issue vii

campo review ‘17

campo review APRIL/MAY 2017

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campo review ‘17

THE CAMPO REVIEW APR & MAY.17 2

campo review ‘17

temporary relief

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letter from the editor Maybe it is that people are here who I’ve last seen as such an age that I’ve taken a photograph of me, age seven, from my nightstand drawer to assess in the light. Maybe it’s that I’m feeling nostalgic for what I’m beginning to forget. Dome-topped bannisters in white glazed wood. Foliage that turned the duck river bloody in reflection. Almond flavored ice cream in a Tudor style snack-shack.

Snowstorms. The Tappan Zee Bridge glimpsed from 9A. Whatever the reason, I’m sitting up in bed—to the right, cheap accordion shades the color of Elmer’s glue, straight ahead, a chair supporting a black J-Crew excursion vest, worn less-than-jet for being favorite and a black hat emblazoned with the Princeton ‘P’ atop a copy of two novels, David Remnick’s “Reporting” and Ernest Hemingway’s “Selected Journalism,” to my left the mahogany nightstand from which the photo issues, atop the vastly overpriced Restoration Hardware faux fur blanket, color mink, which two years prior had been an entire Christmas in itself—meeting my past self with the same mild-mouthed attention out of which she stares.

It is a pleasant night that smells like pollen and approaching summer but I’m drinking warm milk under wraps in my old worn black Champion Princeton sweatshirt, looking at a background of mustard colored leaves in Fujicolor Crystal Archive FUJIFILM paper, thinking myself somewhere else. In that white turtleneck, with those loosely crossed arms of my past self.

Beside my sister in an identical outfit, a foreign proximity when it wasn’t foreign, because we were friends. With a composure of features, with a sort of calm I, in what has been a month and a year and a high school career of college admissions anxiety, been something I saw not in mirrors but only in images as relics.

It is this kind of calm we tried to create in this issue. What Sierra Warshwasky attempts in her molecular focus. What Tanya Zhong captures in expressing a want to look at her veins instead of her stress. What Isabel Owens depicts in her simple, black and white portraiture. What Katie Nunn expresses in her “screaming.” All of which Elena Koshkin captures perhaps best of all with her photograph of balloons clustered like grapes in “temporary relief,” a happy break from the reality we, with AP tests and assignments and obligations and all the other ligaments of high school life are glad to get away from.

Alexandra Reinecke, EIC 4

campo review ‘17

from the issue “a house salted gray the presence of life a classmate’s comment: it’s a miracle we don’t learn to breathe.”

“She knew they did, logically, but emotions were not logical. She knew she needed help, but she was like cat, and shied away.”

“Someday I’d like to shrink myself down and pay a visit to my own veins so I could witness that roaring tsunami making me alive.”

“So, here I am, age 17, an age at which black kids my age wear an already tired understanding of our country’s prejudices, coming to learn them.”

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editorial staff EDITOR-IN-CHIEF alexandra reinecke MANAGING EDITOR elena koshkin SUBMISSIONS MANAGER brigitte jia SUBMISSIONS TEAM fiona deane-grundman (poetry) katie nunn (fiction) betsy alter (art) isabel owens (photo) WEBSITE DESIGN tanya zhong SPREAD PHOTOGRAPHER sierra warshawksky PUBLICTY MANAGER fiona deane-grundman ADVISORY COUNCIL lindsay webb-peploe sarah morgan emmanuel williams 6

campo review ‘17

contributors alexandra reinecke (’18) elena koshkin (’18) brigitte jia (’18) katie nunn (’17) isabel owens (’17) tanya zhong (’18)

fiona deane-grundman (’18) sierra warshawsky (’18) maya jenn (’18) zoe del-rosario (’18) adam frost-venrick (’17)

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campo review ‘17

temporary relief

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campo review ‘17

food for thought from the campo review editorial staff

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campo review ‘17

molecules by sierra warshawsky

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thoughts on pressure by tanya zhong 1. Home is where the water pressure feels right, I think to myself as I stand under a leaky hotel showerhead.

2. When I was younger I wanted to be a mermaid. When I was six I took a kiddie swim class where the other children would compete to see who could touch the bottom of the pool. As I pushed myself towards the floor of the pool, the water flushing in through my nose made my head hurt, and my view of the neat white tiles below was blurring. I decided I didn’t want to be a mermaid anymore.

3. Pressure is all around us. Like all those tiny air molecules whirring and humming against my skin. Endless energy, like children on a playground.

4. Pressure is all around us. I'm pressuring myself right now, in fact. I'm pressuring myself to think of poetic things related to pressure. I've got a lot of non-pressure-related thoughts swimming around my head now. Here's one: I drank mint tea for the first time in a while.

It reminded me why I don't drink mint tea.

5. The most comforting thing in the world is blanket pressure. The weight of a blanket on your body. Maybe like, five blankets. Wrap them around you and make yourself a blanket burrito. Aw yeah.

6. I wonder how my blood vessels are doing right now. I hope they’re holding up well, containing all that plasma circulating through my body. Blood pushes. It’s a constant tsunami pulsing through a hundred thousand kilometers of veins and arteries all at once.

Blood pushes, and blood vessels push back. It’s a process that’s been going on since I was born, and maybe even before that. Wow. Someday I’d like to shrink myself down and pay a visit to my own veins so I could witness that roaring tsunami making me alive.

7. I don’t handle pressure well, but at least my lungs and my blood vessels can.

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portrait, b+w by isabel owens

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white wakes up by alexandra reinecke White, which the internet tells me is “color at its most complete and pure, the color of perfection” and which means “purity, innocence, wholeness and completion,” is one which I am exceptionally familiar. The website which pegs white as “the color of perfection” goes on to report its understanding that the shade “contains an equal balance of all the colors of the spectrum, representing both the positive and negative aspects of all colors.”

While I am no chrome-guru, as the website’s author claims to be, I believe my lifelong proximity to the shade—a childhood of ski-slopes, a childhood of racial privilege—allows me more than adequate authority to balk, as I did upon reading it, at the statement that white’s “basic feature is equality, implying fairness and impartiality, neutrality and independence.”

In English, we often read work by long-dead authors. Emerson. Thoreau. Twain.

Hawthorne. Fitzgerald. Last week however, in accompaniment with a work by the more recent but still long-deceased W. E. B. Dubois, we read an excerpt not by, as our English teacher would phrase it, “some dead white guy,” but rather by black and 41-year old MacArthur Fellow and National Book Award winner Ta-Nehisi Coates.

Our revolutionarily-fresh reading was an excerpt from Coates’s 2015 novel “Between the World and Me,” a work published, in literary time, only a millisecond ago. Coates, like the other authors we had read, captured America. Unlike the other authors, however, the America he captured was not a past America—as was Fitzgerald’s shimmery 1920s, Twain’s rugged 1840s—but the America in which we live today.

