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THE CATALYST co n t e m p o r a ry l i t e r a ry a r t s m ag a z i n e

issue 6 // FALL 2015

COVER // ROSE SPANBOCK

Letter from the editor Dear reader, Sometimes when I’m paddling out at Sands or biking to class, I find myself questioning why I want to do this. With such huge shoes to filI, I feel both an outward and inward pressure; it sometimes feels as though my entire existence depends on the success of this magazine. This quarter I realized why I am a part of The Catalyst: I feel an inexplicable compulsion to create art and to share it with others-- to be a part of an entity that is creative and raw and real. I want others to feel that too.

I have realized something else, as well: with great art comes great uncertainty. And we are not without flaws. This is our first issue without Natalie O’Brien, who in collaboration with Julia Marsh, effectively resurrected The Catalyst from obscurity three years ago. When Natalie asked me to take over as Editor-In-Chief, I said yes. There was no way she or anyone could convey to me the full weight of the project I was agreeing to take on. Luckily that weight is not solely bared on my shoulders; I have a great editorial team that shares it with me and inspires the evolution of The Catalyst. In our endless experiment, we build upon where we came from and create who we are going to be. It’s a balancing act.

A lot has changed this quarter. In the Spring, we launched a successful Kickstarter campaign and raised $10,000, which helped allow us to print the magazine you are holding right now. Without the generous support of friends, family, and faculty, Issue Six would not exist. Those funds also enable The Catalyst Class to continue. We are incredibly grateful.

With your help, The Catalyst will continue to be a uniting force-- allowing students across our campus to create and collaborate. Catalyst Writing (INT 185CW) is being offered next quarter, and we want to invite you to join our project. Please continue to inspire and connect with us. We hope this magazine does the same for you.

Cheers,

Madeline Lockhart

THE TEAM EDITOR IN CHIEF

design director

MANAGING EDITORs

design team

Madeline Lockhart

Emily Balaguer Kiana Fatemi Hannah Mussey

art director

Madeline Lockhart

ADVISORS

Jeremy Chow Brian Donnelly Bishnupriya Ghosh

EDITING TEAM

Emily Balaguer Alexa Bowers Daniel Jordan Booth Jeremy Chow Alexandra Dwight Madeline Lockhart Sarahi Maldonado Lisa Raub Kimmy Tejasindhu Kevin Tesei Natalie Wong Jeremy Zimmett

COVER ARTIST Rose Spanbock

Le Tang

Cindy Belkowiche Cindy Chang Alexandra Dwight Kiana Fatemi Shaina Goel Madeline Lockhart Shay Mehr Hannah Mussey Emily Rogers Le Tang

artists

Emily Balaguer Cindy Belkowiche Lauren Covey Lauren Davis Alexandra Dwight Kiana Fatemi Madeline Lockhart Alex Manrique Shay Mehr Ricky Miller Hannah Mussey Natalie O'Brien Rose Spanbock Le Tang Anna Tiner Leslie Zhang

Writers

Korrin Alpers Emily Balaguer Daniel Jordan Booth Tyler Chavez-Feipel Alexandra Dwight Kiana Fatemi Shaina Goel Sam Goff Patrick Harrington Canelle Irmas Nick Juskie Sean Kittrick Madeline Lockhart Emma Lombard Ryan Mandell Hannah Mussey Taylor Nguyen Natalie O'Brien Roberto Perez Itxy Quintanilla Emily Rogers Selena Ross Kimmy Tejasindhu Madeleine Thompson Annabelle Warren

table of contents Prose 4 - A New Disease Sean Kittrick Art // Madeline Lockhart 7 - Swell Daniel Jordan Booth Art // Anna Tiner 9 - Couch Tyler Chavez-Feipel Art // Emily Balaguer 10 - To The Stones Emily Balaguer Art // Alexandra Dwight

12 - Reviewing Books and the Best Place to Keep Them: Reflections On an Afternoon Well-Wasted Patrick Harrington Art // Lauren Covey 14 - Cigarettes Canelle Irmas Art // Madeline Lockhart 16 - The Pugilist and the Bull Nick Juskie Art // Kiana Fatemi

18 - Death On the Board Daniel Jordan Booth Art // Lauren Covey

29 - The Far Distance Emily Balaguer Art // Ricky Miller

20 - And To Think I Saw It On Del Playa Patrick Harrington Art // Alex Manrique

31 - Swimming Through Dew Drops Shaina Goel Art // Alexandra Dwight + Le Tang

22 - Lost Hills Natalie O'Brien Art // Leslie Zhang 26 - Intersections Hannah Mussey Art // Kaitlyn McQuown

poetry 34 - Two Palms Korrin Alpers Art // Le Tang

37 - Curdled Canelle Irmas Art // Hannah Mussey

43 - People Watching Kimmy Tejasindhu Art // Alexandra Dwight

48 - Thanks Ryan Mandell Art // Madeline Lockhart

35 - Hazy Blue Emily Rogers Art // Madeline Lockhart

38 - Holy Moment Blues Alexandra Dwight Art // Leslie Zhang

44 - Rosary Selena Ross Art // Le Tang

49 - Brave Emma Lombard Art // Le Tang

35 - Captions Itxy Quintanilla Art // Madeline Lockhart

40- half light Madeleine Thompson Art // Rose Spanbock

45 - An Apology Anabelle Warren Art // Natalie O'Brien

50 - Feverish Daniel Jordan Booth Art // Ricky Miller

36 - The Brown Leather Hat Emily Balaguer Art // Rose Spanbock

41 - Poisonwood Emma Lombard Art // Kiana Fatemi

46 - The Anarchist Kiana Fatemi Art // Shay Mehr

51 - Wisteria Drive Roberto Perez Art // Ricky Miller

42 - Myth Taylor Nguyen Art // Emily Balaguer

47 - Bite Me Madeline Lockhart Art // Cindy Belkowiche + Madeline Lockhart

52 - Sutro Tower, White Thumbnail Moon Alexandra Dwight Art // Alexandra Dwight

37 - Stereo People Sam Goff Art // Leslie Zhang

PHOTO // LAUREN DAVIS

PART I::

::

PROSE A New Disease // Sean Kittrick swell // Daniel jordan booth couch // tyler chavez-feipel To The stones // emily balaguer reviewing books and the best place to keep them:: reflections on an afternoon well-wasted // patrick harrington cigarettes // canelle irmas the pugilist and the bull // nick juskie death on the board // daniel jordan booth and to think that I saw it on del playa drive // patrick harrington lost hills // natalie o'''brien intersections // hannah mussey the far distance // emily balaguer SWIMMING THROUGH DEW DROPS // SHAINA GOEL

ART // MADELINE LOCKHART

A NEW

D ISE ASE by sean kittrick 4

“And now, for your neeeeeext question,” called the airport employee, “who created…” he paused

pounding of his breath and blood formed the cacophonous thunder of war drums. Swirl. He reached the bathroom door. Another swirl. In the bathroom now. A bang as he pushed the stall door open. His knees hit the tile floor, one hand landed on top of the toilet paper dispenser. Suddenly he felt much better. Are you serious? Paul thought. Now? Now I won’t even be able to throw up?

Some amount of time passed, an amount of time either too long or too short. It was too something. Like the world, time had become fluid and unpredictable. “Paging Paul Stamford,” said the loudspeaker, “We are now boarding flight 5257. Paging Paul Stamford.” It was the guy who had been running the game show.

I guess I’m out of time, Paul thought. He flushed the toilet (for no reason), turned, and opened the stall door.

And then he threw up.

“Paul?” said the gate attendant as he opened the bathroom door. “Are you in here?” He’d counted the passengers at the gate. Everyone who was supposed to be on the flight had been sitting around for hours. This guy in particular, who had bolted off to the bathroom just fifteen minutes before the flight had arrived, had been there since eight or so in the morning. Some bit of connecting flight madness. He’d spent all day in the airport, and now the plane was about to leave and he was going to miss it.

“Paul?” called the attendant again. And then he saw him.

“Oh man,” said the attendant, “Must be such a crappy day…”

and squinted at his iPhone screen. Pronunciation wise, he was apparently getting more than he bargained for, “… the fictional grimoire called the Necronomicon? Was it A) Edgar Allen Poe, B) George Orwell, C) Connie Willis or D) HP Lovecraft?”

Lovecraft. Paul smiled instead of wincing. The guy was kind of a buffoon, but he liked what he was doing. His flight to LA, for which Paul had woken up very early and which had been delayed for 8 hours, would show up in about 9 minutes. There was only a small crowd left in the terminal at this time, and the skinny, zany looking man in charge of the gate had decided to play a trivia game with the passengers to lighten the mood, mainly for the benefit of the small gaggle of five-year-olds and their exhausted mother. The game had maybe gone on for too long at this point, and the children were the only ones really still playing, but regardless, as far as Paul was concerned it was the most heartwarming thing he’d seen in an airport.

“Lovecraft,” he called.

“That’s right!” said the employee, his head bouncing on his shoulders. “H.P Lovecraft! This guy gets some coooookies!” A few other employees had brought out some leftover snacks for everyone, which were being used as rewards in the impromptu game show (though of course all passengers were free to pick up any of them at any time).

“I’m okay, thank you,” said Paul, bending forward in his seat. Almost nothing appealed to him less than a bag of Chips Ahoy right at that moment. Whether from a combo of bad sleep and a sketchy sandwich at the airport deli, a bug he’d picked up at the conference the day before, or some other equally commonplace cause, he was feeling pretty sick. Oh well. He wasn’t going to enjoy his day of air travel anyway, whether in sickness or in health, smooth flying or delays. Better to be just a bit more unhappy now than have to miss something important. He would get home and then he would sleep. Worst case, he would have to see a doctor and get examined. He puffed out his cheeks and let out a long sigh at the thought. Doctors.

The game continued and as the nausea squirmed inside Paul he stopped thinking about the questions and just started counting how many of them there were. Blood jolted urgently in his left leg. His elbow was supporting his head— it slipped on the armrest and he sat upright with a sudden jerk.

“Just an update for you all, our plane will be here in about 15 minutes,” said the gate attendant. “We’ll try to get that cleaned as quickly as possible and then we’ll start boarding.”

I should throw up before I have to get on the plane, Paul thought. Here we go. He grabbed his briefcase and all but flung himself out of his seat. The world, angered by his sudden movement, responded by transfiguring itself into a vicious swirl of color. With head and shoulders forward and back hunched he charged like a stampeding bull. The

▲▲▲ Paul woke up in the hospital. The doctors took some swabs from his mouth, took a history, asked him some questions, and told him, on a preliminary basis, that it was probably the flu. He grabbed a pillow and flung it over his eyes. Not only did he feel much worse, but it was offensive to him to lose time in such a way. He now wouldn’t get home for some uncertain number of days, he would have to miss a lot of work, and for what? What could he learn from this experience? A stomach bug wasn’t going to change his life, force him to confront his mortality, anything like that. And even if it did—it was something he’d already done. When he was twelve, he’d been hit by a car while bike riding, and everyone, himself included, thought he was going to die. He’d gotten in touch with one of the EMTs a few years later, by chance, and was told that it was the worst day of that responder’s life. Apparently Paul, just a kid at the time, had looked like a spider that had been smashed, and yet was still whimpering softly. Paul spent one year in a wheelchair and another in crutches (and that outcome was considered extremely lucky by the doctors). Everything he could hope to learn about pain, about death, about relying on others, about isolation, about boredom, he had already learned twenty years prior. And it was all very well for the medical staff—for them an illness was something to be dealt with by

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action—but the only course available to Paul was to lie there and continue to be sick. No, there was nothing to make a person feel unimportant and profoundly toyed with than a sudden stomach bug. It’s just chaos to be sick like this, he thought, an event utterly without meaning.

Oh, and he was sweating. Already the pillows (of which he had been given far too many) felt like a mountain of damp Kleenex beneath him. The droplets were fully visible running along his arm.

Wait.

They were running the wrong way. Against the grain of gravity. A droplet ran along his forearm to his fingertips.

And then, a few seconds later, it escaped entirely and floated towards the ceiling like a soap bubble, catching a bead of brilliant amber light from the window as it went.

I’m hallucinating, Paul thought vaguely. Well, we’ll just see how that goes.

