a n e r h C t
Chanter would like to thank the following:
Our generous alumni donor
Professor Matt Burgess
Elephants
Justine, for letting us into the Mac Weekly Office
Taylor Swift
The most efficient layout weekend in recent memory
OSLE and the Chanter Alumni for helping us scramble to success this semester <3
Editor-in-Chief: Zoë Roos Scheuerman
Literary Editor: Nguyễn Trung Kiên
Art Editor: Emma Nguyen
Submission Manager: Charley Eatchel
Staff: Ezekiel Ambrose Cambey
Tim Delventhal
Madeline Graf
Ian Glejzer
Birdie Keller
Colin Massoglia
Chloë Moore
Marvellous Ogunsola
Jamila Sigal Vasquez
Writing ~
Sex as a Verb 8 Adrien Wright
Cricket Jazz 9 Annalise Gallagher
PORTRAIT IN YOUR FATHER’S TOO-LARGE 10 Rowan Stephenson
SWEAT-STAINED SWEATSHIRT
Pharmakon 12 Adrien Wright
Ode to Minnesota Winter 13 Anna Šverclová
I Sculpt my Father out of Ice 14 Ashton Rose
Scarecrow 16 Zoe Frank
THESE ARE THE THINGS THAT MATTER TO US NOW 17 Chloë Moore
M238 ELECTRICAL 18 Lucy McNees
CW: sensitive sexual language i’m procrastinating again today 20 Marvellous Ogunsola
DREAMING OF AN ORCHARD 21 Rowan Stephenson yoke 22 Tommy Fowler
To Life 23 Marley Craine boy 24 T. Delventhal
Pomegranate 40 Anna Devine last spring, a black box 41 Maeve Sweeney
Meditations in an Emergency 42 Anna Šverclová
Hmong Again 43 Calla Lee
The Price of my Skin Color 44 Anonymous
CW: mentions of sexual violence, child abuse
Invisible Cities 46 Nguyễn Trung Kiên
An Entirety / What is said through silences 48 Anna Devine not language 49 Lucy McNees
February in the Midwest 50 Marley Craine
environmental damage 51 Maeve Sweeney
Blind to Her 52 Birdie Keller
This time, there are fireworks 54 Jonas Costa
The Way Home 55 Zoë Roos Scheuerman I am still here 56 Charley Eatchel Art
The Cabin 26 Ezekiel Ambrose Cambey
Still Life in Blue 27 Inbal Armony
Autumn 28 Leah Long soft light 29 Tommy Fowler friends :) 30 Asa Rallings reportedly 31 Kailey Gee carnivore 32 Tommy Fowler
Tyler and Ethan Playing Chess 33 Gabby Simpson the rise of the red sun 34 Kailey Gee
Sevilla Market 35 Carmen Quintos
The Plea 36 Ezekiel Ambrose Cambey
On the Sound 37 Leah Long
Window Watching 38 Carmen Quintos
Ben 39 Inbal Armony
Cover art: Uragami River, Nagasaki
digital photograph (light painting)
Asa Rallings
Editor’s Note
Every semester finds ways to be unprecedented. That truth has manifested in many ways this fall, but on this page, I’m especially thinking about the evolutions that Chanter has undergone in the last few months: new leadership, new staff, new COVID guidelines, and, of course, new, gorgeous artworks. Layout weekend is always a rollercoaster. I can’t count the number of times these past few days when I’ve wanted to turn to Teddy to hand off copy edits or defer to him on procedures, only to remember that, wait, I’m the one with the final say now. The current board’s ascendance was a year in the making, but we haven’t been exempt from growing pains. Nevertheless, through this semester’s trials, whether personal, academic, or Chanter-related, I continue to find joy in our weekly gatherings. I couldn’t be more proud of our work this semester or more honored to be entrusted with so many vulnerable, powerful, breathtaking pieces from Mac’s incredibly talented student body. This opening note is also a temporary goodbye Charley and I will be abroad next semester. However, Kiên and Emma will do a fantastic job in the spring, and I can’t wait to see the edition that they put together. In the meantime, without further ado, welcome to the fall 2022 Chanter!
