Vibrato 2013

Vibrato THE HOCKADAY SCHOOL | 2013 | Volume XLVIII

Dear Reader, Art seeps from the brain, words line the bumps of the cerebral cortex, and colors drown the frontal lobes. Vibrato embraces the human brain and its ability to create. As you explore each page of Vibrato, we hope the beauty of the brain will overwhelm you—the logic and reasoning conquered by the left brain and the color and creativity harnessed by the right. Our brains work in fantastically mysterious ways. Dare to find all the ways it can.

“I dream of lost vocabularies that might express some of what we no longer can.”

–Jack Gilbert, “The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart”

Vibrato 2013 | Volume XLVIII

The Hockaday School | 11600 Welch Road | Dallas, TX 75229 214.363.6311 | www. hockaday.org

Dear Reader, Art seeps from the brain, words line the bumps of the cerebral cortex, and colors drown the frontal lobes. Vibrato embraces the human brain and its ability to create. As you explore each page of Vibrato, we hope the beauty of the brain will overwhelm you—the logic and reasoning conquered by the left brain and the color and creativity harnessed by the right. Our brains work in fantastically mysterious ways. Dare to find all the ways it can.

“I dream of lost vocabularies that might express some of what we no longer can.”

–Jack Gilbert, “The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart”

Vibrato 2013 | Volume XLVIII

The Hockaday School | 11600 Welch Road | Dallas, TX 75229 214.363.6311 | www. hockaday.org

Table of Contents ART

LITERATURE 5 6 9 15 17 21 22 24 26 30 33 35 37 39 40 44 46 49 52 54 56 58 60 62 65 67 69 71 73 77 80 85 87 88 91 94 96 99

How I Accidentally…by Jennifer Davis Elusion by Mary Margaret Hancock Into Abaddon by Annabel Lyman Smell by Grace Howard A Conspicuous Silence by Laura Harvey Thunder by Sophie Lidji Reason #16…by Lizzie Vamos #6.5 by Hannah Matheson Opa. by Lizzie Vamos The Ingénue by Tai Massimilian Dirty Dishes by Margaret Hardage Oven Fried Cod Fish by Katie Bourek Where To Put…by Camille Hunt The Night…by Mary Margaret Hancock Chasms by Sophie Lidji Hot Air by Sophie Lidji Poems Found With…by Margaret Hardage Blossoms by Sydney Wilkins Belief by Sarah Nesbitt Bones by Grace Howard Dig by Sarah Nesbitt Whisper Bones by Sadie Lidji Indigenous by Katie Mimini puzzled by Annabel Lyman Marigolds... by Victoria Almanza Without Herbicide by Margaret Hardage Untitled by Sarah Nesbitt #3.4 by Hannah Matheson The Hunter’s Treat by Meredith Hosek #8.5 by Hannah Matheson Purple Dresses by Katie Bourek Something Wicked by Sophie Lidji Revelation by Sarah Nesbitt Creative Nonfiction by Annabel Lyman The Moment by Katie Bourek Hush by Sophie Lidji Fur by Eliza Schreibman If Words Could Fill…by Annabel Lyman

4 6 31 33 36 41 43 45 55 61 63 68 81 84 90 98

Jeux D’Eau by Sydney Thomas Androgynous Man by Evi Shiakolas Persephone’s Despair by Katie Bourek Elephant People by Evi Shiakolas A Machine That…by Casey Kim Hooke by K.C. Thompson Apollo and Daphne by Katie Bourek Peeling Away... by Emily Bluedorn Window by Casey Kim Koi by Katie Bourek The Human Heart by Katie Bourek Scene From The…by Casey Kim The Violet Hour by Sydney Thomas Toes by Grace Howard The Sleuths by Katie Bourek To Hot Imagination by Natalie Pasquinelli Box cover art by Casey Kim Book cover art by Katie Bourek

PHOTOGRAPHY 15 16 18 22 24 27 28 34 38 46 48 53 56 58 64 66 70 72 76 78 86 95 97

Fireworks by Devon Knott Mount Popa by Natalie Pasquinelli Pleasure Pier by Shelby Cohron Kootenay Island by Grace Dau Lost in Casa Loma by Meredith Hosek Bleached by Annabel Lyman Memorial by Shelby Cohron Fish Out Of Water by Kate Hoffman Stacked by Meredith Hosek Pat by Natalie Pasquinelli Morning Mist by Grace Zacarias Contact by Meredith Hosek Market by Emily Yeh Falling by Laura Harvey Ripley by Olivia Lechtenberger November by Meredith Hosek A Different Perspective by Allison Lanfear Snouts by Tai Massimilian Bubbles by Grace Dau Sunday by Emily Yeh Sliding Nostalgia by Devon Knott Clocks by Laura Nagy Claws of Kuri by Cathy Ma

4 Jeux d’Eau

Sydney Thomas

How I Accidentally Cut My Finger Off While Trying to Peel Potatoes on a Sunday at 4 p.m.

Jennifer Davis Dripping faucets on Friday nights have a way of becoming voices.

And smoke rings from the neighbors’ cigarettes look like your bones— crushed, compounded— almost invisible, yet startlingly loud when they crawl on my doorstep and make the sounds of 8 months spent away.

Saturdays are chalk and rain and a maroon shade of veins and arteries.

The blood pumping under my sidewalk and into my insulation has shaken this house— the muscles are bruised and the intestines haven’t stopped bleeding.

I couldn’t change or accept it, so instead I sat in a kitchen from which you were three hundred miles away with a head of lettuce and a dozen carrots that I chopped into microscopic pieces in hopes to fade you into greying plots of land.

5

Elusion

Mary Margaret Hancock Happy birthday to the pre-decorated cakes on aisle 9, Whose frosting never expires, Wilting under fluorescent lights And vegetable misters.

We try so hard.

I slid into algae-crusted water.

Your skin shone celestial Like the inside of an oyster Served over ice.

Mango juice coats my fingers, So I paint it across the window In cosmic spheres.

OneOneZeroZeroOne ZeroOneZeroZeroZeroOne. I fall. Philosophically.

6

7 Androgynous Man Evi Shiakolas

8

Into Abaddon Annabel Lyman

A salesman stands idly behind a suitcase, in which, packed tight and brimming over, lay his finest linens. On top rests the Turkish silk, the sight of which sends him reeling back to 1984, to a certain woman, to a time when he wasn’t selling anything. He zips the suitcase and lays it against the others by the door.

The salesman walks to the window and looks out and thinks to himself that maybe moving is just what he needs. He thinks this a lot nowadays, about a lot of things, and he is always wrong. What he needs is something beyond the shallow bounds of his own comprehension. He will chase it for the rest of his life, and then he will die. The disillusionment is slowly killing him, and he can feel it every time he gets where he thinks he needs to be. He has never told this to his wife, because the time is never right, and anyway, he doubts she would understand.

She greets him from the bed. He tells her “good morning,” but the words are painted in shadow, and suddenly he is selling something again. She doesn’t notice, never does. Sometimes he thinks he wishes she did, but then it would all fall apart, wouldn’t it?