The nurse came along to change Paul’s pillows and discovered, much to her surprise, that a cloud of golden mist emanated from his sleeping form—like fireflies, or perhaps like ocean spray at sunset. But this nurse had been born taciturn, had lived taciturn, and would die taciturn. She was there to change the pillows, and change the pillows she did. Nonetheless, this was the one event in her career which provoked her into expressing astonishment audibly.

“Huh,” she said.

“Well, he doesn’t have the flu.” Said the balding doctor “Oh dear,” said the doctor with the eyepatch. “Maybe you screwed up the test somehow?”

The balding doctor frowned. The doctor with the eyepatch was always the first to suggest errors by his colleagues.

“Don’t you have patients of your own?” he said.

“I’m not on call for another fifteen minutes.”

The nurse entered the room. “His sweat is floating away.” she said.

“Who?” asked the doctor with the eyepatch.

“The man with the flu. His sweat is floating.”

Both doctors stared. The nurse never made jokes or mistakes, or spoke in less than a straightforward manner.

But also, sweat did not float. Neither of them could decide which rule of life they felt was more inviolable and so they simply stared.

“Come see,” said the Nurse.

It was quite true. By the time the three professionals got to Paul’s room, the windows were fogged up as though it were a walk-in shower. The patient himself had entered a state of delirium.

“Let’s do every test we can even think of,” said the balding doctor.

“And consult every doctor we know,” added his cyclopean cohort.

“He’s going to need more pillows,” remarked the nurse gravely.

the fact that his illness was not caused by a huge number of very tiny germs, but rather one germ of extremely prodigious size. No sooner had he arrived at this realization than he noticed the germ itself, curled up at his feet like a dog. It resembled a slug, of perhaps five feet in length, which had been crammed into an enormous fuzzy stocking.

“What are you doing out there?” Paul asked.

“I got tired of waiting for you to die,” said the germ.

Paul was shocked. “I’m not going to die, am I?” “Not with that attitude,” grumbled the germ. “You must be some sort of survivor.”

“I know that!” said Paul. “I’ve known that since I was eleven years old. What are you doing here?”

“I don’t know, I’m just here, that’s all.” The germ wormed its way up towards the front of the bed, and Paul recoiled in disgust.

“Augh, don’t touch me!” he said.

“Why not?”

“You’re all slimy, it’s gross.”

But the germ did not listen. “It’s high time you were eaten alive by an amoeba,” it growled. Paul screamed and the two thrashed about on the bed, tangling the sheets beneath them…

The Nurse came in to get a more accurate history. The two doctors had recruited roughly twenty more, and their tireless work had revealed that Paul was suffering from an illness not biologically related to any known disease. The leading theory among them was that perhaps Paul had withheld some sort of top secret government connection or scientific work, and that he was suffering from an alien virus. And, as the doctors were all presently occupied by lab work, it fell to the nurse to get some answers.

“I need to ask you more questions,” she said.

Paul’s eyes snapped open. “Chaos.” He said. “Let me tell you about chaos. There are 100 trillion organisms in this body and they all want different things. There are no answers.

There are no questions. No thoughts. No feelings. There is only Chaos.”

“I’ll come back,” said the Nurse.

“He’s not lucid enough for questions,” the Nurse said.

“Damn!” cried the balding doctor. He had been working for twelve hours and was beginning to despair. He could not understand the disease at all. Predictably, none of the medicine used had any effect. The patient would continue to deteriorate, and then he would die. At least if he died, though, they could do the autopsy and then he would know for certain. The balding doctor realized he was very afraid of the impending death, and very excited as well. He’d had lots of horrible thoughts as a doctor: one gets frustrated with patients, one becomes too fatigued to feel much empathy, one is only human. But what bothered the balding doctor about his realization was the firm conviction that even if he were to have a shower, and a cup of coffee, and some time to get his feelings in order he would likely feel the same way.

He clenched his teeth and hissed at the wall. You’re going to die anyway, do it and spare me the suspense! I just want to know! He sighed. It was disappointing to discover these

▲▲▲ At some point during the night, Paul became conscious of

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thoughts within himself, but he knew he couldn’t help it.

The best scenario of all would be if he could figure out what was wrong without the patient dying. He would simply work harder. Working harder was practically always the solution

the case. To help you, is what I wanted. But also just to know.”

Paul nodded. “Do you want a hug?” he asked.

The balding doctor did.

▲▲▲

▲▲▲

Two hours later, Paul was allowed to change into some fresh clothes from his luggage. His hair looked like grass that had been stomped upon—he stared into a mirror and neatly parted it again. His limbs ached with the desire to be moved, his skin thirsted for a shower. From within the mirror, the germ stared back at him as it neatly parted its cilia.

It was good to be free. ▲

But it was not necessary. The next day, Paul’s symptoms had vanished. He could remember nothing of the germ, nor of what he’d said to the nurse. His tests all revealed he was back to normal. All of this the balding doctor explained in trembling tones to Paul in the morning.

“I do feel I’m about ready to head home,” he said. “I feel terrific actually.”

The balding doctor nodded, and then his eyes filled with tears.

“What’s wrong?” said Paul.

“I’m just a bit disappointed,” he said. “I wanted to solve

Swell

By Daniel JORDAN Booth

S

o, the red steps once again. Ratty blood-colored carpet, coming apart at the seams, that follows the shallow inclines up this eight story apartment complex. I had come to dog-sit for Charles Revis, which always struck me as much too serious a name for someone so silly. Every time he’d come over for dinner, I found myself shifting in my seat throughout the night. He would wear checkerboard ties and talk about the need for an “occasional day to feel fancy,” this being apparently every day for him.

And so being the dutiful son that I am, I found myself plodding up the stairs to the third story, kicking up dust all the way, to care for his dog. I could hear a man and a woman shouting about a sink or a sinkhole, it was unclear. As soon as I rounded the mid-story turn of the staircase, I saw the door. You couldn’t mistake the place. Something about the elaborate cursive inscription “Charles’ Humble Abode” gave it away. Taking out the keys, I noticed someone had written underneath the big cutesy red swirls, “queer.”

Inside the apartment, just a few feet from the door was an ornate brown table. Adhered carefully onto the wood, conforming its right angle to the table’s, was a sticky note that said if I needed help for any reason to call Charles at said number. It was signed with a heart. This was handy, because Charles’ ancient Great Dane was dead as a post. It was lying on its stomach, ears flopped down pathetically.

And I had just walked into Charles’ apartment, first witness on the scene. Clearly, this can’t be; these two facts cannot be linked. I began to panic a little bit, but it was moments like these that my scouts training allowed me to act in a collected and mature manner beyond my 12 years. Now, in the event of a death of a family pet, the scout’s handbook Rule 413(a) states: “Report of said deceased pet must be reported to a higher power ASAP (as soon as possible).” Rule 413(b) states: “If a person of authority is not present, a religious icon will suffice until they are.”

Though this dog, I could not remember its name, was not

7

my family’s pet, the fact that he was a family’s pet meant that he could be treated according to the rule at hand, according to my interpretation. I grabbed the phone on the counter and grabbed the number on the note.

“Hello?”

“Charles, this is Redford, I came into the apartment and your dog was-“ “He’s dead, isn’t he?”

“Yes, how did you know?”

“He’s been nearly dead for a few years now, I’ve made my peace with his passing already.”

“Oh. Well, uh, what do I do with him?”

“I left a suitcase in the hall closet in case this was to happen. Take him to the vet on East 57th.”

“I don’t think a vet will help him now.”

“Yes I understand that, my boy. They know to cremate him, this has been an accepted outcome for some time.”

“Oh, well, I’m sorry.”

“No, no, none of that, but I should say, good luck, you’ve got a trek in front of you.”

into his shoes on either side of his ankle.

“No, just new actually.” I’m not sure why I felt the need to say this. He clucked as if he was impressed. As we rounded the final bend of the staircase and approached the ground floor, the man jumped the last set of stairs and ran out of the building. I was so shocked I didn’t realize what was happening until he was nearly gone. I ran out to the street, but he had rounded another corner, and the dog was gone.

And what would the man do with a dead dog with broken legs?

The breeze picked up and softened what was becoming a peeling heat. A man slept peacefully among the weeds in the vacant lot across the street. ▲

▲▲▲ The trek wasn’t the hard part, as the vet was only blocks away. The difficulty was going to be crumpling this enormous corpse into the suitcase. When I got the suitcase out, it became clear that he couldn’t just be lifted in. The suitcase was too small for his current position, and he’d become as stiff as a metaphorically appropriate stiff object. When I tried to fit him into the suitcase, his forepaws wouldn’t quite fit in, so I tried to bend them into the frame, but his old bones snapped without much resistance. I nearly threw up on the spot, but I choked it back. This dog deserved a proper delivery of his remains. So, I closed the suitcase and extended the handle. When I got to the stairs, I stopped. I didn’t want to chance the suitcase opening up in the middle of the stairwell, god forbid anyone happen to open their door or pass me at that moment, so I picked it up completely and carried it in my arms.

As I made my way down, I could no longer distinguish the different voices of the couple arguing, as focused on the task at hand as I was. The suitcase was nearly as large as me.

A man in a white undershirt and camouflage cargo shorts brushed by me on the staircase but stopped before rounding the next bend below me.

“Do you need help there?” He sort of half-smile-halfsneered at me. His hair was parted down the middle like a monk.

“Uh.” Before I could finish, he insisted.

“No I’ve got it, that’s a heavy case there.” I passed off the suitcase to him, but I wasn’t too relieved for fear of the suitcase opening.

“What’s in here, then?” He asked offhandedly.

“Speakers.” It kept conversation going.

“Some speakers. Are they quite old?” His shoelaces were tied in a single knot without a bow, the extra length tucked

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ART // ANNA TINER

COUCH

By Tyler Chavez-Feipel

PHOTO // EMILY BALAGUER

It was so empty. The indention from the prolonged sitting was still there in wrinkles of scratched, brown leather. I thought I’d be okay, but seeing an empty couch struck me more than I could ever imagine. I cried. Tears poured out of my face as I attempted with all my might to hold them back, but at this point my face resembled a broken dam. The sadness was more than sadness. With it came feelings of anger--pure, heart-wrenching anger. One I had never known existed within me. Every tear consisted of pain. In that moment, all I wished to do was have him there, one more time. I created a reality that was not realistic in my head, as I stood there crying. Screaming. I pictured my anger living, my screams vocalized, and pain made real by the actions of my hands. Then him. I saw him, I imagined him holding and smothering me as I cried and screamed for him to come back. Angry as I was at him, in that moment, there was nowhere I wanted to be but with him. In that fraction of time when he was with me again, I was loved.

And he was loved back.

I hated that couch more than I had ever hated anything.

I wanted it destroyed, burned. Decimated. I wanted its presence eradicated from my sight. I hated it because it no longer held something I had loved so much. To see was to see my regret, my faults. My hatred for the couch was a hatred for myself. I had loved so much, yet shown so little. And, in that moment, all there was for me was scratched, brown leather. Empty. Lonely and deserted. He must have felt this way too. All the power I had was right there, and yet I left it all to the couch.

It was inviting and warm. A sense of beauty radiated from it as I stood there staring, in blurred vision and pain. The couch spoke to me and said it would never love again, and I stood there in regret listening to its love. I miss so much the love that used to be there. â–˛

9

I

hadn’t meant to read her diary, but when she held it up in my line of vision-- she in the passenger’s seat, I in the backseat behind her-- I couldn’t help myself but to take a glance. And even given those circumstances, I normally wouldn’t have peeked, except for the fact that she had just mentioned that she’d written about something I’d told her the day before. I'd explained to her that on my way from Barcelona to Budapest, I’d taken very seriously the airplane safety guidelines: put on your own oxygen mask before helping others. In fact, I’d done more than take this tip seriously; I’d resolved to apply that precautionary measure to all aspects of my life. Be it perhaps my consequence for snooping, but what I read in her just-barely-legible-yetnonetheless-beautiful pseudo cursive was: “There is a sad air to her, but…”

I darted my eyes away, towards the green of the rolling grassy hills, with the feeling that my life was a movie. For the first time, that sensation didn’t feel absurdly pompous.

What had I done to illustrate myself as having a sad air?