Coates spoke not about some distant historical injustice, but of injustice faced now. He spoke about the unavenged death of Michael Brown. The news media’s misunderstanding. Of his words, all of which powerful, a particular phrase struck me. “And for so long,” he wrote, “I have wanted to escape into the Dream, to fold my country over my head like a blanket. But this has never been an option because the Dream rests on our backs, the bedding made from our bodies.”

The idea that the American Dream, our national conceptual fixation and personal template, is one intrinsically at odds with black America is one I had never considered. Others had. A friend who sits behind me raised her hand to comment that last year at the Democratic convention Michelle Obama had said, to national attention, that she wakes up every morning in a house built by slaves. Another referenced an article we had read in AP United States history, which had pointed out, similarly, that the cost of founding our country, that heralded as the ‘Great Experiment in Democracy,’ was the exploitation of the African race.

It is this idea which has led to my bristling at the internet claim that white’s “basic feature is equality, implying fairness and impartiality, neutrality and independence,” this idea which affirms what I’ve understood, if somewhat removedly, through the veil of cultural amnesia, all my life: that history says otherwise.

Just as I am no chrome-guru, I also am no authority on black America. I am, however, familiar with white America. As a white person, I understand, maybe only logically, definitely 13

campo review ‘17 without the daily presence of such understanding as those without such privilege feel, the extent of my racial privilege. I understand the unbridled opportunity, the complete mobility, and freedom, and with such opportunity, mobility and freedom the acceptability of carelessness, for action without consequence, which comes inherent to being white.

Unlike black kids my age, I’ve never been warned to be cautious around or feared the police. I see police officers as an extension of the actors my family watches on Blue Bloods because white people aren’t targeted by but protected by such powers. Unlike black kids my age, I’ve never received sidelong, anxious glares on a BART train. Unlike black kids my age, I am not more likely than my peers to be expelled or suspended, am not more likely to fall in adulthood below my parent’s socioeconomic status, and in better probability, will not, as a recent news study assured me black kids my age will, be described as “beautiful” or “statuesque” in the teacher recommendations for my college applications.

I am in no way an expert on black America. I have neither read much of the black experience nor seen any of it firsthand. I am, however, a white person with white privilege, which is to say that my vantage there makes me an authority on white America. I have seen the white side of racism firsthand, and often. White friends who belittle Asian classmates’ academic success as a side-effect of their race. White classmates who refer to interracial marriage as ‘cute’ or ‘trendy,’ or an interracial kiss, in a movie or on social media, as something they’d “like to try,” as though an expression of love between two willing parties, was a frozen yogurt flavor instead of an act in which neither race nor the recognition of race has any role.

I am in no way in touch with black America. I am not in touch with black America because I spent time with black high-schoolers form Hartford, Connecticut at writing camp back in 2014, or because I similarly befriended black high-schoolers from the Bronx, New York and New Orleans, Louisiana this past summer, both of which were academic opportunities I understand my socioeconomic privilege as responsible for.

I am not in touch with black America because I read about the Civil Rights movement in AP United States history, or because I juxtaposed the argumentative styles of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcom X in English, or because I followed the progress of the Black Lives Matters movement from the comfort of my i-Phone screen. I do not pretend to be.

Neither my race nor my surroundings give me right to comment on black America. My home, my school, my community and what fraction of it I come into regular contact with is monochrome. Any racial conversation other whites and I undertake, in class, at the dinner table, over rows of silver Apple computers in the journalism classroom, are purely theoretical.

Racial injustice is like a television program for those living in our “white bubble” of Northern Californian suburbia, a program we quite literally have the autonomy to turn on and off with the click of a Comcast remote, an Uber ride to a different neighborhood, a BART ride from Oakland back to the green-treed landscape universal to our respective homes. The only black people I see with anything close to a weekly basis are Don Lemon and Van Jones on CNN. I have little to no difficulty in my life, racial or socioeconomic. I am subject to no institutionalized boundaries. Much like David Remnick expressed in stating that the greatest daily threat to his personal liberties goes no further than the state of the office frozen yogurt machine, my daily challenges do not go far beyond the quality of the drinks I order at Starbucks.

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campo review ‘17 I am lightyears away from understanding the dejection a fellow Kenyon Young Writers attendee expressed in “Blueprint of the South,” a poem I admit I’ve only come across due to an extremity of privilege even most of my suburban friends lack—X has a lifeguarding job, Y a tutoring position, and so on—which is the ability to pour hundreds of hours into writing, into perusing web searches such as “high school fiction contests” and “high school lit mags” and applying to contests such as the Princeton High School Poetry Contest, where I found the piece among the winners’ ranks.

Though I can revere, can logically comprehend it, I cannot, on a substantial level, empathize with Christiansen’s statement “This body and many others like it / have been overused for centuries now, / and aren’t allowed anger or flight, / so in the end, I have to rehab past minds, / along with my own,” because my white privilege, my arbitrary allotment of inherent access to the world’s basics—money, education, self-autonomy—has removed me from such suffering, both historical and present. I do not feign understanding of such suffering.

I don’t know what it feels like to experience the irony of feeling targeted by what is purportedly a protective societal service. I can’t comprehend teachers or classmates sizing me up as a physical rather than an intellectual being. I have no experience to hold parallel to that of being brought to a police station on “suspicion of possession” of a substance I’d never used, so much as sold.

But something I do know, and comprehend, and have experiences to wield in understanding of? White people react in different ways to their privilege. My respective reaction has been largely influenced by my personal socioeconomic status.

Racism is in no case understandable, and is in all cases reprehensible, but it is also a disease which, like any other disease, is likelier to develop under certain sets of conditions.

Living in a wealthy white community, I am not, after all, my white cousins, who, living in impoverished and rural Oregon, see a town member’s use of food stamps to purchase corn tortillas as an abuse of the welfare system. I am not one of Trump’s supporters, who I’m told supported a racist platform out of a fear, a feeling of anxiety of losing the ability to meet their most basic needs.

However moral I like to consider myself, I too am the result of my surroundings; as a white, upper middle class child, who will go on to a higher education and an intellectual career, I do not feel the same anxiety that some white Americans feel, as I don’t understand the rise of black America as a threat to my own future.

Despite the degenerate philosophy of the “For me to win, he must lose” mentality, I cannot neglect the fear which underpins such thinking, which is both a concrete one, and one to which I am unfamiliar. No more can I pretend that my family’s financial security, my own lack of such anxiety, has not encouraged my moral conviction in racial equity.

