CALEDONIA
2016-2017
Dear Castilleja, Thank you for deciding to read the 2016-2017 edition of Caledonia. We are proud to present this eclectic collection of poetry, paintings, photography, drawings, and short stories. It was hard for us to choose from the incredible pieces of writing and art that we received. Caledonia’s mission is to celebrate the works of students in the Castilleja community. Those featured in Caledonia are not only exceptional writers and artists, but they also are athletes, musicians, thespians, bookworms, coders, engineers, and scientists. The varied backgrounds of those who submitted to Caledonia this issue demonstrate to us, and hopefully to you, that everyone has artistic potential. It is our hope that Caledonia inspires everyone, from those of who have always been passionate about art and writing to those who don’t feel particularly imaginative, to create and share their work with the Castilleja community. We have some exciting initiatives planned next year to promote the celebration of arts and writing at Castilleja, and hope you will join us. Thank you to everyone who submitted their work and to Ms. Smith for serving as our faculty advisor.
Enjoy! – Sho Sho, Megan, Riya, and Grace
a pathologist’s report at the wharf we begin bare-knuckled, bare breasted. sooth our stings with salt. that is how we learn to hunger for the liver. for the fish eyes anchored, souvenir magnets cool against our cheek. what we love we grab only with throat, swallow it whole until stomachs oscillating and full, our lips desperate for the skin-like. we sit, cattle boating -our nets yakked from below the soundstage, from electric fencing around the perimeter. soon, we will electrocute the bay with our catch, split down the scales for the high-end and their bellies. but for now, we are raw-throated; we are mouths like bow-legged infants. wailing. ravenous. defected in the bone. we carry our teeth like a history -- always snatching; leave biting to the dogs. in our youth we learned how to body a beautiful thing: to whittle the abdomen empty, to teach how to prey, to break jaws on the elbows of children for their polyester. what we learned was all cutthroat, kept on suckling until stomached, the shells we spat only for tradition. still -- we hollow wharf for a fish bone hoping the smallest chokes us. hoping we bruise easily, how quickly we find the knives in our softest parts. – Noel Peng ‘17
Katie Jo Schuman ‘17
Charlotte Lamm ‘20 The Mountains’ Sea the wind sends forth waves across the sea, they bend in waves of purple and gold, poppies, mustard and lupin roll, ringed by the green of a never ending meadow, nestled in the crook of the mountains, where bison and deer once roamed, the perfect flowers dance, the light from the sky frames the valley, ready for the flowers to come hence. – Lauren Ashby ‘19
Straw Theory Ruby first taught me to untangle stirrers of showy coffee shops by tangling them: to perforate the paper coats with our teeth until the holes pooled together, crumpled off like trousers, then to interlace them in fingers until they were no longer wound. She showed me the magic trick over and over until I memorized how she laid the straws across each other like crucifixion, wound the stem of the cross over the arm, choked the neck with the right limb, bent the structure how a bird opens its wings towards each other. It was a trick of the eye: snap snap, knot gone before we could see it. Watching her twist straws like watching god devise glow from thunderclap. Any latch, when bolted too tightly, too cautiously, she taught me, spun the other way without notice. How two could be coiled so tightly and suddenly know nothing of each other. That night we pretended we were straws and locked so firmly we ebbed from each other's arms. It was a trick of the brain: snap snap, knot gone before I could see it. – Margaret Zhang ‘17
Riona Yoshida ‘19
I wanted to eat lunch, but here I remain, writing a haiku for you Scarlett Akeley ‘19
Negative Opinions I dislike haikus. They’re boring to read or write. Why must they exist?
Positive Opinions I adore haikus. They are amazing poems. I’ll keep writing them.