The day before-- our first and only day together-- had been lovely: flat whites from Borough Market (in spite of the fact that they seemed British and despite the fact that we had no idea what the distinction was between a “flat white” and a latte), street food and thrift shopping in Camden Market, ridiculously touristy photographs at Abbey Road, and a smorgasbord of finger sandwiches, scones, and

PHOTO // ALEXANDRA DWIGHT

by Emily Balaguer

To The Stones

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toffee accompanied by The 1849 Blend in The Tea Room at Harrod’s. What had I done to convince her that I was walking under a rain cloud?

And while I sat there wondering what about me was blue, trying to hold down my breakfast amidst the sickening driving-- if indeed it can be called driving-- of her greasyhaired friend, I simultaneously entertained the notion that it was my duty, my obligation to fulfill her diary’s description of me. By the looks of her diary, her floral pants, her lip liner, and her history of writing for The Catalyst, I deemed her an artist. And, as I have found, artists tend to have grandiose accounts of that which is mundane-- grossly embellishing the simple, plain, and ordinary into emotional entities, or having “a sad air”, if you will. In the name of validating her art, I sought out to live up to her declaration of me and my air. For even if I didn’t, I am certain she would have still seen me surrounded by and breathing in my sad air, believing her own rendition of me, because she is an artist, and this is what artists do. I am aware that, by this definition, we are all artists.

When we arrived at Stonehenge, I emerged from GreaseBall’s cat-hair car feeling in my gut a mixture of nausea and gratitude for the character building that I had unmistakably endured as a result of my wandering eyes on that maniacle and windy drive. We walked towards the site. Gifts from her included a purple daisy she picked-- I placed it in the pocket of my trench coat-- her recognition of the black sheep in the meadow to our right, and silence dancing with her subtle sighs, which allowed me the space to internalize the beauty of the landscape all around me. From the Visitors’ Centre to the Stonehenge site, we opted to walk rather than take a shuttle. It was an asphalt path just wide enough for one direction of motor traffic and an alongside stream of pedestrians that would lead us to the site most directly, but spouting off from the sides were small dirt trails that grew fuzzy in my vision as I followed them with my eyes

as far away from the asphalt path as I could. Upon the first fork in the road, there was a brief moment of uncertainty.

Which path led to Stonehenge? Immediately answering this question was a growling bus, packed with eager and wide-eyed tourists, maintaining faithful in its relationship with the asphalt path. We shared a giggle-- not so much in response to humor, but more so as an acknowledgement of its queerness-- at the words formed by the screen on the bus, which read: “To The Stones.”

In the slow pace of her gait, I found a curiosity in the tilt of her head as she noticed things and bit in the corners of her mouth and the sides of her cheeks. It was in this curiosity that I began to question the associations we make between two things-- an old friend and a new one, a film and a song, a memory and a smell, an expectation and an image. What are we without our comparisons, and what is she without hers?

If she tilts her head as a result of drawing upon her past, then all the better; as I exercise my recollections of watching her do such head tilting, I tilt my head too. However, whether mine is an honest result of my memory searching or an appeal to her own mechanisms is beyond me.

My association with stones is actually rather morbid. And that is not in my attempt to satisfy her gloomy portrayal of me; that is my own true air of sadness, but it is not sad-- at least not to me. I think of stones and I think of tombstones and I think of death and I imagine the permanence of stones, in contrast to the fleeting instability of life. There is a distinct fear I have registered residing in some people, a fear of impermanence. It is a fear so vast, it breathes the air of a myriad of emotions: in with regret and out with despair, in with rage and out with desire. Such a respiratory system leaves a scar in its place: the will to be permanent-- just like stones. So swaths of glasses-wearing, nose-scratching, hiccuping humans board on to buses, cramped like sardines, searching for the wonders of the world, going To The Stones.

But alas, stones are not alive. ▲

ART // LAUREN COVEY

By Patrick Harrington

Reflections on an Afternoon Well-Wasted

Reviewing Books and The Best Place to Keep Them:

concept, and not the reality of the world as far as we know--seems splendiferous. However, this is where lightness becomes unbearable as the absence of eternal return is a double-edged sword, causing the lightness of each of our choices and actions, which will only ever happen once as we only have one life, to become heavy. There is really no way to know the best decision, as we never have the chance to go back and try it another way.

Or rather, our choices and actions do not become heavy in themselves, but are wanting of a heaviness to ground them in some kind of meaning. Without this heaviness, our lives become unbearably light.

We commonly think that the love of our life, be it another person, a profession, or whatever other passion gives us meaning, is supposed to be something heavy: necessarily absolute and necessary to our very essence as a person.

Kundera turns to Beethoven’s last movement of his last quartet, entitled “Der Schwer gefasste Entschluss” (Translated as either “The Difficult or Heavy Resolution”), and its refrain “Es Muss Sein” (It must be) as evidence of the claim that we

Milan Kundera’s novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, is concerned with discovering metaphysical truths; it does so by centering itself on the dichotomy between lightness and heaviness. Going all the way back to the Ancient Greek philosopher Parmenides, who in examining the qualities of a long list of binaries like light and darkness, warmth and cold, etc., finds lightness to be positive and heaviness negative. Kundera questions this conclusion’s validity and emphasizes the ambiguity of the two’s relationship. He seeks to answer the question of whether lightness really is positive.

He does so by beginning with Nietzsche’s idea of eternal return, which states that every thing that has happened will happen again exactly as was and that even this cycle itself will repeat to infinity; Kundera considers the gravity--das shwerste Gewicht (“the heaviest of burdens” as Nietzsche calls it) of every action as each one must be taken seriously if it is to recur ad infinitum. Thus, it seems the lightness of our lives--those which will not be repeated over and over again, for Nietzsche’s concept of eternal return is just that, a

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believe great men bear heavy burdens, as Atlas once bore the world’s weight on his shoulders or as Christ carried his cross.

We think “My burden, no matter its weight, is mine to carry; it must be so.” So we think that our characters will be judged for it, so we do not complain or think of buckling, but rather repeat in our heads the refrain “Ess Muss Sein” and carry on-that is, if we aspire to greatness. Thus we view the course of our lives possessing a certain amount of gravity and meaning, even though the meaning itself stems from the weight of the load we put up with.

Though it may be that Fate has a larger role to play than we think. We are in less control than we would like to believe. For without Its guiding hand, one may begin to think “Es könnte auch anders sein” (It could just as well be otherwise). Rather, it is the imbuement of meaning into random occurrences that is the guiding force of life. In this imbuement of meaning, we have both choice and the illusion of it. We have choice in deciding which occurrences are heavy, meaning the ones that are important enough to stay with us for the rest of our lives forever altering our lives’ course, and which ones are light, meaning the ones that will float away from us forgotten forever. Yet we are also unable to completely control this choice, for this decision may be made for us either by external circumstances or a predisposition of the internal self. We feel both a lightness at the unknown future teeming with endless possibilities and at the same time a weight of responsibility for those things that must be. Yet it is when we lose a grasp on those things that must be--the heavy ones--that the positive light of lightness, as Parimendes would put it, becomes unbearable in the same way that the crushing weight of responsibility may become unbearable.

to follow.

I discovered this on a nice day in San Francisco when Blake was in town, when I lit out from work behind the bar at about 2 o’clock in the afternoon and made my way to the other side, where cold beers and burgers were zealously enjoyed until we lit out again, this time with Brendan and his new Madridista fling, some 28 year old actress who had begun to reveal my dear friend’s cosmopolitan side. We headed for Chinatown to indulge in a marijuana cigar, gawk at the odd wares, and unashamedly ask every person we saw for fireworks. We then went to Mr Bing’s Cocktail Lounge in search of exotic intoxicants from the Far East only to be told that the best cocktail in the house was a shot of Jameson, a notion that suited us Irishmen just fine. Here, we realized that at some point Blake left and his bag didn’t. And just like that, my book was gone, as if I never had it. Poof, whoosh, gone in the wind, light as a loose sheaf of paper falling out a skyscaper window and floating slowly to the ground or the feather of a pigeon that he decided he no longer needed mid-flight. Then Brendan hoofed it to work in North Beach, and Blake and I meandered after him, stopping at some literary landmarks and the favorite hangout of one of Blake’s favorite authors, the Vesuvio cafe. He went so far as to order the Jack Kerouac, a tasty rum punch right up his sweet alley while I still pursued the exotic intoxicants of far off lands and ordered an absinthe.

Here things got hazy, and though I enjoy the strong flavor of licorice, la fée verte ensured that I would not entirely recall the ascent up Coit tower for the sunset nor the descent to Golden Boy Pizza for slices and more beers and a quick word from our friend Brendan, whose break we had missed by a matter of minutes. I remember even less about our return to the sunset and nightcap of doobies and champagne before waking up Friday to a foggy head and a foggy sky and The Hazey golf tournament to play in. A fitting adios to Blake’s time in Frisco.

Thus I spent the lightest summer of my life (aside from the last, and the one before it and so on, each precurrent year lighter than the previous as I eternally return towards the womb and its warm, weightless well-being) and I can tell you that such a life is far from unbearable while young, thank you very much Mr Kundera. Yet I refrain from absolute judgment as my replacement copy is still in the mail and his text remains unfinished (since finished). Instead, at Blake’s recommendation, I picked up Kerouac’s On the Road, whom you can thank for this verbose tale and the many more adventures in this never-light-enough summer. For Kerouac’s book is light and fun, a mad rambling dash across the United states and back again and up and down and every which way the winding Highway may take him in a daze of drunkenness and whoring and apple pies, and yet simultaneously it is heavy, if only for the author, for these are the experiences that crystallized in his mind and stuck with him and guided the shaping of his life (even if the shape is only the curving of the white line of a road) and allowed him to revisit them with the clarity and eloquence that make his book magical, just like the flashing moments of truth blindsiding he and Dean and the rest of his whole raggedy crew that inspired him to write the whole damn thing in the first place. ▲

▲▲▲ I learned from my friend Blake that the best place for a book is not in a bag. It is probably not on a shelf either (though it is much safer there). Preferably it is on your person, in your hands being read or if not in the act of reading then under your arm (One of Kundera’s characters, Tereza, believes this to be the ideal spot, as she views reading and enlightenment as a kind of secret brotherhood, the symbol of which being a book tucked under one’s arm) or if your arms, too, are occupied then tucked into the back of your waistband. This is my personal favorite place for a book in transit, as long as it’s a good book, and by that I mean one made manageable enough in volume by the author to be feasibly transported, though I know many ‘great’ books will never meet this criteria. The criteria of your pants is only a little room at the waist, one that befits a relaxed lifestyle quite well, especially when paired with a Hawaiian shirt. This is the preferred position of a book not being read, because it means that shortly before or after the book was being read or will be again soon. The position’s only downside is the tendency of the lower back to sweat, particularly during exertion such as the mild form you find yourself partaking in during a leisurely stroll on a nice day up one of San Francisco’s many hills; however, some slight sweat stains on the book should only endear it to you further as a truly personal piece: undeniably yours, blood and tears

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Cigarettes ART // MADELINE LOCKHART

By Canelle Irmas

I could probably recall every cigarette I’ve had in my life if I really wanted to, I tell Charlie Steel in the art yard.

It’s just around midnight and the stars are out, but I can’t quite find the moon. I’m watching the sky just over our college’s little building, chin tilted slightly up and to the right. I haven’t looked back at him because I’m afraid of catching his eye.

I used to hate them, like whenever we went to a big city and we had to pass smokers on the sidewalk, I’d hold my breath, I say.

I inhale the smoke of Charlie’s menthol. I really do enjoy the smell of it now. There’s something so thick and dark and warm about it. I can recognize the sharpness of Charlie’s menthols from a mile away.

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I don’t know when I changed my mind, but at some point they stopped disgusting me and started sort of captivating me like an image, but I still never actually smoked, I say.

I’m sitting on the metal table in the little courtyard, with my legs crossed and dangling over the edge. My hands hold me up on either side, and I can feel the cool table underneath chilling my fingers. The pressure hurts my wrists, and I can feel Charlie’s intentions too close, standing in front and slightly to the left of me, although I still haven’t looked back at him. I shift a bit to alleviate the weight.

Then sometimes, I’d go out with a few of my friends to the beach at night, and one of them would bring a pack and we’d all have one or two. They’d talk aimlessly, and I’d look out across the ocean with my cigarette, thinking and listening, and I didn’t feel so cold, I say.