While others have worked jobs to help support their families, I’ve had the privilege of an Amazon Prime account through which plastic packages holding books are delivered multiple times a week to my doorstep. While others have driven siblings around, I’ve had the privilege of watching New Yorker podcasts. While others have done chores or run errands for working parents, I’ve had the privilege of empty space in which to develop a comfort with the English language that, however it may henceforth be used as a tool to fight inequity, is itself the most glaring of my signs of privilege, my most obnoxious indication of luck.

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campo review ‘17 My moral objection to injustice, then, has been born of my separation from its actualities.

This is an irony I do not overlook.

Author Claudia Rankine similarly pointed out white privilege in stating that November resonated so clearly with white America because white America has never before been targeted.

Rankine was right in asking, during the podcast, where whites were, before the election, at the Black Lives Matter Protests. The answer, of course, is that we weren’t there. We weren’t there for Black Lives Matter. Neither were we present in solidarity against the police-killing of Michael Brown, or Alton Sterling, or Eric Garner. We weren’t concerned with the word equality before it pertained to us personally.

That my hunger for equity moved outside of theory only after my radicalization, that I came to recognize the threats others face to their personal liberties, and have faced for much longer than I have for my own, only after my own personal liberties—to control my body, to have social equality to men, to have access to Planned Parenthood—is more evidence to what has been, for most white people, a distant national consciousness, a cultural amnesia to the alltoo-present plights of black America.

In another New Yorker podcast, activist Brittany Packnett was softer than, though similarly-minded to Rankine in stating, “No one is born awake. Something woke every one of us.” So, here I am, awake.

So, here I am, a white person with little knowledge of black America. So, here I am, a bundle of ironies, a product of privilege and yet its opponent. So, here I am, age 17, an age at which black kids my age wear an already tired understanding of our country’s prejudices, coming to learn them.

So, here I am aiming to bridge the 13.8 miles between Oakland and me which, all my life, I’ve traversed only a number of times I can count on a single hand. So, here I am, in comprehension that however opposite are my burdens from Darius Christiansen’s, I too have not only my own personal history, but the histories of hundreds of years of people like me to account and to act for.

So, here I am.

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campo review ‘17

science museum 1 by fiona deane grundman

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on chappaquiddick by alexandra reinecke my textbook says edward m. kennedy died in 2010, of a tumor, twenty years after he should have jumped on the vineyard (where the hydrangeas change hue based on the sand) where my friend (the slut) has a summer house: a dunked car a solemn bridge overtaken (and dead hydrangeas) (and dead reputations) tarnished like the color on the handles he failed to turn: a house salted gray the presence of life a classmate’s comment: it’s a miracle we don’t learn to breathe the afterthought: we’re equipped with certain understanding how to cry where to put our hands with which limbs to bear the weight of

a stranger

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for whom the flowers (also lacking the necessary oxygen) have assumed a cadaverish ice-tone blue

eucalyptus by maya jenn

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science museum 2 by fiona deane grundman

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temporary relief by elena koshkin

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the man who couldn’t grow by alexandra reinecke The pleasant hotness of afternoon was coming up over the fence. It was the fence to a small house and a small house nice in its modest size so that it wasn’t the sort of image of poverty one might conjure in a momentary haste of fear but only so that there wasn’t very much extra space in it to be had except for the things which were needed and some extra, some small lovely things which took up in revelry what elbow room of the smallness they could and in colored cup and in plastic bicycle and in velvet-eared rabbit plush made it sweet, dulcet, a kind of diminutive and reduced version of the good of life, of living, taken out of it only the superfluous detail which is called to be removed in making a miniature mold of anything, into modest form shrinking it, but in which removal it is really not any lesser, only different, how the toy silver renditions sold of the Chrysler Buildings are not any less for their lack of glass pane windows, for what they lose in architectural detail they atone in metallic paint.

The house was a white house, with an L shape to it as exists in the easy simplicity of game piece and which had been sat down in the landscape in a similar manner; put in simply and separately from its surroundings as though its placing were an easy, removable thing, removable with the regret of two fingers, among the pines and the high reaching and the short reaching trees with dark green and almost black looking, clouded leaves the shape of egg yolk stirred but black, and in among the salty smell of the manmade bay nearby and the stretch of green and the flat white gray pavement which made up that stretch of road which in any more expensive area would have been called a neighborhood. But it was not. It was not a neighborhood because the people in the little white houses were all very different from one another, with different motives and different plans, different ideas in their heads of what the fat of life was and what the velvet; they had different political stickers outside and varying states of array and disarray about their lawns.

There were plants in front of the house, trees, but no flowers. Immediately across the street was a similar white building, which looked to be made of tin painted over and almost trailer-like as the house was, but that one with two stories and strange outside staircase down the side that was narrow and made of white painted wood, thin, and situated much like a fire escape, the beams of it hug tightly to the exterior and in matched hue to it, with the same apparent friction of holding and blending to it as has a brown snake to a trunk. From that house were close lines hung and various untidy lawn clutter; some broken plastic buckets, a pile of yellow and mauve children’s clothing, a dingy, sun-wearied, anorexic beach umbrella.

The area looked some like projects, though it was down near a field with trees and down near the water, because it was a body of water constructed of man and not natural force and 22

campo review ‘17 because about it were the industrial paraphernalia of mining and of shipping crates and about it the sort of towering iron beasts as the little granddaughter called giraffes called in reality pulleys.

The house across the street was one of those which looked an appendage to a project, but many colored more in the hues of the modest white house, which bore overflowing plants, some of which flowers, and defiantly uncut grass and wind chimes and the kind of earth tone electric cars to which existed a part socialist and part intellectually harrowing impression.

Outside the modest white house was one of these; theirs a blue Toyota Prius the hue blue is when simplified, in construction paper, in candy, theirs done in at the front a bit with a scab shaped dent and bandaged in the back, as though with gauze over healthy skin instead of wound, a few inches over, with the maraschino and America blue of a Vote Bernie, 2016 sticker.

Inside the modest house, opposite the kitchen window through which could be seen the car and with none the modernity of the vehicle sat the renter, the owner in reality but a man who had rented long and so who, as effect, thought of himself always in such temporary terms in means of power over the land over which he stepped, and ate, and slept. He was a large man with great wide hands veined with age and a wide mouth and eyes set back neatly behind the large jut of his nose in which sat always, or near always, a somewhat dazed, quiet expression that wasn’t so much a broken sheen to life as it was a by age reduced intensity, with some of the vigor gone out of it but no lesser of joy, of attention and of light, as exists in a thing warried but unchanged, for it is, as things are, warried by age but touched not by any particular corrosive agent as is war, and in which was only a reduction of what had been but not a differing intent, in which was the same steadfast loyalty and conviction as had always there existed but quieter by lack of resource for harboring such thing. The gleam in the eyes was like the lack of the element of the thing a blue shirt gets after five years of wear, holding fast still to the color but by abrasion of cotton holding lesser, or like the fractured twinkle of a music box opened in the idle space of college weekend, looked back upon and found for less, but by no fault of its own rose velvet webbing and to no attention of the ballerina, who danced within and who danced as though to reverberation of sound then, and forevermore, anew.