– Vanessa Woo ‘18
Eva Szoboszlay ‘18
Ava Axelrod ‘19 Trying to fit Essence of man-made and natural Three short lines of unrimed – Jordan Jackson ‘17
Cashmere In the moments after her mother swallowed the peaceful pill, Ann felt the need to wrench it back out of her mouth. Her desperation hung in the air, frozen, like a crystallized breath of air on a wintry day. She saw her father standing there, grim-faced, and felt her anger whoosh towards him. How could he have let this happen? He once told Ann that her mother was entwined with his own soul, so why was her mother's hand lukewarm, a wax statue on the verge of melting? The sticky warmth of Ann's chair seemed a part of her now. Maybe she could just sit there and melt. It was as if Ann was floating above the somber scene, as if it was some other little girl’s red, puffy eyes that glared at the pasty man next to her. Ann sniffed and noticed that her mother smelled the same, like lilacs and purple. It was an unmistakable scent, one that comforted her among the stench of sterile linens. “Get up, get up” but she could not. Her feet were rooted in the floor, and she wound her fingers around her mother’s tightly, as tight as the time when she got her first shot. She had screamed into the doctor’s ear and left marks embedded in her mother’s hand. Once, she tore the flesh from her knee against a wire fence and started bleeding crimson streaks. Dipping her finger into the blood, she drew on her thigh and thought the red marks looked like a happy face. She wanted to take her fingers and smear her blood all over her face and be brave like Pocahontas. Her mother rushed up to her and started clucking, her father yelling “Get up! Get up!” She started crying. The tears, hot and never-ending, “get up, get up” like a backwards chant dancing upon her temples. She got up. To this day, she could find knobby scar tissue on her right knee. On the day of the funeral, the sun was shining too brightly. It hurt Ann’s eyes dreadfully, and she climbed onto her little foot stool clumsily, jumping for the shutters and shutting the sun out. It did not make sense to her; she did not understand how the world could continue in such an indifferent manner when her Mama, the Mama who clothed her and read her bedtime stories was stiff and cold in a casket. She did not remember much, but there were relatives and friends, hugs she could not feel, words and well wishes and prayers that bounced hollowly off her skull. There were flowers everywhere in the reception area. They made her sneeze. The colors were bright. Mother would have said they were garish. Ann picked up one burnt scarlet rose that had a particularly long thorn on the stem and pressed her fingers into it. Maybe, she thought, if they bled enough she could use her fingers as paintbrushes and draw faces on those stark white walls of the hospital. She pressed her fingers against the thorns, urging blood to come spurting out. She wanted to sit back down, but the voice would come back: “get up, get up.”
After the funeral, a lady with coiffed hair came up to her, dressed in a florid dress trimmed with black lace. Ann noted, with a hint of distaste, that this woman did not bother wearing a pantyhouse and her red lipstick bled past her lip-line. She looked like one of the Barbie dolls Ann had once attacked with her red Magic Marker. Was the lady still talking to her? Yes, she was still talking and gesticulating wildly. Her words wound around and around her skull, tightening like a snake before it kills. The lady looked her up and down and Ann felt her say, if you were such a good little girl, why did your mother leave you? Why did she choose death over you? Ann wished the lady would leave her alone. She mumbled something about finding her daddy, and pushed past the crowd of people to find an empty corner. She needed some air. The cold of the brick walls felt refreshing against her stuffy little dress. She thought about Mother then. Everything was moving in slow motion. It was like walking through water. Ann had never actually tried doing that, but it sounded awfully poetic, so she decided that this is what sadness must feel like. She and her father, each helpless in their grief, floating like two pieces of driftwood, rotting in the sea. “Get up, get up” she thought to herself. When she heard that voice, it was no longer her father’s. Ann continued floating away, coming home occasionally, but when she did, the memories of a ghost mother would crawl into her brain, poking at places that remained numb. On one of her visits back, she went walking with her father. He was overweight. Although he once was tall, his spine now curved; he once smelled of mint, not the greasy aftertaste of a burger. She realized that she did not want to lose him too, so she started walking with him. And now, walking besides her father, she realized that her father was growing old. She could see it in the sagginess of the dark purple circles underneath his eyes, in the liver spots dotting his skin. He hunched as he walked, his back stooped in a gentle slope. What was left of his hair formed a halo, silver and ashy. It filled her with a great sadness, this recognition of his age. She watched him pause to take a shaky breath and sit down on the wooden bench by the pier. “Get up,” she’d like to have told him, but she couldn’t bring herself to. Her eyes were hot. She wrapped her arms around her father’s neck and they sat there for a long minute. They continued to walk along the pier, felt the cleanness of the wind carving into the air. Twilight had just begun to set in. The sun that had blazed down upon Earth with all its might now set without fanfare. It started an orange disc, perfectly circular, then slipped below the horizon until the violets of the sky turned a dark purple, a hue that reminded Ann of lilacs and the cashmere scarves her mother liked to wear. – Sho Sho Leigh Ho ‘19