Charlie offers me his menthol, and I have to look at him again for a moment. I can see his calm, clear smile under his glasses. I accept a drag and look back up and away, handing it back to him without looking and shifting slightly.

We all went off to college, and I sort of forgot cigarettes then, for a bit, until the night Ellie killed himself, and I was shivering on the beach, but I remembered how the cigarettes made the cold go away, so I went to the 7-11 and bought a pack and smoked a few on a park bench with Ryan while he talked to me about American Graffiti, which I still haven’t seen, I say.

You smoke with your teeth, not your lips, Charlie tells me. He’s not wrong. I like to hold the cigarette between my rows of pearly whites and wrap my lips around the outside.

His comment makes me a little self conscious, and I wonder if I’ve been doing it wrong. Is there a particular way you’re supposed to smoke? It bothers me the way some people smoke with their fingers like it’s a blunt. I just smile and continue.

And then, I had to hear all of them on the phone, and when I had to call my parents the next day and tell them, I didn’t want to be so shaky, so I smoked one before, one during, and one after, and I started doing that anytime I had to talk to anyone from back home because it was all they could talk about, like are you ok, I’m doing alright, are you coming home for the funeral, I say.

Charlie has moved closer since I handed him back his menthol. I can feel his side warm against my crossed legs.

I never really liked the taste of menthols. They leave this weird minty feeling in your mouth. I don’t want it to taste like I’ve just brushed my teeth when I smoke.

When I went home for the memorial, my parents were in Mexico so I was home alone, and I smoked in the backyard before I walked the few blocks to the service, but I was very careful to toss the butt in the trash outside and brush my teeth first. And then I had a few more after, ignoring my bleeding ankles from the heels, I say.

The menthol smell dissipates, and I assume that Charlie has burned it down to the filter and snubbed it out. One thing you can say about true smokers, they don’t waste a millimeter of cigarette, opting rather to singe their fingers than leave any white unburned.

I accidentally left my leather jacket at home and my mom

found my cigarettes in the pocket, and I told her I had just had a few because of Ellie’s death, and I told her to throw them away because I wasn’t smoking anymore, and it was all ok, so I stopped smoking regularly, just to make it more true, I say.

Charlie puts his hands over my hands still in the same position on the table. He begins stroking my fingers, and I barely feel it. He asks me to look at him, but I pretend that I don’t hear.

I like being around people that smoke though, like all the literature majors waiting outside class, and you know Don smoked, and I just loved the taste of it and the smell of it on him, like that one story Alex wrote with the guy addicted to second hand smoke, I say.

He puts a warm hand on my cheek, and I don’t quite resist because I like the feeling of his hands on my skin. I know it’s not a good idea, but I do it anyway.

Look at me, he says.

I indulge his request this time, but I look through him more than at him. I don’t know if he notices.

Kiss me, he says.

My jaw tenses, and my nose twitches from the cold. I breathe in hard from my nose and then exhale slowly, directing the warm air up at my chilled upper lip. I feel it rustling my eyelashes.

No, I say.

Why not, he asks.

I look back up and right, as his hand falls to my neck. The sky hasn’t gotten lighter or darker. It stays star-studded and dark blue.

Don’t ask me that, I say. ▲

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The Pugilist and the bull By NicK Juskie The prizefighter sat slumped in the corner of his dressing room and laced up his crimson gloves as tight as he could muster. He imagined he was the warden of a big gothic asylum, stuffing his trembling arms into a stark straightjacket. He was hoping the self-imposed constriction would suffocate his nerves, but in his heart of hearts knew he couldn’t quell a fear so consuming this easily. Cheer the fuck up, his trainer would spit at him inches from his face.

You ain’t never lost a single fight, so don’t you dare prostrate yourself to this motherfucker.

somewhere far off, cooing the iconic, “Let's get ready to rumble!”

His entourage rushed in and hoisted his pretzeled body to his feet, barely looking at him in the process. They probably didn’t even notice the caricature of fear his face had twisted into: his eyes agape and his lips pursed. All the Pugilist wanted to do was reverse these rolls and scream a shrill caw of surrender to the masses. Unfortunately, as a national symbol of manhood – he recently appeared on the cover of “Team Testicle Magazine” – he was forced to stifle this overtly feminine urge.

Usually as articulate as a Jack Russell terrier, his trainer had scavenged the word “prostrate” from some corner of his limited literature collection and had since been unabashedly wielding it whenever he believed appropriate. At least it sounded good this time, the Pugilist thought.

After this, I promise I’ll retire, he compromised with himself. If I survive.

He swung his feet in front of his chattering knees, step after step, making his way down the Hallway of Doom (formerly known as the Hallway of Triumph). He did not hear the overwhelming roar of the crowd, though he felt it. The tunnel opened to reveal a scene of familiar barbarity, encased by a ceiling of swaying arms and bouncing bodies.

It was true, the boxer was 33-0. He had never even really been challenged. But the Bull ought not be discussed in the same sentence as the other thirty-three fighters.

Mammoth and striated, the Bull was rarely commissioned to fight thanks to his unrepentant brutality and inhumane aggression. His paws were slabs of stone and his jaw was an impermeable vault door guarding his speck of grey matter, all of which was genetically tailored for mayhem (in the least hyperbolic sense of the word). The International Boxing Federation faced constant pressure from activist groups and frustrated mothers coalitions to revoke the Bull’s boxing license, but the IBF would not budge. “It would go against the very bedrock of combat sports to disqualify a fighter based on natural talent, and a propensity to use such talent to the best of his ability,” was their official retort. Truthfully, he was just too damn entertaining.

Finally he clambered into the ring, and danced around a bit to conceal his crippling anxiety. After donning his most convincing mean mug, he slunk into his corner and stared into the abyss from which his opponent would emerge any minute.

Without warning, a gong sound throughout the arena and every voice shrunk into nothingness. The Pugilist’s chest tensed and his pupils expanded and a sense of calm flooded over him. He was ready. Cutting through the silence, the ominous clacking of hooves ebbed through the dark

As the fighter rocked back and forth, straining to steady himself, a dim voice snuck into his chrysalis of terror from

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ART // KIANA FATEMI

tunnel The Pugilist was fixated on. After several forceful steps, a single horn peeked from the blackness, then moments later another.

The Bull’s head followed suit, his beady eyes emotionless and imposing. His neck was every bit as girthy as the legends had suggested.

As quickly as this hope fled, however, it was replaced with orgasmic relief. As the Bull approached the ring, he tilted his head curiously and stepped hesitantly on the canvas mat. He attempted to replicate this with his other foot, and toppled pathetically to the ground below. After swaying himself to his feet once more, he gave it another go, this time placing one front hoof on the mat then sidestepping a rear hoof on as well. His horns quickly became entangled in the ropes, however, and he met the ground again.

Fear began creeping into The Pugilist once again. Even more intensely, however, was his building anger. How is a human expected to fight a bull armed only with padded gloves? This sort of bloodsport should have been expelled from society centuries ago. He would never see his beautiful boyfriend again. He would never see his cats again. He would cease to exist and, following the many lawsuits and amendments to the sport that would certainly follow his imminent slaying, he would be forgotten.

Perhaps the dimensions of the ring had changed. Perhaps the ropes were newly aligned in a way that proved bullproof. Perhaps the Bull had simply forgotten his entry strategy. The Pugilist did not know. Regardless, this charade continued for ten minutes before officials scurried out and tranquilized the Bull, rolled him onto a bull-sized stretcher, and wheeled him away. A beat of silence passed, then a voice over a loudspeaker quickly interjected with a brief, “Sorry.”

Sensing an unanticipated end to their evening, the crowd groaned and groaned and filed out the doors one at a time.

The Bull lumbered closer. What terrified The Pugilist most was the beast’s lack of human accompaniment. The behemoth bovine walked alone towards the ring, somehow aware of the task at hand without any coaxing whatsoever. A bloodlust was engrained in him from birth that needed no training, and at that moment The Pugilist relinquished any hope he had kept tucked within.

The Pugilist raised his arms to the sky, tears drenching his blood-drained face. A few weeks later he had his hefty check mailed to a scenic villa in Spain, where he sipped from a bottle of wine and safely spectated the Pamplona encierro. ▲

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DEATH ON THE BOARD

by Daniel Jordan Booth Jones?

You have the softest voice, you know that?

Yes?

(coughs) Oh, you think so?

Have you ever considered suicide?

The softest. It’s like water being poured through reed paper.

Why consider suicide when this city is killing me?

Well, I’m flattered, I really am.

That’s a bit arch, don’t you think?

It’s a compliment, I’ve just not really noticed it recently.

And what a question to say hello with.

I’ve had death on the brain.

Have I?

Oh?

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You’ve given me 10 descriptions in 10 months.

First it was a snake moving through crushed autumn leaves, which I must say was the best image, the others really have been pale imitations, then there was the series--

Yes, I see the problem.

And I’ve spent every moment out of the sanitarium at the corner bench opposite this billboard. And, and I have to tell the staff where I’m going and be back at a reasonable hour, you see, but I can’t bring myself to leave her, and they come after me, and they say we apologize for the inconvenience, but you’re going to have to leave now.

Can we get to the point at hand?

Yes, yes of course. Suicide?

Yes, suicide.

Does she have any distinguishing characteristics?

What’s this all of a sudden? You seemed fine a week ago.

She likes water heating units. ▲

Well, that was a week ago.

Yes, so, what happened this week?

I met a woman.

Well come now, that’s not much to make someone contemplate the old “one and done.”

It was one of those moments where you know nothing’s going to be the same now.

Well, what was so special about this woman?

She was large.

I didn’t know you were of that preference.

Neither did I. Well, what was she wearing?

I couldn’t tell.

How, then, could you tell she was large?

It wasn’t shown.

Yes, what do you mean, shown?

It wasn’t in the picture.

You’re telling me you’ve gone and fallen in love with a picture?

A billboard specifically.

And to know I will never meet her, I will never regain my sense of myself, I do contemplate an early grave.

ART// LAUREN COVEY 19

By Patrick Harrington

And To Think That I saw it On Del Playa Drive

W

hat if one night I am walking home down DP, as you do when you live along this riotous strip, and I see two men running, one chasing the other some yards behind?

dressed in all black went out late, testing the doorknobs of different houses until one conceded. He crept into the hall of the quiet house and walked down it towards the shared living area: a kitchenette combined with a catch-all space that comprised the living, dining, and rec. room. He hoped to top off his already bulging knapsack with another laptop or two that had been carelessly left to charge for the night.

And who knows, maybe some nicer gear, like a lightweight TV that he could hoof back to his house around the corner before anyone noticed. But he had not expected the headphoned face of a resident illuminated by a laptop screen to turn and stare up at him. Scrambling off the couch, the resident followed the thief out the door and onto the street in hot pursuit of justice.

It may be that the first man was caught with the other man’s lady and leapt from unfaithful sheets hardly with time to put on his other shoe when he saw the raging cuckold, and, upon quickly scanning his rival’s superior size, decided the best course of action was to leap from her second story window into a dumpster. After composing himself by wiping a stray piece of garbage from his left shirtsleeve, he hopped out and saw his pursuer come charging through the front door and down the alley towards him. The cheater’s wheezing sobs are heard through the window as the dumpster diver turns left at the street and starts running West down DP, angry boyfriend close in tow.

It may be that the first man, bladder-a-bursting, stopped to take a piss in a crowded bush. It was crowded in the sense that there appeared to be another man doing the same. As he unzipped his pants and grasped his manhood, he heard an authorial voice ask, “Stop! What are you doing?” At the same time he saw the glint of a badge and realized that he must have run into an undercover cop and that he was one unlucky motherfucker. So quickly tucking his junk back into his pants careful to preserve his family jewels from the gnashing zipper-teeth, he took off down the street with the long arm of the law at his heels.

Or, it may be that the first man was the victim and the pursuer was a mugger looking to relieve him of his valuables, which included a Timex watch with a leather strap he had recently gotten for his birthday, his worse for wear iPhone 5 with a cracked screen and dodgy home button, and his worn-in black leather wallet that, though it appeared cashless, actually had a folded-up $50 bill wedged behind a Polaroid photo of him and his girlfriend, not to mention the countless other valuable–if only in sentiment– scraps of paper filling his wallet that all brought up their own odd memory. All his goods were still in hand as he sprinted headlong into the night with renewed fervor.