It was dark in the house though it was daytime. Outside was a plot of dark hard dirt which made up the lawn and which was decorated with bits of chipped glass and the small gurgle of a fountain and the neat white marble of gray veined stepping stones, the sum of these things, these happy garden things, giving the lonely and fractured impression of jewel setting without jewels, for among the leaves and the stones and the places which in space called in hunger for petal there was no hue and only want of flower.

Inside Edward Whittaker sat at the right hand arm of his hunter green couch. His wife was in the kitchen. It was high noon and they were waiting, the Whittaker’s, for the arrival on the shelf of the evening of the substance of their day, namely, the small, neat saffron dress of their granddaughter, and with it all that went in effect; the dinner candles and the plastic cups and the bland meal they would fret not over but over which they would watch the small heat of the lavender scented flames cut in the plastic child cups the ghost of iris petals.

They were purple cups. They were untouched, presently, above the drying rack before the dishwasher.

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campo review ‘17 “Well what’d he say to you?” Whittaker’s wife said. Her name was Amelia. She was a large woman wearing a long tiered white skirt and a lemon meringue tank shirt into which fit neatly the copious size of her sun-worn chest.

“What’d he say?” said Whittaker.

“John Drenen,” Amelia said, wiping her mildly wetted hands on a dishrag, “At the store.”

“At the store,” Whittaker repeated, as though considering, for the foremost time that afternoon, the shape of the word. “The store. Quickly’s.”

There sounded from the kitchen the hard whoosh of the sink tap into the basin. There followed the small clanking of diminutive plates; the unforgiving push against porcelain of plastic dishwasher hold, sticking up from the drawer like the stock of a gray lacquered weed.

Amelia closed the dishwasher and ran it and folded the dishrag up over the handle. She took down a glass then, from the cabinet, ran into it another great whoosh of the tap and plucked from a skinny side drawer, behind the chest of a pack of matches, the silver foil of a drink packet.

In the space of the living room, which was the space of the house really, Whittaker remained on the couch. He did not move when she came in except to take the glass and the packet from the large fold of her aged hands. “A dream, he said.”

Amelia undid the packet and poured the crystals of it into the glass. They stuck first to the bottom in a magenta hued hub before settling some among the liquid.

“A dream, huh.”

“That you were a dream,” said Whittaker, “and I said no a dream’s but cloud and ash.”

“Yeah?”

“Said that wasn’t what you were wasn’t what you could be because a dream’s only a glowing gray glob of a thing. And he put the bag of corn flakes he was buying—he was buying cornflakes, that’s why I saw him in the same aisle, the grain one—in the basket in his arm and he just nodded. In that odd nod he does how—” Whittaker paused a minute.

“Like see,” he said, turning his large aged head some, in the kind of prod a horse might make but a trained one, and this a diminutive even of the most thoroughbred of neck mechanics.

“Just like that and I said to him he was wrong. Said you were more real to me than—than what’d I say. That you were—” Whittaker’s voice let off again, but this second time not in pausing for action; much the opposite.

He wore a strained look on his face as though looking at a set of digits who in combination had failed him.

“You don’t—” Amelia started.

“That he said you were a dream and I said no a dream isn’t but cloud and ash said you were more real to me than my own legs,” Whittaker said, and all in one Alameda flavored breath as though in catching the thought he were afraid to reel it into reality any slower than mind allowed him, like the flick of a silver fish one would not take in idly.

That’s what it smelled like in the living room: Alameda. It smelled like trees and like white gray pavement and the mildly oiled smell that hung in off the manmade body of water, no less cool than that of a natural bay but only tinted some with amber, with a film on it like maple syrup scraped plate remains only thinner. Like rice paper.

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campo review ‘17 Some of the particles from the vitamin drink had risen to make an artificial hint to the air around Whittaker’s face which did not have any real cousin in smell in the natural world but which, asked for a parallel, might best be called to resemble that of staled bubblegum.

“Speaking of legs,” said Amelia.

“Yes.” “Haven’t gone for your walk yet have you.” She said it without the turned up end of a question and with a neat disinterest on her face as though without retort she knew the answer.

“I will,” said Whittaker, this much in the distracted, irritable voice of a child torn from his play, “I told you that already. That I’d go before dinner.”

Amelia stood still looking at him. She had her hands knit together before the tier of the skirt under which her thighs would show in having disrobed. Whittaker did not move to further the talk and only looked past her at the cheap monster of a TV screen behind her that was an old kind and dark gray and boxy in the old way that looked like the face of a granite boulder pregnant in the mold of a square.

Whittaker reached out and took one of her hands and had her sit down beside him in the sinking blue flesh of the couch. It was an old couch and so the flesh of it wore that restrained give of worn flesh, like the flesh of a heel. Whittaker had the window shades pulled down and coming through the bottom of their plastic, their cheap, white plastic accordion spread of folds black and heavy with the room’s darkness sat a vibrant and persistent pool of sun. He did not ignore it but neither did he pity it. He had folded in his hands and in the sinew behind his chest a special irreverence, a special hatred as one could not have aimed at a thing directly from whose ill will you have not been personally and singularly sought out. Harmed.

He was watching flowers on the screen. It was a small screen though a large TV and fuzzy with the old quality of screens that revealed almost the pattern of the boxes in it, like miniscule bits of quilt to make the image or shards of glass holding still in the second after the fracture, steadfast but broken to that image of old. On it then were the vulgar hot colors of petals and of boughs of stems held in arms as though oat stacks, with the same copious weight in their holding, the same heaviness of arm translated even through screen and through year, many year, twelve, thirty two, seventy four, however many eras and shades stood between the receptor and the receptacle for viewing, and as easily as though it were a bearing of weight held far off in space and in time, in Hollywood maybe, but in colors and shapes and fake stage depictions of Phuket, but there among the cream hued simplicity of the house, the wet slightly oiled heat but not humidity off the street.

“You haven’t stirred it,” Amelia said, standing, looking as she did not at the visceral pinks and tangerines and glowing emperor’s purple of the screen but at the simple, untouched and unstirred glass of the vitamin drink. There sat a spoon beside it.