(100 years ago) all dying happened quickly after Jennie Dear i. Now, it’s easier to look at black holes. The span of nothing tugs inward: a woman suckles at the air the same time her daughter escapes, hissing. When found naked on the carpet, the doctor chuckles Just like when you were born. Outside, pineapples ripen saccharine-sour under blacklight, the luau cancelled from wildfire. Here, the waiting room smells like human grief, the kind of tired that is unaware of morphine. In the hall of her caving stomach, her daughter once sat enthroned. now she shrivels like a fresh husk, choking with no water. In the beginning, holding her is easy. She trickles down the thighs weightless as milk; this riverbed, her first and last coming where everything is cold. ii. do you want to know what happens as your body shuts down. by shut down she means the restart button is broken. no engineer wants to tinker flesh over metal (in other words: softness is not breakable enough). in other words: it’s impossible to rescue fire from air. consider this consequence: the daughter falls ill, is buried. phantoms float in and leave gifts, white cards from whitened trees, pink ink like a bloodless heart. flowers grow old and take all the water. a syringe at the crash cart waits patiently with 200 cc’s of sugar cane. do you want to know what happens and the tape begins again. the daughter is five years old and won’t live beyond the age of ten. in kindergarten, nobody learns to count past ten. in other words: she is halfway through her body’s shelf life. the mother opens her up and dumps everything inside to the outside. her blood is clear, grainy. her dog runs footprints through it like sand, like the wrong kind of rain. it’s summertime and everyone mistakes it for saltwater.
iii. before breathing / kiss that swaddled bone mass. this tight fist / set it on fire the trick to keep a flame / alive is deny her oxygen don’t / hold her when it’s cold don’t worry, it doesn’t / hurt to roll the stone into a body / empty of throne where you lay / once fawn and lily-white. here, you smell / of newborn breath -does that mean / the universe recreates you again when it’s night and / the sky blackens / your mouth opening and it’s easy to look Inside? – Noel Peng ‘17
Sophia Nesamoney ‘19
Isabella Wang ‘17
Ms. Abraham by Noor Hanafi ‘17
Ms. Kauffman by Noor Hanafi ‘17
Katherine by Chloe Middler ‘18
Mr. Cox by Noor Hanafi ‘17
Dear Noah Noah, I remember walking down a long hall. My shiny dress shoes hit the clean floor, and the sound reverberated in the hallway. My heavy briefcase swung beside my leg, and I kept walking. I walked inside a small room. “Hi, nice to meet you. I’m Victor,” I said. The man tilted his head in his wheelchair and said, “I’m Elias. I’ve been charged for murdering a man. I have two sons and a wife waiting for me to come home. I have multiple sclerosis. Days are long here. The longer I’m here, the more distant I am from the crime I’ve done. I don’t even know what I’ve done.” “I’m sorry.” Elias chuckled. “I’m alright. Why’re you here?” “I’m gonna try to help you.” The best part of life is making promises. His eyes lit up like a candle in a dark room. Smiling was so hard for him because his smiling muscles were all so tight. Those muscles hadn’t been used in months. For the next few weeks, I found home in a comfy black chair, in an empty conference room, and in a business suit. I made endless phone calls, some bold and passionate, others timid and fearful. Time counted down. My hands were sore and aching from typing opening statements, closing remarks, and cross-examinations. You were young, but I didn’t see you very often during that time. Once a day during my lunch break, I visited Elias and told him my stories. How my aunt was raped, and how she committed suicide at age sixteen, when my mama was just eight years old. How I went through poverty with a single mother but made it to Yale Law School. I told him about the time I had to defend a man who had shot ten kids and their mothers at a local playground. After, the police had found him sitting on a park bench. I told Elias about how much pain I felt to defend a man with severe bipolar disorder and the fact that he couldn’t control his own emotions, impulses, or actions. “He was sentenced to life in prison,” I explained. “People with mental illnesses - capital punishment couldn’t have fit a broken person like him. That’s like using a bat to hit shattered shards of glass into even smaller bits.” Somebody at the court that day had whispered, “I don’t know who could feel more shame. The black lawyer defending such a reckless man or the black criminal regretting his stupid decisions.”