Zoë Roos Scheuerman Editor-in-Chief 2022–2023
Sex as a Verb
Adrien Wright
Sexing chickens is an art form in the places where it gets quiet at night. In some cool field I am sure there is a world-mean woman in big boots who can lift up feathers tender like a guitarist and move them through loud markets faster than you can ask what kind. When night water kisses the morning by its grass it is whispering about the taste of this, dropping feathers mottled with clearish blood. The children, not long out of the hen’s rock-womb, will sustain worlds they have no choice because of what was written under the honey-soft fuzz this woman has tightened to them under star battlements — they will grow life in the stone or by the flesh — and the world will move on in the morning, eating, writing epitaphs.
Cricket Jazz
Annalise Gallagher
Friday comes around and my Father tickles my genes with a sneaky feather I sneeze and I laugh, cracking open boozy brains like walnut shells Here, my friend!
Am I allowed to call you that yet?
I know your brother’s middle name, but Who do you want to be?
but you laugh and you howl and The drawbridge is coming down over the Mississippi
my veins, the red lazy river. a liquid horizon cooking organs to stew suddenly! there are colors that exist inside this room stuffed with sweaty air and smiling faces and crunchy salt rocks We slap our knees with rubber fish How silly!
My heart doesn’t feel so heavy with all of these arms wrapping around me like a present
We slur our silly syllables and I ask you about your mother braid together the strands of yarn in your pocket and ignore the secrets that stick to these walls when our eyes do not meet on the street tomorrow but I will remind you of the tales at this time again next Friday
See you then,
Friend…
PORTRAIT IN YOUR FATHER’S TOO-LARGE SWEAT-STAINED SWEATSHRT
Rowan Stephenson
I know if I find you I will have to leave the earth — A.R. Ammons
The goosebumps on your bare legs in the lavender glow of evening, the shine of a thousand leaflamps in your pupils…
The gap in the hedge growing slowly closed, the side yard filled with only the purple blossoms: iris, hyacinth, lavender…
Next door, a yardful of flamebright orange poppies stretch the length of the drive, lighting up the street…
The sycamore reaching its many arms, sighing, to the sky, arcing parabolically down towards the streetcorner…
Afterglow atop the distant white mountain ranges of clouds like nectar bursting from mintleaves between your teeth…
As though in a dream you walk through a bountiful garden, ripe blackberries erupting with blood throwing themselves at you…
Mourning doves like watchful moons, glowing like distant light — houses on the coast, weave the trees and space between together…
Your stained white sneakers, worn out soles, your quiet smiling in the slow blue blur… the sweating of grassblades…
The plum in your pocket, dewy condensation gleaming on its skin like rain in Detroit in December, like deep clearness…
And, what else to call it, the wanting, matchbox of slumbering fire, the dog sleeping curled up on the porch, dreaming…
There is sadness in the garden, in the evening, wanting down among the grassblades, up between the clouds…
There are insects in the grass, there are ants, there are worms in the dirt, there are tiny snails with silver filmy trails…
There are mourning doves unseen between branches, there is sadness, there is mint on the back of your tongue…
In your belly, in your ribs, in the grass, in the petals, beyond the clouds: pollen, moonlight, wanting, ants…
The teeth in your smile, the sad in your bones, the dirt in the earth, the flowers in the dirt, the ants on the stems…
There are trains on tracks all night long… leaf on the stem, juice in the leaf… rain in clouds… far out, dream garden, heliopause —
Goodnight, they sing, goodnight?
Pharmakon Adrien Wright
There is a moment the halved grapefruit on our counter is still edible and a moment it is not. It passes this line lightly, with dancer’s feet, like the deer with the same milkyslow look in its eyes approaching and leaving the impact.
