loose ends & nevers Selected works by the Howard Nemerov Scholars 2019–2020
loose ends & nevers The Nemerov Anthology, 2019–2020 Presented by the Howard Nemerov Scholars at Washington University in St. Louis Edited by Shellandrielle Jones and Bread Lee
“The world is always ending. It always has been from the start. Our calling, as artists, is to see the beauty in that, to celebrate and warn and mourn. So we have a job to do and a future and you are a part of that and your friends are a part of that so love each other and help each other and this will become a memory but you’ll have it and you’ll make the world more beautiful with it.” —David Schuman
“I’m really fucking devastated. There is so much I wanted for all of us this spring. You are one of the MOST important parts of WashU for me, and have changed me and gifted me with unimaginable things and moments. I am thinking of loose ends, and nevers, when I should be filled with more gratitude than I know what to do with. Thank you for all of it.”
—Hannah Richter
Dead Reader, For many of us, this has been one of the most challenging and heartbreaking semesters we have experienced. For all of us, it will not be the last hard thing. But we will endure and overcome it. As writers, it’s only in our nature to take such proverbial lemons and make metaphors of them; to form poetry and prose from our deepest pains. May the words written here bring you comfort during whatever hard thing you are facing when they find you just as they have brought comfort to us. — Shellandrielle Jones and Bread Lee
contents freshmen 02. 04.
Sydney Weiss - spring cleaning Joshua Keller - AnImal FrienDS
sophomores 08. 12. 16. 17. 23.
Sophie Devincenti - Grey Cam Lind - State of Jazz, Fate of Jazz Annabel Chosy - Cairo, Missouri Noah Slaughter - Spaces of Infinity Brianna Hines - Plane
juniors 26. 30. 32. 33. 34.
Isabelle Hill - The Rig Kelcie Ford - Quarantine 001 Jess King - Fishnet Bread Lee - The Middle S. J. Jones - Prospect from the airplane window.
seniors 38. 46. 54. 62. 78. 90. 98. 108.
Meredith Brus Isabel Torres Hannah Dains Maya Samuels-Fairs Kate Wardenburg Anna Konradi Elissa Blake Grove Mullins Hannah Richter
i. freshmen
Loose Ends & Nevers
spring cleaning Sydney Weiss
i don’t wanna write. i asked mom “when’s the last time something like this happened?” she said never. quarantined: a word so stigmatized but means lay in bed and watch tv. a day of rest is nice, but when you know it’s indefinite sabbath–microscopic monsters are parading through the streets–it’s less nice. ignorance is bliss, but it doesn’t matter; it just keeps spreading, knowing no bounds, ignoring stop signs and traffic lights. and is this–right now–helping? is any of it helping? i went to missouri and back yesterday, passing little ghost towns along the way. i ate at a sandwich shop, and i’m pretty sure i held my breath till the meal was done. mom drove the whole way. i kept asking, “can i drive?” but even that no one’ll let me help with. dog doesn’t know what to think, tail wagging with condescension. i paint nothing but silver linings and hope to forget the grime underneath. we create more distance until the population density is a mosaic. we keep sayin “after all this is over,” but i’m startin to think that point is mere fantasy. the ripples create tides. i facetimed my roommates, and we laughed until we were in my room on my bed sharing one pint of icecream. daydreaming about “after all this is over.” everyday 2:00 mike dewine mike dewine mike dewine. i brought grandpa chili, tiptoeing around his kitchen cuz he was yelling at his client in new york, saying “soon, de blasio won’t even let you leave your house to go to work!” he’s right. then 2:00 mike dewine closed the barber shops and hair salons, and mom gasped then amazoned a bottle of brown goop for her roots. tornado sirens roared, winds ripped, and rains poured, and passover came early. my hands are tired from making new normal out of lego blocks and puzzle pieces. i’m sick of this game of ‘could be worse.’ at least you got food. at least the roof don’t let the rain in. at least the sun’s still in the sky and the grass on the dirt. could be worse could be worse could 2
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be worse. before bed, when my brain’s overflowed from tv, and my eyes are tired from reading, i just shut them and make my own stories. my mind used to be a prison, but now it’s wonderland. worlds spew out faster than can hit the page, so i don’t bother. i give you this instead. are you happy? is this helping? little dumb bug is crawling up my wall, and normally i’d get it out–dead or alive, don’t matter–but in this half-world where my house is my half-outside and my half-inside, i don’t deem who’s worthy to stay. bow down to the bug king.
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AnImal FrienDS Joshua Keller
Otters in rivers, in search of their mate Bears in caves, staying warm for the winter Chickens in coops, mindlessly laying eggs All playing together Like Pigs in the mud All dying together Like Pigs being slaughtered
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Loose Ends & Nevers
Grey Sophie Devincenti
How do I tell you about what’s not there? I don’t know what’s not there. What I know is silence, the distance, stern jaws, and unspoken words in between. What I know is, I understand the body as in service to others. What I am supposed to know is flesh in hands like dough, hands in flesh like wet folds, teeth on lips tugging at meat, stumbling around in the dark, breaking my body into a warm wet feast, whispering something I constructed in my mind, something I was told to say, all while thumbing the space in between your thighs. But, I don’t want that. — My best friend is doing it too and we are both in fogged up cars with our boyfriends. They are our first boyfriends and our first cars. We are parked alongside the fence of my best friend’s house. He and I sit side by side in the backseat of his car, waiting for the ceiling lights to dim. I think the moon looks too small to be this bright in the sky as I look out the car window. I am avoiding his gaze and what I know should happen next. Once it’s dark I pause a moment before I ask, “Do you want me to?” Perhaps I ask to fill the silence, the nothingness. We are both hesitant because we are young, nervous, and inexperienced. Later I will learn I pause because I don’t want to confront the fact that I want to do nothing with him. But I don’t know this yet. What I know is what comes next. Something on the floor of his car digs into my knee as I try to remember the tips I once read in a Cosmo article: Where to put your hands, how to pull your lips over your teeth, but not always. I know something is supposed to be in his eyes and mine too. I stare up to see white light on the curve of his chin, but I can’t see his eyes. Covered in shadow, maybe it’s too dark to see them, or maybe they are closed altogether. 8
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I wonder how I will know when he finishes. But, I can’t remember if he finished or what he said after. When we exit the car, my friend pulls me aside, giggling. Under her breath she says, “Did you do it?” and I am smiling or grimacing as I nod into her shoulder, trying not to show my face, but we are exposed by the too bright moonlight. Out of the corner of my eye I see our boyfriends fist bump. That night he drives me home and walks me to my door. After the door closes behind me, I go to my bathroom, undress, turn on the water, and wait for it to steam. My skin turns red under the hot water and I cry in the shower with my mouth open. — This was my first experience with other bodies. For the longest time after I try to reconstruct this night in my mind, playing over the different scenarios. Maybe if the lighting was right, maybe if there was music, maybe if, then I would’ve wanted it. But, I knew I would do it again. Occasionally I am able to convince myself that I want it. I am able to convince myself the giddy nerves like bees in my stomach are a form of desire. Besides, I don’t even know how to tell him I don’t want to do what he wants to do. So each time I sit in silence in the dark and swallow the words sitting on the back of my tongue, burying them deep in my throat. A couple months later when he asks me why we never hookup anymore, I say, “that’s not true,” even though part of me knows it is. And when he says “Normal couples hookup all the time,” I think to myself, then I must not be normal. I’ve never been the type of girl who wanted sex. My realization wasn’t sudden. It came in waves that never quite synthesized into understanding. It was like putting together a puzzle, but not knowing what it was supposed to look like. — So, I went on like this, trying to forget my hesitancy, I chalk up my previous unwanted feelings to bad hookups, not the right moment, not the right person, and it’ll get better with time. Eventually I start to grasp at what is maybe pleasure. I start to think I can want. It started one night the next summer. I am with a new guy, he’s not my boyfriend, but I like him more. The night is dark and warm. We’re in a car and there’s music. And maybe it’s the same car. But, I feel something in my body I 9
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haven’t before like nerves or desire or a stomach ache and I want to give this person my body. I want to be a body he can hold. There is a buzzing and wetness and whatever pleasure can start feel like when it buds. I feel all these things. I drive away from the night thinking, that was good. I am smiling and screaming along to a song following the headlights of my car down the freeway. — Around this same time I go to gay Pride weekend in San Francisco with some friends. We spend the day hazily slipping in and out of crowds, bookshops, and bars in the Castro and end up in Dolores Park. There is music coming from seemingly everywhere and so we dance. We ebb and flow with the crowd and all around there are palm trees and bubbles and we are spinning and the sun is starting to set and we are starting to leave as someone grabs my arm. They look me in the eyes and say, “You Ace beautiful.” I thank them and smile and keep walking, but my mind stays there, ten feet behind. “Ace means asexual right?” I ask my friend. She doesn’t hear me over the noise of the crowd. Did they mean I was so beautiful an ace person would find me attractive? Did they mean I was a beautiful ace person? Do they think I’m ace? Maybe in this moment I stop because a small part of me wants to be identified. I want them to be right. I can’t remember their face, but I remember how their words sounded, how I swallowed something in my throat, how I felt the rise of fear or hope. A fear that: the body is not capable; a hope that: my body is valid. — That summer is now two years ago and I still try to bury the memory somewhere I can’t find it. Sometimes I think I might be ace But it feels wrong to identify when I am so unsure. There is still so much I don’t know about myself, my body. Maybe I haven’t been patient enough. Maybe I am so unaware of my sexual needs, I am unable to articulate them, act on them. Maybe I haven’t found pleasure yet. Maybe I am scared. Maybe I am still learning. 10
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and I can’t say what my body wants. It was always dark and I was always looking for something in his eyes. Looking for pleasure in someone else’s hands, by someone else’s definition. I try to watch videos about asexuality, and they just keep saying lack, lack, lack. Lack of sexual attraction. No sexual attraction. I start to sink. I can’t say I haven’t felt any. I can’t say I am completely devoid, blank, nothing, lack. Fuck. Because there are moments when the night is soft and warm and I am held in another body. And that is enough. — But here’s the thing I’ve learned for myself. Asexuality exists on a spectrum... you can experience arousal, you can engage in sexual activity, and that is completely okay... And there’s also the term... Grey-A: People who identify somewhere between sexual and asexual. So, how do I tell you about what is not there? It’s not blank, lack, devoid, silence, or nothingness. It’s just grey.
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State of Jazz, Fate of Jazz Cam Lind
On a warm, sprinkling night in June, I stepped out of my apartment building onto Bleecker Street and ambled towards Washington Square park. It was barely dark, even though it was around the time you would see couples walking arm-in-arm to sit in red velvet booths and sip thick, red wine. I pulled on my draper hat and stuck my hands in the pockets of my jacket. By the time I reached the arch, I was sweating through my shirt. I knew it wouldn’t be long before the jacket was soaked, too, but all the greats kept their getup on the whole night. Miles Davis wore a suit and tie with his cheeks all puffed up on the cover of Kind of Blue, so I figured I should do the same. The walk up Fifth Avenue was my favorite part. Women in kitten heels and polka dot dresses, men in silk shirts, teenagers trying to look like they belonged there; it was all there on Fifth Avenue. I peeked in the front windows of nice restaurants when I passed by. There were those velvet booths and those dapper couples sipping their wine. In a particularly gleaming window, one with chandelier light dancing off of the glass and coating the slick sidewalk, Sun Ra sat at a table in the center of the room. His eyes were closed and he was wearing a beaded headpiece. He reached his hand out across the table to a woman wearing a bright blue linen shawl. She took his hand and kissed it, then took up her fork and knife and dug into a plate of soft lobster. Sun Ra swiveled his neck and looked into my eyes. He held a piece of lobster up to me on his fork and nodded, then went back to his meal. As if the great interstellar pianist had taken control of my mind, I took my eyes off of his bright red lobster and kept walking. I was almost to the kitschy restaurant I was playing that night, and I decided to take Sun Ra’s energy in there with me and do my own thing. The remaining eight blocks to the restaurant were quick, as if Sun Ra’s look was pushing me along. I turned into the back alley and heaved open the steel door. The back room consisted of a ratty couch, which the owner was sprawled across, and a small wooden stool. There was a mirror with a crack along the left side that was splattered in paint from being left there when the room was painted crimson in 1968. 12
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“Leon,” I whispered as I shook the owner awake. “Leon, it’s nearly eight, I’m here.” Leon Lianides grumbled and flipped onto his stomach, waving his hand at me dismissively. The old Greek man slept the whole day and was up all night, making sure his restaurant’s transition from the jazz standards to the experimental newcomers went smoothly. At the time of night I walked in the door, the place was solidly in the middle of its geriatric stage. The sweeping room was full of tables of old guys in tweed suits and women with silver hair. They were waiting for me, although I never really felt like they needed to see me. I grabbed a towel from the closet and started to wipe myself down. The walk over had left me soaked in rain and sweat, and I hadn’t even thought to bring a change of clothes. Leon always got mad at me for dripping all over the piano, but I told him I wouldn’t be working hard enough if I didn’t sweat my ass off. I was fiddling with my tie when Leon sat up, stretched his arms miles above his bald head, and then shook it like a dog. “You look like you ran here, Don. I don’t understand you,” he said in his deep, rumbling accent. “They can’t even see me out there, you keep it so dark. Their eyes don’t work that well anyway,” I mumbled while trying to figure out my tie, but when I looked up Leon had an expression on his face like he was about to shove me out into the alley. “They like you,” he said dryly. “You can’t say that you’re not good, you must get on the stage and play the damn keys. Tap tap like you always do,” he mocked my deliberate keystrokes, knocking his knobby fingers on his knee. Just then, Lennie tapped on the door from the other side of the back room, the restaurant side. Lennie Tristano was my piano teacher. He was the one who first recognized what I could do and taught me everything I know about improvisation and how to please old folks with jazz standards. I shook my head at Leon and opened the door. Lennie’s face was red, and he chuffed at me as he grabbed my wrist and pulled me out to the side of the stage. “You’re late,” he whispered as he pushed me up the two steps to the stage. “And here’s your coffee.” “Thank you,” I said with a smile. Lennie always denied that he was my manager, probably because I didn’t have the money to pay him, but he did care about me enough to get me coffee before I played every night. 13
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I sat at the baby grand in the corner of the open restaurant floor and took a sip of coffee out of the cracked blue mug. I shifted on the bench and began to play the bouncing melody of “Blue Bossa.” As the lonely notes floated out into the room and wove among the tables, I spotted Maria at the bar. I craned my neck as best I could while still playing to get a better look at her. Her hair was pinned back, a single tendril falling down each side of her face. She was wearing a long red dress, and it floated down to her ankles in an ethereal swirl. Her black, pointed shoes didn’t quite reach the floor, and she swung her crossed ankles gently beneath the bar. That was Maria, my other half. She watched me play most nights, when she wasn’t working at the diner across the street. She swiveled on her stool and smiled at me, leaving every trace of grace behind with the huge grin that spread across her face. I smiled back and turned to face the piano again, as my fingertips were balancing more precariously on the keys every second. The plinky rhythm of “Blue Bossa” was dwindling, so I moved on through my tried and true list of standards. When I got to my favorite, “So What,” my hands awoke with a new kind of energy. The coffee had finally kicked in, and I felt the blood moving towards my fingertips. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Lennie close his eyes and tap his foot. Since his eyes were closed and his ears were open, I knew he had forgotten where he was. I did a little riff and a smile spread across his gray face. I kept going, riding my wave of improvisation. The grandfather clock by the bar said half past nine. I was too early and I knew it, but once I started, I couldn’t stop. Lennie’s smile was getting wider. It was strangely infectious, and I soon realized that everyone in that dim restaurant was staring at me. I didn’t register if the look on their faces was content or rage, I just kept playing. “Don, Donnie,” I barely heard from the side of the stage. I glanced over to see Maria, eyes wide, pointing at the bar. There, with his back turned to me, was a hunched over man in a dark purple leather jacket and a silk scarf tied around his neck. I shrugged my shoulders at Maria, I didn’t know what she was trying to get me to see. “It’s Miles Davis, Donnie. Can’t you see him? You’re playing his damn song, for God’s sake!” Then, when she realized she was practically yelling at me, Maria wiggled her fingers like she was playing Chopsticks and gave me a double thumbs up. I tried to keep my cool as I turned slowly back towards the bar. There was the man in the purple jacket, but now he was looking at me 14
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with his warm brown eyes and slowly rubbing his scarf between his fingers. I sat up straight and took a deep breath. Every nerve in my body became hyper-aware of what was happening. A drop of sweat fell onto middle C, like it was reminding me how to play the piano. I glanced at Maria. She was standing back against the wall, tapping her foot a little off beat. Her enthusiasm comforted me. She had never been into music the same way I was, but she humored me every chance she got. On the other side of the stage, Leon was pacing in circles like a chicken with its head cut off, and Lennie was standing calmly with his arms crossed, nodding along. I raised my eyebrows at Lennie and he shrugged. I remembered the look Sun Ra had given me earlier that night. His eyes, like Lennie’s at that moment, told me to keep playing. So I did. I played all over the place, trying to forget that it was for one of the greatest living musicians. When I was done, every key was damp with my sweat. I rose slowly from the bench, making sure not to bump the piano, and took a small bow. I did a hop-step down to the floor and hurried into the back room. After a quick retch in the sink, I threw my sopping jacket on the floor and flung myself out the heavy door. After a lifetime of promise and a moment of triumph, my musician’s jacket lay on the grimy carpet of the back room of some kitschy restaurant in midtown Manhattan, ready to be forgotten. — Maria took me back to our apartment that night on the subway. She and Lennie had found me in the alley, slumped against a dumpster and deliriously crying. The sweet rock of the F train put me to sleep on Maria’s shoulder. I only woke up after we had walked the two blocks from the subway stop to our building, up the stairs, and into our bed. “You did it,” Maria whispered. “You improvised on a Miles Davis song, for Miles Davis. Remember to sleep happy now.” My fingers felt like they were about to fall off, but I woke up the next morning with a remarkably clear mind. Miles Davis, the Prince of Darkness himself, had watched me play. Not only had he listened to me improvise on his song, but he had done so an hour before his own legendary show at the Fillmore East. Many years later, while listening to the live album recorded at the Fillmore that night, Maria would tell me that I was Miles’ inspiration for the magical, funky performance. I always told her there was no way that was true. There was barely any piano on that record.