Or, they may be two happy souls, friends even, who had grown tired of the night's reverie and were determined to reach their destination: the soft, cool pillow of their respective beds. So they careened homeward in a race not against the other but with their own drunken spirits.

It may be that the first man–a cat burglar–had been made and was running from his would-be victim. Say a man

It would be best to let them go on their way. ▲

PHOTO // ALEX MANRIQUE

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lost hills by natalie o’brien

I understand.

Two impossibly opposite words inextricably stitched together via idiomatic surrender. Let me explain why Karenin’s Smile is the moment of beauty for Milan Kundera’s entire novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being; why the animal “is”, the extended moment, modestly foils the human “and” in the face of death. The organizing principles humans use to extrapolate meaning out of loss boil down to the recognition of narrative beauty and an understanding of “elementary language” (pg. 295) exchanged between the lost beloved and the survivor. Virginia Woolf, along with Lily Briscoe will be attending Karenin’s celebratory tea for the discussion as well.

My “understanding” of Tereza in the Hills A village woman, an insignificant stranger, save for one encounter, strides in and out of Tereza’s life. She speaks a foreign language to Tereza, who acquiesces by conversing in the few words she knows of this woman’s foreign dialect: “I understand”. To Tereza, these words make a lie. It is a paradox that the “I” is paired with “understand” because no “I” can fully understand another “I” or be understood. She cannot understand because she loves Karenin, and the woman cannot understand because she has not been a part of the grace Karenin has brought to Tereza’s life.

Tereza, a no-faced woman clothed with ambiguous sixtieseighties/Maria in Sound of Music clothing, gazes out at the rolling green hills yet to be traversed, from atop one already claimed by the cows. She sits in an idyllic pastoral paradise a Hollywood Gone with the Wind glowing orange background behind her, (not yet sliced by the knife), like Little Miss Muffet on her rustic stump with Karenin down beside her. In these

hills, in the non-human sounds of the birds and the cows and Karenin’s true and dutiful barking, in the whispy-ness of the whispy grass, Tereza becomes her own oracle. She can see her life clearly as if by airplane, within this one, timeless moment now extended for her by the clock-keeper dog Karenin. This is my image of Tereza in the hills. I will get to Tereza and the dog.

The last section: Karenin’s Smile, leisurely stretches a drawn out moment of beauty as if a suspended vacuum of time. In this realm of one moment, reflection and discussion buzz within and between Tomas and Tereza. It is a micro scale of Karenin’s death, where the mundane transforms into irreplaceable treasure. Karenin keeps the time in this reality, and gives the gift of slowing it so that the reader can keep up with Kundera’s rapidly transitioning characters for once. The reader witnesses the exchange and may observe how close they really are. Tomas surprisingly, is very open with Tereza. Kundera does not make it clear whether or not this has always been the case in their relationship or if this is in light of the miraculous situation. Tomas confides in Tereza:

In Karenin’s Smile, the reader is finally granted for the first time, the gritty details of Tereza’s and Tomas’s home life together. The dialogue comes from both sides and thoughts are explained in alternating pattern. Only in the country, in Karenin’s paradise can time slow over their inner, outer, and combined lives, rendering them transparent. The dynamics and intimacies of their relationship to each other and Karenin are described in the novelistic detail Woolf surrounds her characters with, to expound the vitality of the irreplaceable, eternal moment. Karenin’s eternal moment, the transition from being to death, becomes the altering moment for Tereza and Tomas. The power dynamic shifts as Tereza, watching Karenin’s undying love and expectations of her, suddenly understands.

“Frankly, I have stage fright at the thought of meeting him.”

“I don’t know what’s made me so headstrong…”

“Every year it gets harder to change” (Pg. 308).

Tomas philosophizes with Tereza in his own dialogue rather than Kundera’s paraphrasing of his mind. (Kundera hands these ideas to Tomas to speak himself, as if they are his and his alone). However, though Tomas and Tereza are communicating like never before, they are still separate beings. The recognition of beauty is singular and as Kundera shows us by positioning them on opposite sides of a dying Karenin on the floor. Tereza and Tomas separately endure the loss and their own feelings about the situation. The urgency of the moment with Karenin is what binds them: “They did not want to let him out of their sight; they were with him constantly” (Pg. 293). Tereza and Tomas feel the need to gather and record those final, most beautiful smiles, because they were going to be Karenin’s last.

Beauty comes out of the time spent observing the same things over and over again. It comes out of the banality of routine and one’s surroundings or regular interactions. Beauty happens when the brain blends idea and emotion with reality, upon discovering something singular and unique out of it all. Woolf suggests that moments are what endure when the physical being is gone. What qualifies as a moment? For Lily Briscoe, the moments are stored out of piqued fascination, inspiration, love, and the urgency to remember the muse of her ideas. Only later do these visions mature into truths, returning to tell Lily what she had missed before. Therefore memory of the things we actively choose to hold onto or things profoundly impressed upon us, makes these moments special to us. Those moments can feel timeless in one’s memory, and as Proust suggests, can be experienced again in the alternate time of the mind. “Quickly, as if she were recalled by something over there, (Lily) returned to her canvas” (208) where in a flash, her vision, the combined flashes out of moments with Mrs. Ramsay sparks the final concluding moment of her novel with the Ramsay’s. So moments as motifs, recorded by pattern-obsessed humans carry the potential to give birth to another roll, another fleeting instance where the heart and mind are once again joined with all past visions and portals of hills.

ART // LESLIE ZHANG

We as humans know that everything ends. The problem with loss is that it launches forth millions of unanswerable questions. Why is it that when we know, we use that time to adapt like a squirrel packing acorns before hibernation?

Recording the last and sweet bits of a memory is a battle strategy against death. Lily and Mr. Ramsay had no preparation. He grabs at the air, Lily calls out to Mrs. Ramsay. They are robbed, emptied by this abrupt loss. That is why the bracket announcing Mrs. Ramsay’s death does not yield Woolf ’s inspired prose. Kundera writes, “Horror lacks every hint of beauty,” (pg. 304). Karenin’s death is not like a sudden open-fire execution, where Tereza would die by firearm in her dreams. Karenin’s death is known, predictable, and Tereza spends those days preparing the grave in her heart. There is no horror, only sadness, only “a gentle, bluish light that actually beautified it” (305). This is where beauty and loss merge: in the extended moment. The two authors accomplish this with different approaches. Kundera takes one moment: the death of the only family member in paradise, and saturates us in it. Woolf takes a life’s worth of moments and builds them into to one culminating divine flash. Within all the regularity of living, there is room for poetry—to notice our own and shared reprises before the coda.

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details. Kundera writes Karenin’s Smile in a starkly different style than the rest of the novel. Each slight task or movement fleshes out the page. Kundera notes the final “two licks” given to Tereza, and Tereza relished those final licks, “as if she wanted to remember it forever” (301). Forever. The hoarding and collecting and recording of beauty is to keep a part of something one loves for forever; to preserve a souvenir of what will inevitably be lost. Tereza knows Karenin will die.

She does not know she and Tomas will die soon. Tomas is a constant part of her life, yet she has not built up a series of motifs in order to preserve his memory, (in contrast to Sabina) but rather to justify her choice to be with him. She admits now in this new life in the hills, “She knew all along that (Tomas) would come to her” (310). Tereza’s culminating moment is one of the realization of knowing. Sabina’s moment is the realization of loss through the failure to apply her personally sacred meaning (the bowler hat and Franz) to the present: to her, Tomas had died and was only a memory. From that point on, the art she made only she could understand. The responses are varying, the interpretation of the same event affects us all in personal ways, and our “poetic memory” holds onto the beauty that we want to live forever. We are alone and require personalized poetry of our own, but most of all we need what beauty can provide us: a timelessness that allows us to wander through our past relationships and experiences, reveling in that love. This timelessness is evidence of the unconscious “is” in humans.

We are drawn to beauty instinctually, as we also follow it.

Woolf would like to have a turn.

There is a war going on in To the Lighthouse: The Battle of the Brackets. Here, within the brackets, the endings are meaningless, (as Tomas’s, Tereza’s and Franz’s were until others projected meaning onto them). The decisive touch of Woolf ’s fingertips on the life lines of her characters let Mrs. Ramsay die in brackets, as did Prue and Andrew. Yet also within the brackets, Woolf positions the poet Carmichael (and in separate parenthesis, the return of the artist Lily) to uphold the balance of these graceless deaths.

“[Mr. Carmichael brought out a volume of poems that spring, which had an unexpected success. The war, people said, had revived their interest in poetry]” (Woolf, pg. 134).

Yet Carmichael’s poetry is impersonal, like the world war it is born out of, and does not exceed the modest bounds of the Bracket Battle over insignificant life events.

This does acknowledge the human need for monuments, poetic plea to address the injustice of mass death. Within the Bracket Battle, the information for all characters reads like a military telegraph. This is why Lily exists outside the [brackets], because she speaks the language of Mrs. Ramsay and the Ramsay’s. She understands the language of eternal moments, as Tereza and Karenin do.

Kundera and Woolf are illuminated by the same burning candle: one illuminating Virgil and blown out at midnight (in the brackets) (Woolf, pg. 127), another in the center of Mrs. Ramsay’s masterpiece: the table (Woolf pg. 108) and the lamps cropping up throughout Karenin’s Smile. This candle/ lamp represents the flicker of illumination, the beauty resulting from a darkness, a murkiness combated by light.

The burning candle resides in the realm of beauty because it constantly dies, while the light it produces would seem to suggest it lives. Only when the living exist to perceive the light, does the light of memory carry weight. Over the dead, it ”can neither touch nor destroy…as if (it) had feather-light fingers and the light persistency of feathers” (Woolf, pg.

126-7). This is why Carmichael, under the candlelight of his memory, produces poetry; why Lily finishes her painting; why Tereza thinks to herself, “two buns and a bee”. Out of the loss survives a shared language in the living. Between Woolf and Kundera: the glowing light of the candles and the Lighthouse, the lightness of being and the lamp.

Let us return finally to Karenin. These moments of regularity and repetition provide a stable base built on love (something Tereza needs as a constant, and only Karenin could provide that for her), from which Tereza can observe, project, muse and make conclusions about her own life.

In this scenario with Karenin in the hills, Tereza is free to look within herself because she has stopped following and subsisting off of Tomas. When Karenin runs the clock rather than Tomas, Tereza is given power and sight as she presides over Karenin. She lives in constant beauty, as Kundera writes, “idyllic paradise” and it wasn’t until the threat of losing it came that she beheld it anew—when she recognized the beauty of it. Kundera writes that it is impossible for humans to be happy. He must mean constantly happy, because this threat of loss is the punctuation mark to happiness. In the garden, or paradise, foreknowledge of the things dying, ending, of the fleeting nature of things does end the constant bliss. But at the same time, these are the elements required to make up the complex ability to perceive beauty. We strive to pretend time can “run in a circle” though we know each of us are on a time “line” (298). “Happiness is the longing for repetition” (298) which can be accomplished in the reconnaissance of repeated moments of beauty throughout one’s life despite the impending losses we will all have to bear. Karenin’s “is” took over Tereza’s life for a short while, where she was safe in contentment. But when Karenin’s “is” becomes a “was” Tereza is forced to make “and” to organize the “why’s” in her life.

So how can we humans, subject to involuntary irreversible change, work to make sense of this loss in instances when death abruptly plucks a human being from the living?

In other words, when we do not have choice. We make a small moment a big moment. We collect objects, build new out of the foundation provided by the lost one’s memory, and we make art. Lily mourns the body and celebrates the fragmented spirit or essence of Mrs. Ramsay through remembered glimpses. Tereza is hyper sensitive of Karenin’s

24

all deal with the past differently. Tomas tries to let go of pain by accepting his present: his moment of beauty is “a beautiful woman on a railway platform” (221) who eludes him. His beauty resides in the unexpected discoveries the future holds.

Tomas remains true to his art: surgical discovery in his exploration of beauty in life. He loses these encounters with women, and feels the loss as it is replicated in his dreams.

Sabina subtracts herself and draws lines between whole images. She sees beauty in what lies underneath the seen.

