Copyright © 2021 by the Student Publications and Radio Committee (SPARC). The Grinnell Review, Grinnell College’s semi-annual undergraduate arts and literary magazine, is a student-produced journal devoted to the publication of student writing and artwork. Creative work is solicited from the entire student body and reviewed anonymously by the corresponding Writing and Arts Committees. Students are involved in all aspects of production, including selection of works, layout, publicity, and distribution. By providing a forum for the publication of creative work, The Grinnell Review aims to bolster and contribute to the art and creative writing community on campus. Acknowledgments: The work and ideas published in The Grinnell Review belong to the individuals to whom such works and ideas are attributed to and do not necessarily represent or express the opinions of SPARC or any other individuals associated with the publication of this journal. © 2021 Poetry, prose, artwork and design rights return to the artists upon publication. No part of this publication may be duplicated without the permission of SPARC, individual artists or the editors. The typeface for the body text is Palatino and the typeface for the titles is Didot. Cover art: Dhall 2019 | McKenna Doherty All editorial and business correspondence should be addressed to: Grinnell College c/o Grinnell Review Grinnell, IA 50112 www.grinnellreview.com
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LVI | Fall 2021 Editor-in-Chief
Editors
Kripa Bansal Chelsea Shang
Meghna Adhikari Claire Boyle Elisa Lanusse Carrasco Ela Chintagunta
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Contents Writing Joseph Fisk
Meredith Benjamin that school in Athens
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Paths, Lines 26
@my-inability-to-confront-reality. 12 Freudian Romantics 24 Planned Socialization 37
William Donaldson 44
Gabe Ferguson Little Gabe 14 Lucia Finkelstein Midnight Somewhere
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Sarah Licht
Eyerusalem Desta
Hauntology
The Bear
i-dont-know-us.mov
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Hindsight is 2021 42 Anna Lipari To The End 32 Ganga Prakash
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Strange Eyes 28
Art McKenna Doherty
Ivan Kwei
Spun 10
Portrait 9
Golden Hour 11
In The Moonligh 13
Untitled 29 Dhall 2019
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Vending Machine Blues
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Wait! 13 Longing
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Celia Meagher Pride 19
Shabana Gupta Dancer 26 Fighters 43
Zoey Nahmmacher-Baum July 23 sure of it 27 cowfrog 30
Liv Hage Armor Suit, 3042 37
on-the-Hudson 31 new york new york
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Letter From the Editors Dear Reader, When we retreated into a month of peace for winter break, it was to recharge our youthful souls and hearts to be able to color Grinnell’s solemn whiteness away in the spring. We returned with the threat of Omicron lurking in the air, vanquishing all our dreams of a colorful semester. But amidst these threats, the Grinnellian spirit remains everlasting. In hopes of being fearless towards what sets our hearts on fire, we must have the courage to let go of all uncertainties. The Grinnell Review is excited to publish its Fall 2021 edition keeping that very spirit in heart. Osho said that “Creativity is the greatest rebellion in existence.” Our response is to fight back these uncertainties and threats by documenting and presenting the unlimited realms of creativity that lives on this campus. We hope that our rebellion to nurture creativity in spite of whatever is thrown at us, can be osmosized onto any Grinnellian who picks up the Review. We would like to thank SPARC for their unending support and Mittera for making our vision a reality. We would also like to thank all the writers and artists who had the courage to fight back with us in the form of all their wonderful work. And of course, we’d like to thank you, reader, for being here with us. With love, Chelsea ‘23, Claire ‘22, Ela ‘25, Elisa ‘24, Kripa ‘24, and Meghna ‘24
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“Have the fearless attitude of a hero and the loving heart of a child.” —Soyen Shaku
Portrait Ivan Kwei ink on paper
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Spun pun | McKenna Mc Doherty| video still
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Golden Hour | McKenna Doherty | video still
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@my-inability-to-confront-reality. Sarah Licht
If life was a competition, I would have lost, tripped five feet past the starting line and bled my worth in skinned knees. And yet, my body remains scarred, sandpaper against the softness of life. Pick a piece of me to carry, parts scattered on pavement. I always found ants to be the supreme form of life. Always carrying on with legs crushed by predacious shoes, turning a momentary existence into something worthy. And no one asks ants if they’ve taken their medication. (I’m fine. My body was getting tired anyway.)