“I told you—” “Whittaker, you said you’d start—” “I said I’d—” he moved his arm some, not touching her but moving it about, beside her flank, in the general direction of the space in which she obstructed his view of the screen. “Oh move Amelia would you I’ll have it before dinner you know that I’m only trying to watch—to feel—” And his voice let off in a small, pained, ultimately childish manner.

“You said—” 25

campo review ‘17 “Oh damn it, Amelia,” Whittaker said in a tone together composed and violent. And up out of the small pulse of his fury he moved toward him the mean pink of the vitamin drink glass, taking up with it the spoon in the same shade of disruption.

There sounded the steady clink of thin metal against thin glass and in the body of the glass emerged a more saturated, magenta color. A new waft of bubblegum air emerged and Whittaker sat with his face in it as he kept his featured fixed on the screen.

Amelia returned to the kitchen. She was putting down on a pad of paper the messy, slanted script of a housemaker’s list.

In the tired, white wet flesh of Whittaker’s eyes reflected the lovely ankles and arms of the girls carrying on the screen the flowers, the bundles of them as wide and as copious as those of wheat, of grain, and as heavy. They were in cream hued dresses, the girls, which were thin shapeless panels from the waist down, the waist being the one place where they were pulled in, cinched, and these with simple fat swashes of velvet also cream hued. The girls all had dark hair, the seven of them, and all of them with it combed neatly back behind the ears and kept behind the back in that reverent arrangement, as though as not to detract from the flora.

There were also on the screen marble obelisks and great, sweeping, shallow bowls set atop pillars as though receptacles for sacrifice but beside this there was no locational distinction to the scene, no INSERT NAME Street sandbox to be taken in suspension of belief for flat of Cairo, or hill for flat of PLACE, but only the simple dark green and flawed, size-wise, image of a mountain range, as though the foothills of Vermont or anywhere else, and about them a mean and steady whirr from off stage machines of fog and of wind that pulled about a diminutive manner at the tiny petals, the tiny raised bits of thread which composed the velvet sashes.

And as from the arms of one of the girls was set down a bough, this atop a sacrifice bowl, there panned a larger image of the wonder. Backed in the subdued dark green and the mist and beside it the inversely vulgar light of the other things, the velvet and the dark combed back hair against shoulder blade and all the little gold bits making up the façade of the old time, of the fiscally irresponsible Californian wonder, the pastime, the mecca, the glow, were the sherbet colored stocks of earthen flesh; dahlia and rose and tulip and lily, the easy nodded drops of delphian like sugar scooped up and returned to stalk by spoon.

In a stirred, excited stupor, Whittaker paused in the flesh of a moving minute the TV. In one steady and determined breath he drank down the glass of the vitamin drink and, in setting it down, moved the large bulk of his body toward the screen.

He put his large paw of a hand on the screen and sat there a minute, the coffee table pulled up under his body weight, leaning forward into the image, hearing beside the skin of his cheek the buzz of its hued, saccharine wilted reality.

“Whittaker,” a voice said from the kitchen. It was a low reasonable voice.

“Whittaker you get away from that TV.” And then in from the ante-room came the great sweeping body, the tumbling breasts, the white tiered skirt, the face with whom beauty had once flirted, briefly and exorbitantly, lustily in a sort of enamored transcendence and then left one sick January, all the remnants of it picked up quick and hastily as though things from a temporary dwelling, the cheap carpet of a motel room with a drained swimming pool, thrown savagely and away in a suitcase but in this haste a thing

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campo review ‘17 or too forgotten, and so the fractured glass quality swimming still in the eyes not by any defiance of its own but that of circumstance, as has a comb left behind on bathroom counter.

“Whittaker I told you not to put your—Whittaker!” This in a voice not exactly raised, only with more density to it than had weighed in it before.

Amelia went and crouched down beside Whittaker at the TV and, in wedging her hand between his and the screen, pushed it aside from the pink and the dripping purple and the vulgar sherbet colored glow of the buzz.

“Put your hand down. Get away from—” “I was only watching the flowers.”

“Touching, Whittaker. You were only touching the flowers.”

Whittaker moved back some. Took up a resigned posture at his old spot in the couch.

“And what’s wrong with that, hey, tell me what’s wrong with that not like we have any of our own. Not like we have any flowers outside to work with of our—” “The radiation. I told you the radiation.

“Damn the radiation. Radiation’s a lie for a thesis paper.”

“And this lie, Whittaker. Entertained by whom? Who would harbor in their head such a fantastical idea as not to press one’s flesh up against a screen given—” “Damnundergraduates.”

“What, Whittaker?”

“Damnundergraduates. Cal students.”

Amelia went outside, to the dark soil plot they called a garden, after that, to answer the ringing of the telephone. They couldn’t go out to the house that night, their granddaughter and Whittaker’s daughter and her husband; they couldn’t go out because they had something they’d neglected to remember about. An event. A ballet recital.

So Amelia prepared the dinner but on a smaller scale and Whittaker prepared the salad and they ate their on the face of the table, over which the purple cup set out for the child was set out, and which they simultaneously made conscious efforts at ignoring, though it was a bright thing and a bright reminder and had more hue to it than any item in the room beside the sherbet buzz of the fiscally irresponsible movie garden.

It was brighter, too, than the photographed flowers, which they had hung up all around the wall but these in black and white prints for they were cheaper that way.

They succeeded in ignoring the violet plastic cup a while, or succeeded in pretending to, but it bothered Whittaker after a time, its fluorescence reminding him against the flat hues of the room, the mellow cream color of the pulled chicken and the tan glistening skin and even the dulled quality about the ketchup, which was organic and bought on a whim, of the privilege robbed of him that night, and by hand of such irreverent event as by a ballet recital, a great kicking of baby tanned legs and of tulle, to which he was asked not.

It angered him after a time and so he took up the cup in his great big hand and used it for his own, pouring against the mocking violet of its mold the thick crimson of wine, and a copious amount for his own drinking. He cleared his plate, washing the shreds of white chicken down the drain with the bleeding of the ketchup, afterward taking up the child violet cup and the bottle and carrying the both of them outside with him, out into the graveyard of growth with which another

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campo review ‘17 owner, any other person up that stretch of oil-scented pavement, would have made and called ‘garden.’

Whittaker sat at one of the thin metal tables. It had beside it some stepping stones and behind it the extravagant reach of the useless fountain, with to it the colors and impression in cut glass as had an old movie theatre sign, towering and glowing and lit. The place where the garden should have been ran most of the yard, excluding the small cement area, which was leaned up against the side of the house and in which grew only the plastic of the granddaughter’s toys; some water pails, a part-chipped rocking horse, a white plastic rendition of a princess wand without any of the necessary qualities, no glitter, no thinness of stretch, only a thick white glob with a face set into it bearing all the qualities of milk glass.