Franz finds beauty in beauty! He lives under the presiding goddess of art, who stirs his romantic urges. He recognizes beauty for its sake alone, and dies for it. Tereza lives in the memory of her mother and answers to her dreams. Her beauty rests with the hills, with safety, with small animals in sanctuary and forgiveness. Karenin lives. His beauty is living.

Kundera ends the whole narrative with an insect flying out of a lamp. At the end of the reader’s interaction with their story, life comes out of light.

Each existence created by Kundera is a life born out of something, juxtaposed against an ending with the weightless flight of a living creature, the (return), an answer completing the circle to the novel’s beginning “Lightness and Weight”.

And Karenin’s circle, the routine of a dog’s day I see again on Page Fifty Two, perhaps now a new reprise of my own, mends the tears death and loss make, because humans are touched by the beauty of symmetry, the circle, a return to consistency and form. Yet this sameness, though experienced between people, paradoxically applies to the personal and unique— to the “I” that which only “I” understands. We all process in our own way the things we behold as beautiful. This is why Tereza takes seriously the “Six Fortuities” and Tomas reduces them to silliness. To Tereza, the Fortuities make a poetic arc leading to Tomas. And yet Tereza claims space in his poetic memory (pg. 208) because he envisions her in a basket floating to him down a river. Anna Karenina, (pg.

52) accomplishes her return in death, her circle, by granting herself the grace of music and poetry. We don’t see Vronksy throwing himself in front of a train, but he chooses to die in his own way. Anna decided, just as Tereza and Tomas decided with Karenin, sealing his pastoral poem with the epitaph reprise: “two rolls and a bee”.

I too am searching for my motifs. How will this continue now that I’ve recognized that? Will they still make me cry, arrest my attention, bring me unquestionable, intoxicating happiness? Will I reach many circles or one giant one? I’ve come to conclude that defining beauty is what humans do to destroy the happiness it brings. So if I could just be… But grammatical structure we’ve made for our language inevitably sets the “I” before the “be”.

When Kundera first informs the reader of Tereza and Tomas’s death, it is violent and cruel. But by the time Karenin ends the final stage, we are ready to let them go.

Yet Kundera chooses to show us their life after. He sings to us with a lullaby trailing off into just another reprise of Tereza’s dream. What solidifies the ending for the reader is the symmetry; the circle complete with a dream made real.

Kundera puts his characters to rest mercifully and dutifully.

Would there need to be a gravestone for a story that will live inside the host reader until he or she dies? Or has Kundera through the novel accomplished his exploration of uninvestigated options and facets of his character? Has he claimed his extended moment?

▲ ▲ ▲

For Kay Young.

In driving through the hills I feel rather than see the recalled highlight reel consisting of pure, unexplainable happiness.

Perhaps this happiness is generated by the love it takes to recognize one’s own personal moment. Why have I cried the three times I’ve read the conclusion of To the Lighthouse? In reading Kundera, I might have the shell of an answer. Why did I weep uncontrollably on the train while I read Karenin to death? And upon seeing my father waiting at the platform, the first words from my mouth were, “Dad, Karenin died.”

Because Kundera understands. Kundera speaks the language of dogs and animals and therefore understands my family.

I can share this extended moment of a loved one’s death with Tereza. I kept reading the sentences Kundera must have overheard and recorded my family saying, the hope for Karenin’s smile to keep him alive forever. The animal will do it for us too, if only their bodies could.

Kundera writes this book (without knowledge of autobiographical material) I assume having experienced loss. His characters are always losing in some way, but they

25

PHOTO // KAITLYN MCQUOWN

INTERSECTIONS

By Hannah Mussey “It’s your last day, right?”

many of the requesters realized that the song is actually an account of the Fab Four’s drug excursions? People always made dedications to their families with the creepiest songs: tunes about pedophilia for their daughter’s sixteenth birthday, breakup manifestos for their son’s first day of kindergarten, and so, so many songs about sex innocuously intended to make some grandmother smile.

The restaurant is “Fifties Themed,” which means that the waiters and waitresses wear misogynistic outfits resembling some sort of movie aesthetic. While the hostesses got to wear cute poodle skirts, us bussers and “soda jerks” had to wear unfortunate button-up-and-bow-tie ensembles to exemplify minimum functionality and maximum ridicule. Why do they make us wear white? Another chocolate milkshake splattered up my arm.

That was my job. Milkshake/dessert/soda maker/splatterer.

At least we got to stand behind a counter in the back of the dining room. There was no register at our station, which meant that customers couldn’t order from us. I don’t know how long I would have lasted at that place if I’d been forced to regularly smile and nod as bratty customers screamed in my face because their kid’s strawberry shake had “too much strawberry” in it.

▲▲▲ How excited I was to walk in through the back entrance on that last day. The sticky schwoop of the door opening into the stuffy, sweaty kitchen was enough to keep any nostalgia from setting in about this being my last time coming in. It was miserable, especially on nice days, when hoards of people would flit in to dine and flash their patronage in our faces, which were always cemented with aching smiles. We were stuck inside eight grueling hours, pandering to families whose children are certainly more important than the rules and regulations of the Corvette Diner, pandering to the elderly whose age earns them a coveted right to be supremely rude and demanding, pandering to high schoolers whose parents never taught them the customs of tipping their servers at a restaurant. I always felt bad for the poor waiter or waitress who got stuck with the table of fifteen theater kids, flocking in ten minutes before closing to suck the kitchen dry of appetizer samplers, “extra-ranch-dressing-please,” and patience.

The too-loud music assaulted my ears as soon as I hit the floor. “Yellow Submarine” again? I wondered how many times the DJ had begrudgingly taken a request for the hit. How

26

▲▲▲ “It’s your last day, right?”

I looked to my left as I wiped up the surfaces of my station, which had been left an absolute disaster by the morning soda jerks. It was David, a busser, one of the first people I’d spoken to at the restaurant. I had only been here three months--a summer job. My managers hadn’t asked if I intended this to be a temporary position, so I hadn’t told them.

“Yup,” I beamed in a too-cocky, too-pleased manner that was obviously overdramatized. “I would kill myself if I had to stay longer.”

I always say things like that too glibly. My angry-at-theworld persona is an easy jacket to don, so that’s the one I’d taken to this summer. David gave a half-smile that made me instantly regret saying anything. He had that effect on me.

Round and soft-spoken, David was a UC Santa Cruz graduate hoping to find his way into politics. Our initial conversations led me to believe that he wasn’t anything special by way of intelligence, but in his silence he was most profound. I liked David.

“Yeah. I don’t know, I don’t hate it here as much as a lot of people,” shrugged David. He placed his empty bus bin on the counter, which meant that he was ready to stay and chat. It was only 4PM, the ease between the lunch and dinner rushes.

I usually took this time to clean my area, restock, and sprinkle holy water about the place in anticipation for the night to come. “The workers here are nice. You never got around to hanging out with Alvin and Cecil and I,” he frowned, the last sentence a sudden realization.

I never had any intention to spend time with anyone outside of the workplace. We spent so much time there that I felt like I had no reason to see anyone for supplementary hours. I had a stuffy bedroom to sit in, and a dog to keep me company. “Yeah, shit,” I replied, eyes downcast in my pseudoregret. “I don’t go back to school for a week, though, so maybe next week.”

David knew that it was a fruitless venture to pursue at this point. He simply gave his polite smile and shifted his gaze to the nearly empty dining room floor.

“You gonna miss this place?”

“No.” “Not at all?”

I hesitated. No, I wouldn’t miss this place. I wouldn’t miss being berated like a child in front of my coworkers for wearing grey socks instead of the required white. I wouldn’t miss coming home covered in ice cream and peanut butter with sprinkles in my shoes. I wouldn’t miss the hourly, synchronized dances in which the staff was required to partake.

“Not really. I’ll miss some of the people, I guess.” It was the polite thing to say. I knew that David wouldn’t have taken it personally had I said otherwise, but still. I didn’t want to be that asshole that didn’t like anyone. For some reason, the staff had taken to me. Maybe because of my innocent, quiet demeanor and maybe because of the cynicism lurking beneath. I had no idea, but it made the time pass quicker.

David was looking for that answer. “That’s why I stay,” he

told me, as he had several times already. “My internship pays the bills, so I don’t really need this job, but there’s something so...I don’t know. Special about working in a restaurant, don’t you think?”

I was supposed to be the poetic one of the group, as the literary student. It made me double back, immediately searching his question for some sort of deeper analysis of which I had no grasp. Special about crushing Oreos? About mopping floors and smiling as we suffer?

“I don’t know what you mean,” I finally admitted, darting my eyes toward the ceiling, which was excessively decorated with playing cards, fake vinyl records, and vintage CocaCola posters. “I hate working in food. It’s dirty, it’s tiring, the managers have a million sticks up their asses.”

David gave a subtle laugh as he strut behind the counter to fill himself a soda. “You aren’t thinking about the other staff.

We have as many old people here as we do young people.”

“So?” “So? Don’t you think that’s special? You’re the youngest one on staff. You’re 19. And you’re already leaving. Donny is in his fifties and he shows no signs of leaving at all.”

I thought about that. It sounded like David was trying to give me a compliment, but I don’t think his intention was to congratulate me for my accomplishments and aspirations. “I mean, I guess.”

David was patient with me as he sipped his cherry Dr. Pepper, a drink I always made for him when he was too swamped with dirty dishes to make himself. “I just think it’s interesting. No one ever wanted to work in a restaurant when they were little, did they?”

“No, I don’t think anyone really wants this to be their career, though.”

“Exactly,” hummed David with a small shrug. “We have

you, the youngest, going back to school because you don’t want to be here, and we have Donny, retiring here, because he doesn’t want to be destitute.”

I was too impressed by his use of the word “destitute” to respond. Impressed and miffed all the same.

“Did you know Donny used to be on Broadway?”

I looked at him with raised brows in genuine surprise.

Donny--well, his name was actually Simon. The waiters and waitresses all had “diner names” to keep with the fifties theme. But Donny was the oldest waiter on staff. He was funny, flamboyant, and a bit intimidating in his outlandish manner. I hadn’t really talked to him much.

“Really?”

“Yeah, back in the eighties, he was in Jesus Christ Superstar.

He was the understudy for Judas.”

I closed my mouth and hummed, clearly impressed. A lot of the staff at this particular restaurant were actors, dancers, singers, and other performers. They reminded me a lot of my high school drama friends, goofy and physical and crass. But Donny had been on Broadway, the endgame of all endgames for these people. What the heck was he doing here?”

“That’s crazy. I never knew.”

“That’s because you don’t hang out with anyone,” chastised David humorously, poking my shoulder, but I was in too deep to jump back to shallow conversation.

at a gas station and she worked here. It always made me upset when she spoke so disparagingly about her 17-year-old son, wondering if he was really so bad of a kid or whether she was simply fudging the truth for her own entertainment.

Ellen. Stanley. Cee Cee. All of these people had shared little bits and pieces of their lives with me, maybe to pass the time.

I hadn’t paid anyone or anything much attention, because I was too focused on my distaste of the Corvette Diner and my impatience to leave.

“You’re right,” I finally agreed. “Working in a restaurant is special.”

So many people come in and out of that place, each with their own pasts, presents, and futures. Some, like me, stay for a few months at a time for a little summer cash. Some stay for years and years, letting the Corvette Diner author a lengthy, ponderous chapter in their lives. But we all intersect here.

“You see? I like to think about how we’re, like...part of each other’s lives for at least a little bit.”

“I get it.” ▲▲▲ David seemed pleased with himself as he picked up his bus bin and began to make his entrance back out to the floor. “If I don’t see you before you leave, goodbye. And good luck. And I know you’re gonna keep kicking ass in life,” he told me with his sad, knowing little half-smile. “I’m glad you worked here.”

“Yeah, you too,’’ I replied quietly, my face mirroring his.

“Thanks.”

“For?” “I dunno.”

I shrugged uselessly as I began to disinfect the counters once more. ▲

▲▲▲ I thought about Liv. In my first week, she’d already told me that she’d driven from Florida with no plan and wound up in San Diego. She was 25, abrasive, and operated on a different plane of reality than everyone else, but I liked that about her.

She gave no fucks.

I thought about Lou, the thirty-something who had tried to get in my pants at the start of the summer. I’d successfully avoided him for most of my employment, but recently, I realized that our similarities were more numerous than I’d initially decided. We spent an entire shift talking about our mutual closet love of anime, classic rock, and dogs. He was a former software engineer for Hewlett Packard, but a car crash and a brush with death had him changing his course of action for a life less ordinary. I hated him for most of the summer, but now I was rooting for him.