She shuffles out of bed, and they wrap their arms around each other, because it makes them feel better to know that there’s someone else in the world who might understand their strange sadness, if ever each could wrap his up in words and offer it to the other like a piece of jewelry or a new bow tie.

He feels the thing push against his stomach, feels it thrust its leg out toward his gut, and it makes him sick like it did the first time she told him. And he smiles like he did the first time she told him.

9

My mother called, she says.

Huh. She cleaned out a room for us.

Good.

Are you packed?

Mostly.

We’ll head out at noon.

There is something tearing at his insides, like a corn chip lodged deep in his throat, and he’s becoming tired of squashing it into submission. So he brushes his teeth, and he watches her through the mirror, opening and scouring each suitcase.

We don’t have room for all this stuff, honey. I thought we agreed to store the linens.

Please, Margaret, it wouldn’t feel right to leave them.

But she’s already tearing the silk from the suitcase.

We only take what we need, John.

Her fingers are all over it. He can’t watch, so he spits into the sink and shuts the door. And suddenly, he knows why she kept the baby, after he begged her to let it go. He always knew. She didn’t love the thing growing inside of her. She loved the power it gave her. She loved the groveling beast he became by the simple fact of her having it. *** Somewhere along the road between Chicago and Abaddon, the world begins to feel like it fell out of an old Western, where the people blend into the sky and the sky into the houses, and everything blends into the dirt, so pretty soon you stop believing there’s anything on earth that isn’t a sort of burnt, dusty red.

The salesman rolls down the window in search of fresh air, then quickly seals it shut before his hopes can be dashed against the red cloud kicked up in the truck’s tire tracks. Abaddon is the sort of place where you always feel like you’re choking—like you’re underwater, except there isn’t any water, just cigarette smoke and so much dust. The salesman settles for the Air Conditioner.

He begins fiddling with the radio tuner, pouring white noise into the dull grumbling soup of the engine, when it emerges, as if rising out of the ground itself, from behind a hill—first the head, then the terrible, straining neck that seems to stretch on for miles, then, finally, the iron-clad cage of its body, the legs that straddle acres. This was the great Colossus of Abaddon, forged and smelted in an age when wealth rested in great inky puddles beneath the earth, which men called their own. No one could see an end to the black gold, to the money, which, in time, dissipated like a sweet perfume.

Now, it seems silly—a giraffe, of all things—whose head is too high for it to realize it rules over an empire of dirt. *** In the place where her parents live, there is an old Airstream, and in the dim light, you can just see a silhouette of him, his legs dangling over the edge, the whites of his eyes searing holes through the red darkness at twilight.

She slams the truck door hard, hoping by some miracle he will turn and tear himself from his reverie. He does not flinch.

The salesman has already gone to the door, but he can’t escape the low, resonating chants that rise up from the old man’s throat like the last saccharine sap oozing from the blackened carcass of a deadwood tree. Leave him, he wants to say. Let him go. But he cannot bring himself to speak, and she hangs on to whatever fickle brim her heart can grasp.

He is knocking, harder and harder, so taken in thought that he forgets the pounding of his own fist. And then the door swings open, and he is caught between arms that smell like the last tendrils of smoke after a candle blows out.

Oh, oh, she says. I am so glad you made it.

He cannot stop breathing her in.

Now where is my Margaret?

But she knows. She hears the chanting, louder now, and she knows Come on, dear, let’s get you fed.

The salesman follows her to the dinner table, sits down, and makes idle

conversation the way he learned to as a child when he first felt the way silence could tear the skin off him. He feels the scratching again in his stomach, but this time, he doesn’t have the strength to press it down. That’s when the door opens and Margaret strides in, stone-faced. The salesman falls silent, and for a moment, so does his mother-in-law—all hanging in strained suspense.

And then, as if realizing her familial duties, the old woman steps toward her daughter and opens her arms, saying, My sweet girl, my sweet sweet girl, have I missed you. And Margaret, too, realizing her duties, wraps a smile about her mouth and walks into her mother’s arms. How are you, Mama?

The salesman sighs in relief. Dinner is served, and they eat, and when there is silence, they fill it with words. *** From his desk by the window on the third floor, the salesman peers into its steely eyes. He finds himself watching desperately for some hesitation in its gaze, some shift in confidence. The waiting has begun to drive him mad.

He moves his desk to face the opposite wall, but all he can see is that great metal beast, the hot tarnished silver glaring through his mind’s eye. So he rises from his chair and pursues distraction down the stairs.

But there it is worse. There, he finds Margaret feeding her father through his grizzled beard, spoonfuls of peas.

There is drivel down his cheek. But in his eyes, there is something infinite, like the infinity of steel that has weathered rain and snow. There is unshakeable confidence.

The salesman goes to him and plants a hand on his shoulder and asks, What are you waiting for, old man?

He can’t hear you, she says. Let him eat.

What the hell are you waiting for, he yells, grasping with both hands now.

Get your hands off him, John, he can’t understand— Why would you make us come here? The old man lolls in his arms, his eyes fixed and unchanging. Look at me!

Margaret has thrown herself between the men, flailing her brittle limbs.

You monster, she says. Get out!

But the salesman only pumps his arms harder, back and forth. What is it you’re so damn sure about, huh? His eyes are full of fire.

He’s done nothing to you! She screams.

The salesman stops cold. He thinks he sees a shy smirk pass across the old man’s face. He thinks he might have broken him. And then, like a willow easing into bloom, salvation, comes the word from that old, chapped mouth. Salvation. *** The baby is born red—the same color as the clay—and full of his father’s fire. Just minutes after his birth, his grandfather dies draped over the side of the Airstream. The salesman finds him hours after, his eyes glazed over, still open, his lips curved into an eternal smirk. It takes Margaret another month to find her mother, living in a nursing home on claims of dementia.

For three years, the boy screams. He drives the neighbors into hiding, screams until his parents forget the simple bliss of sleep. At four years old, he sets fire to the kitchen and blocks all the exits with chairs and trash can lids.

His father is the first to wake, choking. The salesman shakes his wife, whose eyes roll open, and together they run for the door, but the smoke is already butting against it, squeezing through the cracks. They move instead for the window. Then, his mind a hot rush of adrenaline, the salesman conceives a plan.

He will go back, fetch the child. He utters something to his wife, and she kisses him on the forehead before reaching her leg down over the windowsill. The salesman stumbles back, fills his lungs, and crawls on all fours through the door to the next room. The crib is barren.

He hears a shaking cry from outside and follows it through a window, along the siding, down a gutter, until his quivering legs meet solid ground. Margaret is on her knees, weeping into her hands. Before her, skipping, singing, is the boy.

And before him, straining, still, toward the vast emptiness of space, towering proudly over his kingdom of dust, is the Colossus, consumed in flames.

Smell

Grace Howard My childhood smells like July: Driving through west Texas to pick up fireworks from men who found the meaning of life in match boxes and small canisters of gun powder.