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There are still bits of me that remain, what even the vultures refuse to carry, build nests from hearty bones. Someone told me my eyes resembled festering wounds. Maybe now they feel like home, rolling deep within a participation trophy. Another speck of life crawls onto my cheek, two bodies remembering to exist, to breathe.
Wait! | Ivan Kwei | ink on paper
In The Moonlight | Ivan Kwei | ink on paper
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Little Gabe
*** I first met Gabe in our middle school’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. While I starred as Bottom, he, on account of being two years younger, was resigned to playing “the wall.” He wore “Gabe, you have a visitor,” my mother cryptically a sheet painted with a brick pattern and rigidly stuck out his arms while trying not to laugh the whole time. calls from the door. I leave the sauce I’m cooking to In the scene I remember most vividly, I faked a kiss simmer and walk out of the kitchen, forgetting to set through a V made by Gabe’s hands, which ostensibly down a large silver pot lid. I am confused because we represented a hole in the wall. are amidst a pandemic, it is winter in Minnesota, and, even during “normal *** times” spontaneous visits are rare. As I reach the Gabe begins our first front hall, through the conversation in well over a year screen door, I see him. by asking, “How’s Grinnell “Hey Gabe,” he online?” At first, I am pleasantly says. Despite my shock, surprised that he remembers the I am quick on my feet college I attend. While I spit out and reciprocate. I ask my platitudes about how “it’s not mother to turn down the burner and stir my puttanesca great, but I suppose it could be a hell of a lot worse,” sauce. Then, I step outside to catch up properly. Six I realize I am wearing a black hoodie with “Grinnell” feet apart, I sit atop my front steps, slouching, while boldly emblazoned in white across my chest. I am he stands on the sidewalk, wearing a goofy lumberjack disappointed in both of us. Did he even remember hat, his quintessential childish grin and, perhaps, the what I intended to do after high school? And he must faintest trace of a smirk. know that I’ve turned myself into a sweater person,
Gabe Ferguson
“Wearing a goofy lumberjack hat, his quintessential childish grin and, perhaps, the faintest trace of a smirk.”
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and this is just a bad coincidence, right? I ask him if he has any idea what he will do next year. He tells me he is applying to colleges but doesn’t have any clear front-runners yet. He is 50/50 on whether or not he will debate in college. If he decides to debate, he will likely go somewhere like Northwestern or Dartmouth. If he decides against it, he is looking at obscure Canadian colleges. I tell him not to do it, and we force ourselves to laugh. *** When I was in ninth and tenth grade, I occasionally saw Gabe when I judged middle school debate tournaments. One time, he attended a tournament in Spanish and abandoned his script to give an impassioned rant about anarchy. I declared him the loser, partially because his Spanish was intolerably bad, and partially because he did not back up his position on the necessity of anarchy with sufficient evidence. After the round, the mother of Gabe’s opponent reprimanded me because she considered our light banter “unprofessional.” At a tournament in English, I sat on a panel that declared Gabe the winner of the Varsity City Championship. I voted for Gabe, mostly because he deserved it, and partially because I liked knowing that boys named
Gabe from our middle school had won the top honor in middle school debate in two of the past three years. *** Before too much time passes in our conversation, I remember to congratulate Gabe on his recent success. In the most recent coaches’ poll, he and his partner have been ranked as the fourth-best policy debate team in the entire country. He thanks me and tries to brush it off. He was never very good at being humble. Gabe credits his success to our old coach, Oskar, and tells me I should sit in on an online practice sometime. I can’t tell if he’s joking. I respond that I haven’t debated in forever and would have nothing valuable to contribute to the team. I tell Gabe that it’s great to see South, our high school, and the name “Gabe” getting some positive attention. I do not tell him that yesterday, speaking to my friend, I said, “this kid named Gabe from my high school is tearing up the national circuit, and sometimes I like to follow his tournaments to live vicariously through him.” I still don’t know what he is doing at my house. I do not tell him that I hear a voice in my ear, whispering, “You summoned him.”