June. 24 and gorgeous, sweet and ridden with anxiety. She aspired to be a something big someday, but her own fears built a wall barring her progress and kept her stuck in the comfortable monotony of her waitressing career.

Gloria. 45 and grumpy with teenaged kids. Her husband worked

28

The Far

By Emily Balaguer Distance F

or the first week I knew him, I was not sure what color his eyes were for two reasons. One: he was shy, and he rarely looked up to make eye contact; as I know him better now, I attribute his resting downward gaze to a general uneasiness that is harbored somewhere between the nape of his neck and the protrusion of his collar bones. Two: any attempt he might have made to find my two blue eyes would instead have been met by the brave whites of my eyes, which, like eggshells, carry enough strength and nutrition to protect their yolks or irises and pupils from the outside world.

My ears, however, were receptive to his quivering sarcasm that delivered an apology about not bringing any food to the potluck­­-he only ate apples and cigarettes and hot cheetos-­­a nd hints of his lust for Dr. John’s music. My eavesdropping served me well in my attempt to unveil this person whom I found to be so fetching.

the give­-and-­take necessary for a conversation between two people who don’t know anything about one another. The music was too loud for me to hear what he was saying, and I think that was probably for the best. When you have to ask “What?” it breaks up the conversation and gives you time to stall and be witty.

On the shin of his left forearm was the tattoo of a six­-letter word I have rarely used in conversation. And even though I knew what that word meant, I still found myself looking up its definition in the couple of hours between seeing him at the Co­ -op and our artichoke rendezvous.

Until that week, I’d never cooked artichokes before, never bought them, and never invited anyone over to eat them. My intuition led me to place them in a pot of water that splattered until it boiled all the way down and the stove was wearing a thin and transparent olive­g reen film. When he arrived, he was an hour and four minutes late, and the artichokes were burnt. Tough army­ -green artichokes matched the green in his mostly-­ hazel eyes. At some point, we stopped looking at those burnt artichokes and carried our giggling banter into my front yard on a wooden park bench with rusted iron arms that were green. The sounds of our words flirted and danced with the harmony of the silences that fell between them.

I am told that my speaking style suffers from solicitation of a soliloquy­-esque pentameter, both satisfying its listener and intimidating its responder.

The next time our paths crossed, his eyes were hazel­ g reen. Sometimes eggs break, and their unborn, unfertilized contents spill over leopard­-print carpeting, making a mess; sometimes eggs break, and the mess is limited to the carton they are in, easily disposable in a receptacle nearby. When the eggshells around my eyes cracked, the whites bled out, exposing my blue yolks, runny and raw, making a mess in the parking lot of the Food Co­op, which was where I was standing.

On that bench we sat and we chatted until my feet were so cold that my toes lost their identities and coldness obstructed the flow of my words so much so that they virtually ceased and our thoughts and conversation became interrupted by yawns. When he left we hugged briefly, my cheek against his, and I put myself to bed, my feet finally warm. ▲

“Emily, do you have a cigarette?” Hazel.

“One left. We can share.”

“Thanks.” A little bit of green in there, too.

Neon flood lights. The Catalyst triangle. A pale blue carton. A crutch supporting two things: filtered tobacco and

29

ART// RICKY MILLER

ART // ALI DWIGHT

ART // ALEXANDRA DWIGHT 28

SWIMMING

through

DEW DROPS

By SHAINA GOEL It was morning, and I asked if any of the two out of six of us who were awake wanted to join me on a walk. Jesse said yes, as I had pleasantly hoped for. Harper didn’t feel like joining—I didn’t mind. Jesse and I drifted in silence on the delicate incline towards the damp forest, I a step ahead. He was well­ dressed: his black windbreaker concealed a white and blue striped shirt and fitted olive pants were cuffed at the bottom to reveal dark leather hiking boots plodding across wet earth.

His clothing seemed effortless, though I’m sure at least minor thought was put in. The sun longed for our attention, filtered through domineering redwoods. The leaves rustled in the wind, as if to proclaim their existence. My step, then his. We were walking to the authentic sounds of the forest, moving and manipulating the dirt below us, leaving patterns only to be redesigned when a new being would walk on the same ground again. Who knew if that would ever happen?

“This little bubble where we are sitting, it exists and always has. If we were able to put ourselves in a transparent time machine right here and transport back, what do you think we would see?”

After five minutes of silence, we settled on a fallen tree trunk. Without explanation, I took out a joint and lit it. The first exhale sensual. The second the same. I offered it to Jesse, gesturing towards him with a hand motion I knew he would comply with. His first puff was relaxed, allowing the smoke to flow out wherever it desired, not forcing it one way or another.

I wanted to speak with him and look at his eyes, but I didn’t know what to say. All I could do was smirk.

“I’m sure this tree has seen a lot. But, maybe nothing has touched this space, maybe we’re the first.” His smile turned sideways. It was one of those smiles that looks sinister, sometimes used erotically and other times sarcastically, but here it was neither—something more playful. The thought that we could be the first to touch this space intrigued me, but I think we both knew it wasn’t plausible. We had only walked five minutes but were already sitting on the side of a path distorted by millions of creatures, micro and macro.

He was intrigued, so I fed him more in an attempt to tickle his brain.

“Would this tree still be here? Would a dinosaur be walking past us? Would we be underwater? Maybe preserved inside the layers of a mountain? This space has an unseen history, and I’m curious.”

He stopped looking at me, but I didn’t take it personally.

His eyes wandered around our space and then rested on the aged tree to his right.

“Why are you smiling?” he asked, revealing the infancy of his own slowly growing smile. His tranquil voice complimented the sweet diegetic melodies of the forest.

By this time, the joint was dead, and we were high, and the dew was still held magnetically to the leaves above our heads, not wanting to let go, to fall even further down, down, down, until down no longer existed. I imagined one drop falling from the leaf it longed to stay glued to, landing on the center of my forehead to inseminate me with the knowledge and history of our space. But it landed on my thigh, imprinting my tanned corduroys with a darker circle of color.

“I’m just happy in a simple way.” I felt stupid for saying it, but I meant it. All he did was look at me, and his smile was no longer in its infancy.

“Do you ever wonder what was in this space, this area, thousands, or maybe millions of years ago?”

A gift from the tree to me, thanks to gravity. ▲

“What do you mean?” he replied, strengthening the delicate thread of eye contact between us, causing my infant ­smile to grow as fast as a sparked fire on gasoline.

31

PHOTO // LAUREN DAVIS

Part II

::

Poetry Two Palms // Korrin Alpers Hazy Blue // Emily Rogers Captions // Itxy Quintanilla The Brown Leather Hat // Emily Balaguer Stereo People // Sam Goff Curdled // Canelle Irmas Holy Moment Blues // Alexandra Dwight Half Light // Madeleine Thompson Poisonwood //

Emma Lombard

Myth // Taylor Nguyen People Watching // Kimmy Tejasindhu Rosary // Selena Ross An Apology // AnNabelle Warren The Anarchist // Kiana Fatemi Bite Me // Madeline Lockhart Thanks // Ryan Mandell Brave // Emma Lombard Feverish // Daniel Jordan Booth Wisteria Drive // Roberto Perez Sutro Tower, White thumbnail moon // alexandra Dwight

TWO PALMS

by Korrin Alpers

It was like this: two palms–one mapled by the Ensenada winter­sun, one soaped rosy–pressed hard, like the monk’s lips as he prays for his jasmine

ART // LE TANG

to bloom.

By Emily Rogers

Hazy Blue

Hanging, amidst a misty fog of inhibition, ambition, and creative curiosity Crystalline blue eyes well with emphatic motion, Hazy, black, and glossy voids stare waking.

Streams and rivers run between us as truth spins and winds Like the mountain roads that run rocky yet faithful, The journey is bumpy and hazy, but we’re singing in time, and Slapping the roof and running and skipping and jumping, farther, but we’re still caught in a fog, Your outline in the distance is growing dark and navy just like those eyes-- that deep part of your eyes that sinks deep into your heart, I can see you. I swear, I can see you, those eyes now.

Captions

BY Itxy Quintanilla Google Image Search: “lighthearted picture captions” 1. balsamic vinaigrette stained my notebook 2. the waves are roaring and they’re telling me to listen 3. death by the internet 4. last year I melted away and told myself I wouldn’t come back 5. greetings from not here 6. you’re not what I imagine warmth to feel like 7. sweating in between my knees 8. fingertips digging into an orange, and a mixture of dirt and sticky liquid collects beneath my fingertips 9. i’ve been under the sun for too long; i’m starting to feel like Meursault 10. last night I dreamt about this feeling 11. chronically incompetent 12. existentially lonely 13. last night I counted until 233 repeating “i love myself ” after each number hoping it would engrain itself into my brain 14. searching for: core self

ART// MADELINE LOCKHART

35

The Brown L E a t h e r hat by: Emily Balaguer

The Brown Leather Hat found me again last night.

This time, in a dream.

He was clean and free-- emancipated from the doused yellow endowment bestowed upon Himself in the dusty underworld of The Woogie Stage.

It would be selfish to regret that when I awoke I was alone; this bird had flown.

He has found me twice now, found the escape route twice

now, too.

36

It is alright though; something else has found me in His place-something always will.

She hovers half-seen candidly, and justly so.

I have never seen Her lunar crescents so early in the day before.

As a wispy grey thing of a cloud finds me, She begins to lose me.

I hope the next thing to find me will be the marbles

I

have

lost.

Stereo people are not scarier people not more evil than your average jug of wine

grind down the block’s will to block out stereo noise with their—oh! beautiful, new monochromatic toys

ART // LESLIE ZHANG

every nite it’s Ballistic Explosure lite the same routine of wine whine wine wine whine neighbors whine louder wine harder wind down stereo people wind down oh yes

By Sam Goff

Stereo People

Curdled

By Canelle Irmas Words come out of your mouth Like spoiled milk, Not poured but propelled From the carton, The coagulated dairy Sticking solid in the air, Lingering with its Individual smell, Breaking off in a stick To fall—squelch— To the ground.

ART // HANNAH MUSSEY

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You talk such rot That flies hover at your lips, Awaiting shit and carrion.

Vultures battle coyotes, At your feet, Fighting for your company.

The sight and sound Of your countenance Excites maggots.

HOLy MOMENT

Blues

By Alexandra Dwight

I crave connection.

Don’t we all?

Isn’t it the human condition?

Isn’t it the light at the end of the tunnel?

It’s in the books we read, The films we watch, It’s in your morning cup of coffee.

Especially in my dreams, it’s there: two warm bodies intertwined in the darkness.

I awake, 4am, red city haze— definitely alone.

As I’m getting older, I expect it more.

In pleasant moments— drunk swaying moments.

And then I doubt it even more, when I am tracing ant paths on cold concrete.

ART // LESLIE ZHANG 38

I search for it endlessly, everywhere I go.

When I am sitting out on the bluffs on a bed of ice plants, pale halo of moon piercing though a veil of sea mist, and I imagine some divine force extending its hands to me, to take me home, like the last gray fingers of clouds shooting out from the black.

Then, I look to my right and see Jim Morrison’s crystal ship— that blinking oil rig, lit up like an eternal Christmas tree, and I wonder at his loneliness.

I wonder if everything was made right up there.

Either you lost it at birth, when you left your mother’s arms, or you never had it at all.

You’re no better off clinging to some great Godhead, the longing is ingrained— biological, even.

Relieve it with drugs: uppers or downers pills, alcohol, blow— take your pick.

Lose yourself in cinema, music, art, technology, debate, in the cosmic safety of an orgasm Distract.

Desire materials.

Desire to lose weight, to be attractive.

It’s all a guise, a sweet trick of the mind that drips into your ear canals like cherry cough syrup: a temporary substitute for what we truly want and need.

But, after I have worn out all my wonderings, I often become frustrated with myself for being such a sentimental human being, and I let the brilliant sunflower unfurling from my forehead wilt in black tar oil with no water and no light.

And when it finally seems to arrive— oh, holy moment, the lips touch, the eyes lock and pupils bloom wide to seize the object of desire—

I become disgusted with my desire and turn away from it.