Like raspberries the last moment before rot, angrysweet and starting to sludge, I hold my own hand as I practice translation. I want a life lifelike bent over laid out twisting light with the play of red on the asphalt
Ode to Minnesota Winter
Anna Šverclová
God bless black ice; it’s the best excuse to run a red light. Toe-tapping the break just to look like I tried, I practice the ope, sorry! hand as I bash my face into somebody’s bumper. Winter roads are like Mario Kart in real life, except all the banana peels are invisible and if you die you become a road hazard. What an absurd season: polar vortex, eyelashes glued shut with frost, the very real threat of losing a limb. My dad says it makes us stronger. We learn to laugh at the dead and the dying nerves in our feet turning blue. The leaky window is one of many villains in this story that always ends in spring. We become creative heroes, oven open, cardboard over windows, snowbanks carved into playgrounds or extended freezer space. We grow prideful of our cold, scoff the Californians shivering in December. You don’t know cold ‘till you’ve seen January. And we freeze with coats open just to prove we are hearty, like the third puff pass you insist you’re not high yet, stalactites frozen mid-drip to your mouth. The best part about winter is watching everyone try to look cool in a snowsuit and balaclava. It’s comforting never to be the only one with hat hair and scarf-face, boot squeak down a linoleum hallway, slow motion instant-replay of a man falling with his coffee over and over again on the same ice patch, if there’s anything I can love about winter, it is how it strips us to our most red, ugly, and angry. Big fat snot icicles dangling from my lip. I wake up cursing the cotton sky like a scrooge, can you believe we all hate all at the same damn time? We sing in the great choir of goddamns. Goddamn fucking shit. Goddamn frozen limb. Goddamn fucking ice in my boot. Goddamn dead car battery. Goddamn biting wind.
I Sculpt my Father out of Ice
Ashton Rose
I pick up my die grinder, the same his hands once held, and begin cutting, shaving off the edges. I move toward the center, create roughly the shape of a human head.
I’d seen blocks like this, many times before, in his workshop. A place made of alien tools and metal walls, and always so cold, like the telephone poles in winter. Most days the sign hung on the door: “Do not disturb” My sneaking entry was a betrayal to rival his.
A new bit now, smaller, capable of more precise cuts: the curve of a hairline, jutting ears, the silhouette of a man created in ice.
The first time he caught me, watching silently while he worked, his tongs clattered to the floor, his face the only spot of red in the cold room. His words were loud, his hands rough, and as he slammed the door onto mine, I screamed. My scar the first of many chips into my surface.
I replace the die grinder with a pick. This work needs to be done by my hands. First stroke hesitant, soft, the crack a whisper.
Then another, harder, louder, whittling away at the ice. Forming dips and curves, new valleys in the grief of our relationship, and now my hands don’t want to stop, like this is what they were made to do, what I was made to be.
He taught me the difference between a flat chisel and an ice pick, his hands red from the cold. “Why don’t you wear gloves, daddy?” I like to feel my work.
As I transform the ice into the harsh lines of his face, I am calm. Silent, as he was when he worked. I bring in sandpaper, smooth out the curves and gently scrub away the anger, the violence, the grief.
Finished, I step back. My fingers are cold, lips numb, sensation long abandoned. I set down the tools that were once his, in this cold room that was once his, and in the sculpture’s reflective eyes, I see the young, scared boy that was once his.
I leave the door open when I exit, cranking the thermostat up to 90 before I get in my car, and drive toward the dying warmth of the evening sun.
Scarecrow Zoe Frank
If I could see anything beyond the garden shears in my belt
It would be their blades skinning my nails
Down to the cuticles
So that when soaked in cold water they may grow back as vapor and produce rain of fontanel.
Then, animated by the wet in the rye
the grounds borne to this drought of July
Might bud.
THESE ARE THE THINGS THAT MATTER TO US NOW
Chloë Moore
behold the stillness of the afternoon the emptiness in the absence of busyfolk, and the whispering of the breeze, and the stillness of the ephemeral, cinereous sky
but hark! the red is screaming from the trees the gold is clamoring for your attention and the green is heaving its dying breath as the chlorophyll leaches away into time immemorial
these are the things that matter to us now history says, this is how it always has been but we, in all our glittering, self-obsessed newness, say we can be better than this
these are the things that matter to us now, our melancholy autumns and our future uproarious springs the breaking of corner store bread and the silence of ivy-covered brick
i do not know the different types of matter but i know the motes of dust in the shaft of library afternoon sun take up space and i know fingers intertwined and the sound of you existing in the next room over are the impactful things today, the future love poem i’m planning to write
M238 ELECTRICAL
Lucy McNees
is what I walked by when I remembered what summer camp felt like
I hope you don’t see the young in me I hope you feel it like imprints on your thighs when you’re sitting on cement steps waiting for the bus skin scrunched on the rocks and jean shorts
My past won’t keep me from my best but my present might and I would never plagiarize but if you say you don’t drink or smoke I won’t either, and I’ll tell myself it’s for my own good / it probably is that way I’ll be able to see myself clearly in the mirror after you leave I’ll be able to flip myself off and like the way my ring covers my knuckle
is what I walked by when I thought about when swear words were new. we knew we were cursed: like you were the first student to say fuck but it didn’t sound like a word until I was nineteen and he was inside me and all I could think was fuck.