There was a permanent stain of fast food and gasoline in the air vents of our 1999 navy blue suburban. That was the year I was in charge of the dog—I forgot to bathe her.

It was four hours to Tulsa where my grandparents lived.

Fireworks

Devon Knott

15

16

Mount Popa

Natalie Pasquinelli

A Conspicuous Silence

Laura Harvey The only hum

Is that everywhere silence (That is anything but).

17

18

20

Thunder

Sophie Lidji

Once I stuck a harmonica out the car window to let dirty air and flying dust squeal out shrill notes of almost-music.

They were limp like the weak shivering lungs of mine that couldn’t play it in the first place.

If I could squeeze it in my back pocket, I would carry a tuba— smelling of rusted pennies and stale spit— and hold it to the wind.

Give me a cacophony loud enough to scare the squirrels off the sidewalks.

21

Reason # 16 That I Should Not Think About You Before Bed Lizzie Vamos

Last night, I dreamt that you and I rode in a boat shaped like a whale. I dreamt that we dove deep below the surface and looked with wonder at coral reefs bluer than aquariums. I dreamed that we sank and floated and lurched and rolled with the imprecise undulations of its mighty tail and broke the surface with exuberant sprays and were blinded by impossible golden upside-down towers that shattered the laws of gravity and shimmered in the sun. I dreamed that we did not speak, but gripped our seats in terror and ecstasy and held our breaths as the blue sea swelled up around us and swallowed us like grains of salt.

It was so beautiful that I almost fell down the stairs this morning thinking about it.

22

Kootenay Island Grace Dau

23

#6.5

Hannah Matheson

I counted you among the things I would keep, Placing you carefully into the Tension of my palm, Taut with tendons stretching out Like a road map for the eyes of Some gypsy.

A spicy musk and cackling jewels That would hold my hand And see the heart lines While beads of sweat clustered To spell it out, Little rivers beseeching Is this what there is?

And it only took from 11:30 Until 3 am for me to misplace You in the nighttime, Let the moon wax and cast you In shadow.

Everyone fell away into The distance of a tunnel That stretched out as if Running away from me.

24

Lost In Casa Loma Meredith Hosek

Lost In Casa Loma Meredith Hosek

25

Opa.

Lizzie Vamos 1. We buried my grandfather in a field, so far from the house that all you could see was dead black trees and dead white grass stretching away in all directions. The shovel made a sickly thudding noise as it sank into the half-frozen ground, and when I looked up at my father, his face was red with cold and shoveling and crying.

2. I did not cry when my grandfather died. This was, somehow, more upsetting than the fact that he was dead, because I knew that you were supposed to be sad when people you loved died and when people were sad they cried and I loved my grandfather and I was sad that he had died so why couldn’t I cry? I sat on my bed and stared between my fingers at the white stars winking in the carpet on my bedroom floor and tried and failed to cry.

3. The matzo ball bounced when it hit the carpet. It had fallen from the spoon in my grandfather’s hand. He laughed, and so we all laughed, but I remember the anxiety in my father’s eyes because my grandfather never made matzo balls that bounced and he certainly never dropped them, and if his cooking and motor skills were going then his mind could only be the next thing to wither into oblivion just like his legs already had.

4. My father hated my grandfather’s wheel chair, because it crippled him, finished what the diabetes had started and began to kill him from the feet up. My father hated my grandfather’s wheelchair because it meant that he had given up.

5. My grandfather decided that he was going to die at 70 and gave up for the next twelve years of his life.

26

Bleached

Annabel Lyman

27

Memorial

Shelby Cohron

28

6. He gave me my first lottery ticket, bought it from a dingy neon convenience store uptown and watched with pride as I scratched away its silver skin. My father hated the lottery, thought it was a waste of money and a statistical impossibility and a great big cheat, but my grandfather loved it, loved the gamble and the chance and the odds of the game like the odds of his body: 50/50, which kidney will fail first; 50/50, which foot will he lose; 50/50, will he make it through one more hospital stay?

7. 50 years before I was born, he fought a war in an army that was not his in a language that was not his for a country that he could not go back to and a family that he could not see. And while he lied about his name in Croatia, his father stood on a platform in Budapest and waited for a train to take him to God. 8. I do not believe in God, but I wondered if he was watching us when we buried you, when I stood in dead white grass holding your dead white ashes in a cardboard box and you were so heavy with the weight of a people and a Diaspora and a lifetime of things I did not understand—I was only nine, after all, how could I begin to even ask why you gave up and why you loved the lottery and why your memories stick like barbs in my skull eight years after you died and why did you die, when I was too young to see the history in your eyes, when you never had the chance to teach me how to make matzo balls or how to sing your father’s prayers or why I could not cry when you died?

9. The answer, I think, is in a cardboard box buried in a field behind the hour, under dead white grass and dead black trees that reach, inexplicably, towards the sky.

29

The Ingénue Tai Massimilian

Stones are piled in the purple pits of my lungs.

They are heavy, and they make it hard to breathe.

They tumbled out on the sticky pavement this June; I peeled my back off.

Sharp and edged—the rocks crushed your windpipe.

They built a cliff over your chin.

I clutched the crevice and my knuckles fell pale and I thought you’d swing me up But you sighed and your breath sent me wailing through white ceramic rings.

I have a hole in the fleshy dip between my collarbones From smoking through the Spring.

That’s where the rocks roll out, I mean.

It is abhorrent.

I understand.

You see I am horrific, horrified by me, and you— Every time you round my peripheral I feel them Heaving, scraping, and grinding through phlegm to the marrow of my ribs.

It’s not a pleasant feeling, you know.

It scarred my throat And it drenches my mouth in grainy bile.

30

I’ll panic. I’ll dig my nails through your sternum.

You’ll choke on sweet nothings while your windpipe crumbles Like white chalk wet with summertime.

The noise hurts, but I’ll toss my head back and I’ll laugh and laugh and then laugh again.

When the whites of your eyes streak blue And your last gasp of air whispers an evanescent “why?”

I’ll realize the blood on my hands And heed Nothing.

Persephone’s Despair Katie Bourek

31

32 Elephant People Evi Shiakolas

Dirty Dishes

Margaret Hardage I couldn’t find a bowl this morning, So I had to eat my cereal out of a tuba.

It made my Cheerios taste like coins, So I decided to go to a bakery, Hoping to exchange them For a slice of cheesecake.

“We don’t accept cereal as currency here,” Said the baker.

33

OVEN FRIED COD FISH Katie Bourek

Fish Out Of Water Kate Hoffman

There is an empty lot on 245 Catalpa Street. The house that once stood there is long gone—demolished in the 1930s or ‘40s—time enough for the thick pines to grow unwieldy and drop their needles and grow them back and drop them again and for the clovers and grass and poison ivy to propagate wildly. The residents of 243 and 247 Catalpa Street never minded the abandoned lot between them, nor did the residents of 244 Catalpa Street across the way. Not even a single Real Estate Agent seemed to take notice of the lot—the arduous task of clearing the area itself was too great to consider. It wasn’t until 1977 that Elinor ‘Ella’ Marvis saw the lot’s potential and unofficially took up residence.