Later that evening, I sat down with a bottle of wine and wondered if the death sentence actually would fit that man better. I mean, look, he had killed ten people. Maybe he didn’t deserve to suffer more. Death would take less time. Now he would do nothing in society but let society squander precious resources for him. I suddenly didn’t know if I believed in all the lectures against the death penalty I had given. The day I thought that thought, my sense of purpose in my work seemed like a diamond lost in the sea. When I told Elias this story, I cried. Elias was completely innocent. In his wheelchair, he had nodded and nodded and nodded. The next day, Elias and I had everything ready to go to court. My shiny dress shoes hit the clean floor, and the sound reverberated in a different hallway. My heavy briefcase swung beside my leg, and we kept moving. Testimonies were testified. Evidence was presented. Elias’ words were spoken. His son’s sixth birthday was being celebrated while this murder was being committed. He saw candles; he didn’t see blood. I blinked. The verdict was announced. You may not believe me, but the criminal justice system caught me off guard. My name is Victor, meaning conquest and victory, but alas, not this time. I found Elias, calm and collected. I remember him nodding at me. And Death seemed absurdly like a child finally finding its toy, and Death had unfairly found a man to steal from me. Why isn’t there mercy for the innocent? Son, you leave for college tomorrow. I don’t know how best to send you off for your next four years of independence, soul-searching, and parties. Son, I know you well enough that I’d know you’d wonder, “Papa, why a sad story? What happened to that bipolar man?” Son, the bipolar man has found ways to cope. You’re thoughtful, and you’ll struggle with Elias and the bipolar man for too many days, just like me. The world isn’t always a tug-of-war: if you pull hard, you still might not get the rope past the flag. Understand that I still haven’t moved on, I’m still conflicted, and that’s okay. Son, this is the best that I can give you before you leave. Love, Dad. – Angie Wang ‘18
Yasmine Razzak ‘17
Tinkerbell People call me short So I annoy them for sport Sprinkled fairy dust in their ashtray Woke up being chased by the DEA I ended up in a Wendy’s Their chicken offends me The food is handled by the cook! So how clean is that hook? The lost boys love this slop I know ‘cause we hang here a lot Please don’t tell Peter That I’m a cheater Tick Tock Comes the cops Sadly you aren’t hard to spot When you’re the color of snot – Lauren Sibley ’20
Ava Axelrod ‘19
Alyssa Sales ‘19
Megan Carter ‘17
A portrait of you; If I write down this poem in a book and hand it to you neatly wrapped with smart edges you’d spread the book open and crack it’s spine devour and pick at the meaning behind the lines and crunch the words in the back of your jaw, spit them out coated in your acid slime and stare back at the bare skinned skeleton poet. Her shiny skull will nod to you, acknowledge you, all bone, no skin, and your jaw is sore and aching, you think you’ve crunched and ripped and swallowed whole. You come with hands full of crinkled paper. You come with words highlighted then underlined then stricken through-the book, a war zone of arrows and speculations, accusations, condemnations, but naked poet will reply, my darling, what you see between the words unwritten must be your own face, enveloped in the shadows. – Makee Anderson ‘19
Selena Zhang ‘19
How They Succeeded When they asked us how we succeeded, we pulled out our resumes of the last four years and pridefully showed them. They said, were you a good student? We nodded. So you had a 4.0 GPA? We nodded. Though it was probably higher since you took all AP and Honors classes? We nodded. But you must have had a 1600 SAT score too? We nodded. Of course you must’ve been well-rounded, the best at everything you did, whether it be all the clubs you led, the volunteering you did, or the interests in which you presumably made a significant difference? We nodded. And through all of that you were a picture of perfect health, both physical and emotional, so you never looked like the weak, unsuccessful people with whom we shouldn’t associate ourselves? We nodded. Oh so that’s