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Cairo, Missouri Annabel Chosy
I’ve never been to Egypt but when you talk about home I see wave after wave of red sand a silent sifting ocean a mango in my hands split down the middle spilling pulp and seeds the Nile boiled blue Me I go home to a place so cold my breath unfurls in my chest like a flame I was raised by the wintertime by the kind of deep snow that folds over the world You by a heat so dry it burns Google translate tells me my name in Arabic is أنابيلbut I can’t wrap my tongue around it I’m just now realizing I only know you by translation When you tell me about the year you didn’t go to school (“pretty chill”) I hear that loss is the shade beneath every cracked tree each stroke of lightening that embosses the fields a frisson of terror The Internet tells me at least 846 people died in the revolution Revolution a forcible overthrow of a government or social order in favor of a new system an instance of revolving e.g. observing the revolution about the axis of rotation Cairo is the capital but also a town in Randolph County Missouri Pop. 292 humidity 82% I’ve never been to Cairo or Cairo but I know just the same that something named is Just something destined to be unnamed Like me by you as you fold around me like leaves into themselves to escape the heart of the fire.
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Spaces of Infinity Noah Slaughter
The Eye As a child, I played games with light on the backs of my eyelids. I sat on the floor of my bedroom or in a corner of the schoolyard and clamped my eyes shut, watching spirals and flashes of color whirl through the emptiness. I pressed harder, forcing the colors to burn brighter and dance faster. There were yellow dots and shaking white lines, little red bursts and streaks of blue. Darkness bloomed around them all. I wondered if the shifting fibers were the nerves in my head, bouncing light back and forth. If not, I surely saw the colors through a telescope to outer space, as if the light beams were space ether floating above my body. Each time I played this game, I dared myself to stay longer, since I suspected that I was on the verge of discovering something new, something I had not yet encountered within that darkness, something only I could find. I pressed my eyelids down until a dull ache pulled them open again. In this way, I visited a world no one else saw. No one heard it, either, since there were no sounds, as in outer space. I could imagine that this world was as tiny as a dog hair or a dust mote drifting through the air, or so massive that I shrank like Alice after her potion, becoming smaller than I already was as a child. I believed I could sail through this expanse, if I could will myself in far enough. When I gathered my strength to enter that world, I forgot the heaviness of my body. I no longer felt the press of the bedroom or the schoolroom around me, and I was deaf to the shrieks of schoolmates and the calls of adults, none of whom, I thought, played that game. I did not feel the fabric of my clothes so much as the fabric of something other, which, as best as I felt it then, was a sort of lofty, dark infinitude. I was lost in this world of my eyelids, though not in 17
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the ordinary sense of my imagination. For a few moments, deep in the darkness, amidst the flashing spots, I—as a being—was lost. In that never-ending world, I no longer existed at all. The Astral Plane In my second year of college, I first heard of astral projection. One’s consciousness, or soul, or being, however it is named, leaves the body to enter what projectors call the astral plane. The consciousness is said to turn and look at the body before it moves on and leaves it behind. That night, I attempted to astral project. I lay in the darkness of my dorm room, alone on my bed. I tensed my muscles, then let them relax, a strategy I once read about meditation. My shoulders and my jaw, normally so tightly held, sank down slowly, while my hands fell open on either side of me. I felt my body against the comforter as it pressed on the mattress, and I tried to dispel all thoughts of how banal my surroundings were, how incompatible pure consciousness was with IKEA sheets. My breath softened. I had been made aware, or had been warned, that I would meet other beings on the astral plane. I pictured us shimmering over a holographic world, which would be entirely silent and void of people. On the astral plane, I imagined, there were only empty things. I tried not to worry too deeply about my consciousness separating from my body and never returning. When I remember the scene now, I picture my body forever frozen on that dorm room bed, like an astronaut in a science fiction film who never awakens from cryogenic sleep. I hoped I wouldn’t be found like that, though I should hardly have worried, since I never reached the astral plane. I never saw the blue, shimmering world of other beings. Instead, I saw darkness inside my eyes. I saw the colors whirl. After an imprecise length of time, I sailed back down to Earth, if I ever really left it. After my attempt, I tried to decide if I believed in astral projection. I hardly knew. What I did know, however, was that I had a body, and that I wanted to leave it behind.
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The Universe Images of space have always held an almost mystical power over me. When I flip through the pages of an astronomy book and come across a photo of a celestial body, like a nebula or a planet’s rings, I stop and marvel at it. I can do nothing else. This desire to see and to feel the universe, as best as one can feel the universe from Earth, explains why I once took a college course about stars and galaxies. My class spent weeks studying light, and I learned how, deep in the galaxies, the photon—the wispy fairy of energy— breaks from a star, never to return. It passes other stars, where other photons lay, and courses around empty planets of gas, and others of broken rock; it cut that emptiness, that total emptiness. The photon leaves spinning comets, it swims through clouds of thickening dust and bands of hot, blooming plasma. It illuminates moons of craters and hidden ice, frontiers left unsoiled by human hands, perhaps forever. If there are extraterrestrials, light passes them, too. At every moment, light stretches further into the folds of the observable universe, laying down the boundaries and making itself the first explorer in the universe, of the universe. And light will be the last explorer when no others remain. I learned all of this about light’s journey to Earth, and this is how I imagine light still: the voyaging photon, the open universe. When my class reached the Big Bang and the infancy of the universe, I realized that light came before stars. Light came before atoms, too. Strange to call the cosmic beginning the Big Bang when space is soundless, a vacuum, then dust and particles. Space is not lightless. The Past When I was still in elementary school, a dinosaur show came to town, and I, of course, attended. Perched in the rows of folding chairs at an indoor stadium, I watched the dinosaurs wheel out from behind a long black curtain. They trundled about on the concrete floor, performing a prehistoric dance about the big oval. Their jaws snapped at one another, and their tails whipped back and forth. When the flying dinosaurs came out on tall poles, flapping their wings and sending mechanical 19
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squawks into the stands, I nearly gasped. I loved the colors of the dinosaurs, the mottled purples and reds, the deep greens, the eggshell whites of their teeth and of their eyes. I was captivated by the glowing flora scattered across the ground, the flowers that bloomed, then receded with the ages. When a thunderstorm came, I wanted to run for shelter, to find an empty cave. I imagined how the pterodactyl once spun through the air, aloft on his wings, as the diplodocus with its great tree of a neck watched from below. Light passed them both, it sifted through the pterodactyl’s wings, it bathed white the ferns around the diplodocus, it sparkled in the pale blue sky. Light once showered those creatures as they cracked from their eggs, light had remained as their forefathers marched through pre-history, and, as I then realized when I trembled before the asteroid, light presided when the dinosaurs died. The Cemetery I was often sick as a child. There was never a chronic illness, nor a particularly serious one, yet it seemed that I always had something, or I was on the verge of something else. In one delirious night of pneumonia, fully awake but with a kind of shimmering consciousness, I lay on the couch in my home and watched the red glowing light of the kitchen clock, which blinked above the electric stove. In the oven, a single bulb burned, as if it and the silent clock were to guard the night that wrapped around that country home. I watched the shadows they made. I imagined the stove turning into a face, the clock lights becoming its angry evil eyes. In the heat of that night, I felt I was in an empty castle, one with stony passageways that glowered orange from torchlight. The light burned and the clock turned until they were overtaken by the sun; they gave themselves over to the morning. Ear infections struck frequently, as well. The infections recurred enough that, when I swam, and sometimes when I bathed, I stuffed my ears with putty-like orange plugs to keep the water out. Sometimes, the plugs popped out in the water. The pain then, when it came, would seem to split my ears, then my head, until all I could do was allow myself to be rushed inside to the couch, my little lazaretto. I aimed a book at the ceiling and read from below. 20
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Perhaps it was fear of agitating my ears and bringing on an infection, as if that were how infections spread, that founded my childhood fear of noise (and water, and many other things). When an ambulance or a firetruck sped up the hill next to the schoolyard, I ran for the back of the school building, as far from the road as I could get without going inside. I leaned against the red brick wall, of which that school really was built, and read a different book each afternoon. Sometimes, I watched squirrels jump through the trees, and I collected acorns for them. Other times, I stared out the yard and up the nearby hill to the silent tombstones there, on the precipice, and I wondered what it meant to build a school at the foot of a cemetery. I laughed—a hollow sound in the air. The Sky In the sixth grade, I decided that I would become an astrophysicist, to study the stars. In the tenth grade, I realized that what I craved was not machines and mathematics, the things of modern science, but the kind of contact with space that I then believed scientists disdained. I did not want formulae and rules; I wanted the thing itself, the beautiful. This explains why, on one July night, I drove down an empty country road to find the stars. Tall grass waved around the car, and tree branches reached down to scrape the roof as I drove and I drove. Eventually, I reached a flat place, an empty park, and turned off the car. When I got out, I looked up. There were the stars. I lay on the grass, amidst the dirt and the hopping insects, and watched the lights above me. They were all white and yellow, yet each point was shaded just somehow differently. The sky was so dark then, so unlike the sky clouded by streetlights and garage lights and headlights, the things I knew in my suburban neighborhood. The stars were scattered so perfectly imperfect, I thought. And I realized how, in that time, I could have been anywhere. I could have been outside Athens resting on a hill or somewhere deep in the Indian Ocean, rocking gently on wooden junk. I could have been at the top of a ziggurat in Mesopotamia or up in a tree in the Amazon, feeling the forest sway below me. I could have been at any 21
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time because, as I realized then, the sky was timeless. The sky always was, and the sky always will be. This, as I then most deeply and wholly understood, I could not say of myself. The wind rustled the grass, and my body lay still. The Mind When I played the game with light as a child, with my mind leaving my body, which was tucked into bed or soaring up high on a swing, I did not think about light, not exactly. I did not know then why the light shifted around the schoolyard or plunged through the bedroom window, nor did I know how exactly it had come to me. Instead, I thought about the play of color and darkness, the burn of the sun through the skin over my eyes, the shutting out of reality as my eyelashes came down. I thought of light by these means, which is to say that I thought of light indirectly. Which is to say that I thought of light without words or without understanding. Which is to say that, when I thought of light, all I could do was wonder. When I think of light now, I imagine the dinosaurs. I imagine their bodies plodding clumsily through Pangea as the light falls down, it falls down so hard. Though I will never know the roar of a dinosaur, I once saw a tyrannosaur’s bones in a museum in Chicago, as a child. His fossil arched above my body, his forelimbs spread in incomprehensible rage and power. His legs would have crushed me, if they’d had any muscle or flesh left, if they could have moved. Sunlight filtered in from above, cascading down from cloudy panes in the ceiling, mixing with the glow of artificial light as it sifted through those old bones. Long after the sound of the dinosaur, long after the asteroid, when no one left on Earth had heard his roar or smelled his stench, when he was forever condemned to be petrified in the American Midwest, the tyrannosaur was still to be seen, in that raw mixture of light, which showed him the world: the one that I see, the one that he saw. I stood in awe.
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Sophomores
Plane Brianna Hines
Now when I head out to work after dinner I suck on a throat lozenge that does not really taste like cherries and my teeth chatter so I wear my earmuffs that I insisted I needed and they help but I don’t think they helped my grandma when I put them over her poor fingers at her husband’s funeral. It’s only eleven more days and I’m almost back there so again I think of last week and I wish I were as old as they are now instead of later because I always thought we were growing up together. I walk out into the rain from underneath the canopy passing the concrete flower pots that I shy away from in the summer when they are full of flowers and bees and I almost stepped on a grasshopper in September so now I look down and don’t look at the dead weeds drenched in rainwater and dirt but I look up and tip over my purple umbrella under another awning before I wait for an Uber to drive by and then another car only no one else seems to wait because I guess they assume it won’t hit them so I follow behind someone else, then when I get to the other side I glance up as I hear a plane overhead and I still for a moment too long because I wonder if someone I will love is in that plane right now, flying over me as I walk to work and when I start again there are raindrops staining my glasses but I don’t really notice until I am inside at my computer reading the names of strangers as they flash on the screen, marveling at how one day I’ll meet a stranger I could love.
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The Rig Excerpt from Manuscript II Isabelle Hill Dad’s truck is like a giant metal ship that ran aground years ago and somehow found four wheels and a life in suburban Maryland to suit it just fine. It’s a 2002 silver Suburban that Dad has been modifying for almost twenty years. It’s only a few years younger than me but has always been treated with the respect of a senior citizen. Strangers revere the enormity of the truck and the respect it commands on the road. (These are the strangers that stare at me when I drive the Suburban, the men who pull up next to me with their forearm sticking out the window as if to say not even this can hold me.) The Suburban is segmented into fourths: the first filled with the worn, cracked gray leather of the driver and passenger seats, with the center console nestled between. Sugary old coffee spilled and solidified into a syrupy brown goo that traps time-sticky quarters and wrinkled receipts in the cup holders, along with a small collection of oddities that every well-loved truck acquires: a tiny screwdriver, over-stretched hair ties, a few forgotten but once-marveled shells and pebbles. The second row of seats locates the heart of the truck, where the floors are sandy in every season and the seatbelts have stiffened with age and use. The left window doesn’t work anymore because during the summer at the beach Dad rolls down all the windows and puts his sandy feet on the window frame to hoist himself onto the roof of the truck to strap on the surf boards. I sit in the backseat (because Mom got the front when we all rode in the Suburban and didn’t laugh at my jokes about overthrowing her tyrannical rule of the passenger seat, even as I got older and grew taller and the top of my head brushed the roof.) I read quietly while he stands above me, brushing sand off the pages every few seconds and not caring where it goes (because this truck is safe, nothing can hurt it, nothing can hurt me in it.) Now that the left window doesn’t roll down all the surf boards are stacked on the right side of the roof, a balance corrupted slowly over time.