Smart kid. Smart kids know what fuck means before they do it. Stupid kids don’t say fuck because it used to mean rape No one gives a fuck.
M238 ELECTRICAL
is what I walked by when I realized I’m old enough to rub my own stomach when I’m sick
running my fingers through electrical cords like they’re willow leaves like I could climb their branches right into the outlet until I’m your power source until I’m your power source until I’m your power source and you’re not mine until I power trip /
I’m over my ability to get up in the morning it means I eat too early it means I see people in the mirror / ghosts of me in the mirror it means I get shit done / but won’t stay up late to do attractive shit so when I do, I drink.
Just by the river. Just while staring at the rings on his knuckles. Just while scraping dry dirt off of rocks.
My stomach hurts, and there are ghosts of me in the mirror.
i’m procrastinating again today
Marvellous Ogunsola
behemoth task: unapproachable, impossible, and undoable. i just know no matter how much i’ll nibble, i won’t chew enough to make a dent.
so i rationalize and propose and reschedule and i will never do enough to succeed so why even try hoops can be jumped through, not deadlines.
i hate stasis and sweat vapors and slow shivers in remembrance of the impossible task suffocating me senseless.
now i’m a statue, oh little meerkat observing the clock ticking brainstorming the ways my life will end. in broken promises and shed tears
and an empty basement houses only my yearbook photos and the way i held my friends and laughed to future toasts is ash.
unforgiving task. laziness abounds
like the stills of my long-winded fantasies of change. five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes, i stall. i waste away. time is racing.
no one stops. ugh! no solidarity, no warmth or safety, no reassurance.
i wait and wait and wait until slayful yawn sets in, sleep calls to me and i surely must answer.
….rest.
DREAMING OF AN ORCHARD
Rowan Stephenson
This is a love poem — you can tell by all the fruit. Pears inching into golden ripeness, sunny oranges, dusky plums, apples exploding like hand grenades. In wide fields of granite and marble they soften, sweeten, give in to time. From the table watches a glass of water, a being of tiny bubbles and angles of light. And what are you but refraction? You say there’s an orchard, somewhere, where the fruit sweetens forever, the laden boughs always bending earthward under the weight of their fattening burden, where yellow-belted wasps never orbit the carcasses of sweet rotting windfalls. Where the bright grey sky folds itself forever into the rolling verdigris spine of the horizon and the fish
in the pond swims forever in silent golden circles beneath the water’s dark surface. And now night falls and the moon, wrinkled and milk-pale, grows into the sky like an apple blossom becoming an apple. The fruit, still scattered all around like debris, is sketched now in black and white, highlights of mother-of-pearl, luminous silver outlines, and silent snow falls, beyond, on the woundless sleeping world.
yoke
Tommy Fowler
counting the hollow frames of red blue tracings wincing, you nullify, but still dont feel better like im somehow to blame. in my head its a game, reclaimed from my mother and my dad (so why am i chasing? im not a debtor). breathing is easy when im not seething, blood not rising in the back of my throat like im having a stroke with your arm as my yoke. back in my own room, im biting and teething, the youth is now returned.
i can feel it happening again in the curves along my spine. ill never grow into a man, i wont become like my brother. ill take that path if theres no other, its all i think i can.
i am not obsessed: in your home im still a guest, your lifes not entwined. can i know youre really mine? is it in the way you speak to me? make me feel like somebody.
tuck me away instead of finding things to say, i know that you arent good for it so i wont ask you to stay, dont tell you to swallow cause ill always spit, you made your bed now lay in it.
To Life
Marley Craine
At Grandpa Toby’s funeral I read from the textbook, not the Torah to keep up with my grades, to keep myself from crying.