INGREDIENTS:

1 empty lot 2 stolen white oil pastels 1 cup of leaves 2 cups of twiglets 1 Beetle

1.

2.

3.

4.

SERVES:

1 to 2 on those monotonous summer days between the hours of 9am and 2pm

The day was preheated to 97°—the temperature had been in the high 90s all week, so the sidewalks still radiated heat, even in the middle of the night. Ella was tired of summer school. Her friend Charlie Grayer felt the same way, so they decided to skip. The empty lot on 245 Catalpa Street was the perfect hide out. There were plenty of trees so they wouldn’t be burned.

They drew patterns on their faces with his mother’s white oil pastel and simmered in the afternoon heat.

Then, when they decided that they were crisp enough, they played elf-men in the shade, tying leaves into their hair, constructing forts, and fastening twigs into booby traps (though Charlie refused to say the word ‘booby’).

She enjoyed herself until Friday afternoon when she decided they should sacrifice a beetle to the elven gods, and Charlie said he couldn’t because he was Catholic. With one fell swoop of her pocket knife, Ella sacrificed the beetle anyways, and Charlie stormed off, boiling.

When Ella’s father, Maxwell Marvis, Ph.D., found out, he sent her to bed without supper. But Ella didn’t care—she hated oven fried cod fish and vanilla Jell-O pudding anyhow.

35

36

A Machine That Would Change The World Casey Kim

Where to Put Things You Want to Forget Camille Hunt

I wove the image Through the vertebrae of my neck Compressed it Molded it Into a shape that fit Hidden between my spleen and pancreas.

Now I need someone to Reach down my throat Grip the insides of my feet And yank my body inside out So I can paint over the burn marks Between the vertebrae Between my spleen and pancreas With a white brush And lay myself out to dry.

37

Stacked

Meredith Hosek

THE NIGHT THE LAMP CLUNG DESPERATELY TO THE MOTH Mary Margaret Hancock

T

he smoke air burns my tightened throat, reminding me of the animal skins tanned to make teepees and the Indians and red-orange poppy flowers. But the guests, skipping about in discordant pairs, are too distant to care—too weightless to linger on such things when they are touching—loving—swooping—flying. I was always told crackheads try to fly to clear their heads of this haze. Anyways, nobody tries to fly anymore. I think there is something to that.

I ride over to the streetlamp. Its rings of light splay across the concrete like Saturn. Dropping my bike at my feet, it lays collapsed, with the back wheels spinning, twisting, ticking. Out of the corner of my eye, I notice him—half a cheek, a hand, a shoe, illuminated by the light.

“I assumed you would be inside,” I motion, “with the rest of them.”

His eyes, blank like the rocks at the bottom of a fishbowl, close slowly.

“Out of everyone here, I thought you would be the one to remember. I’ve been clean for years. No blow, no smack, no ecstasy. C’mon Ellen, you know I just end up laughing like a lunatic all night,” he gestured towards me.

“Anyways, I don’t want to end up like those free-loving lunatics back there.”

The nausea returns. I had glanced at the skin bare bodies, falling over each other. Their knees couldn’t even hold them.

“Listen,” he says, pulling at my arm. His hands are rough and soft like the heel of the bread.

But I cover my ears, too aware of the fact that nothing good ever comes after “listen.” When all I want is to swallow the marbles that roll against the back of my throat, he pulls me closer. Submerged in time, I feel like I am in a swimming pool, the oppressive heat of the night folding in on me.

39

Chasms

Sophie Lidji Wedged between my busted gut was a ball of black-hot plasma.

Black-hot plasma and there wasn’t regret, but a wonder of how to spell the word hell now that hell has added me.

Last Thursday, there was a red rope fastened to my heel, rope that smelled of gunpowder and rasps of gravelly throats.

Red rope tugged down and all was nebulous and there was a tuxedoed man who spoke by hollow chokes.

He spewed torn-out pages from a holy book and they cemented down my melted bones.

He crafted caterwauls and shadows and scooped my screams out with a spatula.

40

Hooke

K.C. Thompson

41

43 Apollo and Daphne

Katie Bourek

Hot Air

Sophie Lidji I misplaced my brain, left it behind a cracked portrait of Abraham Lincoln hanging above a dusty bookcase in Pittsburgh.

I stole Abraham’s top hat, forced it over the swell of my neurons and frontal lobes, but it fit a little funny.

Suited in presidential black, my brain fled to Copeland Street, riding on the blonde cashmere back of the only cat I have ever loved.

A talking tangerine hopped from my cerebral cortex, whistling citrus and beams.

She sipped from a tin can of condensed milk and fed some to the cat from an orange finger.

She had a smile like a lemon slice and smiled it when she found an abandoned yellow motorcycle and pulled it from a ditch by its handlebars.

They rode then, the brain and the tangerine and the cat, on electric wheels through air that smelled like red lights and yellow lines.

The cat had brought along a transistor radio and he tuned it to some Spanish mariachi.

And they skipped on twangs from the guitarrón and tumbled to a college-ruled street lined with fences crafted from eraser shavings.

44

45 Peeling Away The Layers Emily Bluedorn

Poems Found With a Cracked Egg in a Bottle Sent Adrift at Sea Margaret Hardage

I. I will use a boot to crush your heart’s shell Into many millions of broken pieces That I will then with my fingertips Deftly rearrange into tiny Jaguar sandcastles that tend to fight And when they fight I will call my mother over so that she can see With her own trying eyes How strong you really are II. With a ladle you will spill the clouded Egg whites of your soul into a lighthouse lantern And by inserting one drowned firefly The light will guide my lost Yellow canoe to the shore where you will wait For me with fistfuls of shells III. Give me the blush yolk of your heart And I will not scramble but poach it and Eat it tenderly with scones Until it settles and makes shelter On an island within the hushed sea of my gut

46

47 Pat

Natalie Pasquinelli

48 Morning Mist

Grace Zacarias

Blossoms

Sydney Wilkins You whispered to me that the flowers brought out the red in my hair that doesn’t exist.

Women danced out from the center and the petals formed to their bodies as the laughed at me, reminding me that from each stem bloomed an apology for each night with a foreign woman.

So I named every blossom after them.

I poured the water out of the vase onto the picture of us smiling at the camera like forever was a promise you could keep.

And I watched them die.

Their backs broke and the petals shriveled into clusters of the dead remains of a beautiful thing.

Then, I saw the similarity.

49

51

Belief

Sarah Nesbitt I have trouble believing in “Good� that makes shells of flesh with minds but eats their souls before they set foot, or hand, crawling hand, on earth.

52

Contact

Meredith Hosek

Bones

Grace Howard I twisted the ends of the paper square, let the red soak through, then re-opened the tissue; it was kind of like tiedying, but there wasn’t enough blood for a whole shirt. I was grinning in the mirror—“…don’t you mind people grinnin’ in your face.” I cherished that soft fleshy hole in my mouth and pressed the tooth back in, but this time, it didn’t stick. It was like latex, chocolate-mint toothpaste, and rust.