why you got into the schools of your dreams, oh yes, that’s why we’re so very proud of you. And when these words poured from their mouths, we retreated to our separate corners and wept for our lost childhoods. As children we watched all the movies with the so grown-up, so-put-together teenagers and said, that, that is who we will be when we are big. We’ll be the drama kids, the nerds, the populars, the goths, the druggies, the preppy kids, the jocks, the geeks. We’ll be anything we want to be. How high school surprised us at first. It was a place not filled with rebellion and mistakes and finding yourself, but of constant complaints and school-based conversation and not a moment of free time. Soon we became the teenagers who looked like they were so-grown up, so-put-together, but who, we knew then, were also secretly drowning. We became the fakes who hid behind our perfect social media lives like everything was okay. We became the traitors who only acknowledged friends and family and God after that big project or test was over, after many weeks of not saying anything at all. We became people we did not know and never thought we would be, and we never asked why. But it all paid off, for then we branded A’s on our chests like proud adulterers of a different breed. For those grades and test scores, we memorized, stressed, worked, suffered--anything to be the best. We studied like fiends, like what we were learning would make or break the world, like our lives would end if we didn’t always know everything. Sleep was a weapon with which we killed ourselves. Counselors sat on the third floor, but we never visited for that would mean we were a shameful anomaly in a perfect society. So we suffered in silence, bent over our computer screens, homework at our fingers, college on our minds.
In the end it was all for those letters we received in the mail, the small and big envelopes which determined our future. When they came our fingers shook as we tore them open and our hearts sighed when they rewarded all we had sacrificed in the past four years. But now, now that we’re big, we realize that maybe we aren’t successful after all. After all, how can you define success when all you are is an “A,” a “1600,” and a dream-school student? – Katie Mishra ‘18
Alexa Miller ‘18
Alex by Chloe Middler ‘18
Yasmine by Gwen Cusing ‘17
Churchyard The mind warps time As a muscle Clings And releases The seconds Slipping seasons Through loose fingers Ghosts of changing seasons Haunt a white washed graveyard Of encrusted stones Stories buried Of summers breath Through the tousled hair of a bride Emerging From white washed doors Sun seeps Through Flying foliage Happiness amid bells And laughter Clenching The fibers of time Black clothed figures Weeping in wintertime Branches Raveled bare Beneath snow settled A frozen soul A mother A child Forever as they are Beneath the minds Who hold them Who step privileged Through a palace of threads Connected by infinities – Robin Sandell ‘18
Alyssa Sales ‘19
Talia Kertsman ‘18
Breakfast Is Over To some, breakfast is the most important meal of the day; for my father it carries the significance of a Sunday morning service. Disturbing breakfast in the Markle household is akin to launching a ballistic missile into the sovereign zone of a global super power; an act of war. We all have our spot at the table, different ones for breakfast, dinner, and even lunch (although that’s rarely a family affair). This morning I sit directly to his left facing the sliding glass doors that look out over the patchy scrap of lawn we call our backyard. His paper, though delivered this morning, curls inwards on itself as if warped by age. My father imitates this same posture, sitting hunched on the edge of his seat, blocking out the world that lies beyond the twelve inch gap between him and his arcane scrap of paper. While he has food, I am empty handed and my stomach grumbles as I peer over at his thick wedges of slightly singed toast. I’ve learned to accept that tactical strategy trumps biological necessity during any mealtime. I focus my attention on a point between our house and the garage where two bluejays are warring over a grub, my mind drifting to a time before the rearmament of breakfast. When I was younger, in maybe first or second grade, each