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*** When Gabe entered high school and joined our debate team, I became “Big Gabe,” and he became “Little Gabe.” In many ways, we were polar opposites. Albeit mostly by default, I was our team’s most mature member. Just two months into the season, when “Little Gabe” was briefly determined to be too demeaning a nickname, our coach started calling him “Young Lean” instead. Once, when we traveled to a tournament in Michigan, the smell of his weed flooded our car so profoundly that it could not be ignored. We were all glad that Oskar treated us like the family we were, chalked it up to something in the transmission, and said nothing. When we left the hotel in Michigan to return home, I watched with disgust as Little Gabe threw his toothbrush, not even zipped in a plastic bag, into our trunk, directly on top of our luggage. *** Before Gabe has a chance to ask me “How’s Grinnell online?” for a third time while we flounder in our pitiful attempt at small talk, I ask him what he is doing at my house. “Oh,” he says, as if it is a perfectly normal thing to do, “I was picking the pin cherries on your tree here to make jam. Then your mom came
along walking your dog and recognized me.” I don’t tell him that he is pointing at a crabapple tree and that crabapples taste awful. If almost anyone else showed up in my front yard, urban foraging, claiming not to know it was my house even though I was certain that they had been there at least once or twice, I would not believe them. But this was Gabe, so my surprise was only slight. I ask him to let me know how the jam turns out. He adjusts his lumberjack hat and says that he will. *** After debate practice most days, I gave Little Gabe a ride home. Every time, I observed with incredulity how he managed to drop at least three different items as we walked through the hallways. When we finally arrived at my car, he always asked, without fail and always with his mischievous grin, “can I hotbox your car?” Every time, I replied, “no, because it’s actually my moms’ car.” I pretended to both of us that things would be different if it were my car. My ideological comfort with drugs greatly exceeded my real-world comfort with them. ***
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Once we’ve established Gabe’s grounds for visiting, our conversation flows better. We make fun of our mutual acquaintances with whom at least one of us has lost contact. Anton is impossible to talk to because he’s too into his personal trainer persona. Marie is transferring to Reed, and we hope, but doubt, that she is doing well. As for Eiset, well, neither of us have any clue what he’s up to, but we both feel better about ourselves after jointly retelling the story of how he got kicked off the debate team for forging emails to his counselor, asking her to raise his grades. While we agree that Bea and Sophia, who are now both at Stanford, will probably do big things in life, we wonder: at what cost? “Everyone on the debate team was fucking weird, man,” he muses in a bro-ish tone I find a bit too comforting, “you were probably the most normal one.” It’s not a great compliment. *** By the time I graduated high school, my debate partner, Bea, and I had essentially quit the team. At our peak, we were probably the fourth-best team in the state, but our hearts just weren’t in it. By the time
we quit, Little Gabe was en route to qualifying for the prestigious Tournament of Champions. In the debate community, he already towered over us. *** Eventually, Gabe and I run out of gossip. “I should probably get going. Fuck Covid, am I right?” he says. “For sure,” I tell him, “I’ll see you around,” but I don’t believe myself. Just like that, Little Gabe strands me on my porch. I look down at the silver pot lid I’ve been foolishly clutching for the past fifteen minutes. It looks like a shield, but I feel more vulnerable than protected. At dinner, I tell my family about running into Gabe. “What a coincidence!” says my brother. I nod. “If you write about this story, make sure to add how I only ran into him because the dog utterly refused to go on a long walk,” says my mother. “Okay,” I say, and we all laugh. At night, I lie awake, trying to convince myself that my brother is wrong. That, somehow, Gabe and I are bound by more than coincidence. That, somehow, we share more than namest, both our own and the ones on our diplomas. Desperately, I want to believe that Little Gabe was not looking for pin cherries. Futilely, I
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hope that our encounter has preserved something more than the sour taste of crabapples. *** Gabe will never tell me how his jam turns out, and I will never text him to ask. Over the next year, I will continue to check how he performs at each debate tournament. When he rises to first in the national rankings, I will joke that his success would be impossible if I hadn’t driven him home so many times. Frequently, I will think about reaching out, maybe even sending him this essay, but I won’t ever do it. Every time I take my dog on a long walk that happens to pass by his house, I will look up at his window, but I won’t ever stop. Whenever I arrive back in front of my own house, I will have to stop my dog from eating the crabapples which litter the sidewalk. If he eats too many, he’ll get sick.