Whittaker poured some more crimson into the violet cup. It was a vulgar violet, the cup, and a small cup, not one half the size of his hand and only three times its width, and it glowed some in the dark, summer air. There rose off the wine a smell similar to that of cinnamon only darker.

So Whittaker sat in the little metal garden chair, black and with lines across the seat of it like the pallets of a bed but thinner, this piece of furniture much too small for him, clutching the child cup in vulgar violet and supping wine from it, and looked out at the dirt of the yard. He’d been watching the movie all afternoon, and in the dark with the shades pulled down, so as he looked out at the dark, unyielding dirt of the dead yard what grew before his eyes were the vulgar sherbet hues and shapes of the screen. There was the violet, and there the rose, there in the corner beneath the cheap tired pane of the window a bough of alder with blooms the size of one’s fist!

It grew colder as the heat of the summer night subsided some to the neat humidity of the evening wind; out beyond the dark plot of the yard the shapes of the TREE NAME trees moved slow and black and reticent like bits of cloth in pool water submerged and, by no will of their own, by gutter-flow shaken. Out beyond the yard, past the street pavement the body of the manmade bay let off a small, black glimmer over which hung a maple syrup smelling vapor.

Across the street a bit of a child’s yellow shirt, the browned color of a dingy banana, blew some on a clothesline.

Whittaker was looking at the flowers. They were bloomed in great sherbet rows over the small dark plot of the lawn, reaching up in petals to the sideboard of the house. In his cup the wine was gone though the bottle still half full; he poured himself another. And looking at the great sherbet hued blooms, and the burgundy blooms and the reds and the neat dark sprigs of iris, he brought the purple child cup, his large hand closed around the wine, and sat down beside the plot of yard with his legs crossed on the ground.

“Amelia! Amelia!” he called out through the sherbet hued blooms of his daze, and loudly, “Amelia! Come out here and—Amelia!” And he stood from the ground with the purple, plastic child cup in his hand, the wine sloshing up at his hand in a mini Hokusai musing as he did, to knock incessantly on the pane of the window.

“Amelia! Amelia!”

Amelia’s large, age-warried face appeared in the box of the window. Her sand hued hair was pinned behind her head and she wore under her eyes a mayonnaise-looking cream yet half rubbed in. Her thin, tired mouth closed around the word “what.”

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campo review ‘17 “Come outside! Come outside and see!”

Amelia came out through the small rectangle door from the main room of the house. She was pinning a bit of fallen hair to the nape of her neck. She held in her hand the foam of a neck brace and held in her face a taxed disinterest. “What, Whittaker?”

“What do you mean what? Come over here! Look!”

She walked slowly to the dark yard plot beside the house.

Whittaker was trembling some, sitting in the dirt, the purple plastic child’s cup of wine shaking violently in the great paw of his hand.

“A flowerless yard,” she said, crossing her arms over her chest. “That’s what you called me out of bed for, Whittaker, a flowerless—” “How do you mean flowerless—” he said, the cup steadied.

“Flowerless. Without flowers.”

“Don’t you—” Whittaker fumbled, his mouth suddenly dry, “Don’t you—” “Dark and flat and nothing growing in it. Been the same, Whittaker, for twelve years, but what? It’s all of a sudden sparked an interest in you? The dirt?”

“The flowers!” he cried incredulously, a bit of wine spilling out of the purple plastic child cup onto his hand, “Don’t you see them? Like something out of the movie! Like something out of Babylon—” Amelia began back to the door. She was fixing another clip as she went, muttering under her breath the brittle space of the words, “He’s mad. God help me he’s gone mad.”

After she had gone inside, and closed down the shade over the window so as to dissuade further tapping, Whittaker set the purple cup back on the flimsy metal table beside the fountain and returned to the plot of the yard with his hands held open before his face. Standing with his old, thick sweater hung loosely over the slope of his back he rubbed his eyes roughly, desperately, with the paws of his hands, stopping over some as he did toward the place where before had sat the brilliant blooming of sherbet.

When he opened his eyes again there was no crane of violet, no bough of rose, no slash of alder, but only in their place the dark hard ground the shape of all man’s end, the dark dampness with to it the hard, unyielding flat wall of all misery and all grief. He rubbed his eyes again, desperately, but before him remained the same flat of black. He sat back down in the dirt, this time without the purple child’s cup and with his flat out flat and hard.

“They were here,” Whittaker said to himself. “I saw them, they were—” and his voice let off into the humid black of the night. He hit the flat of his hand violently but not forcefully against the hard, flat dirt, because he was tired, exhausted. “I saw them,” he muttered again to himself, there appearing over the screen of the dirt pieces of tan and whispering pink chiffon of the recital, the lines of small mouths and globs of Cleopatra eyes painted in extravagant, sweeping black liner and that the eyes beneath the paint were not even dark. “I saw them,” he continued, returning to the flimsy black table, holding to his mouth but not drinking from the purple, plastic cup of the child, telling himself that his grandchild’s eyes were a mean, hard pale blue, like the flesh of a flower he could not in all the muster of his courage will to grow. ***

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campo review ‘17 The next day, after the ballet recital and with the residue of it still in her child skin and the mascara of it stuck still in tiny globs beneath her eyes, Whittaker’s granddaughter stood in the cement area of the back lot yard. Whittaker was feeling a pain in his side so he sat in the chair of the black table instead of at his usual spot at the stoop; Amelia had taken his place in immediate proximity to the pile of plastic toys. The granddaughter was wearing a full piece swimsuit that fit over the childish ball of her stomach like frosting to the slope of a cake; it was a swimsuit which looked to be composed of two pieces sewn together, with a white bottom and a hideous turquoise top that met the white in a bit of transparent mesh like a sash under the tiny flatness of her chest, and over which clung to her shoulders in thick, nylon straps.

It was a Little Mermaid bathing suit; it had knit into the middle top of it the nub of plastic outlined in gold hued, ridged plastic with on it the same tiny, gleaming portrait of Ariel in boulder sized eyes and large white mouth and cherry colored hair as bore the white plastic wand lying unused on the bit of pavement.

Whittaker’s daughter and son-in-law were sitting on terrycloth towels from inside, succulent hued towels in pale green and subdued magenta, respectively; John, the husband, had put a Strokes album on inside. The sound wafted out through the door, slowly, with the strange effect of rock music turned low. They were drinking Diet Coke and the daughter had spilled some; over the granddaughter’s tiny nubs of toe nails ran a dribble of soda like brown blood.

“Look at it,” said John, the husband, taking in his hand the small nub of his daughter’s brown tanned ankle.