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The third row of seats is forever clouded by the heady scent of Sex Wax left to melt in the flat storage containers attached to both sides of the back seats. The wax melted and filled these rectangles, deconstructed and then re-solidified in their shape. (When things are broken down completely they re-form in the shape of those closest to them. If nothing contains them they disappear.) I used to sit in the extended back seat and pick at the wax, releasing the nauseatingly sweet, soupy scent of coconut and rubbing the thick residue between my fingers as we drove. The wax is always there (it still is.) I smell coconut in every season (because there is no season in the Suburban.) Dad’s very expensive Nikon binoculars get special priority in this section: after each use they must be returned to the proper spot, placed precisely atop the old wax and resting ever so slightly against the window, so as not to be knocked over during the guaranteed bumpy ride ahead. (Binoculars make small things large. Sometimes my brother Henry and I look at Mom and Dad walking on the beach through them, watch them hold hands and walk slowly in the sun, two human-shaped blobs on the horizon connected just barely by extension. Sometimes Mom and I watch the dolphins, sometimes Dad and I try a hand at bird watching, sometimes we like to spy on our neighbors.) The fourth and messiest section of the Suburban is the trunk. A faded fire engine-red tire jack is somehow fastened to the floor alongside the giant blue first aid kit that came with the Suburban almost twenty years ago. (This summer I cracked open its time-heavy jaws and unearthed expired off-brand Advil, an unopened Ace bandage, and a pair of small medical scissors that had gotten so rusty that the fine brown-orange dust created a powdery layer on the clear plastic lining of the bag that held them, staining my fingertips the color of period blood.) These permanent fixtures are accompanied by the transient equipment and junk that floats in and out of the truck. Shovels, dog cages, random bits of firewood, purple rope with blue knots, white rope with tiny black threads, twine, dog leashes, straw sun hats, and of course, sand. All of these collected treasures are covered in a fine layer of dog hair from the ten to twenty different dogs that have lived with us over the years. Two sets of giant headlights bulge like bugs’ eyes on the front of the black, cage-like metal contraption that Dad designed for the front and back of the truck’s body like bookends. A heavy piece of metal anchors the very front of the truck’s body, hanging parallel to the ground just between the top of the tires and the headlights, with two flat, vertical 27
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pieces of metal connecting two more horizontal bars on top of this heavier piece, light in comparison to its mass. Resting on top of these horizontal metal bars are the two enormous, bug-eyed silver headlights that match the size of my head. They’re made up of small, fractured, pieces of glass surrounding the lightbulb arranged in the shape of honeycomb, magnifying the brightness and “turning night into day!” as Dad loves to exclaim. The effect of this construction is a fence around the truck’s original headlights, half a cage protruding from the front of the truck that intimidates and demands space between the Suburban and other lesser cars. This modification was added to accommodate a winch on the front and something to hold the spare tire on the back, a metal frame that swings open like a door with a special handle that requires intimate knowledge of Dad’s construction to operate. I helped him build it. I held the metal as Dad attached a piece of thick wire first to the truck, then to the door, and then we both held our breath as we let go and allowed the heavy frame to swing open and stretch the wire taut. (This wire is still there, holding the metal armor to the body of the truck with tension and strength. Dad hangs his wetsuit on it to dry at the beach because we made it so well.) Dad jumped back and cried “Yes!” and I smiled and later Dad attached the license plate to the metal door, an image of a bright orange and yellow sunset behind a red barn with “HWAY61” printed in thick black letters on top. Dad drinks four or five cups of coffee every day with three scoops of sugar. He has been doing this for forty years. The first time I tried coffee I woke up lying on my side in the backseat of the Suburban, the seatbelt pressing into my spine because I wasn’t wearing it. (I never wear a seatbelt in the Suburban because Dad is responsible, he’s done this before, he was a taxi driver, this is his truck, I am safe, I am his responsibility.) It was around eight in the morning and we were driving to my lacrosse tournament in Pennsylvania for the day. The sun made my face sticky and the heat permeated the tinted windows, left a blanket of stuffy warm air to hang inside the truck around us. I climbed over the center console into the front seat and he handed me a steaming silver thermos without a word. I unscrewed the small metal cup on top and pressed the red button on the cap to release the liquid from within that screamed and hissed as I poured it. I very carefully handed the small cup to him but he shook his head and said, “It’s for you.” I looked 28
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at the dark brown liquid in my hands and brought it slowly to my lips. It wasn’t what I thought it would be. It was thick and sickly sweet, left a sugary residue on my tongue and the back of my throat that I could taste as I ran down the field hours later, made me gag as I stopped to catch my breath and tried not to vomit. (Now I drink two cups of strong black coffee every morning and hold the warmth in my belly all day). Dad calls it “The Suburban”, or “The Truck”, or “My Truck.” When Henry brought it to college in upstate New York for a year his friends all called it “The Rig.” That’s my favorite name. It sounds like an old ship, which, in a way, it is. The tires are so big that I have to step at least two or three feet off the ground to get in. This is my favorite part, mounting the giant and embarking on Dad’s quest of choice. The engine quite literally roars to life, but once the truck starts moving and I remember that it doesn’t get any quieter, the noise builds and layers on top of itself and I forget how loud it is until we reach a stoplight and all the electric cars automatically shut off and everything is silent save for the growl of the monstrous engine. This is when Dad says “can you guess how many horsepower this engine has?” and I say “I dunno, maybe 100?” and even though I’ve heard this a thousand times I can’t even think of what “a horsepower” is and Dad will laugh with delight and say “Nope, 345 horsepower and 455 pounds of torque!!” and I won’t quite get it but I will laugh because he is. This is what it is like with Dad. I do not understand but I love to see him happy so I smile and laugh and ask questions and allow him to teach me things I don’t care about, like how the pistons in the engine work or how to turn off the daytime driving lights “because those are for pansies,” to which I will reply, “Dad, please, you can’t say that” but I won’t say “Dad, I’m gay” because he is happy, he is the captain of his ship and I am his first mate, I don’t know where we are going but I know that he knows, he has to, I am safe. (When I came out to my mom she smiled and said alright. I said please don’t tell Dad and she frowned and said I wouldn’t know how.) I was the first person to ride in the Suburban after Dad got it. When he picked me up at daycare Mrs. Lauren yelled up the stairs “Isabelle, look outside your dad has a surprise!” because somehow even she already knew how important it would be. I hobbled over to the tall white metal bars on the patio and peered through them, saw Dad’s arm sticking out of the Suburban waving like a maniac. 29
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Quarantine 01 Kelcie Ford
Breezes blow Houses stand Family stays Life is lived In a myriad of ways We all want it to be pleasant But unpleasantness will find You in the most unexpected Times Maybe the most opportune Times. Depends on if you’re willing To take a half-empty cup And make it full Or down the liquid So that your parched throat can Remember why water Is precious So so so precious To us
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Humans A weird word For an even weirder group I guess everything is weird then We’ve somehow lost track of the new Because what’s new is strange And what’s strange can be scary But when we remember Change leads to new And new leads to strange But change makes the world go round And change makes the crappy diaper go away I suppose then I suppose then We will be alright As a group As humans.
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Fishnet Jess King
Incorrigible ripples are present. Waveline within them through and through. There is no beneath in the sky full of hills. White chiffon grass exits my socks. We know Velcro does more. You cure homesickness by renaming it. Write a calendar without a ruler. Suspend flecks of foil in goop. Crows like things that shine and so do we; this is nothing profound anymore. Ancient complexity has nothing on today. There is no way to win. There is no way. Epic knots are tied daily. Nothing is really taken ever, only added back and back again. This is the way I choose to see. Anthropomorphic membranes are vibrating; this is not all time is. Sort them by flavor; grate tastebuds over bolognese. It’s been cooking nine years. Sweet balances simmer; pass it around the room. Windbreaker rustles are accurate. Preventative prosody is not limiting, but binary is. Estuary is inverted etchings; writing rivers is spatial. Many things are massive. You are both. Believe in capacity and belief. All we can do. Is the name for concrete complete; edges argue otherwise. Corners exist for a reason. There should never be any more than three. When was the last time you saw a red thermometer. Vacuum sealing falsities does not work. Juice truth through a meat grinder. You are only visible because you can see; is this so. Cubic zirconia is the natural unnatural. A name is nothing but. Mismatched morphemes make something useful. Intention crafts action in a furnace; we are always the judge. A serious storm is better than you. A Xerox of a Xerox of a person1 is half; contradiction is a construction. There are three spheres and you exist in none of them. There are things that rule more than us.
1. Bojack Horseman Season 6, Episode 12 32
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The Middle Bread Lee
Summer brings Mike’s hard lemonade and the 1987 movie Maurice playing on the living room TV. “Lemonade?” my mom asks, eating at the table behind me as Maurice tackles Clive, kissing him. I nod, my bottle half empty. My mom stays to watch Clive break up with Maurice and marry a woman. Maurice’s conversion hypnosis fails and he runs off with a man who wants him. Later, my mom goes to bed. I gather empty bottles, wash them, take off their labels, bury them deep in the recycling. Later, my mom tells me that not long ago, people were arrested for being gay. I nod, pretend I didn’t know.
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Prospect from the airplane window. S. J. Jones The flight attendant tapped my shoulder and smiled at me, a crumpled bag of pretzels in her extended hand. I’d been staring out the window, caught in an emotion that feels like letting go of a balloon on accident. Really, that feels like watching that balloon shrink away, shuddering in the wind, ghost on a string. The sky around the plane was dark and the cities below appeared to me like colonies in a petri dish; blood splatters under an ultraviolet light, God’s gentle, gloved hand holding the world, turning it over: my my, what happened here? We could have been flying upside down, where streets formed constellations, avenues of flowing yellow headlights and red telephone towers, phosphorous and hydrogen, disembodied molecules in uniform conformations; where vaporous chemical plants were galaxies and oceans were the unknown: dark and full of the same shivering light: a silent shadow of the world. I could open the emergency exit, see the night wild with stars, see the slow and quiet tremble of life. I could step out and fall into the sky. Was I leaving and going home, or leaving home and returning? I could not remember. It didn’t matter: there was a constant longing in both cases for the alternative, and that is to say, for neither; I became aware that I will never be satisfied. The space below blurred into thin strings of light: twisting from white to gold to black, bright and disordered and too far for me to reach out and touch from this spaceless mezzanine. The enormity of this night, this sky, this world, felt like it would break something unfixable in me. Then, surfacing from these static thoughts, David Bowie’s voice came forward and sang in my ear, softly, softly, oh no, love, you’re not alone; no matter what or who you’ve been, no matter when or where you’ve seen. It was at this moment that the flight attendant had tapped my shoulder. In my surprise, I rose a hand and shook my head, not meeting her eyes in the dim golden glow of the cabin. She retracted the pretzels, and for the next ten minutes, I wondered why I didn’t say, “No, thank you.” she smiled so nicely at me, the least I could have done was say no thank you.
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Meredith Brus House of Palindrome
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“A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.” —Thomas Mann
I, Meredith Brus, being of sound mind and corporeal body, hereby bequeath the following unto all generations of Nemerovs henceforth. First, the building known as Anheuser-Busch Hall or the Law Lib. Tread lightly here and learn its many secret paths. Second, the menu item known as “Minced Pork Rice Bowl” at the restaurant Corner 17. Delight in its rich and varied flavors; think of me as your taste buds explode upon their encounter with a tea egg. Third, the green rock statues outside of Cupples II, aka the only good statuary WashU has ever brought onto its campus. Fourth and finally, a request from the beyond: please start spreading the rumor that Park and Mudd are haunted because I’m pretty sure they are but no one else will admit the truth.