Pride Celia Meagher acrylic pour on glass 18
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in the painting the men argue in a phosphorescent room.
that school in Athens Meredith Benjamin
after Raphael’s ‘School of Athens’ (1511) fresco in the Vatican. in ‘School of Athens,’ Raphael imagines the great philosophers, mathematicians, and scientists of classical antiquity gathered under one roof. it has come to symbolize the marriage of art, science, and philosophy that defined the Italian Renaissance.
i have spent all morning staring at Jesus on the cross. the silence was tense and awkward. so i asked him oh my god how’ve you been?? and hey, have you heard from your dad lately? which was cringey, i know, but in my defense the past few years, God has been a little off the grid. he says i could be his Virgin Mother Mary, that our resemblance is uncanny. i bite my tongue, pretending there’s no gaping difference between her and me. it seems most of my time these days is spent negotiating the sexuality of all of womankind but my feet hurt and my back was aching and i simply didn’t feel like getting into it with Christ today. so when he said that for him it’s been awhile, i just said yeah, i’m waiting for ‘the one’. in the painting the men argue and compared to all that Jesus stuff, i guess it’s more relatable?
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by far the most erratic of all erratic things, the hysterical thirst to be recalled as more than carbon and dust. and Plato says to Aristotle, that Alex kid is Great but kick his ego down a notch. cause even in antiquity, no one likes a tool. i like the painting because on some level, it tells me the thing i want most to believe: that everyone interesting who ever lived is gathered together somewhere in a shiny marble room, marveling at the very miracle of having been someone back on earth. that if i can just get the right bearded man to want to paint me, i, too, could spend infinity exploring epistemology and shiftings in the stars. that everyone who deserves it is somewhere in that room. but then again, do you think Aristotle has ever broken down at the arrival gate in an airport?
cause all his robes are packed away, and even with all this in the news about those two degrees of global warming (and how the ice is melting and the polar bears will croak) it is so much colder in New England than he’d remembered, and grief grips like gum stuck to his shoe, he understands that believing something hard enough has never made it true. because there’s Ptolemy with his celestial orb and we all know i would just come out and say it: eclipsing the space of the people around you won’t make you the fucking sun. and yes, i could’ve been more tactful, but it’s not my name on the plaque. forgive me, Jesus, for not believing in the consecrated power of waiting an eon for a man to come around and carve my own words into stone. and so i’m sure Aristotle deserved his admission to that prestigious School of Athens. and perhaps he really did get there on his own.
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but probe at a possibility in which luck has been stitched into his very DNA. in which a person can earn their success without earning their opportunities. in which the painting shows nothing more than the vastness of the Western frontier. i like to think after that, every prolific contribution he made was honestly just the marijuana talking. was the goosebumps he woke up with after that dead boy hugged him in his sleep. was accidental and anonymous, and fuck the American Dream. was him just trying to crawl out of a hole. so maybe Raphael can paint me too?
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i swear if i had a buck for every time i lapsed my feminist religion cause i was trying to make a bitter man feel less sad, a note for every night i didn’t sleep as he baptized me with indecision, a penny for the things i thought, and did not say, i wouldn’t even need to buy my way into that painting; i’d buy the damn Vatican itself.
July | Zoey Nahmmacher-Baum | alcohol ink on paper
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Freudian Romantics Sarah Licht
Tell me all the secrets that lie between eyes drifting to dorm room ceilings, counting cracks in plaster like lost chances, another heart lost to the wilderness. Devoured by wolves or perhaps you could only dream of such romance. You tell me pain is the only proof of existence, the longing we feel in absence, the sharp thorn of feeling your chest burst with nothing to spill from it. Fill me with sorrow like a sponge, and let me carry all the stories of love struck down over a cafeteria salad bar, embraces you hardly knew were the last. Allow me the chance to see what you save for midnight journal entries when the world outside can hardly recognize your face. But never wring me out. No, I want you to fester within me. Filthy and alive and existing until there is no space where you end and I begin. Until then, the blankets between us will suffice, ligaments holding fragments together.
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We were never made to be connected pure as jagged pieces. Even I know that I am a side note in your story, a figure waiting alone on a bed for you to enter, something glossed over upon a first read, soon swallowed by time that prefers lives to be sanded smooth. But tell me that I am a piece of your puzzle, that I exist no matter how small. That my absence distorts the image, rips through clouds and erases what should be beautiful. The night will end before you finish, but stay until I’ve guessed the ending, memorized how those words would feel against my lips. Let me remember how wrong it is to wish to be more, for us to exist outside of closed doors, out where wolves run free and wild and satiated. There will always be these blankets between us, my chest filled with mildew instead of life. And yet I love & love & love.