All I could think of was brushing my teeth when I saw what was floating in the river that morning—and to think—I thought it was the compost pile. It was just a hoof at first, but it made me think of the red gummy worms on my dresser, and how I would probably never eat them again.

I’m glad I threw away the candy—I found the trap snapped in the laundry room. I mean, I hadn’t checked it in weeks, but this mouse was warm. I buried him with the celery I planted earlier this week.

Fresh celery soup: the soup of the day. The kerosene never left the kitchen when he turned the stove on high. I took a long look at the shrunken head in my spoon—then ate with caution. I couldn’t shake the notion that I was doomed to bite down on a bone in some parallel universe.

54 Window Casey Kim

55

Dig

Sarah Nesbitt I am your archaeological dig.

I’m all orange dirt packed atop dry old bones…

Ants run (blood-like) through my tunnels (called veins) but their coldness doesn’t bother me because I’m too focused on the shovel that ceaselessly dives into my tenderest ground and then extracts itself – holds at its very tip the blistered canvasses of your industrious hands.

(Well, perhaps you see them as industrious… My grated flesh may beg to differ).

I am silent.

I am yours to devour with cold little tin picks and coarse mule-hair brushes.

I am yours to excavate, but I’ll make you dig and search and dig and search (and dig and search and dig) until you tire, and even then, you’ll have to dig some more.

56

Market

Emily Yeh

57

Whisper Bones Sadie Lidji

Sometimes I feel my bones creak inside of me and I wonder if it’s my body’s way of telling me I’m going too fast.

I’m acting too ambitious.

Be whatever you want— with approval first.

I don’t know whether I need to be vicious or give kisses or lie under the stars in a manic state for days, living off the sweet air my adventure gives back to me.

The atmosphere whispers my name.

Spidery tree roots lick my arms and legs, webbing me to the forest floor.

Each begs me to stay for just one more day.

Am I a free spirit or not?

I am the faraway atmosphere.

I am the ambition of a thousand work days.

I feel my bones creak inside of me.

They are telling me I’m going too fast.

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59 Falling

Laura Harvey

Indigenous Katie Mimini

60

My dad had a truck, a white 2002 Nissan Frontier, that when I turned five years old and the old Ford overheated, he paid fifteen thousand dollars for. I remember because he told me, several times, as I rode with him every day all over the city, squishing my illegally-placed behind into the passenger seat. The apparatus for operating the window was archaic, a lever that you rotated left to open the window and right to close it, and it took you something akin to a whole minute (thirty seconds if you were working hard) to go either way, but my dad said he liked it because it reminded him of why they called it “rolling up the window” in the first place.

On the increasingly often nights when my parents fought, I wandered outside to escape the barreling, raging war that reverberated through our house; our walls were so thin, like paper. Finding my way to the passenger seat of the truck, I would sit in the tepid, muddy darkness of big-city nights and contemplate my six-year-old thoughts. Often my sister, sixteen years of age, would join me on my internal odysseys; ten years older and two feet taller, she served as a constant reminder of my status as my parents’ befuddled attempt approximately seven years ago to rekindle their marriage. To what degree of success, I didn’t know.

A middle-aged Kwik Kar automobile inspector with much to gain and not a lot to lose, my dad strove to impress me in any way he could. Although the speedometer boasted a top speed of a hundred twenty miles per hour, the truck shook liberally at a hundred, its frame quivering but noiseless, quieted, hidden away within the folds in the concrete, blanketed by super-white headlights and an over-cast, cloud-cover sky.

In the back of the truck’s cab, there was a window that opened up onto to the bed through which I would frequently climb. I settled down onto the black metal surface, the foot-high riveted walls bordering me on all sides, smooth and cold like stone. My dad beckoned for me to put on the dreaded seatbelt, more commonly used to secure cargo, required for these adventures. Clipping the somewhat cumbersome vice into place, I squinted my eyes and watched the streetlights stretch and warp as the violet night shot by.

In the summer of my seventh birthday, my dad promised to take me to the movies and I asked my mom if she wanted to come. She shook her head, and when I asked her why she bent at the waist and kissed my cheek, but said nothing. Later in the truck, when I asked my dad, he said he didn’t have an answer, nor did he want one. I fiddled with the window lever for a few minutes, up down up down up down, until I noticed my dad watching me out of the corner of his eye, repentant but silent.

Koi

Katie Bourek ******* Later when I was eight and he sold the truck for five thousand dollars, I had to try hard to keep from calculating the loss. In that same year, my sister went off to college, my parents ended their twenty-year marriage, and my dad got a Lexus. Leather seats and automatic windows, that car was the vision of the future, with cup holders too, and a steering wheel that lifted up eagerly, electronically, every time you turned on the car. I always wondered what the eighty-five year old woman who bought it would want with a pick-up truck, our pick-up truck. She appeared one day out of the woodwork, green-purple-blue veins poking through her silicone skin as she signed the check. The next week when the check bounced, my dad didn’t go after her. After that I lived with my mom, my sister visited every few months, and I threw myself into my homework and books and became a person who wouldn’t dream of riding in the bed of a speeding truck. Now on weekends when I see my dad, we have the same conversation on the way home. “How is school?” “Fine.”

“Good. How are you?” “Fine.” “I’m glad. You know I love you, right?” “Yes. I love you too.” His hands painted onto the steering wheel, there is silence as the night crawls by.

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I you call yourself a man, but I peeled back the onionskin and found a mole rat perched naked on the front porch. and in the summer when the drought blows in, you can see him through the chapped cracks, just above the left lung.

II Let me shatter into three thousand pieces, with each edge scraped and sanded smooth.

Let me bathe in sky, so people will come and stare and bang their fists and tear their hair out, saying, What devil would dare break blue and leave it so hideously unbound upon the table?

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63 The Human Heart Katie Bourek

64 Ripley

Olivia Lechtenberger

Marigolds In The Winter Victoria Almanza

He was wearing a black t-shirt and standing on the front porch when I first saw him, smoke flew out of his mouth at regular intervals, and I wondered why my mother didn’t say anything. I hadn’t brought much with me, just a bag to stay a night or two. I didn’t know how long I would be allowed to stay; I hadn’t seen her since that night in Los Angeles when I still lived in a place I considered home.

He didn’t speak as I followed my mother through the brown yard, which was slowly being ravaged by thick weeds and dandelions that drooped from the heat, instead puffing smoke and quirking his dark eyebrows at me in mild interest. Even as the creaky screen door closed behind me, he didn’t say a word, instead letting the sunset and distant squeals from unsupervised neighborhood children speak for him.

“So you’re the sister I’ve been told about, Helen’s girl?

Where’s the boy?” He inhales, “Too afraid to come?”

Grainy, probably from all the cigarettes, yet thick, I know he’s eighteen and not to be trusted. I don’t know how to answer. So I don’t.

