of the capability of lines. Jot down an equation; capture the way paper crinkles into itself. For she who wrenches finds blueprints simple, the world and its mercenary machines too flat. Walk past slopes, past boundaries of recognition. Fly, flip a wing: birds tilt so similarly into the angle of folding suns. Find among it all not when but how: the fixedness of things. In place, never the same, again. 19
AMY GONG LIU
“medusa” by Cameron Lee
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“Jasmine” by Margaret
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Nia Holton-Raphael
The Chinese in me lingers like an afterthought, a poorly-wrought P.S. Delivers in garbled floors and politely lingering dreams. No room for it in my worship, where a White god sits and governs my tongue, saying things like I accept you the way you are. A perfect savior for a girl whose mouth forms words like lineage and change and The Wild West with a language that betrays both past and present. Uprooted from eons of rolling vowels to spit out hard R sounds daily. Perhaps
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that’s why devotion feels familiar even when Anglo prayers don’t sit well on my lips. But neither do conversations on the phone with my mother telling me to Go to temple to collect your miracles and me replying with an accented Fei hua! You yourself only believe in something when it’s convenient for you. Meanwhile I hold memories of my spine curling like smoke at altars. Meanwhile I carved through space so desperately, begging gods with fat bellies like mine to forgive me for muttering words that they would never understand.
AMY GONG LIU 24
Nia Holton-Raphael
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I. (Pilgrimage) Her name is California on the edge of America on the edge of coming down the stairs I see her trying to do something with her hair I see my father telling my mother to scrape off the yellow paint and roll my crib to Georgia They are leaving California II. (Destination) I pay 80 dollars to sway under dizzying kaleidoscopes to fuck until I’ve found her somewhere else III. (Ascension) my mother was a beach town-Yankee fusion that soared through coastal skies and flower-rock edges her name is California we talk through the drug-haze the canonization of Joni Mitchell that should’ve been IV. (Sweatpants) we skip the same scenes in movies that make us twitch and pang we listen to the same songs as we drift and dangle I was warned about the dangers of leaving California but not of falling inside it
ISABEL DRAPER 26
“Park” by Chloe Zhang
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his spirit tangles like a bone-white feather twirling between the coarse fingers of a man idle in his lonesome thoughts anxious to feel something unfamiliar once, his spirit flickered with the silver-sheeted flames of a goldfish swirling against stagnant water, knocking itself alongside a glass bowl on his desk, leaving watermarks on the wood beside creased love notes and loose change, seldom visited by restless fingertips, but most often ignored now, the old man sits, his left leg stinging, because just yesterday his spirit was a lit match, chasing itself across a brown phosphorus striker, burning a hole through the thigh of his pants––ouch and one day, he fears, his spirit will be fleshed raw into the purples, yellows and reds, that pepper into a scabbed knee on a child too often careless, poor girl, her experiences slowly blooming into soft pinks over time, learning as she goes––and she is, in fact, learning it’s not too late, she says, to learn as you go after all, she says, you’re still going, it’s the spirit, too, that returns the feather to the sky, sends the fish to the sea, and heals her scabs back to skin and the match, she shrugs, well––it can’t be un-charred but it’s something for you to hold on to, old man ISABELLA SARNOFF
To my testified. To my Jersey. my rat culture Queen— I’ve hated you since the day I was born, with a coupon to Wawa in hand dollar store labels plastered to my crib— worth 1 mill as fine art. Suburbia or into my lungs I tell her she’s funny (because I love to lie to her). Distance make me grow fonder
(truth).
First meal was kids menu, from the diner on Vauxhall. I am a chubby baby emphasis is on very fat, but, as in, phat. I choked on the grilled cheese. Jersey parents harden you from early on with grilled cheese, near death experiences, at diners. 29
"The Human Collective: Our Relationship with the Natural World” by Trinity Reeve
Rita’s drips out of my mouth when I try to speak. Making conversations = difficult. I pay $13 for a mozzarella sandwich then tell someone I accidentally died in a really embarrassing way. I want to say love, loss, exhaust fumes in dirty jerz Something trails down my left leg from a paper cup held hands literally cried when I finished the icie I am bad culture. Confess that I’ve never really liked Bruce Springsteen. Shame, shame. Oops. LILY SICKLES
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Ruba Nadar
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My mother no longer wears her wedding ring Maybe she hasn’t worn it in years She probably hasn’t worn it in months Did she take it off in her bedroom? Was she standing in front of her mirror? Did she look into her own eyes? Maybe she cried I think I’d like it if she’d cried Was the ring difficult to take off? Did she wiggle it with difficulty and think for a moment that she could just leave it on? Maybe it slipped right off Maybe a weight was lifted off her shoulders when it fell to the dresser Did she plop it into the green, rusted Sleepytime Tea tin with the rest of her jewelry? Did it sink to the bottom as she walked away? I only noticed because she got a new ring She turned her hand over to me on the subway and said, “Look at my new ring. It’s twisted like a branch.” My eyes moved over the ring on her pointer finger and to her bare ring finger I held my own hands out Left hand, second finger in, there should be a ring “It’s nice,” I said ANONYMOUS
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“Funhouse II” by Maya Sibul
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“Desk” by Sarah Huang
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I have been to that place where the robins sang and wrapped the wind and their song under their feathered wings, Cast their luck over the Danube where the church-bells rang— My cat brings me her, proudly, red wing crooked, soft feather mangled to lace, Just as boats mangled the Sun painted across the river’s face, In Hungarian there is a word aranyhĂd Which is the Sun painting the river in 35
a bridge of gold, crossing the world, we’ve Been told those stories of Hungary before it was: how the Mongolians stood on the bank of the Danube, and waited for the river to freeze, to cross onto Buda and call it their own, hold it proudly in the mouth as it dangles, Soft, red wing, Have you seen the Danube at night? Frozen over, as if waiting for the men to dress it in their footprints, To walk across water and call themselves God. Do you wonder, If gospel found its roots buried beneath a bird’s wings? Threaded softly until sound split into two, they called this Song. Have you heard the story, about the white stag? And the two brothers who chased it Into the promised land. Losing it to the Carpathians, the brothers picked two wives to seize, Instead. These are our Ancestors. We call the stag Miracle, though I’m not sure if it’s to praise him for leading, or for getting away, 36
Do you hear
how quickly a shrill can become note? When a violin cries, we Call it beauty, then call ourselves country as we sing the anthem Which begs for torment to stop. Our parliament is made of gold, and we’ve sown it into the clothes women have lost their sight threading, They fill their needles with the red We call beauty, We call this beauty gold, Like we named Buda, where tahe sun now sets and paints the silhouettes of copper towers and thin glass in sun, Where the bridge crosses the calm velvet of the Danube. The ducks float beside the ships which pull the currents with them. I watch the red from behind the mountains spill over speckled light into the harbor, where I now sit, filling my eyes up with the sight, Wondering, If this beauty of the world and its gold is a bird’s stolen freedom. ALEX VOLGYESI 37
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