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Paths, Lines Eyerusalem Desta
Inspired by images from “Street” in What Can A Body Do by Sarah Henderson. How can I get from here to there without over-explaining myself? There is the line and there is my hope, a second one. In the picture I’m alone and standing, waiting to be finished with the project. I draw a line between us. The grass is pressed down by chalk, and opens like an inverted mohawk my white lines divide concrete, grass, and sidewalk. Man-made white lines over small blocks of brick lined up neatly. I draw in the Gaps with chalk. New Balances could smudge. My hands are in my pockets as I look at the lines overhead. Lines that help me navigate the space between us.
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Dancer | Shabana Gupta | digital
sure of it | Zoey Nahmmacher-Baum | digital
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Strange Eyes Ganga Prakash
You know that feeling when your father tells you that you’re not his daughter? That knife in your eyes? Drawing tears of blood, making the river run red? That rock in your throat— From grit telling you that you can’t cry ‘cause you’re strong. The feet that move on their own, So you don’t freeze forever. So you don’t fall Onto dirt, Or between the cracks of the tiles in your home, Where your soul will forever be drenched with shame, From the water your four-year-old nephew just spilled.
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It’s the same feeling. But instead of my mother’s husband, There are strange eyes that yell at me. There’s no knife in my eyes, It’s my own nails. The river is dry. There is nothing in my throat But I still can’t talk. I force my feet to move So I can keep up with the rest, So I’m not left behind So I don’t fall. There is no sand here. No familiar tiles. It’s just a black hole of sorrow, From which there is no escape. I am a foreigner.
Untitled | McKenna Doherty | pen, marker, & colored pencil on BFK & tissue paper
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cowfrog | Zoey Nahmmacher-Baum | digital 30
The Bear Joseph Fisk
A hundred thousand miles, In terms of an ant. Heavy paws break their backs. A crunch and they’re gone. It pads through bundles of green, The reclusive killing machine. Borne of mountains and muck. Now not quite so collusive. on-the-Hudson Zoey Nahmmacher-Baum oil paint on canvas
Whittled away, fibers of torn tartan. Greased metal and worn leather.
Taut in the shoulder, Loose in the wrist.
The birds take flight, Though they don’t know why.
Inhale, exhale. The sleek steel sings soundlessly.
Musk emits a malleable stench. Superimposed smokey signatures.
A hundred thousand ants, Felled beneath the beast.
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To The End Anna Lipari
foot of the tower in a nest of steel cables, seeping soft static into the stagnant air. “Well,” it said.
In the evenings, it got into the habit of sitting in the corner of the living room, tucked between my I found the end of the world underneath the great-uncle’s frayed red wingback armchair and the cell-phone tower at the top of the hill. The tall orangecrystal lamp with the burned-out bulb. “It’s almost white spire, crowned with a single blinking red time,” it told me one night, after we’d been living in beacon, floated like a neon buoy over the fog-washed that empty house together for long enough that I was evergreens; it was October, early evening, and the used to seeing it there, casting backwards shadows and lights of the neighbor’s houses were already on, their humming softly to itself. A year, maybe, or a week. faint yellow glow leaking out of the windows and I was kneeling in front of the fireplace, burning it a spilling across dark sidewalk-puddles like an oil slick. sacrifice. The fireplace was where my grandmother I could have sworn I moved away from there years used to light juniper branches every December. ago, that I left behind the house I grew up in with its long dim hallways and the greying roses on the kitchen We’d bring them back from the desert for her each wallpaper and the dark, serrated silhouette of the pine- Thanksgiving, wrapped in grocery bags and tied with crested hill looming over the backyard. There had been twine; the brown paper would catch flame and peel away, and the skeleton of the branch inside would a time when I packed up suitcases and took myself to glow vermillion, and the whole room would smell like a college dorm, and then later to a little white-walled open sky. I was trying to strike a match, but I’d never blank-slate apartment in the middle of a city. But no been all that good at it, and I kept getting nothing but matter how many times I left I always seemed to end little curls of smoke. “We haven’t got long,” it said. up back there, walking in those grey streets, always in “I know,” I said. “I’ve known for a long time the direction of that tower. I think there used to be a now. I think it has something to do with that tower.” barbed wire fence around its base, but at that point it “I’m thinking next Thursday,” it said. “For the was long gone. The end of the world was resting at the world to end, I mean.”