morning I would rush into the kitchen tripping over myself to get a plate of whatever he was cooking up. Frittata with spinach and prosciutto, crepes dusted in a light coating of powdered sugar, poached eggs and homemade hollandaise sauce, and my favorite, fried apple pie cooked up from the remains of Thanksgiving dessert. He’d turn away from the pan for a moment, pick me up and twirl me around singing his off key rendition of Sweet Caroline. From the doorway my mother sighed and shook her head, “You may be a Neil, but you’d need a lot of polishing to become a diamond.” He always laughed at that and walked over and spun her around too, laughing loud enough to ignore the beeping of the kitchen timer. My mother would needle him as we took our first bites betting money that the food was overcooked in his negligence, but there was never a burnt breakfast. Alice walks in, startling me out of my reverie. She saids nothing but I feel my father’s eyes slide to her face, focusing in with disapproval on the metallic glint of her nose ring. Alice doesn’t remember those peacetime breakfasts, and I’m hit with a wave of envy as she takes her seat facing our father. She can hate him without guilt, without the burden of understanding the time I can only label as Before.
Often during our allotted hour for weekend breakfast, I employ a trick I learned from part-time senior class hype man, full time stoner, Patrick Brunbower: every sixty minutes can be endlessly divided into more manageable sections. I used to divide the hour into ten minute intervals but recently I’ve found myself using more creative forms of measurement, counting the number of chews it takes for my father to finish a slice. He’s chewing on the toast now with the slow, grinding strokes of a cow chewing its cud. Alice, in her daily act of rebellion, pushes back her wicker chair and ventures into the kitchen, returning with a banana. My father’s left eye twitches. She sits. I wait and count three chews. Her acrylic nails snap the top of the banana and she meticulously lowers each side of the peel, keeping her gaze lowered, not looking at my father. The silence dares him to comment. “Could you eat that more like a slut?” He’s engrossed in his paper and raises neither his head nor his voice. Alice fumes, but for once knows better than to comment. I sink deeper into myself, chastising my own passiveness. He’s on his last slice of toast. Alice and I have been conditioned to wait. Waiting in sterile hospital rooms, waiting for mom to get better, waiting for dad to accept her decision. We’re still wishing for that one even after all these years. He’s on his tenth chew and a bite sized piece of toast is all that separates Alice and I from freedom. Eleven, he swallows, puts down his paper, looks up at Alice, looks up at me. He frowns and the lines of his forehead ripple with the effort of it. Alice and I look at each other as he stands and folds the paper, gearing up to exhale for the first time in an hour. He’s almost to the door, about to head into the study and disappear. “I don’t blame you.” My lips are moving but not of my own volition. Somehow I’m standing nearer to him than I’ve stood in over a year. “She was in pain and we were in pain and she knew what she wanted,” I pause. I have to choose these words with care. “Mom chose to die just like she chose to cheat and it’s not your fault. But it’s not Alice’s fault, and it’s not my fault either.” I’m breathing hard. The words sit heavy and sharp on my tongue and they’re exhausting to expel. In front of me, he hasn’t moved, but I can see Alice shifting back and forth nervously in my periphery. I push on, the jumble of emotion pouring off my tongue. “I wait for you every morning and evening, holding my breath, wishing you would hurry and up and realize and I’m done. I’m done.”
He doesn’t look me in the eye and turns on his heels, leisurely like he hasn’t heard, like he’ll never hear. I look to Alice, but she’s gone too, probably holed up in her room. I tuck in her chair and then my own. Breakfast is over. – Lilah Penner Brown ‘19
Eva Szoboszlay ‘18
2016-2017 Front Cover Claire Traum ’17 Back Cover Ellen Howard ‘18
Editors Megan Carter ‘17 Sho Sho Leigh Ho ‘19 Riya Berry ‘18 Grace Lee ‘18
Faculty Advisor Ms. Smith Castilleja Upper School