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The Sun Makes Everything and Then Leaves Meredith Brus Shempi would not be born for another three months when Uthabos died. In fact, news of the death would not reach the small mountain village in which Shempi’s mother lived until three more months after the birth of her son. Despite the fact that a temple full of astronomer-priests was less than a twenty-minute hike from the edge of town, the villagers rarely interacted directly with their solemn and secretive neighbors. Instead, they ferried offerings from worshippers up to the temple and acted as guards, cooks, and servants—and were only allowed to speak to the head priest and overseer of the temple. Nevertheless, while life in the village (named Yoros on-Roxsard) continued uninterrupted, with the lovely exception of Shempi’s birth, things were not as calm in the gated temple compound. This temple was, unfortunately for the priests residing within, dedicated to the worship of noble Uthabos himself, and one of the first places to make the terrible discovery. The night that Uthabos died, a young acolyte climbed to the top of the observation tower, which she had reserved almost three weeks prior. She told the scheduler that she would use the time to divine the implications of a newly-instated tariff on silk, as part of her studies. The truth was not so academic; she hoped to consult Uthabos on matters of the heart—how best to win the attention and affection of another acolyte. The acolyte was quite heartsick, and she laid out all of her tools painstakingly and did all of the rites just so in preparation for her consultation. Finally, she felt ready and placed her eye to the lens of the great telescope. She fiddled with it for nearly three minutes, confused as to why she could not seem to find the red-brown planet in its predictable orbit. Then, she saw it. Dark Uthabos, the god-planet, had been split almost in two. She could see flashes of light as the molten core flowed towards the surface. Great clouds of dust and ash swirled around the planet’s surface, staining it an ugly gray. Two of the god-planet’s eight moons appeared similarly shattered, while four others were nowhere to be seen, probably already reduced to craters on the surface below or floating into the deep darkness of space, tethers cut and lost forever. The acolyte ran to wake the head priest. 40
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By the end of the next day, all the temples of Uthabos on the three continents had become aware of the calamity. Within days, scores of pigeons and messengers were dispatched so the leaders could best decide how to approach the complete destruction of their god. The temples of the other god-planets had to be notified as well, of course (mostly because they, too, had telescopes and the worshipers of Uthabos felt it was very important that no loose-lipped priest of Ylilia could be allowed to alert the entire populace of the situation). So every single temple on the three continents was sworn to secrecy, at least until the six archpriests of Uthabos could decide how to approach not only the total annihilation of their god, but also the unequivocal end to their order. The archpriests met in the sacred city of Warren of-Eulana, fourteen days after the calamity. They sequestered themselves in the temple of Uthabos in-Warren for nearly a week, allowing only senior priests of the order to bring them food and clean their quarters. All servants and acolytes at the temple were barred from entering the compound, and warrior-priests of the god-planet Titer were sent to guard the main entrances, as well as the central meeting room in which the archpriests deliberated. Soon, however, curious citizens noticed more birds than usual being dispatched from the dark granite temple. Considerably more birds, and increasing in number by the day. Within five weeks of the calamity, almost all head priests from across the three continents descended upon Uthabos in-Warren. As they arrived, Titer’s warriors ushered them inside the compound, and they were not to be seen again by the locals for months. Rumors spread like floodwater in Warren of-Eulana. It was obvious that the locus of activity was Uthabos in-Warren, but the temples of all six god-planets were in an uproar. Therefore, nothing could be discounted. Some people speculated that another of Uthabos’ many storm systems had produced an eye, which was always a sign of great ill fortune to come. Others suggested that a passing asteroid had crossed in front of the planet, signifying an upcoming political upheaval. The most popular opinion, however, was that a new moon had been discovered. A new moon meant, of course, that a new suborder must be established, and a satellite temple added to Uthabos in-Warren. The turmoil following the discovery of a new moon never failed to devolve into the worst kind of political intrigue and maneuvering—everything up to and including coups d’état and even assassinations within an order. The number of moons a god-planet possessed 41
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correlated directly with its power in the Pantheon, and if noble Uthabos had indeed gained a ninth moon he had now outstripped his brother, the god-planet Benides. All of Warren of-Eulana waited breathlessly for any announcement to come. But the temple stayed eerily quiet. No priests left, and the few still trickling in from the more provincial temples were extraordinarily tight-lipped and unfriendly to inquisitive citizens. Priests at the other temples were affected as well, closing their altars earlier in the day and refusing to answer questions. The excitement in the city slowly abated, and dread took its place. Yet still, not a single citizen, with all of the dark whisperings and secret happenings taking place in their city, even came close to guessing the truth. But then again, who would think to predict the death of a god? Five months after the calamity (and two months after the birth of Shempi), the six archpriests ordered white flags to be draped over the walls of Uthabos in-Warren, signifying that a proclamation was to take place that day. Nearly the whole city gathered in the large amphitheater located in front of the six temples. The crowd spoke in hushed whispers, sweat bees buzzing around their faces in the summer heat. Finally, the archpriests filed in to the center of the amphitheater and sat on chairs placed on the raised dais, except for the archpriest from Warren of-Eulana itself—Cala Red-Hand—who had been chosen to break the news as the local archpriest and the (semi)uncontested leader among her peers. The six wore the traditional hooded red robes and black sashes of their order. Then Cala stepped forward to address the crowd. She removed her hood to reveal that her face and long hair had been coated in white powder, her hands in black: a ritual appearance used to mourn only the most important and beloved individuals. “Citizens,” Cala began. Her smooth, low voice reverberated almost supernaturally around the packed amphitheater. No one moved. “Citizens,” she repeated. “There is no easy way to say what I have come before you to say. Nevertheless, I have been chosen as speaker for this, the most dire of messages, on our darkest day. Listen closely and listen well, for what I am about to say will change everything.” And so she told them. After that, news spread quickly, and before another month had passed every town, village, and settlement on the three continents (including even the remote Yoros on-Roxsard) 42
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knew of the calamity. The death was mourned extravagantly, and the details of the demise examined minutely for any and all omens. Yet some questions remained unanswered, though they were undoubtedly the most important: why had the god-planet Uthabos died, and what— or who—had caused his death? No answers presented themselves. — The world that Shempi was born into was already gone, although no one in his village knew it at the time. They wouldn’t know it for another three months, when the head priest of the local temple finally returned from Warren of-Eulana to share the tragic news. Until then, however, life in Yoros on-Roxsard continued as it had for generations: quietly. The mountain Roxsard, found on the continent of Eulana, was not an easy place to live. Its soil was poor and rocky, and there were no deposits of precious minerals underneath the surface. Its face was too steep for all grazing animals except hardy goats with two and sometimes three sets of twisted horns. The villagers depended heavily on these goats for food, clothing, transportation, and other things. Otherwise, their diet consisted of scraggly vegetables and expensive imported foods from the lush lowlands. The villagers would never have been able to eke a living from the cold rock on their own, and survived—even thrived—because of one thing: the temple. The temple, called Uthabos on-Roxsard, was unusually large and wealthy for such a remote location. The crystal-clear view of the galaxy afforded from the mountaintop, however, explained both its wealth and surprising importance for a provincial temple. Worshippers of the god-planet traveled from all over Eulana to bring offerings and consult the astronomer-priests. Uthabos on-Roxsard, despite its prominence, was still small, and able to support Yoros on-Roxsard quite well from the leftovers, in return for the villagers’ labor, protection, and their own offerings. It was a small world, and a delicate one. The morning that Shempi was born, a heavy fog rolled into the valley at Roxsard’s base. The villagers felt even more cut off from the world below than usual. A dull silence filled the air, and when one spoke it felt like the words had been flung against a heavy drape, sliding wetly to the ground. Nevertheless, it was a good day because of the birth. Nine years had passed since the last child had been born in Yoros on-Roxsard. Shempi’s mother, Tharine, was young and healthy. Shempi’s father was a charming, if homely, farmer from the lowlands who had come to Uthabos on-Roxsard some months previously to 43
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consult with the priests on an illness sweeping through his livestock. The farmer left shortly after his son’s conception and never returned to the mountain. “It’s a boy!” the medicine woman’s assistant told the anxious villagers gathered outside when she came down fore more water. Twelve people had been waiting anxiously for most of the morning to hear the news—a substantial crowd for Yoros on-Roxsard. “And how is he?” asked old Millen Traigar, uncharacteristically animated for her eighty-odd years. “Healthy as a colt. Came out screamin’ and hollerin’. Mother and baby are both just fine,” the assistant said. There was an audible release of tension from the crowd and several men slapped each other on the shoulders and guffawed, pretending like they hadn’t been just as worried as the womenfolk. After an appropriate period of celebration and well-wishing, Millen clapped her hands decisively. “Well, I’m sure that I have better things to be doing, and so do most of you, I wager, so I will be going,” she said, standing stiffly from her seat on a stone bench. With that, the spell was broken and the crowd dispersed, muttering about the fog and practically the only current events that ever concerned Yoros on-Roxsard: the temple, and in this particular case what those loons were thinking, refusing worshippers entry to the altar. “...just disgraceful,” Mrs. Tappets could be heard commenting to Mrs. Galls. “All that time locked up in that tower their minds go to rot, forget who keeps them fed and clothed. I tell you our lord has a long reach but often he uses mortal hands to deliver his gifts! If you turn away his worshipers surely you turn away his blessings as well.” “Blessings of Uthabos,” Mrs. Galls murmured automatically. “Blessings,” Mrs. Tappets said. “And did I tell you what that overseer said to Larkin the other day? Why, when he told me I almost went up there myself...” And so the small street emptied out completely, the fog settling like a cat now that no one was there to disturb it. The medicine woman’s assistant returned with fresh water. She set her bucket down at the front door for a moment and pulled two leafy twigs cut from an oak tree and a length of twine, which she used to tie the twigs to the door latch: a healthy boy, and a good birth. Then she went inside, carrying the bucket and whistling. The news of Shempi’s birth traveled fast in the village, and it would be the last happy news received there for a long, long time. 44
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Isabel Torres House of Rhyme
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“So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say.” —Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
It’s been such a pleasure getting to know all of you and read your writing over the last four years. You’re all such talented writers, and I hope that no matter where life takes you, you’ll continue writing and share that writing with others. Thanks for the lovely memories, and keep in touch!
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An Italian Night Isabel Torres
The lights glared over the Venice Canal, blocking Celia’s view of the murky water below. She couldn’t explain it exactly, but something told her that that night was the best night to go on a gondola ride for the first time. There was no festival going on, no guidebook had recommended going on Tuesday nights while the moon was full in the sky and the wind blew a chill in the air that seeped through her clothing, but she felt compelled anyway. She had wandered into a gelato store earlier and stuffed her face full of raspberry sorbet hoping that would keep her busy and satisfy her urge to do something violently Italian, but alas, all it gave her was a stomachache. If she threw up on the gondola, at least she could blame the gelato. Clustered all around her were other tourists with whom she felt guilty associating. One woman was even wearing a beret and Celia was tempted to ask her for directions to the Eiffel Tower. The gondolier pulled up to the docks and immediately began speaking with an accent that had to be thicker than his natural one. It sounded straight out of the SuperMario Bros game she had watched her brother play when they were kids. Her hands twitched in front of her. She glanced down at her phone to see if he’d texted her, but he hadn’t. Natural, normal. He was probably busy. One day, he had left his phone at home before going to work and hadn’t been able to respond when she’d called him to tell him what had happened to Mom. Tapping her foot anxiously on the cobblestones, she was actually relieved when the gondolier held out his hand to help her into the boat, greeting he with a “Signorina.” The gondola rocked unsteadily, then righted itself as she was seated. The boat pushed off the docks and headed straight for a low hanging footbridge covered with signatures from people trying futilely to mark their existence. The guide began his tour, peppering his speech with Italian words the other tourists dutifully repeated and informing them all about the magical love potions imbued in the bridges. They only needed to touch the bridge to be assured of meeting their one true love. Excited hands slapped the bridge as they passed under, but Celia’s hand stayed down. She stared 48
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into the murky water as if searching for her reflection. Halfway through the tour, she snapped out of her daze when she heard her phone buzz. It was her brother’s number. “She’s gone” was all the message read. She chucked her phone into the canal, causing the other passengers to look back in alarm, but she paid them no attention. She stared up at the stars, focusing on the beautiful Italian night. What a beautiful night.
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A Real Boy Isabel Torres
Gaining corporeality seemed like a fantasy Of Skin and bones, muscles and sinew, hopes and dreams But he couldn’t be real until he was free from his strings Theme parks, imaginative games, and sports were the strings That tethered him to the candy coated land of childish fantasy The carefree circus that filled adults’ dreams The warmth of rushing blood, the smooth silk of skin filled his dreams Then he’d wake up to rough wood and taunt strings That taunted him, tugged him out of his fantasy. The fantasy that dreams and starlight could dissolve the strings of childhood.
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Atalanta’s New Competition Isabel Torres
Staring out across the sea of restless, eager, immature, boys Atalanta grew bored with the whole idea of the competition. What did it matter if one of them could beat her in a foot race when she didn’t even feel she could hold an intelligent conversation with any of them? “New rule,” she announced, trying not to get a thrill out of how she commanded the room’s attention. “You’ve heard of this modern invention called speed dating, right? Well, the next person who can hold a conversation with me for two minutes without putting me to sleep can have my hand in marriage.” At that, the quiet conversations in the room escalated to a dull roar as all the boys seemed to speak at once. The sound echoed across the marble walls of the throne room. Atalanta could barely make out what they were saying, but it sounded like they were all fighting over who could hold the best conversation. She had to roll her eyes. Soon enough, a table was set up for Atalanta to receive her suitors, each of whom was given a number. Her father called for silence, and a glorious hush filled the room. The suitors all lined up in a single file line that wound all the way across the throne room like a snake, out the door, and all the way down the steep hill upon which the palace was built. Atalanta felt quite similar to a character at Disney World, which she wasn’t sure how to feel about. The first suitor up was Jason, who had the appearance of a human golden retriever. “Hey, my name’s Jason, and I can name all of the NBA players’ stats. I was so close to having a perfect bracket for March Madness and-“ “Next!” Atalanta called immediately, feeling her eyelids drop already from the few seconds she spent talking to him. The next suitor wasn’t much better. He was a gamer who claimed she couldn’t possibly understand anything about his “hobby” because she was a girl. On and on it went, an endless parade of male mediocrity. Just when she was about to call it a day so that her ears could stop bleeding, a new suitor approached the table, Meilanon. Instead of launching into a discussion of his interests and obsessions, he simply asked, “What do you want to talk about?” 51
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The words were like shiny golden apples, miraculous and a welcome distraction from the tedium of the day. She immediately ended the competition and declared Meilanon the winner. She had no idea, and how could she, that he had paid her friend Aphrodite to find out the answer she would want to hear.
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Hannah Dains House of Limerick
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“I do have a devil inside of me. It says, ‘live.’” —William Gibson
I, Hannah Dains, being of silly mind and stalwart soul, do here bestow my last gifts on the Nemerov Scholars. To my sweetest House of Limerick, I give the pagan pantheon, and hope they will honor them well. To Harry, I leave the secret silence of the tops of the ginkgo trees, the dark hidden corners of the third floor of the DUC, the basements and the tunnels that are easily accessed and easily forgotten. May you fill them with whatever lovely things you see fit. To Bread, I leave the twisting DNA of sangria oranges, pulpy and sweet at the bottom of the pitcher and filled with more information than anyone could ever hope to string into something beautiful. I leave you this in a sealed mason jar along with Olin’s single battered copy of Richard Siken’s Crush. To Henry, I leave the entire discography of Smash Mouth, plastic artillery knives, a wine bag full of blood, and every joyous laugh you have ever coaxed out of tired lungs. I know you will use them well. To Sydney, newly and happily found, I leave velvet scrunchies in every color of the rainbow, battery powered string lights twinkling always in the corner of your eyes, and taxi fare to Almost, Maine. And to all of you, I leave the promise of a future where we will all hold each other, when it will not feel like dying, not at all, not ever again.
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What the Girls Know Hannah Dains
Sadie and Grace sit on the grass at recess and share their theories. Sadie’s father told her that Mr. Richards had gone to teach in a different state and he definitely wasn’t coming back, but Grace’s mother said that he had stopped teaching music because he was going to be a professional musician instead, and he was going on tour somewhere far away. Grace was especially sad he was gone. She had liked Mr. Richards, she had even made him a friendship bracelet when she had extra string after making one for Sadie and one for her mom, and she had seen him wearing it, the tied-off yellow ends sticking out from his shirt sleeve. Sadie had never been in Mr. Richards’ class, she had been with Mrs. Packer, who was old and mean and forced everyone to learn the recorder before anything else, and Sadie was secretly very happy that Grace would be joining her so they could gossip together about how the spots on Mrs. Packer’s chin made her look even uglier than she already was. Grace was more concerned with where Mr. Richards had gone, though. She pressed Sadie further, wanting to know if she really was absolutely sure that her father had said Mr. Richards would be teaching in a different state, because Grace’s mother had said he was touring, and that meant two very different things, obviously, and Grace’s mother was sure, so sure she told Grace that she never needed to ask about Mr. Richards again. But Sadie said that her father had told her Mr. Richards would be teaching, definitely teaching, so what was Grace’s problem? Eventually, because the recess bell rang and Grace and Sadie’s teacher had promised they would watch a movie between recess and lunch, they decided that at first Mr. Richards was going to leave to teach somewhere else, but then on his way someone realized he was really good at music and invited him to go on tour instead, so he did. Grace said it made sense that he was going to be on tour, because he was really good at music, which is why he was such a good teacher. Sadie was glad she and Grace had figured it out, because they had a rule, which was that they were best friends, and best friends never 56
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fought, especially not for longer than a recess period. Another part of the rule was that they never fought about boys, because boys were stupid. Grace told Sadie she was especially glad they didn’t fight over a boy, and Sadie laughed, because Mr. Richards wasn’t a boy; he was a grown up. Grace didn’t tell Sadie this, but there was another reason why she didn’t think Mr. Richards would have left just to teach somewhere else. She knew it wasn’t just some other dumb teaching job because Mr. Richards wouldn’t have left Dearborn Elementary without telling her. She was his favorite student, he said so after she gave him the friendship bracelet, and again when he asked her to stay for a few minutes into lunch period so he could braid her hair. And he did a really good job, he didn’t pull too hard like her mom always did. Even Sadie thought the braids were pretty, except Mr. Richards had said Grace should keep it a secret so she didn’t tell Sadie who braided it. The next day she had brought her favorite purple hair clip to school, just in case, but Mr. Richards was gone, so she and Sadie made daisy chains from the little white flowers that grew in the grass next to the third grade bungalow and put those in their hair instead.
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my father used to hide his joints on top of the fridge and I considered stealing one but I never did Hannah Dains the first time I smoked it was my senior year of college with a boyfriend that I knew I was leaving soon I just hadn’t said anything yet we stood in a circle with two other friends and when I inhaled the first time I didn’t cough but the second time I did the burn in the back of my throat hard and painful I thought I was going to vomit but I didn’t the other girl did she drank too much we had to call an ambulance but she ended up okay and none of us got in trouble except for that one guy who was twice all of our ages he asked for a smoke and we didn’t say no because what if he got mad and we had seen him before when he got mad and he remembered my name which I didn’t like at all but after they called the ambulance for the other girl they kicked him out of the party and then told him he couldn’t come back which was good because what was he doing there in the first place the second time was that summer once in the woods near work with two of my friends guys who worked in the boathouse one of them had brought a little bubbler from home even though we would be in such deep shit if we got caught like sent home goodbye no more paycheck type of deep shit but whatever it’s a summer job anyway my boss smoked too he told me so even offered to share but I said no to him because he wasn’t my friend and it ended up fine I mean we never got caught someone else did he wasn’t smoking though poor kid he was just underage and got so drunk he pissed himself and missed his morning shift on the fourth of july and no one could get his door open until they had to call security and then they had to let him go anyway this was after he tried to kiss me in the kitchen we all shared and I told him no sorry kiddo you’re a little too young for me but before now when the guy with the bubbler asks me not to tell his wife we smoked today but I’m not listening because the other guy finally has his arm around me and I want it to stay there 58
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the third time I had made it to the city and I was in this guy’s apartment we stood on his balcony sharing a joint and my throat still burned but we both spit over the side and watched it fall and laughed we had met in a fucking improv class as if it’s ever a good idea to meet someone there on the first day the instructor told us all to find a partner and tell each other stories from our pasts and I told him about the time I spent a week in Yellowstone and he told me about the time he tried DMT and at some point in the next five weeks I decided I wanted to sleep with him so here we were on his couch me coughing like some high schooler with my head in his lap as he stroked my hair and told me he was sorry he had to be drunk or high to do anything with me but there was a reason something in his past where someone his uncle when he was very young he wasn’t being very articulate and I told him he didn’t have to tell me anything else and then he kissed me and the next morning when I told him that was only the third time I had ever smoked he asked me why and I told him the truth which was that I never actually felt anything but I wanted to keep trying
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leaving is not enough. you must stay gone. Hannah Dains the condom breaks and he says no wonder it actually felt good that time. he says yeah you can spend the night if you need to but give me twenty minutes to go next door and buy coke. there are no sheets on his bed because he sleeps on his couch most nights so i go out to the living room and sit among the ruins of his evening or maybe the last three weeks of evenings. his bong is filthy but it’s not empty and i find a lighter under a taco bell wrapper before deciding not to finish it off because i don’t know if he remembers what’s left behind. my phone lights up with a venmo notification from him. fifty dollars for plan b because he doesn’t remember i’m on the pill. i check for any other messages but it’s four in the morning so what did i expect. my last text message is from him. the door is unlocked. you knew that already. and before that, oh come on you and i both know you’re not getting anything better. and before that, sup come and fuck me. sent and seen at two am. he gets back from next door and sits on the couch across from me. divides the coke into lines with his bus pass. inhales it through a hollowed out bic pen. he starts talking to me about a girl he dated in high school. i send the fifty dollars back but he doesn’t notice. he wants me to know that he likes talking to me and he likes when i come over but he doesn’t feel anything special for anyone right now. yesterday he asked my friend to dinner and she refused but he doesn’t know that we know each other. he’s still talking when i fall asleep on the couch but when i wake up he’s asleep on his bed under a towel. i go to put my socks on but they’re still damp so i take a pair of his. he doesn’t ask for them back.