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“Oh, sorry,” I said, “I think I have a meeting on Thursday.” I tried to strike the match again. My hands shook too much, though, and the spark fizzled out before it had even started. “Friday, then,” it said. It always did care about me like that. I said that Friday was fine. When the match finally struck, I was surprised by how high the yellow flame flared, how it licked at my fingertips and dripped down across the hearth. The offering‑‒a scrap of melody from a commercial I saw when I was a kid, I think, or else it was a button I lost in the gap between the basement stairs, or one of my baby teeth, or my first kiss‑‒ caught fast and burned away.
mornings, I fed it orange peels and bits of poetry and told it all my best-kept secrets. “Who are you?” it asked me, once. This was right after I first carried it home with me from the cell-phone tower, when it was perched on the green-speckled laminate kitchen counter and I was staring sideways at it as I poured myself a bowl of cereal, when we were still getting to know each other. “I’m sure you already know my name,” I said, “You must have learned it all those years ago, when I was a lonely highschool kid. I would always go for walks up on the hill, remember? When I needed to get out of the house. I kept circling the tower like I already knew you were there.” “You could pick a new name,” the end of the world said, “if you wanted At night, the end of the world slept curled to.” up at the foot of my bed. I could feel it through the “Who says I want to?” I asked. The end of the comforter, hot and heavy like one of those black-hole world just looked at me. “Listen,” I said, “someone diagrams in a high-school physics classroom, buzzing gave me that name, I think. I can’t just get rid of it. A quietly like a broken radiator. Sometimes it picked name means something you have to carry with you.” up radio signals, spat out grey static and fragments “Not when you’re with me,” the end of the world of sugary pop hits, distorted and warped so that the said. It leaned in a little closer across the coffee-stained soundwaves buzzed back and forth inside my ribcage countertop. “Not for long, anyway.” and resonated in the hollow behind my sternum. In the I frowned and looked down into my cereal bowl.
“At night, the end of the world slept curled up at the foot of my bed.”
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There wasn’t much in there‑‒I was on my last carton of milk, and the cashier at the grocery store had said there wouldn’t be any more this season. Beautiful farm country down there. I wish I’d been able to visit before the fires got so bad. Well, maybe next year, eh? “Who are you?” I asked the end of the world. “I’m the end of the world,” it said, and I couldn’t argue with that.
When I lived in the apartment there was a city bus that stopped under the window of my bedroom every half hour, all night long. We kept the curtains down, but washed-out neon light would still slip in through the gaps between the blinds and slide across the ceiling of the room, and I could hear the heavy pneumatic sigh of the bus kneeling at the curb, the smooth robotic voice offering a garbled welcome. “Number forty-four to Council Square,” it would The living room, again. Wednesday evening. usually say. “The doors are closing.” Except some The sky was dark with smoke, the air blinking red; nights, when I’d been awake for hours already, when the whole universe ached in time to the pulse of the the bus had come and gone three or four or a hundred beacon on the hill. The end of the world was kneeling times, it would mutate into something different. “To over my shoulder, in front of the fireplace. I could feel the end,” it would sing, “to the end, to the end. Come the gentle warmth of it like gamma radiation on my home.” skin, could taste the dust and cobweb of it coating the The girl who slept next to me never woke up inside my lungs. “Does the world really have to end?” when the bus came. I would reach out and find her I asked. “You don’t think there’s anything we could do, hand in the darkness. I would hold tight and keep any way to stop it? I mean, there are a lot of people out my eyes closed until the blinking red light had faded there who would want to help do something, if they from the white walls of the room and the lumbering just got the opportunity, you know?” mechanical thing outside our window had passed us The end of the world smiled, a warm, sad sort of by. Until the inevitable had been delayed, at least by smile. One with teeth. “Don’t cry,” it said, but I hadn’t another half-hour. even realized I was crying until then. The end of the What I mean to say is, I was in sixth-grade world curled itself around my shoulders, soft as rotten science class when I first learned that we were all velvet. It leaned down. It kissed the back of my hand. living in borrowed times. What I mean to say is you’ve always been with me, wrapped around the back of
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my brain stem. I wasn’t surprised to meet you there, waiting for me at the top of the hill. I wasn’t surprised to end up back in that old house under the darkening, smoke-smothered sky, to smell that last enduring hint of juniper, as if I had only ever stepped out for a few moments. I don’t know where the grandmothers and great-uncles who used to sit around the fireplace and drink champagne every New Year’s Eve went; I don’t know where the girl from the city is now. I hope she didn’t miss me too much. But I am glad to have had you there with me, in the end. I don’t remember what the meeting on Thursday was about. It ran late, and when I got home I fell into bed, and I was thinking about the dishes in the sink and the phone calls I still needed to make, and I forgot all about the world ending until I woke up the next morning, and by then it was all over.