And the summer sun drones on.

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Meredith Hosek

Without Herbicide Margaret Hardage

Between my heart and my left lung, There is a crevice where weeds grow.

Sometimes at night when the gardener is sleeping, They bloom dandelions.

Once when I was lonely I ate one— It tasted like pan-seared oranges so I Spread it over crackers.

A few nights after that, I woke up due to a slight buzz in my chest.

The dandelion was chirping because It wanted the grasshoppers To come and join it for a dance.

The last guest left at dawn.

I think they had a good time.

At around noon on Mother’s Day, I was desperate for a gift.

As I reached for the dandelion, My hands hung hungry and dry, Brushing over the bare, knotted fingers of the weeds.

It wasn’t until a few weeks after that, When I was napping in my yard and Smelt a single clover through the wind, That I knew the dandelion had returned.

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68 Scene From The Train Station No. 1 Casey Kim

Untitled

Sarah Nesbitt I’ve crawled through the beating squalor of tarp-homes and faucet-less, toilet-less “bathrooms,” and I’ve ridden in a leather-lined luxury crossover down streets embroidered with furry green patches and white-bricked castle-houses, and none of it felt the same.

These places are not one; this world isn’t “one.”

So when I reach out in utter blindness, utter blackness, to touch its face, my fingertips are always greeted by the sting of a blue, hissing flame.

Yes, I’ve seen the heaviness of almost-death.

I’ve felt it, strewn across my tanned-with-strife arms.

Then, I didn’t feel human anymore except for the hot and sweaty shiver that made little cold Pacific-Ocean-waves on my arms, and my mind hovered in the doorway while the almost-corpse lay on his pillow for a long, loud eternity.

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70 A Different Perspective Allison Lanfear

#3.4

Hannah Matheson You had this wallet That your grandmother made you Out of duct tape, And you held it And shook it around And two quarters fell out, Like two moons spilt onto the floor.

And I wanted desperately to crush them between my fingers Into silver dust And spread it like war paint Over your soft baby’s cheeks.

I wanted them to melt and run like milk Between my root fingers And drink it from cupped hands, Like we should have forever ago.

Because I see you like my ghost And it’s a beautifully terrible thing To see your future approaching while The quarters are bouncing, bouncing, And you looked so happy I couldn’t Bend down To pick them 71 Up.

Snouts

Tai Massimilian

H e h T

unter’s Tre

at

Meredith Hosek

My childhood smells like raw meat— but nothing barcode-stickered in white butcher paper, nothing shrink-wrapped in freezer drawers, and certainly nothing served as tartar.

No, my childhood smells like limp red and white back-straps stacked waist-high in the garage beside my bike and scooter.

Like my dog’s breath, after chewing on a pig-ear stolen from a hot metal bucket of assorted muscle.

Or my father’s words as he worked through a hog carcass swaying from the same tree as my reading hammock, “The little ones are the most tender, remember that.

Can you imagine the people, sucking and gnawing on barbeque drenched ribs, unaware that someone plucked that sucker straight from the ribcage of a sorry babe.”

From behind book covers, I would watch him dance around his catch, and would reply instead to the hollow beast, “Tragic, really.”

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75

76 Bubbles

Grace Dau

#8.5

Hannah Matheson Back then, we didn’t know what It felt like to swim hours and hours Without coming up to breathe, Because we didn’t have to know.

The air enveloped us; Our lungs never went hungry; We never had to ration out the Oxygen, Never had to say “ We will make this do.”

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Sunday

Emily Yeh

79

Purple Dresses Katie Bourek

I. Purple Dresses Elinor ‘Ella’ Marvis’ mother loved the color purple—no, she worshiped it. Not a soul could tell you why or how she gained such a fondness for a single color, but it was extremely evident, especially in the living room’s decor. Purple throw pillows rested on the purple chair which sat in front of a purple lamp which was pushed against the purple wall that matched the purple rug on the floor. In fact, she even burnt lavender candles.

Every shelf was lined with purple objects—‘something purple’ was every relative’s go-to gift if they couldn’t think of anything else to get her—when her future husband, Maxwell Marvis, gave her that purple lamp for her twenty-fourth birthday, she knew he was the one for her.

She even forced her only daughter to solely wear purple dresses for the first five years of her life. She carefully ignored Ella’s protests.

II. The Purple Lamp Once, Ella unplugged the purple lamp that stood behind her mother’s heavy armchair in the living room. Only once. At least, this is what Ella claimed—in actuality, she unplugged that lamp a grand total of twenty-two times.

The first unplugging…

Ella was playing hide-and-go-seek with her friend Charlie Grayer, the Cub Scout. Squeezed between the back of the armchair and the lamp in the corner, she stepped on the cord, and it fell from the outlet. Her mother had always told her not to touch electrical devices, so she didn’t plug it back in.

Plus, she imagined if she was electrocuted that she would start to glow, and it would give away her hiding spot.

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The second unplugging…

Impressed by her mother’s reaction the first time she found her lamp unplugged, Ella squirmed behind the chair once more and yanked the plug from the socket before resuming her position on her stool. Face to the wall, she waited for her mother to return.

81 The Violet Hour Sydney Thomas

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“Elinor, it’s been ten minutes. Are you ready to apologize to your brother?” she asked.

“Sorry, Gabe,” Ella said hastily, with a proud glance at the welt on his arm.

Her mother released her from time-out, and she walked slowly from the room. Standing just outside of the doorway, she listened as her mother sat down and the lamp clicked seven times. Ella grinned.

“Who unplugged my lamp again?” she grumbled angrily, hitting the wall with the side of her fist, “Elinor, will you come here?”

Skipping back into the room, Ella approached her mother.

What is it?”

“Someone unplugged my lamp again, and your father’s not home to move the chair for me,” she groaned, “will you squeeze behind and plug it back in for me?”

Happily, Ella squirmed behind the chair and plugged the lamp back into the wall.

The ninth unplugging…

“Who on God’s green earth keeps unplugging my lamp!” her mother cried, slamming her book onto the ground, “Who?” She stormed to the TV set, flipped it off, and faced the family. Ella, her father, and three brothers stared blankly into her red face.

“It has to be one of you!”

“Don’t look at me,” said John.

“I haven’t touched it,” said Ben. “It wasn’t me,” Ella lied, hiding a smirk.

“Maybe I didn’t reinstall the outlet properly, honey,” Ella’s father said, “I’ll take another look at it tomorrow. Can you turn the TV back on?”

The twenty-second unplugging…

A collection of electrical tape, rat poison, loose screws, and a broken power strip now collected dust behind the chair. Ella’s mother leaned back against the cushions and adjusted her robe.

“Merry Christmas, mama!” said Gabe.

“This is from Gabe, John, and I,” Ben added, “Ella refused to pitch in.”

Ella poked her tongue out at Ben, and slouched on the floor by the Christmas tree. Carefully removing the red bow, Ella’s mother slid a small box from the wrapping paper.