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Maya Samuels-Fair House of Oxymoron
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“Keep it interesting.” —Stuart Flynn
I, Maya Samuels-Fair, original member of the House of Oxymoron, am not leaving a will. I am writing a confession. It was Friday, March 13th. Spring Break was extended, the semester cancelled. I took a last walk through our abandoned campus and, in a moment of desperation, tread on the Great Seal under Brookings Arch. After all, if this could cancel graduation, maybe it could bring graduation back. The earth shook. The Seal rumbled, and then sank into blackness. Living in 2020, this didn’t even phase me. I reached a steady hand down into the pit and heaved out a small but weighty wooden chest. The Seal clinked back into place, and I ran the chest up to my laboratory. But the contents weren’t meant to save my graduation – they were made to help Nemerovs present and future. To you poets, bards, critics, and creatives, I give the Treasure of Brookings: the Amulet of Authority, the Orb of Opinion, and the Harp of Home. So long as I carry these tokens (and they shall never leave my person), you should henceforth always have confidence in your powers, always have conviction in your beliefs, and always feel at home in any situation. Leave me your doubts and go take the world by storm.
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Sex, Death, and Probability The Narrative Power of Evolutionary Biology Maya Samuels-Fair Conjure the best mental image you can of your parents when you were about seven years old. Did they have food stuck in their teeth? What brand were their shoes? How often were they getting haircuts? I don’t know either. I could easily, however, tell you what kind of Chips Ahoy they bought me, how many I was allowed to eat, and how many I could “sneak” before Mom put her foot down. I could tell you what kind of mood my mom needed to be in before I asked if we could go to the zoo, and how I could tell her mood from the way she pulled back her hair. I paid attention to everything about my parents only insofar as it served my wants and needs, with zero curiosity about them as individual people. Then, little by little, they told me stories about their pasts, and I realized how uncurious I had been, how I took their peculiarities for granted. I knew them too well to know them at all. I began to constantly investigate the mundane. When I was seven – a third grader – I all of a sudden had two questions; Why weren’t my parents signing me up for football? And were trees alive, exactly? Everyone took for granted that, as a girl, I either could not or should not play football. They could say it to my face without feeling the need to give me any further excuse. I quickly learned some cultural norms are so pervasive, they are treated as natural law. As to my second question… I knew trees were plants. I thought leaves were alive, seeing as they grew and then died. Tree trunks, though, seemed more like rocks: senseless and permanent. And what about branches? I didn’t ask anyone, embarrassed not to know something so fundamental. I could have listed all the planets in the solar system, in order, and for extra credit told you which ones had rings. I should have had trees covered. I kept asking questions about trees, microbes, and eventually fossils. I asked “useless” questions, and I especially questioned what others took for granted. My worst suspicions were confirmed; most of 64
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us only pay attention to nature as it pertains to our wants and needs – food, beauty, entertainment – and as a result, our culture is rife with misconceptions about biology, particularly evolution. We know the Earth and its life like young children know their parents. That is to say, not at all. Teaching every high school biology class that Deoxyribonucleic Acid is the molecule of heredity (and the mitochondrion is the powerhouse of the cell) has not really helped the situation; “fewer than a third of Americans understand evolution and natural selection” (Montgomery 2019). Genetics doesn’t tell you why species go extinct, or why the Amazon rainforest is so diverse. To answer these questions, we have to observe long-term, large-scale, real-world phenomena. Though we people have been observing the natural world for thousands of years, this has served only to propagate some strong cultural beliefs about the natural world and our place in it. If we weren’t trying to command life’s course, then maybe I could let these misconceptions slide. But many – particularly Western – voices use “scientific-sounding language” to disguise cultural beliefs as absolute truths and justify problematic worldviews (Ball 2019). Aristotle was perhaps the original offender. He believed humans were the most advanced, enlightened life forms. He also collected specimens of hundreds of species, studying wildlife in such detail that I’ve heard him called the father of biology more than once. But his inability to keep his beliefs out of his science has caused biologists a lot of trouble. Aristotle organized life into a “Great Chain of Being,” with humans at the top, followed by other primates, followed by the other animals, followed by plants (Rigato and Minelli 2013). Predating Darwin by several centuries, Aristotle had species ranked, rather than related. Then Darwin famously drew a tree in his notebook captioned I think; new species branched off from their common ancestors as life diversified. But the two ideas were hopelessly conflated. Many still understand these Darwinian phylogenetic trees of relatedness in Aristotle’s hierarchical terms; highly-derived, short branches representing relatively new species are thought to be more advanced and better adapted, while long branches representing relatively old species are thought to be lowly and primitive (Rigato and Minelli 2013, “Misconceptions about Evolution”). Nothing could be further from the truth. Compare a dragonfly to a jellyfish and tell me which one is more advanced. They are equally incapable of filling each other’s role. Evolution does not 65
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improve species (“Misconceptions”). Individuals vary by random chance, which we call drift. Then, arbitrary environmental factors cause some individuals to have more offspring than others, a process we call natural selection (“Misconceptions”). There are some calculations to be done across space and time, but that’s the gist. If you are tempted to resist this fact, you might be wishing that you were put on a custom planet. In “A Compassionate Substance,” Science editor Philip Ball argues we thirst for intelligent design in nature for a “deep psychological purpose” (Ball 2019). Ball is concerned by modern research that claims water’s particular chemical properties make it the best and perhaps only medium for life’s evolution (Ball 2019). Yes, even scientists still fall into Aristotelian thinking when comparing species. One study found 1,287 preeminent journal articles published between 2005-2010 with hierarchical language (Rigato and Minelli 2013). This isn’t a squabble over word choice, or about making the Lesser Apes feel less than. At its worst, the language of evolutionary superiority has been used to justify Social Darwinism (Rigato and Minelli 2013). At best, hierarchical thinking in biology purports that a culture of anthropocentrism is rational. Ball believes this hypothesis is appealing because we would like to think this world was fated to be. But fate isn’t testable. In reality, life adapted to water, not the other way around (Ball 2019). What looks like fate was actually billions of years of evolution – of sex, death, and probability. While research can be objective, biologists themselves will never be. We would only be pretending that the beliefs implicit in our language are objective. Instead, I as science storyteller have to be deliberate about my narrative choices, and you in the audience should be wary of my intentions. How objective science is presented has a cultural impact. Aristotle taught people to think in an anthropocentric way. Today, however, many evolutionary biologists are making a unique, positive cultural impact. We are telling stories that help people appreciate how ancient, diverse, complex, and precious life on Earth is. We aren’t all conservationists, actively working to protect species and restore habitat, but our stories motivate people to support those efforts. I am showcasing stories that demonstrate evolution research’s capacity to dispel anthropocentric perspectives. Even theoretical research can shift one’s perspective by explaining a pattern that’s normally taken for granted. Perhaps the most basic question is why some things exist and others don’t. 66
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Considering we share the Earth with narwhals, giraffes, and kangaroos, I have a hard time imagining an animal too outrageous to exist. Okapi, for instance, look like a giraffe-zebra hybrid drawn by Dr. Seuss. I am still getting over the time I stumbled across the rhinoceros hornbill, a fat black bird with a big red banana sticking out of its forehead. (The zookeepers assured me the bird was real; his name was Liam.) Compared to what is really out there, human mythology seems reasonable. If we have okapi, why not hippogriffs? If we have narwhals and hornbills, why not unicorns? There are actually rules to this game. In the 1980s, many scientists of the lab coat variety were studying why life evolves in certain ways and not others. They knew about DNA, but they didn’t know yet how to turn genes on and off to induce mutations. Instead, they tried to explain stories of “monster” mutant animals in historical records (Alberch 1989). Why were there snakes born with two heads, kittens born with one eye, but no dogs with three heads? Pere Alberch called this “The Logic of Monsters,” the title of his essay slash instruction manual for evolution’s creature-creating game (Alberch 1989). Alberch focuses on vertebrates, because everything with a spine shares a common set of genes encoding the development of a similar body plan; we have an axis of bilateral symmetry right down our middle (Alberch 1989). The developmental timing of this axis of symmetry in conjunction with all our organs and tissues needs to be very precise. Small errors in timing can be devastating. If certain embryonic cells rush their choreography, the overdeveloped head will bifurcate along the spinal axis into two (Alberch 1989). If these tissues lag behind, the underdeveloped head will only be able to fit a single, central eye (Alberch 1989). Single mutations at multiple positions in this sequence can throw off this delicate balance, so cyclops and twoheaded animals do occur (Alberch 1989). To get three heads, however, development has to go awry twice – first to duplicate the spinal cord, and then to bifurcate one of the heads – which is far more unlikely (Alberch 1989). Alberch only found examples of three-headedness in any species occurring twice in human record. Anyway, genes usually serve multiple purposes, meaning mutations usually have multiple consequences (Alberch 1989). Due to these pleiotropic effects, victims of cyclopia and bifurcation are probably not biologically functional. So, Polyphemus is more likely than Cerberus, but neither would live for very long. 67
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Since mutating just one developmental pathway can add heads and subtract eyes, you can imagine what evolution could do to our arms and legs, our teeth and hair. Infinite changes are imaginable. Like two-headedness, a lot of these changes would not be functional, so the animal would die without passing on its genes. Mutations may increase or decrease an individual’s fitness, meaning the number of healthy offspring an individual lives to produce. Since the fit have more offspring than the unfit, over the generations disadvantageous mutations become rare and advantageous mutations become common. Two-headedness is thus eliminated from nature by this process of natural selection (Alberch 1989). Three-headedness, however, is such a rare mutation that most species never get to test out how functional it could be. This was Alberch’s big revelation – the diversity of life is limited not only by what forms can survive, but also by what forms can develop in the first place (Alberch 1989). Our infinite potential creatures – dragons, gryffons, and unicorns included – are mostly unrealized, because of extrinsic environmental limits and intrinsic genetic restrictions (Alberch 1989). These restrictions on how species can evolve matter, because fitness isn’t constant. Species span a theoretical mountain range known as the adaptive landscape (Alberch 1989). Advantageous forms are on the peaks, while inviable forms lie in the valleys (Alberch 1989). Twoheadedness sits in the deepest trench, but most traits span the slopes of mediocrity. Natural selection pushes evolving species up towards the pinnacle of the nearest fitness peak (Alberch 1989). But since the environment is always changing, the adaptive landscape is always fluctuating (Alberch 1989). Right now, with human-borne climate chaos and habitat destruction, the adaptive landscape is changing violently. Specialized species that were safely on adaptive peaks are now being plunged into valleys, and they are limited in their capacity to adapt. When we lose a species, we lose everything it could become. What future life looks like will be constrained by the limited evolutionary possibilities open to the survivors. The theoretical nature of Pere Alberch’s research makes the takeaway generalizable, a lesson in why every species matters. However, focusing solely on the processes that all species have in common would be a mistake. When we focus on general models, we overlook informative caveats and gaps in knowledge. Researchers who focus on single species, sometimes for their entire careers, contribute this specificity. The stories they tell are even more compelling for their rich detail. 68
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Somewhere in Amazonia, a queen ant of the Attini tribe is searching for a place to start her colony. She carries between her mandibles a mouthful of fungus, a cutting from her home crop she picked before setting off on her solo journey. If she burrows well and births healthy workers, they will grow this fungus on fresh leaves into a farm large enough to feed a colony of millions. Agriculture has evolved in humans, bark beetles, termites, and ants (Schultz and Brady 2008). Fifty million years ago, ants began to supply their favorite fungi, parasol mushrooms, with detritus to eat (Schultz and Brady 2008, Schultz et al. 2015). By feeding their food, the colony could sustain a large and dependable sustenance supply. We’re still wondering what could have inspired the first ant to bring an offering to her prey, but once they started, we can imagine how natural selection would favor the farmers. Colonies with a better food supply would be larger and longer-lasting, qualities that would help them produce more queens. So long as the farming behavior was hereditary, farming queens would outcompete their hunter-gatherer sisters until farming became the norm. (You’re right to wonder how farming behavior gets inherited, but that’s another story). Ten to twenty million years ago, ants evolved three new agricultural strategies (Schultz and Brady 2008). One group specialized in coral fungi. The next group specialized in yeast. The third group domesticated the parasol mushroom. Their fungal crops lost the ability to survive without their ant caretakers. They also evolved plump, nutrient-rich hyphae, like ears of corn, to keep the ants coming back for more (Schultz and Brady 2008). In the last ten million years, a subset of these domesticating ants evolved the ability to grow their fungal crops on fresh leaves, which are abundant but toxic if eaten directly (Schultz and Brady 2008, Shultz et al. 2015). Queen leaf-cutter ants pass down their domestic fungi cultivars like heirlooms, co-dependent and co-evolving. But ant farmers can also face blight. Bad parasitic fungi of no value to the ants come and eat their good fungal crops, like white mold on old portabello mushrooms. To save their crops, leaf-cutter ants use fungicides (Barke et al. 2010). No, they can’t go purchase a bottle of RoundUp. Instead, they carry bacteria that are toxic to the bad fungus and harmless to the crop. They pick up bacteria from their environment and grow them on their persons (Barke et al. 2010). The bacteria that make successful fungicides are passed from queen to queen along with their precious fungal cuttings.