Longing | Ivan Kwei | ink on paper
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Dhall 2019 | McKenna Doherty | multi-colored screenprint with illustration 36
Planned Socialization Sarah Licht
I mark spontaneity on my calendar, underlined in highlighter bold enough to remind myself to remember of when it felt organic to find myself in the presence of another. Even now, the thought of a third dimension of being, seeing people in flesh, warmth replacing pixels feels like a cruel reminder, wingless bird observing blown dandelion seeds. The mapped hours blur into me waiting for the phone to ring, video to play blurred memories of us once feeling the grass between toes, hands holding what now holds our iPhones upright. It is easy to pretend we don’t have bodies at this angle, faces momentarily all that exists between us. Inside, we only breathe by clockwork, so imagine me as you remember. Silhouette in the sunlight, unable to reach the ground. Armor Suit, 3042 Liv Hage | pencil on paper
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Midnight Somewhere Lucia Finkelstein
“What brings you to Omaha,” the man named Phil asks Like one of those old timey taxi drivers in movies he is looking at me through the rear view mirror. He has green eyes and missed a spot shaving this morning— Both these things stick out like a sore thumb. Even under the somber geometric shadows cast back through the car window I can’t help staring at the nucleus patch of greying hairs under his chin. He tells me that his daughters like strawberry ice cream From that place down the block. But it’s closed tonight because the owner’s dog passed away and she’s busy planning the funeral. His daughters are sad, he says The dog’s name was Gracie. Nepalese Street Food 2 Go Saturday Hours: 2pm-12am I wait for my order in the sports bar next door; It smells like onion rings and loveless marriages and tender pats on the back
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when the bartender finally kicks you out at the end of the night. The TV blares on about climate disasters and as I get up to leave the eyes of a bearded man tell me to be careful. Farnham Douglas Locust I taste these new streets on my tongue and swish them around like mouthwash. Outside a purple and red nightclub, A man in a leather jacket lights his girl’s Cigarette and she looks at him all seductive.
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Loosely, effortlessly She positions it Between her teeth, pursing her crimson lips around the filter. She has practiced this move in the mirror at home. Tonight she will get him into bed. I hang my head and stare at the dying Grass trying with all its might to grow up through the pavement. To grow up. To walk the streets of a foreign city In a dress bought for plans that fell through. I am so angry I feel Like crying But halfway back to the motel I stop And I call myself a cab. Phil is five minutes away.
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i-dont-know-us.mov Sarah Licht
your eyes soften when pixelated, frozen while the tape skips another beat, us alone, a moment precious enough for parents delight. did i tell you how i wished that playground would burn, melt rusted swings into something more beautiful than two actors could ever be?
maybe we never were real, photographs filtered to show us as innocence blossomed then nipped in the bud. maybe i never learned how to show you that artificiality is not a flaw but a function of survival. we all have flesh we hide behind pixels, scars unwilling to see the light of day.
i cant see us in this scene, two forms chasing clouds soaked in green squares. why is it wrong to keep playing pretend? all we can do is cling to what we wish soared above and chase it until sandaled feet drop in exhaustion and the tape finally gives way to darkness.
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Hindsight is 2021 Sarah Licht
We can only grow in solitude, and isolation has been plentiful, rivers enough of its pungent syrup to pollute the oceans and heed the call for proper environmentalism. I imagine myself floating in it, embracing what I once wished drowned me. I used to water avocado pits until spindly roots erupted from their wooden cores. I’d like to imagine myself the same, yet perhaps less magnificent as nascent life. Gnarled as clumps of dust has always suited me better, as much as growth, change, suits any of us, makes us any closer to normal. I never knew what happened to them. I always threw the pits out when they grew too large for their own good. Maybe I want someone to do the honors when it’s my turn.