“A book light!” she exclaimed with a chuckle, “I’ll never have to mess with this cursed lamp again.”

Gabe, John, Ben, and their father laughed. Ella grimaced and pressed her face into her knees, sliding her own present to her mother beneath the tree skirt.

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84

Toes

Grace Howard

Something Wicked Sophie Lidji

I. I wanted to write this at 12:47 am when I folded myself into the bedsheets last night. It makes sense, because I’m always scared right after I get into bed. I’m scared by the man who could be hiding underneath my bed to lick my ankle, so that I would think a serial killer was nothing but my dog looking for affection. I read about that three months ago and I’ve thought about it every night since. Every night, I make my bed with lightning feet so I won’t get any licked ankles—because of course he’s under there, and then there would be strange saliva that would burn scars and horror into my skin—and then I get into bed and I see the face of the man that’s been in a hundred people’s dreams, more terrifying than interesting and unusual, and that face has been in my head for two eternal summers.

II. For my seventeenth birthday, I got a big black book, black and red with the most awful details of the hundred most evil people in the world. I asked for the book because all of that terror had always fascinated me. I read the whole thing, those 348 blood-stained, sick-stained pages, on my bed in one bright afternoon, then tossed it to the top of my bookshelf and haven’t touched it since. For eleven nights, I thought of men who kept human heads in their freezers and cut bodies into neat, edible cubes.

III. Someone is going to take me. Every man I see is a threat and maybe that makes me a misandrist, but better to be a misandrist than a collection of bloodiedup, chopped-up fingertips in a jar on a psychopath’s nightstand.

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86

REVELATION Sarah Nesbitt

I bit down on the stick you tossed, and now my gums are leaking where each vowel you spoke dug its feet in and curled its toenails to make crescent gashes on the corkboard-inside of my cheek.

I wish I could scream at you:

there is no age where people start to die There is a certain age where we start to notice that Death is happening, but it never starts, never stops, just floats in and out of the absurd myopia of our bunkered-for-wartime peripheries.

87 Sliding Nostalgia Devon Knott

Creative Nonfiction Annabel Lyman

A cautionary word to the reader: Whatever these words say, do not believe them. Forget whatever it was you came looking for—I cannot tell you the truth.1 I will lie to you, I will lure you into a false sense of gratification, I will abuse your imagination, because that is the best I can do (and you wouldn’t know the difference, would you?). collected pourings of electricity through pipes extending the length of my frontal lobe and ending in the tips of my fingers (the product of extensive rumination and meditation on the past, the present, and the infinity that lies between): Halfway between the sink and the oven, there is a pearlescent green teapot.

Halfway between the sink and the oven, there is a green canary who whistles until the coaldust coats her lungs—she dies, and I capture her effluent soul in my teacup.2 She tastes like chamomile.

And maybe that canary whistled Truth, but nobody heard her. Or

maybe Truth lies at the bottom of the garbage disposal, like the

ground beef from last night’s dinner gored and amalgamated

amongst all the other unwanted food—the rotten carrots and the

wilted leaves of lettuce.

The first cup of tea I poured from her went to my father, who was visiting for Christmas. He had waited for hours alone at his house for his ex-fatherin-law (my ill-disposed grandfather) to succumb to fatigue and ask to be driven home.

My father and my grandfather have not seen each other since the divorce. I was five years old then. I looked like this:

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.

He slips gently into the house. He thinks he catches scent of hostility behind the open door. I would not know the smell if it choked the life from my lungs.

My nostrils are full of apple pie.

His truth is the kind that looks like this:

,

the kind that will rip you into jagged strips and leave you bleeding for the rest of your life.

My truth is the kind that looks like this:

, the kind that refuses to see, smothering the serrated edges until all the world is a bunch of cotton balls.

Because Truth is a matter of perception, and perception a matter of truth, and all of life is really just a big game of roshambo.3

I wonder what it feels like to lose your child. When all she has to give you for the pain is a cup of tea.

I wonder where the bees have gone. All I see these days are wasps, and the flowers look lovelorn.

How can stagnant words feign to represent a universe, a being, a truth constantly in flux?

1

Do you know a canary when you see one?

2

Truth being the thing that conquers rock, paper, and scissors.

3

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eu

l eS

Ka ti

Th

I

eB ou re k

s th

90

The Moment Katie Bourek

Please forgive me…

But there is a moment I wish I could take back—one that I could just fold up, stick in my back pocket, let it go through the wash, and dissolve. Yes. I think I would have liked the moment to dissolve. Unfortunately though, no amount of water—warm or hot—no amount of detergent can shrink it. Or erase it. Or destroy it.

Really, it can only be regretted.

I never could have known, but if I had let the stranger into Lucy’s that day, I would have lived sixty years longer.

Fact: Lucy’s was the only florist shop in town, established 1936.

The sky had been grey all weekend – ever since the clouds rolled in on Friday, leaving a wailing trail of thunderstorm warnings on the televisions and radios of Ambleside, Mississippi—and was grey Monday as well.

I guess that is why I decided to work late in Lucy’s that night: no matter the temperature outdoors, no matter the color of the sky, the flowers were always bright. Humming, I leaned against the counter in the back room, sketching out various arrangements and comparing the colors. My favorite changed often, but at the moment it was pale blue—just like the sky I had been missing lately.

It was 7:06pm. The sun had just set, and the shop had been closed for about half an hour. It was quiet—only steady drips from the leaky roof and quick snips of Richard’s scissors broke the silence. Such little noises, but they seemed so loud in the stillness. Richard, the shop keepers grandson, was the only other person there—a quiet boy—I had never even heard him speak an entire sentence before. In fact, I had no memory connected to his voice. He spoke the daily “Hellos,” “How do you dos,” and “Goodbyes,” but that was all. Yet, while his voice (or lack thereof) never led me to discover his personality, the way he went about his work did. He was a perfectionist, he refused to accept help, and he would not stop until he was completely satisfied with his project. I liked that. In fact, I think that is another reason why I stayed late that day.

Unfortunately, I owned one of the weakest work ethics known to man.

I loved what I did, but I wanted to do too much. I had never spent more than an hour on design or construction. Everything I did was sloppy.

Peering up from my design, I rested my chin on my hands and watched

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as Richard worked on his arrangement. It was the centerpiece for a rich old woman’s birthday party. I was incredibly lucky to have him; the bouquet he designed for my funeral was lovely.

“Magnificent.”

The word slid through my lips.

Ears heating and cheeks flushing wildly, I immediately regretted the slip up. This, however, is not the moment I wanted to dissolve.

Fact: In the next few moments, I would hear Richard’s voice— enough of it to develop a memory.

Richard jumped at the whisper and twisted around. Upon noticing me behind him, he turned quickly towards his work.

“Sorry for startling you. I was just admiring your arrangement. You always work so diligently,” I said. “You know, it’s kind of dark. I’m going to turn on the lamp.”

“Thank you,” he replied humbly.

He began to turn back to the arrangement but stopped himself and turned to face me.

“W-what are you working on, a sketch? You don’t usually stay this late,” he said sheepishly.