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I’m picturing a scene right out of a period drama; a mournful brass ensemble plays as these young queens leave home with a cloak of protective bacteria and a mouthful of food they dare not eat. While we still don’t understand exactly how these particular species came to strike this balance, we can explain this system in terms of natural selection on hereditary behaviors. The bottom line is that each species involved – the ants, their fungal crops, the parasitic blight, and the antifungal bacteria – increasingly behaves in ways that increase their number of offspring. Over fifty million years, this simple process can have big results. On the other hand, time and natural selection may get you nowhere. In 1938, a South African fisherman delivered his bycatch to a local natural history museum, and Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer was handed a career-defining surprise (Amemiya et al. 2013). One hefty fish had long, lobe fins reminiscent of arms. She recognized this species. The problem was – the coelacanth was supposed to have gone extinct 70 million years ago. Since Marjorie was confronted with this first living fossil, hundreds more coelacanths (pronounced SEA-luh-canths) have been found, comprising two species named Latimeria for their discoverer (Amemiya et al. 2010). This rare fish lurking in the Indian Ocean looks exactly as it did in the time of the dinosaurs. Continents shifted, mountains rose and fell, ants evolved agriculture, and yet the coelacanth remained completely unchanged. The extent of their inertia is miraculous. These fish are of particular interest, because their fins’ cartoonish resemblance to arms is no coincidence. We vertebrates share our most recent aquatic ancestor with lungfish and coelacanths (Amemiya et al. 2013). This means that the unchanging coelacanths swimming around today still resemble the fish that first wriggled onto land. While evolution took us from lungfish to mammals, birds, reptiles, and amphibians, the coelacanths have just been circling the same seas. Living coelacanths get us about as close as we can get to having the genome of our aquatic ancestors. It’s almost time travel. But it’s not that the coelacanth can have genes that never mutate. The coelacanth owes its inertia to its stable environment (Amemiya et al. 2010). The tropical waters it calls home have provided a steady habitat, so they haven’t had to respond to environmental change (Amemiya et al. 2010). Coelacanths also lack natural predators, so they aren’t pressured to evolve defense strategies, either 70
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(Amemiya et al. 2010). Still, some harmless mutations have accumulated randomly over the years. The coelacanth genome is not exactly as it was. It’s just, compared to the difference between a cow and a penguin, the change seems negligible. So, is the secret to surviving the epochs settling into a stable habitat like the coelacanth, or expanding to untapped locales like the vertebrates? You’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Myriad things can cause extinction: species can lose a competition for resources, get obliterated by an asteroid, or have their habitat whittled to nothing by climate change. People love to say that the rats and roaches will outlive us all, but with humans gone, the species dependent on our refuse actually would have a tough time in the real world. Perhaps the longest-lasting group of species of all time, the trilobites did nothing spectacular to persist. They lasted 270 million years. They generated 25,000 species. And they were pretty much just ocean roly-polies. Trilobites were early arthropods, like pill bugs, lobsters, spiders, and all the other invertebrates with exoskeletons. They crawled along the seafloor and, when threatened, would curl up into a protective ball (“Trilobites”). Besides that, they were quite diverse. Some were herbivores and others carnivores – some species of trilobite ate other trilobites (“End of the line”). They could be a millimeter long, or a foot (“End of the line”). Some wore ornate spikes to deter the predators swimming above (“End of the line”). They were globally distributed, and they survived the first two mass extinctions (“End of the line”). But even they, ever so gradually, went extinct. During their last 100 million years, the only remaining trilobites were less than an inch in size (“End of the line”). No one is sure why they incrementally but steadily decreased in size and number – perhaps overconsumption by too-efficient predators, perhaps sea level change (“End of the line”). Arbitrary environmental change can flip the odds on species. But their humble persistence has made them a paleontology poster-child. We cut living species less slack. People will tell you pandas are meant to go extinct. They’re picky eaters. They reproduce slowly. Above all, they’re lazy. If you want to make this sound scientific, you could say that pandas are adapted to a highly specific ecological niche whose instability makes them vulnerable. Eight million years ago, pandas diverged from the common ancestor they share with the bigger bears (Wei et al. 2014). This ancestor was a carnivore, and while pandas have 71
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retained the ability to digest meat, they evolved to choose a diet of tough bamboo (Wei et al. 2014). Bamboo is nutrient poor, so pandas need to eat twenty pounds of leaves a day (Wei et al. 2014). If leaves are scarce, they need to eat eighty pounds of shoots (Wei et al. 2014). Yet, in normal circumstances, this isn’t a very stressful lifestyle. Pandas only have to walk about nine hundred feet (think three football fields) a day, and they spend 41% of their life resting (Wei et al. 2014). Every half century or so, bamboo populations will flower and then die off. Pandas may go their lifetime without experiencing a bamboo flowering, but if they are unlucky enough to have the experience, they will shed their lazy countenance and migrate to another bamboo forest (Wei et al. 2014). Thus, pandas were happy, comfortable, and had a contingency plan – until humans fragmented their habitat, making migration during bamboo flowerings impossible. Humans are thus as singularly responsible for the decline of the panda as we are for that of seemingly more powerful species like eagles and elephants. Like pandas’ ability to digest bamboo, incredible specialist adaptations, if lost, probably won’t evolve again on any time scale relevant to humans. When we talk about adaptations, we usually think about opposable thumbs, night vision, big brains, or some other physical ability. But some subtler traits are such miraculous innovations, they deserve to be protected at all costs. I’m thinking of two unlikely species that have evolved traits that seem way too good to be true. They’re mole rats. They live their entire lives underground in the Middle East. And they don’t age or get cancer. Living underground as they do, mole rats don’t have natural predators or experience harsh weather (Gorbunova et al. 2012). They also reproduce to their full life expectancy, which means mole rats that live longer have more offspring (Kim et al. 2011). As a result, anti-cancer and anti-aging traits significantly increase the number of offspring an individual can have, so natural selection increases their frequency in the population. Whereas cancer kills 90% of mice and rats allowed to live to old age, no one has ever observed cancer in a mole rat (Gorbunova et al. 2012). Mole rats live five times longer than their rodent relatives, too (Gorbunova et al 2012). In the blind mole rat, rapidly dividing cells kill themselves (Kim et al. 2011). In the naked mole rat, cells that are too close together kill themselves (Gorbunova et al. 2012). Both of these strategies essentially allow the body to sense and eliminate cancer automatically. Naked mole rats – though they be shriveled and pink – are particularly spectacular, because their chance 72
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of death doesn’t change with age (Gorbunova et al. 2012). A thirty year old naked mole rat has the same chance of death as its three yearold great grandchild. This is just fundamentally counterintuitive to what we people consider to be the rules of life. Absurd examples like this help me appreciate just how powerful mindless evolution can be, and then acknowledge that equally complex things are playing out in my backyard. Darwin had finches in his own backyard, but it took his grand voyage on the HMS Beagle to spark his grand ideas. Biologists continue to invest in field trips to Costa Rica, Iceland, Papua New Guinea, and so on, and not just because traveling is fun. We find it easier to ask questions and make observations in exotic locations, where strange flora and fauna force us to question our assumptions. But equally important biology has been unfolding “right under our noses” (Zimmer 2011). In New York City, tomcod fish and earthworms have evolved immunity to toxic pollutants, and the infectious bacterium Klebsiella has evolved immunity to antibiotics (Zimmer 2011). The intense concentration of chemicals in cities, whether they be poisons or medicines, drives strong natural selection for immunity in these populations. The susceptible individuals are killed, and as long as there are some immune survivors, the population evolves rapidly. Although the speed of urban evolution by natural selection is impressive, the logic is predictable and straightforward. In “The Case for Leaving City Rats Alone,” however, Becca Cudmore shows us how cities affect evolution in much subtler ways (Cudmore 2016). The location of New York’s financial district affects where and when new disease epidemics will occur. Rats prefer pizza crusts over shredded papers, so they avoid the business district “resource desert” in favor of restaurant and residential neighborhoods (Combs et al. 2018). Rats rarely disperse to where there is no food waste, so rat populations are isolated at the mercy of human city planners (Combs et al. 2018). Each isolated population evolves separately, as those who sleep together, evolve together. Within each population, each rat pack claims a city block (Cudmore 2016). Everything is cool, until a human traps one of the family. Then the pack will flee in search of a safer territory. If the next block over is occupied, the rat packs will have a West Side Story. As the fur flies, the rats will swap bacteria. The losers will pick a fight with the next block over, and this story ends with a potential infectious disease crossing the island. Researchers at the University of British Columbia found that a human bacterium and a canine 73
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bacterium have swapped genes in a twice-infected rat to produce an antibiotic-resistant strain of staph infection (Cudmore 2016). Fortunately, resource deserts like the financial district block rat migration and prevent diseases from spreading. That is, until a new Bar & Grill opens for the stockbrokers’ lunch hour, and some eager rats cross their former food desert to fight and breed with the populations on the other side. The evolution of rats and the infectious microbes they carry are controlled by how we obliviously lay out businesses, roads, and waterways (Combs et al. 2018). Our cities not only select for specific traits in urban wildlife; they control gene flow between urban populations (Johnson and Munshi-South 2017). Enthusiastic researchers call New York an “evolutionary experiment” (Zimmer 2011). I call it a mess. I too am an urban animal, and I do not enjoy being obliviously experimented upon. Cudmore illustrates that evolution is not only exotic – a high drama taking place on the Serengeti – but also political – informing urban public health policy. For example, do you propose we tell the single mom not to kill the rat in her kitchen cabinet, because the murder might spread its diseases elsewhere? I don’t. In the first place, these rats were accidentally imported by wealthy merchants on underregulated cargo ships (Combs et al. 2018). This is still happening (Cudmore 2016). Where are the reparations for the victims of invasive species? There is no place on Earth where humans aren’t affecting evolution, because we’ve changed the climate. We are trying to learn everything we can about ecosystems, evolution, and the atmosphere, so we can predict and mitigate climate change’s affects. But we have very little information, and a lot of ethical decisions to make. Should species on the brink of extinction be put in zoos, relocated, or allowed to die out? Honestly, we aren’t even in agreement on what a species is (Jones 2019). Proponents of the “Anthropocene” think humanity has a managerial position over the Earth (Wilson 2016). We should put species where we want them. We should engineer the planet to our liking. We should run the Earth like our personal spaceship (Jones 2019). On the one hand, it’s optimistic to think we know enough to engineer our planet. On the other hand, it’s cynical to think we have no other choice. According to esteemed evolutionary biologist E. O. Wilson, the only thing dumber than accidentally manipulating evolution – is intentionally manipulating evolution (Wilson 2016). Wilson argues that those who think humanity can operate nature must have very little experience with nature’s diversity and complexity (Wilson 2016). It’s telling 74
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that this preeminent biologist would be the first to admit our ignorance. Spend as much time as he has engrossed in evolution, and you can’t help but dismiss this kind of egotistical anthropocentrism. Although I could easily turn to science fiction to argue why “Spaceship Earth” is a dystopic idea, Matt Jones gives a historical account of human ineptitude at species management in “No Heart, No Moon” (Jones 2019). The first moon landing is perhaps science’s most glorified moment in American history, because, as President Kennedy said in his famous speech, it was hard. Jones disparages the lunar mission for justifying ambition for ambition’s sake (Jones 2019). Meanwhile, Walt Disney was constructing his own world resort (Jones 2019). What with the launch facility and the resort, Kennedy and Disney’s ambitions consumed a lot of land in Florida, land that happened to belong to the endemic dusky seaside sparrow (Jones 2019). Americans were industriously designing their spaceships and utopian worlds – researching, innovating, engineering. Luckily, there was a scientific plan to save the sparrows without compromising Florida’s utopic future. The five surviving males were mated with females of a closely related kind of sparrow (Jones 2019). Then, their hybrid offspring were mated with their fathers and siblings (Jones 2019). It was a genetic solution – breed sparrows that have as many genes from the survivors as possible. Nevermind that those genes are no longer adapted to their now paved and pesticide-ridden habitat. Nevermind that incest decreases genetic diversity, which decreases a species’ ability to adapt to environmental change. Could we engineer our way around these problems, too? We never got the chance, because the hybridization scheme didn’t work in the first place. The dusky seaside sparrow went extinct in a captive breeding facility on Walt Disney’s Discovery Island (Jones 2019). The manager of the sparrows’ breeding facility attributed his failure to the sparrows’ inability to “learn their boundaries” (Jones 2019). It’s not news to anyone that society prioritizes immediate desires – space shuttles and theme parks – and assumes we will always be able to engineer our way out of environmental problems. Scientists like those breeding Disney’s sparrows often fuel this harmful worldview by promising to solve problems whose complexity they don’t appreciate. But other scientists counteract this, simply by telling stories that exhibit nature’s infinite complexity. Some of these stories challenge our notions of human exceptionalism; our species’ existence is an insignificant blip compared to the trilobites and coelacanths, and 75
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the leaf-cutter ants show agriculture is not a uniquely human skill. Other stories illustrate the inescapable dictators humans have become to every creature on this planet, from the local rat to the far-off panda. Most would say science’s primary goal is to solve problems. But evolution is change over time, so narration is an intrinsic mandate. Storytelling is a worthy tactic for the evolutionary biologists who believe our culture is the problem to be solved. I once had the privilege of touring the lab of Smithsonian scientist Dr. Ted Schultz, who has spent his life studying ant agriculture at the National Museum of Natural History. He has a square office situated around a square table. Computers, books, and ant-themed memorabilia are crammed along the periphery to give the stars of the show space; on the central table is a complex system of clear plastic chambers connected with PVC and duct tape: his leaf-cutter colony. Inside, a million ants bring leaves to their spongy fungal farm, while another million carry out other chores. Touch a chamber, and soldiers swarm to fend off your attack. An escapee marches towards me across the tile floor; Dr. Schultz can’t build a colony they can’t escape. He eagerly divulges their preferences for different kinds of leaves, a proud caregiver. The other researchers I’ve drawn from describe their study organisms with equal reverence. I have done a great injustice by leaving plants out of this story, but you only need to check out plantlovestories.com to, well, feel the love. I feel the same way about my trees, microbes, and fossils. While our discoveries inspire increasing devotion to our organisms, I think an uncommon appreciation for other species draws us to the work. Thanks to scientists’ and science communicators’ passionate interpreting, good, clean, objective science has shaped my personal values since I was a little kid. First it was TV biologist personalities like Jeff Corwin and the Kratt brothers, then it was nature writing by the likes of Barbara Kingsolver and E. O. Wilson, and finally it’s become my professors and research mentors. When I began writing this, I merely intended to collect both popular and academic science writing that explained evolution in a compelling style. Only upon seeing these snippets side by side did I realize they comprise an overlooked, invaluable genre. None of us get to justify our research as cultural capital in our grant proposals. Nevertheless, I think storytelling is our most honorable, enduring purpose.
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Kate Wardenburg House of Retronym
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“We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.” —Ernest Hemingway
Herein lies the Last Will and Testament of Kate Ellen Wardenburg, Nemerov Scholar. To the House of Retronym — Ella, Annabel, Alexandra, and all to follow, I leave wishes for inspiration and growth. Be inspired by the world around you, the work of others, and especially the things you experience and create yourself. A retronym is a name created to distinguish something that has differentiated itself from its initial version. Growing as an artist and a person is a similarly ceaseless expedition, and I hope that when you look back you will find you have become more than you once were as well. To Kathleen and David I leave a piece of my heart. Thank you for taking me into this family and fostering me within it. I am forever grateful. To my fellow Seniors, I leave the memory of Village House Room 26, shared meals, shared homes, and the sincere promise of never-ending friendship and community. This is not where we end. And finally, to every Nem, I leave these instructions: savor every moment, be present, work hard, play harder, create – even when you think it’s no good, go on adventures, make memories, make friends, be unabashedly yourself and unabashedly there for yourself. I hate to be taken from this home we have made together so early, feeling as though so many things that should have happened now never will, but as Ashbery wrote, “What more is there to do except stay? And that we cannot do.”
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A Temporary State Kate Wardenburg
a. There is a sharp difference in the way these shapes arrange themselves As in the precipitation: either pelting, slashing, driving into you sideways; or so thick and full it is something else entirely The latter of which can except the rule For even when the air itself pains you, latches snarling fangs into your flesh and bone Chills your marrow still It hurls softly and pin-pricks you without violence As if to say, I see you are suffering enough, here, let me show you love b. And what should she do if words and phrases flap between the folds of her brain like Seagulls in a K-mart parking lot Beating dusty wings in a constant phfoom – phfoom – phfoom And she can’t get them out of that niche They won’t spill to paper correctly But uttering them into being is just not possible And maybe it’s best to stay silent For the woods are filled with panthers, and after all Beasts that nurture their own are quick to jump at any other
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c. I’m wondering why leaves on the sidewalk look wrong here, when the snow melts scattered and slimy, pale underbellies of tiny diseased toads I’m wondering how a sky could get that color of pink, like neon cotton candy if someone spilled too much of carcinogenic dye into the machine I’m wondering how many times you have to grab onto a doorknob and walk out before the metal softens, melding into a slippery mirror I’m wondering if the light from the setting sun could cut the concrete because I’ve never seen this color before and I swear it burns I’m wondering why the glowing meter always slips so fast between the first and last and then I’m back at the station pouring last pennies into the atmosphere, just to get away
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Rot Kate Wardenburg
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Two-thousand and Three Questions I’m Still Pondering Kate Wardenburg If you’ve ever thought of thestrals, did you see their taut muscled bodies? Have you ever opened a fresh box of Neapolitan ice cream and run a warm spatula through it? Sat on a rickety lawn chair, basket-woven from nylon strips in 1970? Stuck your fingers between scuffed whiffle ball slats? Jammed a 35mm jack into your CD player and slung it over your shoulder like your mom’s coolest crossbody? If you ever twirled a silken oxygen tube between your fingers, who was it attached to? Have you ever rolled around under mothball sheets adorned with tiny yellow flowers in blue vases? Drank icy tap water from a translucent brown cup? Listened to static resonate from a box television in the seconds before the Wheel of Fortune theme began? Brushed your index through the pillowy feathers atop a cockatiel’s skull? If your holiday plan ever made room for a new element of visitation, in what strange institution did you congregate? Have you ever run up the cracked concrete stoop, sneakers slapping aged linoleum towards the smell of warm oatmeal raisin? Heard the thud and thunderous rush that comes before a rolling stream crashes into a mauve ceramic tub? Dug your toes into shag while you flipped through a marbled-cardboard photo binder? Laid your palms on thin, wrinkled hands to learn what motion forms a roll of yarn into a warming scarf? If you have said goodbye, half knowing but not really believing you’d never say hello again, where were you heading when you stepped across the threshold?