“Hey! That’s my ankle daddydonttouch!” the child wailed, retracting her foot from the hand. Amelia had moved the white plastic wand away from her foot, to avoid the Diet Coke spill, and in seeing this too, she again wailed. It was a high grating wail like that of a newly heated shower head.

“Well you can see it. The little white marks there,” John continued.

“Just terrible,” said the daughter, “just when the curtain came down in that last fit of velvet, you know. Burgundy and all. Just reached out and bit her right on the—” “You want another one?” said Amelia. She was looking at the spill.

“Just right on the ankle. The ball of it, like it were some kind of deranged caramel lollipop—” “I can—” “No, sit,” said the daughter. “John’ll get it.”

By the time they had dinner, which was early and was at five, all of the plastic toys had been pushed aside in disinterest save the white, milk-glass looking wand; five empty Diet Coke cans and a bits of pulled up fountain water on the granddaughter’s terrycloth cover up constituted the remains of the afternoon. After dinner, which had been chicken and rice and a salad, they’d stayed a little while, and with notice of their misplaced timetable which was the low, talc-scented call of parental voices on the night only just gathering to dinner the muddy feet and sunburned backs of their children.

John had started a second beer, though then he sat not on the stoop but stood in the space of the door, as though in delayed waiting. The granddaughter, then with the childish haze of early evening lethargy groggy about her eyes, was bending with her tiny shoulder blades sticking

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campo review ‘17 back harshly from her tilt, the substance of the white plastic milk wand stirring in the fountain a worthless and dizzying current.

She cooed some in that tired expression of joy which exudes of children too taxed for shriek and shout; she called some to Whittaker. “Whitty, look,” she said in her dulcet, ketchupbrightened tongue, “Whitty lookathewater.”

But Whittaker was sitting slumped in his chair, looking out dejectedly at the dark snarl of the unyielding dirt.

“Whitty comeandplay. Lookathewater.”

Whittaker did not so much as turn.

“Lookatthewater!” the granddaughter shrieked finally, the heat of her frustrating pushing even through the lethargy of her tiny, shrine-like face.

“The flowers,” he said to himself in the chair, noticing not even as sprung on her face the hot, garnet drops of frustration damp, the distress of her features. “Made them in sherbet for a minute,” he muttered, “made them before can make them again because I made them for a second like the screen, gilded like—” “Dad,” said Whittaker’s daughter.

“Like,” he was muttering still to himself, “the movie. Gilded violet just like—” “Whit, don’t you want to take a minute in?” It was a reasonable, cautious voice. It was John. “We could put you up on the couch. Get you something to—” “Just like the movie!” Whittaker muttered. His tired blue sweater flapped some against the start of his flank as he muttered it, moving fast to the spread of tools, spades and things beside the toys. He extracted a spade the size of a palm from a bucket and brought it with him, muttering the whole way and with tired blue sweater cotton flapping, to the dirt out beside the house siding.

“Whit,” said John, part drunk, part tired, part angry, “Whit, man, why don’t you come in and sit down a while. Get you a water or—” “Just like the movie, gilded violet and great huge boughs—” “A ginger ale. Keep the screen open and a fan wouldn’t that—” Whittaker started digging madly with the spade, throwing up clots of black dirt up against the white of the still un-darkened sky. It was a sky white as though a single slab of printer paper had been pasted up beside the black silhouettes of the trees. With his age and with his not feeling well in the side the dirt came up in small, flat bits, like exaggerated dark flakes.

Whittaker’s granddaughter was crying then, hot and unreservedly. Whittaker’s daughter was talking in hushed tones then, to Amelia; John was out in the front yard, tucking into the foothold of the station wagon the remains, the bones and things, of the chicken.

When John returned he took up the five empty Diet coke cans and set them, with one large hand, on the face of the flimsy black table. He made a signal, a combination composed of a dash of the eye and a tilt of the chin, at his wife as spouses make sometimes at each other, a signal made up some time between the two of them as a sort of tacit code with which to handle the world, and this particular combination of gestures that which indicated, but not violent or hastily, departure.

“Why don’t you say bye to Whitty?” John said, cupping around his daughter’s tiny shoulder the palm of his hand.

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campo review ‘17 “Don’t wanna,” she said.

Whittaker’s daughter extracted herself then from her words shared with Amelia.

“Genevieve, so help me—” “Don’t wanna saidididntwanna.”

“Little deer,” said Amelia, looking down at the child’s wet face, “you wouldn’t want Whitty to—” “Whitty don’t cry,” said the child. “Aint never seen’mcry.” But she went anyway, without shoes over her tiny white pink hued slivers of toenails and over her left foot still the residue of the spilt soda, on her right ankle the three indentations of rococo, dressed up in tan gauze for wood stage and velvet, of that other knife of a childine jaw.

She went and with her feet dirtied on the bottom by the dampness of the dirt Whittaker had pulled up with the spade. Whittaker was kneeling, with the tired blue sweater hanging down around him gracing the dirt, the spade pausing only the flesh of a second when his granddaughter stood beside him in departure. Her face was hot still with frustration when she pressed the browned pores of her cheek against his; he felt on her skin the still damp garnets of her stupid, exhausted impatience.

“Bye’n Witty,” Whittaker’s granddaughter said, pressing her ketchup-smelling mouth against part of his cheek that was really more his jaw, and not so much issuing him a kiss as stamping for a minute the shape of her wet, tired mouth on his skin, as she might otherwise have utilized a napkin. *** A week later Whittaker was fatally ill, or rather, was found to be, for he had had for the space of seven months’ time, despite waking early with spade and seed each morning before even the geese were yapping wild beyond the bay, seen the success of no flowering except that of a cancer in his left-side kidney. Amelia had moved their bed out to the main room so that he could have more fresh air in sleeping, with the front screen and the bath both open to the dark, talc and maple syrup smell of the neighbors and the bay. She who had before monitored his intake of all things, chicken, ketchup, pills and coffee allowed him in space the width of palate she knew he in years had been robbed of, and so his old habits of green tea and vitamin drink magenta and grain with in it the moniker ‘multi-grain’ subsided almost immediately with the diagnosis for the uptake of food rich and in plastic packaged.

At first Amelia had refused to budge with the wine, to which he had assumed a steadfast and cruel campaign of requesting ‘merlot for the mort,’ that small, clipped souvenir of his boyhood seminary Latin taken like a chip off the white, gray-veined marble of the old world and for his last pleasures. And so he sat up in the thin mattress bed in the main, small room of the small house those last few weeks with burgundy wine flowing always and easy, amber in the purple plastic child cup he’d taken up using, with over his flanks a new coverlet of hunter velvet though they could not afford it to the same extent then anymore then than they ever could, which is to say none, and with a dusting of white powder on the pads of his fingers as he sat from the Hostess confectioneries he, drowned two parts in wine and one part in grief, referred to as ‘cocaine donuts.’