That was all it took. Two little sentences and his voice was embedded in my memory. Suddenly, before I had time to respond, I heard a knock against the glass in the front of the shop.

“I’ll get it,” I said.

The door to the back room swung shut behind me.

A man peered through the window, wiping away droplets of water with the sleeve of his raincoat.

“We’re closed,” I said through the glass.

“But your lights are on,” the stranger protested.

“Sorry!”

I turned off the lights to the front of the store.

That was it… the moment.

The absence of light creates an ominous sensation of vulnerability. It doesn’t matter where you are —an alley way, your own bedroom, or even an empty flower shop—light means safety. It doesn’t make much sense, but I always registered in my mind that as long as I was touched by light, nothing could harm me. I was in the front of the shop, and Richard was in the back.

Only a sliver of safety leaked in from the backroom.

That one sliver was not enough.

Th th leu eS

Ka ti

ek

93

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ou r

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Hush

Sophie Lidji

94

My father never cries. I’ve still never seen him cry. At his father’s funeral, he stood at the podium under the pale gold light of the temple’s eternal flame and he spoke of my grandfather with an unwavering lower lip. Before my grandfather’s three sons spoke, his clients and colleagues and acquaintanceswho-called-themselves-friends stepped up and said a few words: “He was the most gracious gentleman; elegant and worldly.” “He was a marvelous man. You don’t find gentlemen like him anymore.”

And everyone cried. Everyone was crying, it seemed, except for his own son. It struck me as strange, even though I wasn’t crying myself and I cry at most things. This was the most unusual instance of my father’s lack of tears, though it certainly wasn’t the only.

My father doesn’t cry, but it’s not for a lack of caring or a search for a tough-looking exterior that only lies within sirloin steaks and chilled whiskey and dry eyes. He ends the day with a glass of milk and two strawberry Fig Newtons. It’s just that my father never really learned how to cry. His parents had just moved to America and his father was carved-jawed and throwing himself into his work and his mother was just putting on the pretty dresses her husband brought home and trying to figure out why the past tense of “read” is “read”. His father never cried and his mother never cried and when they divorced, it wasn’t cause to cry for anyone because it was an arranged marriage and everyone in the house knew they didn’t even love each other in the first place.

On a bookshelf in our house is a dirty beige frame of my father’s baby photos from 1953. Five small ovals with pictures of his face at the age of two—he’s in a little collared seersucker playsuit and he’s staring at something off-camera with the stiffest grin I’ve ever seen on a child that small. The photographer probably dangled a toy in front of his face while my grandmother watched from a barstool— her ankles crossed under a neat silk dress and her painted lips in a tight smile that didn’t show her teeth.

She would be thinking of words and complaints and protests she ached to say but didn’t know how to say in this language. So she would sigh and

pull on her gloves and purse her lips.

I think my grandparents used up all the sadness during their Exodus, greater in number than the one from Sinai, when they fled their home holding the foreign hand of the person they were expected to love. So they made do and raised their children without tear tracks staining their starched collared shirts.

Clocks

Laura Nagy

Eliza Schreibman A silk cat skin, filled with red organs and fiber optics, steps onto my shoulder and circles my throat with pearls made of splinters.

The engine of a 1967 Chevy Impala asks: Did I remember to lock the trunk?

Who would I call if my car hitchhiked to Mexico?

There is a foreign language made of damp paws and curious noses and intimate tails.

It creaks and slides under my fingernails, blending with my exhales.

My bobby pin unshackles itself, nearly caught by a pink, fish-hook tongue.

Such a ruthless attempt to get me fired.

White fur kisses my rolled up sleeves goodnight and melts upwards, towards the clouds of black crows, whose cries are silhouetted against the sunset and the stoplight.

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97 Claws of Kuri

Cathy Ma

98 To Hot Imagination Natalie Pasquinelli

if words could fill the shell that the world makes of man Annabel Lyman

I want to speak with words so thinskinned you can crack them open and suck from them the sweet flesh of a papaya in the summertime, and when you’re bored snorkeling through asphalt, you can sink your teeth into that ripe fruit and let it simmer on your tongue the way we used to when the air around us didn’t pucker its lips and frown all the time.

The smokers line Fifth Avenue like the broken vertebrae of a serpent seeping the grey breath of some deep internal fire— and I’m wondering where all the fresh air has gone that these people suck tar into their lungs, and line the buildings like disease-ridden trees bearing sick black sap.

I want to speak with words you can sip from the cold rim of a mug, Words steeped in frothy chai and warmed by the fireside, So at the end of the day When the almond buried deep in your flesh has gone all cold and dry, I will make you whole again.

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Colophon Editors-in-Chief

Sophie “meatball sub” Lidji Sarah “old soul” Simmons Literary Editor Maisey “CHOCOLATE” Horn Art Editor Meredith “I’ll read” Hosek Photography Editor Ashley “gusted but” Deatherage Managing Editor Rachel “mil-de-wed” Lefferts Assistant Literary Editor Annabel “bellyman” Lyman Assistant Art Editor Mary Margaret “catwalk” Hancock Assistant Photography Editor Taylor “fanny” Pak

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Faculty Adviser Ana “girls...” Rosenthal Staff Jessica “Charlie St.” Cloud MaryFrances “vegan cake” Dagher Jennifer “swiss chocolate” Davis Lauren “storytime” Kim Mary Kate “inspiration” Korinek Tai “toot squelch” Massimilian Katie “anemone” Mimini Cate “vibrathlete” O’Brien Callie “lil sis” Smith Julia “JT” Teeter Cameron “vibreshman” Todd Kirby “kirbycowgirl13” Young

many thanks to: Mrs. Rosenthal for your unflinching enthusiasm and dedication to ensuring the success of this magazine. We learn more from you every day and we couldn’t have done any of this without you.

Mr. Vaughn for your literary feedback and help in the review process.

We are so grateful for the time that you give.

Ms. Wargo, Mrs. Murphree, Mr. Ashton, and Dean Matthews for your encouragement and support.

Melanie Hamil at Impact Graphics and Printing for helping us plan the production of this magazine.

Katie Bourek, Casey Kim, Evi Shiakolas, Sadie Lidji, and K.C. Thompson for helping to illustrate the magazine’s box, book cover, and title page.

Vibrato is a magazine that exhibits the art, photography, and literature anonymously submitted by Hockaday’s Upper School student body.Together, our staff members closely review and carefully select the pieces to include in the publication, design the spreads, and distribute the magazine.

The text of this issue is set in 11 pt. Karloff Positive Std. Variances in size are used for titles of literary pieces, art, and photography as well as names of authors and artists. The table of contents is set in 11 pt. Tahoma, with variances in size for titles and subtitles. The magazine was designed using Adobe InDesign CS6 and printed on Galerie Art Silk text 80# and Finch Fine Bright white text 80# and cover 130# by Impact Graphics and Printing in Dallas, Texas.

Art by Sadie Lidji

This is issue _______ of 750.

Vibrato