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Jean in loving memory Kate Wardenburg that girl with the perfect curls and the sunny eyes who grew up on a wheat field in kentucky ten miles from a mountain base where the gnats and skeeters gather like the churchgoers thick and often she spent summers staring at cerulean skies from lush crabgrass beds she coasted bikes down gravel roads with her brother stopping at the five and dime for shakes catching crawdads in the stream all afternoon she moved to the city after the war to some stories-tall astoria tenement with more girls in one room than she has sisters she takes the train to an office while the sun rises and sits at a computer adding clacks to the city clamor she married that police man who beats lexington and 5th but i hear he beats her too and that afterwards she treks four blocks west to lay flowers on his parents’ graves because the grass is greener there than on her lawn now she rocks a little girl at night watching full moons trek across the window pane ‘til the screen door clanks behind him on his way in tobacco tannins on the air she closes her eyes and imagines molten vanilla cream dripping down her chin and concrete pulverized to pebbles lining a path to a cool river and when he says he loves her she just looks into his eyes the bluest things she’s seen since that kentucky sky
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Precipice Three Poems Kate Wardenburg I have been thinking for a long time now. We are standing on the brink. The sea is to our backs and already the rolling waves cap bad times with sweet, foamy forgetting. They hit rocks and spray nostalgia. Tumultuous was the journey that brought us here, but already it is numb, tingling like a foot that has been asleep so long you’ve nearly forgotten it’s attached to you. The sky is the color of every good thing we ever saw. It blends down the horizon on either side, kicking up dust that tastes like lemon bars and reminiscent joy – which is to say, tangy. Our toes in our shoes point toward some massive expanse of ground and we call it The Future. We cannot see from this vantage, but it does have an ending. Landmarks lie beyond this divergence, each visage a mystery – for now nothing more than promises and myths, chewed up and passed down by wrinkled old mouths. Evidently we will ‘know them when we see them’, or whatever that’s to mean. I can’t help but wonder how their stony faces have been chiseled for you. For me.
The salt on the wind whispers we must move on. We cannot turn back tides. Are you afraid? From here, nothing will ever be the same. Your fingerpads touch mine and I know this greeting goodbye. This is the rest of our lives.
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Reincarnation Three Poems Kate Wardenburg A state of pure chrysalis captivity enamoring imprisonment sparkling suffocation This room of water-stained mirrors each reflecting some picture perfect parallel universe Time moves differently here but the ink… the ink flows swiftly quicker now faster c’mon hurry up Rewriting myself the way I’ve rewritten this line and every other goddamned line. Like if I shatter a window, reach out through bloody shards, grasp that Futurefabric tightly, perhaps I can turn the tables, swerve past that-thing-that-comes-next, weep, gnash teeth, start at the very beginning, pinkie promise to bask in second chance, never look back, and maybe just maybe I’ll stop what I’m really afraid of, those silver sand memories
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slipping silking sinking slinking just out of
reach –
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Incession Three Poems Kate Wardenburg
All that is left is a tall glass of bright, fiery, white-hot something. It smells distinctly of … Uncertainty Regret and Fear Like fighting with your family or heading out in the morning feeling as if you’ve forgotten something important. Like falling and scraping your fragile palm skin, or rancid milk in a hot car, or bile. But there is another scent, more like … Resilience or maybe Acceptance It is too enticing not to try. The first sip is painful. It peels stringy layers off my hard palate. It settles, still roiling and boiling, in the back of my stomach. But the next is smoother. Not like an expensive liquor or a fine, sweet wine, but like cool water that has sat with its ice for a few minutes. Like lavender-grey fog in the early morning hours or laying down on a newly made bed. It feels right.
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I take another swig and the blinding thing screams FUTURE! and suddenly it has a taste. Like sweet whipping cream and saltwater and a bloody gum and shrimp. Like fresh bread and city smog and acetone and someone else’s lips. I drink the rest, stepping into the scream, but I leave the glass behind. I hope it will be full for the next person who comes along, because I promise you, it tastes so, so good.
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Anna Konradi House of Haiku
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“My library is an archive of longings.” —Susan Sontag, As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980
I, Anna Konradi, being of kaleidoscope eyes and fanciful soul, do hereby bestow these parting gifts on the Nemerov Scholars. To the brilliant House of Haiku: When stars fall from the Gingko trees, know that those celestial beings are yours. So too are the strings of sounds in the witching hour meant for you. Take them and hold them, wring them dry, spoon them until morning, burn them if you must, until you’ve created spells to cast upon the House. To sweet Jess: I leave you light flares, rumors, sky-colored hair dye, and the skeleton of the Knight Center Pub. And to the rest of my Nemerov family: For you I leave a bathtub full of honeysuckle nectar, a doorway to Fae, hidden tattoos, and a promise to speak your magic aloud as the world is ending, just as it always has been.
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MASH Anna Konradi
how to play Mansion Apartment Shack House 1. Choose your categories. These should encompass the primary areas of your life and nothing else. When completing this step, consider what matters. 2. Write down four possibilities per category. It is best to include a mix of desirable and undesirable options. 3. Choose a number. It is best to do this by closing your eyes while a stranger draws a spiral. When you say stop, the stranger will tell you how many rings they’ve drawn. Trust them. 4. Make your way down the page, counting as you go. Cross off the option that correlates with your chosen number. Start the count over from the first marked-off option, making your way around the page. Do this until one possibility per category remains. 5. Consider the remaining options. Consider them as you might a foggy reflection of yourself, or as a story written about you by a spectator. Treat the outcome as your fate. who you’ll marry David feels personally attacked when you tell him you’ve never seen a James Bond movie. On your birthday he hands you an envelope with a homemade ticket: one movie night with David. You watch Daniel Craig evade terrorists in a twenty- minute car chase before David puts a hand on your leg, and later that night you’re saying, can we slow down, I’ve never—and he’s startled. But then his chest puffs up, he looks like he might say, I love you. He tells you you’re safe. The next morning there’s blood on your underwear, on your legs, a Rorschach test between your thighs. David has texted, so, are you a Bond fan now? Tally wraps a lock of your hair around her finger. You shouldn’t ever, ever cut your hair, she murmurs, close to your mouth. Promise? You feel her breath on your neck, trailing down your stomach, curling around 92
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your hips. She twirls you around, even though you’re a head taller. She takes you to Cafe Brazil and orders two hot chocolates. You tell her you haven’t much of a sweet tooth, so she orders a tea and drinks both hot chocolates herself. You ask her what she does when she’s not dancing with strangers, and she tells you that you’re not a stranger, really, and that what she likes to do is see the future. So she reads your tea leaves and tells you, wow, look at that. We’re going to see each other soon. Drew compliments your taste in music. Sorry, you say. You’ll try to keep it down. He tells you not to bother. Thin walls, and besides, a person’s taste in music can tell you a lot about them. You wonder what your ex-girlfriend’s “Teen Spirit for Twenty-Somethings” playlist says about you. He catches you staring at the bar around the corner from your St. Louis brownstone, and he buys you a drink, two drinks, a shot that tastes like lighter fluid. He laughs at the face you make, walks you home, and says, I’d stay, if you wanted. The world is spinning at its edges, so: sure, you say. Stay. He tucks you into bed and lies down beside you, under the covers. He moves his body against yours. He says, this is what you wanted, isn’t it? And you’re sure he must be right. Drew is smart. He laughs at your jokes, buys you shots. He slides your underwear along the curve of your ass. It’s okay if we don’t use a condom, right? he says. He can’t feel you, wearing a condom. He wants to feel you. You wonder if you might be dreaming. Your lids are so heavy. Oliver says, let’s be spontaneous tonight. But he hasn’t any plans, so you suggest listening to a rap album you know he loves on the baseball field. It’s so late that you might as well sleep there, and so you do, until he wakes you up as the sun is rising. You talk in your sleep, he tells you. You don’t ask if you said anything important, or funny, or especially bizarre, because the answer might start a conversation you’re not at all ready for. He yawns, and you catch it with your finger. So he takes your finger in his teeth, and he bites it, so that you wouldn’t be at all surprised if he broke skin. The pain and the cold send shivers through you. And so you’re hyper-aware of the girlfriend, who’s overseas until May, as his tongue flicks out and touches your skin. What were you going to say? he asks you. But you aren’t sure anymore, not now that your faces are so close, so close that if you turned just a little you could—but then there’s the girlfriend, who’s probably wondering why he hasn’t texted her back, probably dreaming about how they’ll reunite before she knows it, probably wondering what he’s up to, right about now. 93
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where you’ll live You go home for Christmas. Your dad says, isn’t it nice, to have a little break from the snow? You walk around Highland Park Village under the lights, smoke with your high school friends and pretend that none of you ever grew up or apart. Anyone special in your life? they ask. One friend wears an engagement ring. You feel shame twisting. No, you could say, but there’s a book on the way. Another friend is pregnant. They’d say, a novel, what about? and mean, oh, that’s sweet. They’d cough, because they haven’t smoked since high school, and they’d think about their jobs as bankers and interior designers and thank god for the stability in their lives. So you tell them about a girl you only met once, and you change your flight to leave Dallas early. You tell your parents you’re sorry, a work thing came up. And they understand. They’re so proud of you, of all your hard work. Before college, you only knew St. Louis for its music. Your dad was a fan of early blues. But by sophomore year you’ve discovered barbeque and baseball. Oliver gets free tickets in a raffle. Your friends tell you that’s a date. You get tipsy and warm off overpriced beer. He stops at a gas station on the way back to buy cigarettes, takes you to the roof of his apartment building, asks you what you were like as a kid. You tell him how shy you were. But he isn’t listening; his face is lit by blue phone light. Sorry, he tells you. He’s always saying that. His girlfriend is calling. Sorry. You get an offer to work in human resources in a fancy office building with an espresso machine and a sexual harassment problem. You aren’t really sure what human resources entails, and when you ask your friends back home, the ones who work in offices, they laugh, like you’re joking. And you have a sneaking suspicion that they don’t really know, either, but you laugh along, anyway. You’ve always liked Denver, the mountains. But Drew reminds you that you hate the cold. You wouldn’t like to live somewhere with so much snow. You send your manuscript to anybody that might read it, and you wait in Washington Square Park under an end-of-the-world-sky. You write about your body, about windows, about the people you meet. Your new friends tell you, you need to let loose, so you dye a strand of your hair blue and pick up a bottle of wine, more expensive than you’d normally 94
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go for. You stick your head out the taxi window and scream all the secrets you can think of to the city. Only one of them is yours. how many kids you’ll have Drew asks you, over thawing pizza, if you have a five-year plan. You do, you always have, but it’s not something you’ve ever told anyone before, so you say no, you’ll take things as you go. He raises an eyebrow. You don’t have thoughts on what you’ll be doing? What job you’ll have? Kids? And your heart stops, screeches to a still, because he has no fucking idea. Easy there, he says, hands up like you’re a spooked horse. He isn’t asking you to have kids. You’d agreed to keep things casual. So you take a deep breath. He didn’t ask for it, either. He didn’t even know— not about the test, about the trip to the clinic, about the night terrors. No, you say. You haven’t thought about kids. Oliver, drunk at a diner: Maybe we should run away together. Build a cabin in the woods somewhere, start a huge family. What do you think about Maine? A crowd builds a block from your apartment. Women are angry. You think, women have always been angry. You’re furious, and you’re curious and sick of heartbreak, so you slip into the crowd and relish in elbows jamming into your back, the feeling of wound, wounded bodies. They let out primal screams that disgust businessmen in skyscrapers. You feel it building, the sob that you’ve kept still in your lungs, all this while. You scream for yourself and for what you have lost. Scream, scream, scream until your voice is raw, until you have to let the others’ voices carry you on. Your ex-girlfriend is moving to New York. She tells you in a postcard from Venice. Venice is why she ended things. You’ve heard she’d eloped with a man twice her age. He probably smelled like cigars and his teeth were probably stained wine-red and he probably told her she was the sexiest thing he’d ever seen. American girls, he’d marvel while he watched her get ready in the morning. She wants to see you. She feels bad, for how things ended. She keeps thinking about a future she had planned once, spooning in bed in her parents’ home. Is it too late for all of that? she signs the post card, yours. 95
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what you’ll lose At fourteen weeks a doctor inserts cold metal into your body. When you flinch, she asks, did you feel that? You shouldn’t feel anything. She gave you a bright blue pill and you’re a little loopy now, only you shouldn’t be. It’s important that you remember. You imagine the metal sliding past your cervix. You imagine it sucking up your intestines and your lungs and making its way up to your diaphragm, sucking out your voice, your tongue. It only takes ten minutes. You shouldn’t feel anything. There’s the smell of cinnamon coming from the kitchen and it’s so sweet it makes your stomach churn. Drew brings you breakfast in bed, and you reprimand yourself because you shouldn’t have gotten so drunk last night, not so drunk that your head is pounding and that you’re startled when he walks in. How did you sleep? he asks you. You have an awful taste in your mouth. He’s smirking. He puts the cinnamon rolls on your lap, and your legs jerk under his fingers. Sorry, you say. He’s being nice. He likes you. You are wearing only an oversized t-shirt. He brushes a piece of hair from your eyes. You have such long, pretty hair, he tells you. The smell of cinnamon rolls is so sweet, you hold in the sick until he leaves. And then you heave everything out. Your mother calls. She’s crying for you, and for your sister. She didn’t love your father, not for a long time, but you did. You and your sister hold hands at the service and push your twin beds together, just like you used to. You get a text from David. He saw the obit in the paper. He’s sorry for your loss, and if you ever want to grab a drink sometime, he’d be glad to be a shoulder to cry on. You are rejected a hundred times. Sometimes you get a letter: Thank you for your submission. Unfortunately, your manuscript does not suit our present needs. We wish you luck placing it elsewhere. You’re told not to take it personally, but how else can you take it? Your story is of your body, of bodies moving together, bodies screaming. You take it personally.
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what you’ll learn You have never kept as still as you do when Drew names it. He could’ve been somebody, he tells you. I can’t forgive you for this, he tells you. You know that, right? And you feel them beside you, the bodies from the protest, and you hear their voices screaming, and you scream, too, as loud and clear and angry as ever. And he listens, because he has to. So you tell him what he took from you. Your friends take you dancing. They tell you it’s the best cure for a breakup. You don’t tell them that’s not what you need cured. But you dance anyway, you throw your head back and fall into a rhythm that lived inside you, all this while and you didn’t even know it. Slowly you reclaim what has been stolen. It feels good, taking. People read your writing. Your friends from home call: We always knew you’d make it. Your mother buys a dozen copies. David texts, he’s seen the book in a storefront, he’s flipped through it, he compliments you on your syntax. You think it frightening, to share a story of your body with people that have seen it and people that have not. But it feels powerful, too, and so you choose to relish in that. You have a child. At first, when they place her wet and gasping into your arms, you think she’s all yours. But that isn’t true. She is only for herself, and you tell her so. You keep telling her. This is a thing that you have learned, but she will not have to. She will always know, right from the beginning.