I sat Shiva at a dorm desk, chair tipped back, feet resting on the baseboard heater, singed. I ate dining hall kugel, took the matzah by the toaster, choked on falafel fried deep enough to dry out any semblance of home. I said l’chaim with a mug of flat coke and eight dollar vodka, bought with a fake id. I lit a joint, not a Shiva candle with a (half-) Jewish boy underneath a tree and it was so cold I couldn’t flick the lighter so I let him kiss me until I was too hot and then told him to leave. Alone, overheated, I wondered:
Do we still say l’chaim — do we still toast to life — after it’s already been lost?
boy
T. Delventhal
swordferns waving like sylvan capes where they grew abundantly in gullies that ran down to the gentle creek child trespassers, dried moss on your nape
Douglas Firs shooting straight into the wispy matter dreamily dense compressing sound masquerading rural lands as industrial centres
of an isle you once visited imperious facades and the spacious insides holding the treasures of the world even all the trinkets stolen from our forests
your appearance is that of an accomplice pale yellow-hair, ruffled bedhead but we lived out our imaginations within the groves forming an impenetrable fortress
around your home, so the mundane couldn’t intrude, just you and your powerhouse brothers younger, behaved like spoiled peregrines
thrashing about in this occidental (James Cook) treehouse under the smell of heat-blasted pine needles carpeting the ground where you mulled, ruminative oldest
when your father yelled a giant of a man who reeked full of Hitchcock and Stratego and Risk partitioning the world but this was only my romanticism
your strange tranquil eyes sallow in the doldrums, lurking as a page in the depths of a Cornish castle. A quaint image, befitting but false you belong in the garden clearing with two apple trees
the eyes below, veins like a continent fissured by purple blue. Never have your chickens by the garden now overgrown been sent to the butcher’s all at once
you were a misplant, that’s all you never played out your adventures at Hadrian’s wall but among dripping green mosses and old man’s beard it’s only fitting that you never told me when you left
for Denmark
Autumn digital photograph
friends :) digital photograph
Asa Rallings
reportedly collage
carnivore watercolor and pen on cardboard
On the Sound
digital photograph
Window Watching
Pomegranate
Anna Devine
Lips and legs parted the dress, and prayer, both lift softly into the wind.
Guilt absolved Fever absorbed
And wrinkles in the sheets, wrinkles near your eyes, and on your nose.
you make me docile, unassuming, a warm caramel cloud, translucence, swallows static shards my hands my eyes my lips pretending stained from pomegranates my hands dirty everything I swore that if I stood on the frozen ground sticky evidence of places touched. for long enough, the heat from my body would start to melt it and resuscitate the dead grass
last spring, a black box
Maeve Sweeney
it was the dissonance, I think that pulled me down the dressing up, the smoothing over of my face and my voice there is nothing to see here
I reach for something, anything to hold onto and find only glass broken, but it hasn’t cut anyone yet
I will only beg if you ask me to it says, if you are very careful, I won’t make you bleed
Meditations
in an Emergency
Anna Šverclová
after Cameron Awkward-Rich
She calls, and it is an emergency. The window, the garbage, the girl in the wall. They are all always emergencies. I walk through the world, cup to the door. I try not to listen. I listen until listening is an emergency. I have a dream in which I was never alone. She holds me and I don’t have to be five to cry. I have ears open as hallways. Hands she knows well. We walk with our palms pressed and our shadows just behind. We make trails in new snow down paths we’ve already worn. We build a house with no ghosts.
Hmong Again
Calla Lee
History heard our name again, love for Hmong so high — but did they see the blood of men, the ones they left behind. Yellow nights of raging guns, the wails of children scream — burning flames they wished away, our lives within the steam.
History heard our name again, love for Hmong so high — but did they feel the breaths we took, the ones they left to die. Memory of leaking marrow and narrow lows of soot — families running, unbecoming, glass and stones barefoot.
History heard our name again, gleaming golden glory — but what about the loves we lost, who will tell our stories?
The Price of my Skin Color Anonymous
“Flogging. Whipping. Belt. Whatever you call it, this beating, this punishment, is as much a part of our inheritance, our legacy, our culture, as any bowl of acorn mush, any wild salmon filet, pilillis fried and dipped in cinnamon and sugar, cactus fruit in a basket. More than anything else we brought with us out of the missions, we carry the violence we were given along with baptism, confession, last rites.” — Deborah A. Miranda, Bad Indians
I’ve always said that being Asian American is a curse. Your body belongs to your parents.
Always
How dare you leave them and live your own life?