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campo review ‘17 Yes, up in bed those last weeks he was a regular poet, drawing in his last the richest from life and all the time without a pain of his own except that which is universal. He was a perfect aged affect of Byron on his Grecian stint, with none the fever and all the velvet. He wrote. He wrote short epics of things with subjects such as open water swims and battles, forests masked in fog and also those things of his own, including a particularly lengthy one on the cocaine donuts and another, longest of all at fifteen pages by hand, which in tumbling, marvelous language exalted the plastic cup from which he had taken hourly to supping his drink.

He fought against the sickness hard, fast, violent, in the terms with which he had treated all the filament of life before the shackles of age had removed of him the ability for such valor.

He died on a Tuesday, without ever having grown a flower and with no more than a single hand’s sum of complaints to his name. He died at night, when the sky was that stark clean newsheet white, and with the cup, wine-filled held gently in his hand. *** It was three weeks after the ceremony that Ingrid was allowed to see the grave at Mountain View; it was built some into a great, dark green slope with trees all about it and over the front the gleam of white marble stood out still not yet merged to the ground in that manner of newly laid stone. Ingrid wore a black eyelet shirt, a little too large for her meek frame, which had a flat black grosgrain neck and sleeves wide and triangularly exaggerated against her thin arms.

She wore long denim shorts under it clad tight to her legs. Her brown back showed in that unicellular effect of child skin out from the back of the shirt, as though it were a single slab of stone.

She did not know where they were and she would not be told; she had behind her teeth the cherry candy of the appeasement.

“Looks nice,” said John. He wore a suit jacket and his black hair combed back neat from his blue-green eyes. “You pick it out?”

“Yeah,” said Amelia, also in black. “Put in the new engraving after the clover sprouted around the plot.” She was swaying some in the small heat of the day; the black tiers of her skirt rocking with the ends up over the damp grass.

“Lookatheflowers Whitty,” said Ingrid, her black, stiff triangular eyelet sleeves pulling down with them in two neat cuts the white of the afternoon as she sat. There was over the grave a great sweeping through the dark, black-backed green grass, of white clover; tiny puffs from condensed nibs of white pressed together. She sat, pressing down some of the white puffs and green with her tiny child bottom so that they wilted down against the dirt like thick embroidery.

And among the blossoms, as though over a blanket of fleece down, she put her fat baby hand among the great white and hunter blooming, with over the brown of her back hanging the black of mourning of which she knew not.

“Lookatem,” she said, her hand still stuck about them, “look!” And then after a minute, with her tiny fat palm never ceasing to push at the white nibs, she turned up the taut, tiny end of her chin up at the second-round funeral party. With the cherry candy artificial, gushing in her mouth, but on her face none the garnets, she said, and in a tone not in the least matter pained, “Whitty never play with me.”

Beside the spread of white nibs, beyond her small brown back, was a simple marble slab with cut into ‘Edward Whittaker’ in sturdy, Roman letters and beneath it in the same proportions the date, and crammed in later addition, so that less empty marble stood from the bottom edge 33

campo review ‘17 and the middle than that of the top, but in no notable lack of symmetry, was also in classic font the phrase ‘hic est qui crescit en morte’; and here lies in death the man who grows.

p-rom in blue series by campo parents

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p-rom in blue series by campo parents

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p-rom in blue series by campo parents

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resistance by brigitte jia

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marnie j’s remorse by adam frost-venrick Did the grocery store not have what you need?

The beggar out of his good deeds?

Is the prison overflowing With the flowers of your greed?

Well, ah, I guess it’s just like What Marnie J. had to say.

So long, long ago.

Is the smack running low?

Does your lover say she has to go?

Is the poison from your pen, Drying up in the sun.

Well ah, hell, I guess it’s just like, Marnie J. used to say.

Long, long ago.

And when you go out at night?

Do you have the chills?

Does the sun burn too brightly?

Can you get your fill?

Well, listen very closely, I’ll tell you, mind your head.

And pay very close attention.

To what Marnie J. said.

Is the poet out of rhymes?

Has your clock run out of time?

Is the night coming, screaming, Born freely from your mind.

Well, you know, I guess it’s Like what Marnie J. had to say.

So long, so long ago.

You’ve heard the story Of sweet, sweet Marnie J. A million words nothing to say.

She took a place inside your brain.

Made you say things not quite sane.

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campo review ‘17 You know the story.

There were two.

There was her. And then there was you.

Is the hangman out of rope?

Are you loved ones out of hope?

Is the car going faster, Faster down the road.

Well now, then, I guess it’s just like What Marnie J. used to say.

Long, long ago.

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screaming “let me out” by katie nunn If she was a rock, she was eroded.

The tired hallways streamed with high schoolers one last time that day before the day got out, like a swarm of minnows all destined toward the doors. She looked around at her classmates’ expressionless faces, exhausted by their days, needing some sort of nourishment.

She had already been in the hallway, looking up at the ceiling, at nothing in particular, simply there to defy. She had taken out her phone, trying to pretend she was busy to no one but herself, looked at her Snapchat, her Instagram, her Kik, and even her Facebook as some way of trying to find love, or maybe approval.

She put her phone away in her backpack and sat down near someone’s locker, looking into nothing. She thought she should do her homework, or read her required reading for her APUSH class, but dismissed the thought. Her arms didn’t have the willpower to move. Her brain did not have the power to comprehend. She wondered if this is what it felt like to have brain damage, or to be dead. She thought the latter. She would of liked to be dead.

She pushed herself up when a random kid shoved her aside. Almost like a piece of dirt, she thought. She got up and wondered if she had ever skipped class before. She hadn’t. She thought about the reason why.

As she left the school, she thought about Daniel, Josh, Tyler. She thought about Lucy, Kaitlyn, Mary, and she wondered if they still cared. She wondered if she could ever tell them.

She forgot, as she was thinking about this, that she was a walking ghost. In this school, violence, emotional, mental, verbal, physical was rewarded.

She was done with the pressure.

She wondered if anyone ever felt like this. She knew they did, logically, but emotions were not logical. She knew she needed help, but she was like cat, and shied away from people’s touch. Logically, she knew this would not be forever, but somehow she felt like she could not keep on in this atmosphere. She was like a flower that had all its water taken out of it. She simply could not survive.

The thoughts of the party ran through her. She couldn’t stop thinking of the feeling of his hips against hers, of the way his hand, shaking, clasped her mouth.

She wondered if she really was nothing, like her soul had already left her body and she was looking down.

She wondered how she could get there

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portrait, b+w by isabel owens

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