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Elissa Blake Grove Mullins House of Pseudonym
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“Still and all, why bother? Here’s my answer: Many people need desperately to receive this message: ‘I feel and think as much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people don’t care about them. You are not alone.’” —Kurt Vonnegut
I, Elissa Blake, being of moonstruck mind, bantam body, hematic heart, and sober soul, hereby bequeath the following sentiments, legacies, and gramercies. First and foremost, to the members of my House: to Joe, I leave the future legacy of House Pseudonym—may our people always be a half-transparent mystery. To Graham, I leave clever syntactic complexity; shoulder-length hair; shirts that button all the way up to the collar; the Greek, Latin, and Russian classics; and an open invitation to the CU area to sight-see the American Football House. To Izzy, I leave the entirety of campus (during both the golden hour and the blue); an orange; a lighter; an organic lollipop; silence; the moon; and everlasting sweetbitter joy. And, finally, to the Nemerov Family at large: I leave my words. What more?
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Twenty-First, October Elissa Blake Grove Mullins
i. afternoon (late) when the trees bereave their leaves like this butter-yellow and scarlet, like bloodied stars they seem to be whispering to me … death is beauty … ii. evening (early) cotton-candy clouds blue-luminous: sip, they, on a rising moon? I do not know. I do not know how she persists to rise. (perhaps it is easier when she conceives it as falling up—?)
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Vesuvius Elissa Blake Grove Mullins
Vesuvius quivers. No one feels. The August sun yawns hazy. The city wakes to warm bread wafting. The wind, which habitually wends southwesterly, today pivots to the northwest. The forum fleetly fills with chattering customers and cosmopolites; their teeth are perfect. They breakfast on dates, stuffed with pine nuts and pepper, salted, fried in honey; fresh bread; pears. Daily life persists—the tremors are not unprecedented—but the eruption is unprecedented—life always persists—until the eruption. Ash blurs, blears, blocks the noon sun, and people never know what to do with themselves, when the sun goes away, like that. Plenty pray to Jupiter, the Father; but one man sways where he stands, overcome with unfathomable premonitions of Jupiter, the planet, its surface roiling with red storms centuries old… He envisions, beyond ash and eyelid, a mist of molten gold, and magmatic tears like precious topaz and citrine—but all he gets is pumice, in lusterless ugly clumps. He picks one up, and it is more real to him than anything else has ever been—more real than memory, or lung. More real than frescoes and fingerprints and fumaroles, this solidified froth of gossamer craters: he clasps it, and crawls. The pavement is slick with spilt olive oil and sour milk; knees and palms meet tamped earth. Here: an amphora of wine is buried in the ground, to keep cool. The terracotta is yet unbroken; the wine has not yet boiled. The mountain’s blood clots as clouded glass. He does not know the word volcano. The swelter is too sublime. The pyroclast glows. Vesuvius sleeps.
*A note on the constraint: the number of words in each sentence is a successively higher prime number, crescendoing to 29 words, then falling back down to two (with one clinamen)
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Alma Mater Elissa Blake Grove Mullins
There is a lone tortoise in the center of the so-called quadrangle. I first saw him there several weeks before, in my mind, in a basement classroom in a building bordering the quadrangle where, over the years, I’d gotten my teeth around the dactylic and my heart around Hector and endeavored not to drift during the ill-timed canonical sojourn required of all who purport to study what I’d chosen to study; and where, most recently—still chill-cheeked and scorched by that late low-forties light, scorching, too, bare tree and pale brick—I sat, seeing a tortoise in my mind. That silly tortoise. He thinks he is lining up for his diploma. Doesn’t he know—all diploma means is paper folded double? But it is not the piece of paper he cares for— (the tortoise, bless him, cannot even read, and would sooner munch than aggrandize). No piece of paper, he knows (no matter how many times it has been folded) can atone for all that has been elided, like bobby-pins lost in the grass forever; crepe paper ripped down; endpages ripped out.
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He is there still, though I am not. Possessed of considerable patience and the promise of longevity—the tortoise has at his disposal (as it would seem) all the time in the world! All time, to sit and see— tassels, and lasts— in his mind.
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Translation of Sappho, Fragment 96 [ ] time after time to this place [ ] she, leading [ ] little goddess, your dearly-known delights at your dance. Among women, she eclipses as, when sun has sunk, the pink-fingered moon mutes the stars, and her glow cradles brine and floret-sated soils, the same; and the dew, decanted, softens the roses and tender chervil, and melilot, blooming, becoming. Relentless, she paces, aching for Atthis; flays her sanity [ ] feeds. Going [ ] not this flooding [ ] distance drawling [ ] halfway Tiresome [ ] to approximate goddesses, to compose oneself of loveliness [ ] to keep [ ]
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[ ] [ ] thirst and [ ]
Aphrodite
[ ] nectar, spilled from gilded [ ] gushing [ ] Persuasion, with her palms [ ] [ ] arrow [ ] [ ] into the temple [ ] dear kith [ ] not a soul [ ] [ ] at thirst, I arrive
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A Note to My Fellows Elissa Blake Grove Mullins
To my dear friends and fellows, particularly my fellow seniors—I want you to know that my proximity to you has been the most nourishing part of my college experience. It breaks my heart that our time together has been cut short. Being sent home from campus—but still having to finish our coursework—was like a waiter taking away our half-finished dessert and telling us to go finish our vegetables. Like, sure, the vegetables are good for us—we’re still receiving our education—but the reward of one another’s company was the best part of our collegiate meal, and it’s been taken back to the kitchen and scraped off our plates into the compost (let us hope the compost will be used as fertilizer, and enable beautiful new things to grow from the soil). Let’s see how far this metaphor can be stretched. In some respects, I have had to adhere to a sort of social diet throughout college. As your friendly neighborhood narcoleptic introvert, I have only a minute fraction of the average person’s energy. I have spent most of it “eating my vegetables,” so to speak: doing my schoolwork, working a job, keeping my apartment clean. I have spent the majority of my college career looking with longing at the delicious cakes of your company in the bakery window, but knowing that I cannot afford to indulge—for, like the tastiest of sugary morsels, it is wonderful in the moment, but overindulgence leads to all sorts of difficulties (a sugar crash—a plunge in energy—or, the converse, keeping me up past my bedtime). I can’t express how much I have wanted to stay up late with you having heart-to-hearts; to come support you at every performance; to grab impromptu meals with you; to go on adventures. My health has so rarely allowed it; please forgive me. Please know how much fondness and admiration I have for you all; never mistake my quietness and sleepiness for indifference.
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If you wish to establish a written correspondence with me that will one day—when we both become famous—be archived and immortalized, you need only ask. I have just purchased a new set of ink cartridges. I’m all set. Send me your writing, and writing you love, and music recommendations, and pressed flowers, and anything else that can fit in an envelope. I believe our purpose in life is to observe life into existence, and the purpose of friendship is observational collaboration. Tell me what you see and hear and smell, out there in the wide world. Tell me—what exists? Much love, Elissa
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Hannah Richter House of Slang
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Bury me where the light is always changing And I shall live in death as I lived in waking.
I, Hannah Corinne Richter, of both wise and foolish mind, of this breadcrumb body now scattered along the lane to strange and trembling shores, hereby declare the following to be my last will, wish, wonder and testament. To the House of Slang, my slanted and tender progeny: to Jess, I leave the purple grass waving madly on the hill, the midnight sun, the holy difference between “rock” and “pebble.” To Sophie, I leave the bookshelf full of tales of “wicked” women, fruits straight from the vine, the fierce and gentle colors of pink and red. To Maya, I leave the centermost point of Mudd field (the whole world spins widdershins around it!), stories about secret, inexplicable fires, and a twinkling shard of disco ball. To Josh, I leave the future of my House, the knowledge that the coming years are clay in your hands and yours alone—a little water, a little heat, and courage, courage, courage. To David, I leave my gratitude (all of it). To my sweet Nem brigade of 2020, I leave the memory of that first nervous Seminar, all of us tucked inside ourselves, not yet transformed, that sweet silence that precedes all acts of good magic. To all the rest, I leave permission to make up your own words—the best ones have yet to exist. I leave my love.
I dreamt once that an EMT shone an instrument into my eyes and said, “Follow the light with your pupils.” To which I replied, “I can’t, doctor—the light is everywhere, spilling from everything.”
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Look!Look! Hannah Richter
It is a gorgeous game of I Spy: to spot the yo-yo string of lightning quickening the sky, to note the perfect roughness of ginger root in hand, the way wine looks precious in a clean glass, how flakes of snow, and pinwheels and kiwi fruits, against all the gruff and unhappy odds, manage to keep their symmetry in common. In the game, we are always shouting out “Look! Look!” like it is a compound word: to orient the vision (Look!) and then orient the soul (Look!) How many little ways the world is willing to come awake before our wide and teary eyes, how countless and gentle the blessings.
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Orchard Hannah Richter
What’s a PartyGirl [you] doing hopping the balcony of a bankrupt place like this [Earth]? I’ll tell you a story, PartyGirl. When I was small and asked a lot of questions, I had a favorite query that I kept in my pocket like a round river stone, rubbing my thumb over the smooth contours of its ??? when there was shouting in the house. When it was quiet enough again, I’d ask my mother to recount how she and my father had met and fallen arm in arm into the ball pit called Love. She said to me quite plainly, as I nestled into my bed of dead geese tufting, that they had met at a party. And that my father liked my mother so much (or just enough) that he invited her to another party after that. And then another one, and another, parties like notes that succeed each other in a concerto, like counting off the geese in their V formation, like polyps spawning off parent coral. Like little red pins freckling the map of my conception. Which is how I wind up thinking, for most of my adult life, that my parents ricocheted from party to party like rubber stars or amorous ping-pong balls, so in love that as one party fizzled out my father would whisk my mother away to a new one germinating somewhere else. I never once pictured them going home or stopping for something so mortal as pizza. It didn’t interest me who was throwing parties at ten in the morning, or what the venues looked like, or what shoes my mother was wearing, though now, these are questions I could ask, if I wanted to. The story was simple and without a lot of “rococo” adjectives, so I took as many liberties as I felt I deserved at eleven years old. Recalling a memory of a retelling of someone else’s memory is like biting into a fruit twice-removed from reality, or harvesting ghost peaches in a ghost orchard planted by a farmer who died before he lived. I remember being inside of the story, and all the walls of the story are made of this chalky light, and I see my father’s phosphorescent hand extend downward towards my mother in invitation, in 111
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provocation, in impatience to get to where they are going, which is through a goldish tunnel, an orchard of parties, until they arrive at the very moment in which I am born at South Miami Hospital. The hospital used to be a swamp, a party of algae shag carpet and flags of Spanish moss, and some of the ghosts (crabs, gators, orchids) wriggled into me as I wriggled out. Babies get haunted sometimes and besides I don’t mind sharing my body. This is the first time my parents have seen each other under normal colored lights (they were so tired from partying, from falling in love, perhaps there just wasn’t enough energy left for the marriage, or they get sober and can’t recognize one another, but they recognize me). I am, in many ways, a few ounces of party favor. And if you’re wondering, hospitals (unless we’re speaking of the x-ray room), are, for the most part, not parties at all. This account makes its way back to me years later, in college, as my liver attempts to translate liquor into acetate after a night out; the sink water is cold and clean from having lived in the wintered pipes in the walls all night, as I turn the faucet and attend to the small glory of face-washing, asking the old rain that gushes from a pumping place to please rinse away the soil of dreams from my eyes and my cheeks. It is in this way that I indoctrinate myself into morning, like the whole day is a birdbath (and I’ve surely got last night’s diet coke soldering my plumage), and consider how yet again, I’ve outlived the terms of my own creation. I dry my pipe-cold face on my red towel, think it perplexing that between the small talk and the Uber home, I somehow missed my parents at the party last night—that perhaps they were always in a different room, that they had left before I arrived, that I am yet again too early to behold my own debut, to witness the pearl-strand succession of events that are as fundamental to my being as my chain-linked DNA. I go out dancing, like you, PartyGirl, (though I am careful to always come home before dawn) and I greet the faceless guests like they are all my parents and they are meeting for the first time and I am laughing and watching the story of myself start to germinate beneath the black carapace of the universe’s subconscious. Or to put it differently, and because getting drunk makes you hungry, maybe I was merely a toaster waffle that someone installed in the microwave while they were flirting and forgot about until, say, nine months later. 112
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When I was born, they say I didn’t cry. This worried the doctors; they paced the room in their doctor costumes and extrapolated on why my dry eyes are in the wrong: 1. Reincarnation (washing one’s face) is a chilly procedure 2. The stork hit turbulence on the way over 3. At first, oxygen is a joke that goes over my head So it stands to reason that I was either warm-blooded in a past life, or not afraid of birds, or that I found oxygen generally inoffensive to the senses. In my version, it’s not that at all. Listen closely. In my version, I show up a little yellow, a little early, a little cold, but I do not cry because I am thrilled to have traveled all this way (by fowl, by amniotic carriage, by canal taxi) to arrive at the correct address. A party. At last.
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One May Never Simply Drive Away Hannah Richter In my spare time, I practice leaving. I have tried the front door, back door, side door & fire escape. Tried going backwards like a scuba diver over the balcony rail or backwards like a memory un-etch-a-sketch-ing itself which is to say, I’ve tried becoming a stranger again but everywhere there is evidence. I tried to get a running start, tried to light votives, tried to make the bathtub flood & ride the rip tide express to sea but I didn’t know what music to play. I tried folding myself into a letter taped to the fridge: tried “Sincerely,” “Best,” “Yours,” “With love,” even “Always.” No matter what I do I end up making too much noise or looking back & breaking my own heart. So I cheat: I leave the windows unlatched. I trail breadcrumbs on the map. I say, very quietly, “Come with me.”
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House of Rhyme
House of Slang
Jamila Dawkins Jaden Satenstein Kelcie Ford Isabel Torres Becca Clark-Calendar Colten Fisher
Josh Keller Maya Horn Sophie DeVincenti Jess King Hannah Richter Ethan Evans Wes Jenkins
House of Limerick
House of Oxymoron
Sydney Weiss Henry Lin Harry Gambelli Bread Lee Hannah Dains Mimi Borders
Sydney Weiss AJ Takata Zoe Cooke Maya Samuels-Fair Annabel Shu Luke Voyles
House of Acrostic Alexandra Jones Brianna Hines Zoe Engels Deena Nerwen Carly Wolfer
House of Haiku
House of Pseudonym
Elizabeth Joseph Cam Lind Noah Slaughter Abigail Anderson Anna Konradi Abby Rochman Maggie Weng
Joe Mantych Graham Boswell Izzy Hill Elissa Mullins Joe Noonan Jonah Glick
House of Retronym
House of Palindrome
Alexandra Jones Annabel Chosy Ella Faust Kate Wardenburg Claire Quinlan Catherine Aviles
Tyler Burston Ellen Fields Shellandrielle Jones Meredith Brus Ebby Offord
Class of 2023 Tyler Burston Jamila Dawkins Alexandra Jones Elizabeth Joseph Joshua Keller Joe Mantych Sydney Weiss
Class of 2022 Graham Boswell Annabel Chosy Sophie Devincenti Ellen Fields Brianna Hines Maya Horn Henry Lin Cam Lind Jaden Satenstein Noah Slaughter AJ Takata
Class of 2021 Abigail Anderson Zoe Cooke Zoe Engels Ella Faust Kelcie Ford Harry Gambelli Izzy Hill Shellandrielle Jones Jess King Miles “Bread” Lee
Class of 2020 Meredith Brus Hannah Dains Anna Konradi Elissa Mullins Deena Nerwen Hannah Richter Maya Samuels-Fair Isabel Torres Kate Wardenburg
Late in November, on a single night Not even near to freezing, the ginkgo trees That stand along the walk drop all their leaves In one consent, and neither to rain nor to wind But as though to time alone: the golden and green Leaves litter the lawn today, that yesterday Had spread aloft their fluttering fans of light. What signal from the stars? What senses took it in? What in those wooden motives so decided To strike their leaves, to down their leaves, Rebellion or surrender? and if this Can happen thus, what race shall be exempt? What use to learn the lessons taught by time, If a star at any time may tell us: Now. Howard Nemerov, “The Consent”
Colophon This book was edited by Shellandrielle Jones and designed by Miles “Bread” Lee in Spring 2020. It is set in Adobe Caslon Pro designed by Carol Twombly and Bodoni Egyptian Pro designed by Nick Shinn.