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The year is hardly halfway through, and already I feel myself ready to be culled, plucked from the pieces that no longer fit in weeks-old piles of laundry. Imagine me a garage sale, produce stand, overflowing with parts ready to be given away, aspects once loved despite their bruises, the large cracks that perhaps someone else could embrace. Please, take the most brilliant, ripest in color, and leave the rest to me.
Fighters | Shabana Gupta | digital
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Hauntology
William Donaldson on being: we are not chronological. we are not logical. some of us are not human. but we are alive. conditioned to survive, building worlds and paradigms just so others can thrive, we reject your linear notion of time.
on being haunted: we feel the past. we live and breathe that which is always already absent, but present. spectres reanimate. memories resonate. we contemplate. caught up in the afterlife, all too reminiscent of a past life where freedom sat on the edge of lips and wavered with the movement of hips. and what becomes of now?
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the past breathes down our necks, threatening to further fog futures un/written in lines on our skin, filling the merciless air we keep breathing in. there are voices on the wind, a murder of gossiping crows alight on skeletal branches overhead: do they speak the language of the dead? should we note their presence with dread? or should we try to learn the language, instead?
on being haunted by you: I can’t get out of bed. your words are poetry and I comb through every one you said. you’re well-read. imperfect memory lends itself to a haunted condition. I don’t think of you as you were, only know you as I thought of you, only understand you through my eyes. you and I are nothing less than an amalgamation of past moments, present feelings, future ambiguities. now we’re nothing more than utility, two greased gears grinding lonely nights into orbital flight. when do memories die? have we forsaken a more meaningful future
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to perpetuate a distant past and the vanity of present pleasures? what’s love in my eyes is failure in yours. what I find in my eyes is forever lost in yours. could we ever be again? with the thread of love and needle of hindsight, I patch over what became of us and speculate on what could be, what I still want to see— what becomes of this love haunting me? new york new york Zoey Nahmmacher-Baum | acrylic paint on canvas
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Vending Machine Blues | McKenna Doherty | video still
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Contributors Meredith Benjamin ‘24 is a second-year Political Science major from Williamstown, Massachusetts. She loves the Ezra Klein show and wearing crocs. Eyerusalem Desta ‘22 is a fourth-year majoring in English. McKenna Doherty ‘22 (she/her) is a current fourth-year majoring in English and Studio Art. She loves chocolate croissants, rainy days, and long walks on the beach. William Donaldson ‘23 is a third-year studying Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies with a concentration in American Studies. His poetry and prose, informed by the interdisciplinary scholarship of his fields, seeks to more faithfully portray the convergence of identity, memory, and emotion. Gabe Ferguson ‘23 is a double major in English and Spanish. He is unapologetic for his love of sad music and bases too much of his personality on having two moms. Lucia Finkelstein ‘24 is a second year English major from New York City who won’t shut up about being from New York City. Joseph Fisk ‘24 is a second-year majoring in Psychology. Shabana Gupta ‘22 is a tired fourth year that just wants to round out zir time at Grinnell with a few final pieces in the Grinnell Review.
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Liv Hage ‘25 is from Los Angeles, California. She likes to draw in her spare time. Ivan Kwei ‘24 is a second year who intends to double major in Studio Art and Physics. Sarah Licht ‘22 is a English and Psychology double-major. In their spare time, Sarah enjoys exploring nature preserves, reading early science fiction, and entertaining their caffeine addiction. Their work has been published in Screen Door Review, Grim & Gilded, and Landing Zone Magazine. Anna Lipari ‘23 is a biology major who enjoys reading poetry, studying fungi, and trying to get kidnapped by the crows that live behind Noyce science center. Celia Meagher ‘24 is a second semester second year GWSS and Studio Art major. Her main media of choice is watercolor and she strives to incorporate her own experiences with mental health and education in GWSS into her art. Zoey Nahmmacher-Baum ‘24 is a simple woman with simple tastes. She likes frogs, cows, and cowboy frogs. Ganga Prakash ‘25 (she/it) comes from her mother, Bangalore, South India, World. She said, “[she’s] young scrappy and hungry, [she’s] just like her country and [it’s] not throwing away [its] shot!”
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