You don’t know the sacrifice, sacrifice, sacrifice that they have given you for you for you
My mother sexually harrassed me for years
My father keeps saying I deserve to be dead
I love them I hate them I love them
I hate them I love them I hate them
My parents claim they loved my grandparents more than anything They would die for them, oh yes
But then why are their scars so visible?
Centuries ago the British told our women they were whores And now my mom yells at me that I am fast and a slut
For getting my period at age 10
And not 12 like the other girls.
My dad explicitly describes a scene of me selling myself on the street
When I wear shorts.
But then they came here
With no papers
Bearing New York winters
With no heat
With only rats
On their bed and A room full of mold.
My dad works 13 hours a day as a Taxi driver.
My mom has been Here for 26 years and She can still barely speak English
Who wouldn’t be jealous of me?
I have a nice room in a fancy college
Access to strawberries even In the winter
Hot water, A future with Paid sick leave
No extended family leeching off me
And the luxury of getting a job I like.
I have to admit the hatred gets to me too. After years of dodging beatings
I am easy to startle.
I have a hatred of middle-class white people
Whose parents speak their language. The only things I love in the world
Are cats because my parents made me
Lose my faith in humanity a long time ago.
Even then I love them I hate them I love them
My dad and mom beat me because They are tired of the world.
My dad and mom beat me because
The white man took the wealth from their country
And now it’s been years since they can afford a plane ticket back. Years of watching relatives die from afar
While they can’t understand the English their children speak.
My dad and mom beat me because They are trapped in a box of poverty and hopelessness.
My parents can’t control whether they make rent or not But they can control me.
Would I be weird for saying I
Miss them
Even though my mom yells at the cashiers at Walmart And my dad steals money from me?
So I go back home
Bathe in their affections
Eat the delicious food
Until they are mad. And I’m tossed around like a ragdoll I remember once my dad yanked on my hair
Like I was a yo-yo
Pulling my head back and forth. I remember once my mom threw her phone at me
Smacking my face
And brandished a knife.
My parents lived through the war of independence
Where there’re many babies born of rape
Where girls were married off at the age of 12. My grandpa was kidnapped three times.
My grandma was permanently stunted by the many famines.
My dad’s house burned down and with it the information on when he was born.
This pain is my inheritance.
This pain is how my ancestors deal with things. This pain is why I hate myself
This pain is an endless cycle, Chasing me down.
This is why I say white people are kinder, Better parents.
This is why I say the non-American way is not Always the better way.
This is why I say that regarding my parents, “It’s complicated.”
Because we have become the monsters They have made us out to be.
Invisible Cities
Nguyễn Trung Kiên
Inspired by Italo Calvino
My skin is marked by Helios’ beating
My feet have lost their steps
Shall the great wooden gates, be so kind as to Open
And let this wanderer in
On cobblestone, I strolled, my satchels filled With coins and parchments and gems
Among horses and wagons And barrels and hope
Even scholars are merchants here
Men on horsebacks, women in silks
Shall we make a trade, sir
I have but a faded map
An empty stomach, a drained flask
And from my travels, plenty a tales
Of the “to be continued…” variety
For I need not be beheaded in the morn
Or perhaps a story
About a princess
Who has herself a story to tell
She said, I’ll tell it if you would listen
I’ll trade you for a bed well made
On top of a tower
Whose spire reaches heaven
I’m sure it’ll be worth the trade
In a land like this, perhaps faraway
A time that once might have been And with that I’ll weave
A tapestry in words
Of a man who likes to tell tales
On his words dance familiar figures
Of princes, and queens, and bards
They trot on thoughts
Take flight in memories And divert the course of dreams
Soon Helios shall stir the men and women
With empty pockets, wondering Where’s the storyteller
Who left with the moon
Leaving only their tales behind
An Entirety / What is said through silences
Anna Devine
I’m sorry, We say, While holding onto the notion that we are both good people.
I imagine your childhood but I do not ask you about it. I couldn’t bear it. So at least one part of you remains a mystery to me, so I can keep something withheld, so I can’t say that we gave all of each other to each other.
I’m sorry, We say,
While holding onto the notion that we are both good people.
I imagine your childhood but I do not ask you about it. I couldn’t bear it. So at least one part of you remains a mystery to me, so I can keep something withheld, so I can’t say that we gave all of each other to each other.