I walk along Pardall, the expansive cement strip, like some kind of saint— a worn ascetic, crushing dead leaves under holy cowboy boots, golden rays glowing from the swathe of humidity around my hair.

It, too, is temporary.

The mind drifts and fades into the slumber of its dim lava lamp-lit haven, and two strangers lie in the darkness 4am, red city haze— definitely alone.

I get so stoned that the world dissolves away like a bad dream.

So, where is this greater connection?

Or, dare I ask, does it even exist?

The long searching question.

But, in the end, it cannot be denied.

The longing persists.

I crave connection.

Don’t we all?

We all want to believe we are awake for something more than the hum and tick of machinery.

Beyond our humble bodies that cower beneath an overhang of celestial lights.

Yes, we all want to believe in Ginsberg’s holy moment.

It’s your hunger, your voracious unending appetite.

It’s your illness and antidote, your addiction and fix.

Sometimes I think every itching craving that buzzes around my ashtray-mind like some incessant fly is just a substitute for the connection I desire.

Oh, holy moment, when we return to the bodies from where we were born.

39

HaLf LIGHT

ART // ROSE SPANBOCK

by Madeleine Thompson Crashing cars and lighting cigarettes– what a glow… what a shine…

But how far can it reach?

How deep does it go? ten feet? eleven?

All the way down to the prehistorics light? let’s go!

I have a submarine named after you, light: I call it symphony because it comforts me– I call it eternity because it terrifies me.

Seventy-six feet deep now! still light, still full of sunshine beanstalks sunlight laughter sunkissed undertows.

Sunlight moonlight beforelight afterlight every single whichandeveryway light sink into my skin light shine below my eyelid light fall into my jar light slip between my fingers light lift me up pull me down light iridescent, luminous, everlasting!

Kiss me like a tidal wave light fill my house with reused carpet light.

Decaying, bark dripping sap feel the light in sorrow marrow, treetop cliffs, ivy homes.

Shoelace earthquakes caused by lunar heartbreaks: further my chaos light, fuel my desire alone

Dive now, dive! test the sun and her omnipotence.

Goodbye heaven clouds and goodbye hellish earth– there’s a fire brewing in a lamp I brought along, licking dry the sides of its glass home.

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The African sunshine beats down on the girl as she searches for her place among the trees where she suspects the green mamba snake has found a better place to call home than anything her obeisant eyes have ever seen in the all-knowing mirror.

By Emma Lombard

Poisonwood

ART // KIANA FATEMI

in her heart that fades as quickly as the setting sun. The makeshift home of her dreams resides closer than what her eyes thought possible before. The girl walks dangerously close to the snake, forgetting entirely the fate predicted by the mirror on the wall. Raising her hopes to the trees

But the face that looks back at her in the mirror is not the same face of the young girl who came to Africa with eyes wide-open, hoping to take the trees and the sun and her dreams home with her. Instead her wishes painfully snake

that tower over her head, she picks up fallen leaves from trees that were once alive but now dead. She makes a home in the ground for them with other un-important things (that can be seen in a mirror) and forces her hands not to deviate from the plan set into motion by her eyes.

Looking up, she’s greeted by her most grievous friend: the snake she loves. He knows all too well the dreams of the girl.

around her brain whether or not the green snake is there to keep her sane. She looks in the truthful mirror inside her soul and feels everywhere but home.

Where in the world could that young girl have gone? If she stares at the leaves on the trees long enough, maybe she won’t be deceived by her eyes any longer. Her thoughts fall like raindrops from her lakeblue eyes even though it isn’t a surprise that she can no longer see the snake or his beautiful green scales as he melts into the trees that she so desperately wants to be. A mirror in the sky warms the skin and dries the tears of the girl who doesn’t cry for herself, but for the home

Take me with you, said the girl when she first let her dreams climb the trees, and if it weren’t for the snake reminding her that it wasn’t her home at all, perhaps her eyes would never have betrayed her by looking in the mirror.

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ART // EMILY BALAGUER

These affectionate transactions.

A penny and a dollar and A tooth for an eye and an inch or maybe more of my skin.

Check after check,

no balance.

I’ll give you my flesh, You’ll give me nothing.

My bones are not a commodity.

This superficial intimacy that I trade for with my lips, my breath leaves an ache in every contour, crack, and chasm.

Bodies crave but I don’t know if mine has ever felt full enough to know what is desire

Myth

and what desire is not.

By Taylor Nguyen

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ART // ALEXANDRA DWIGHT

Dylan, with your ripped jeans and scuffed shoes, floating home to whoever sparked that honest smile.

People Watching

By Kimmy Tejasindhu

Oh, here comes Miss “Birth of Venus” You can be Melissa.

Stomping down Pardall, sun-spun hair and wind in cahoots.

Melissa, girls like you have it all.

Your closet lined with stringy bikini tops because your body somehow violently rejects being stifled and shrouded.

Melissa, you were made for the sunshine, this land of eternal summertime.

With your loose-knit this, cut-off that, crocheted those.

Melissa you were made from this air, this soil.

And there goes a Kevin.

A Brian, a Ryan, A Kelsey, a Lauren, A Hailey, an Andrew.

A her, a him A me, A you.

Dylan. I’ll call you Dylan.

With your ripped jeans, nondescript faded T-shirt, floating past on a board absently pulling at your beard.

You look like a Dylan.

Off to meet some girl, I’d bet.

Off to save the world, or something.

Oh, Dylan you always try to do so much.

No one would love you any less, Dyl, If you weren’t everywhere, anywhere all at once.

Faces with stories, Bodies with scars, Minds with memories.

Floating past, veering off Brushing auras, sharing air.

But keeping namesakes safe, origin stories under lock and key.

IV – welded mystery.

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She chain smokes like a rosary, blowing prayers into rings one after another.

I ask her if her prayers are ever answered; she laughs— ‘Everything I do is bad for me’ She’s not wrong, so I don’t correct her, I just collect all the butts and bits she leaves and plant them in this patch of dirt around the corner from my flat.

I’ve been growing them with salt water— not tears, not blood, but sweat that pours from my frantic heart, it’s panting, out of breath.

And then­­she stands, shakes out her short hair, touches one finger to her lipstick lips; I stare.

Try to tell her the garden I’ve planted has grown not up but down, with labyrinths of roots and tendrils the flowers are all brown.

The words are thick in my throat, and I excuse myself, go somewhere else.

I watch myself walk down the road feel the corners of my boot fill every thread of my coat and pretend that’s all there is of me.

// by Selena Ross 44

ART// LE TANG

ROSARY

AN APOLOGY

BY ANNABELLE WARREN

To sleep, perchance to dream Of you in the driveway and me in my bed Of you in an overcoat and me in my underwear Wan and exhausted of empathy And hell-bent on hurting you.

To dream of the dry winter air that suffocated us both, Condensing your breath into white wisps of exasperation, Numbering each exhale you had left with me So bitter-cold that blood burst from my nose And split me from the inside out.

Perchance to dream that my eyes didn’t gloss over And that I didn’t hum louder than the roar of the engine And that despite my festering pride, I ran outside To stop that big red truck from taking you away.

Ay, there’s the rub.

ART // NATALIE O’BRIEN

The Anarchist

The world is on fire Skin burning up in the whirlpool Rise and fall to the beat of the tongue sensation run through, fingers, Back arched high as ancient stone A cusp of two Where one ends and the other begins Tips of fingers impress Into valleys Of spine notches Of voids between bone Cyclones of skin, of tongue, of teeth

by Kiana Fatemi

Skin folded and bone pressed Hard onto the wrists of weak a line of solid white tombstones caught on too soft words no longer jagged or missing mark time passed wrap around the rib arched forward then back white skin red knuckles eyes brown to black, scattered lines

this is the end, so I am told, I’ve fallen into the abyss there is no coming back,

hanging by a thread, eyes strained at depths below, my last words fall, ‘don’t let go’.

ART// SHAY MEHR

ART // CINDY BELKOWICHE + MADELINE LOCKHART

bite me

by madeline lockhart Blue stars stark like a microwave on an oil­-spill night.

We run in swimsuits Past red cedar trees and white picket fences.

Bare feet on edge The chlorine glows green beneath dead leaves.

Suddenly, A hundred mosquitos rise from their liquid home.

Gnawing at my hairy arms and pink legs They swarm I trade a nervous shriek for each shock in the dark.

Thanks

by RYAN MANDELL

I lost my lemons on the corner and took the whole block with me Earth bound or space cased We couldn’t see through all the mace But the tear gas left the bricks Covered in white powder Took a shower Cold water To try to put out the fire

ART // MADELINE LOCKHART

The movie is not made for tv It’s made for 5D I’m just building back up the energy Reconstructing my own reality She be Doing the same thing Making all the little birds sing Finding that deep love we need to bring Apparently it’s easy-That is-- in the hindsight That is-- if you believe in the human construct of a timeline In the foresight it’s a great big wall Looking back it will look so small So in the present -I stay present Watch the days go by with contentment Keep track of what phase the moon is in Don’t trip because I know the right decision And if I don’t -- it’s a grain of salt And meat loves salt Like milk loves malt Curse the heavens because it’s all my fault Split brain like free will and destiny had a kid And now I’m making lemon curd I just need to find the lid.

If I had the hindsight I could see the future Put you and I In the limelight Cuz back then they all knew we was right Except for me and you But it happened the way it was meant to And now I’m back where I started Big chested and heavy hearted Wait up. Scratch that.

I got a new hat A New head Little lighter because I shed some lead Cleaned house for my intentions Learned more than a few lessons

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PHOTO // LE TANG

Brave

by Emma Lombard

“Nothing costs enough here,” the man said with a sigh, as he paid for his life in tears.

(A whole world full of people with gold in their veins and not a single one could hear him.)

So, he let the words drip down his face instead and collected them in his hands.

He swallowed them whole because everyone knows: that’s the cure for nothing.

And when nothing was fixed the man decided it best to wrap his life around his neck and hang it in the closet.

ART// RICKY MILLER

Feverish

by Daniel Jordan Booth

It seems absurd to be haunted at night by proportions.

But regardless, when my head reaches a temperature of 103 or more I dream of proportions-- of angular terror.

Two lines heading towards me, one infinitesimally small, one large, so painfully large that it blots me out, and then I’m not even a stain On this enormous line to infinity.

The two lines are the same of course, reflections of each other, and

And my parents are shaking me awake, I’ve been screaming bloody murder at the lines into my father’s shoulder and he He’s saying Dan, you’re fine, it’s ok love, it’s a dream, it’s It’s the most terrifying thing in the universe, and you can’t possibly know it.

It exists like gravity, like math, and it’s waiting for me in the dark at night.

If space could conduct sound, we would hear nothing but the roar of Its perfect maw, always, forever.

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Wisteria Drive //

by Roberto Perez

It’s no longer Spring the Purple Urkle nuggets ripe and so pungent The unsettling place with the red-hot smoking gun... wisteria blossoms I don’t go outside, tall trees host goonish creatures strapped with lead and gold A lavender haze fills the air, the scent of lilac over bloody streets Subtle disturbance But they sleep sound in the night, on Wisteria Drive

ART// RICKY MILLER

SUTRO TOWER , WHITE THUMBNAIL MOON

by Alexandra Dwight

Sutro Tower’s bleary red eyes blinking softly out over Twin Peaks Heavy with sleep Peering through blue dark-midnight and ethereal mist that sets in like a milky membrane over Frisco city hills, tucked and folded quietly into one another “Sutro Tower, white thumbnail moon,” I said to title the moment ever-so-poetically And then I almost took out my camera to capture this vision mechanical tower-eyes and moon-sliver cutting through a film of darkness.

But you said “no, close your eyes to crystallize the moment.”

Lids squeezed tight Pressing liquid essence from petals of feeling Of you there next to me My fellow friend of the soul And a prayer that had been whispered on a terrace in Amsterdam one month ago Now, sipping in childhood dreams of October And exhaling the loss of a utopia That I had painted from a palate of saucer-eyes in my first school year

ART // ALEXANDRA DWIGHT

“Sutro Tower, white thumbnail moon” Held now between ratted pages of my journal And that was all it needed, and ever will need ...so they will tell you But the young folks sigh and plink open a new thought bubble in a separate tab

Special thanks to the UCSB English Department, Coffee Collab, and the Isla Vista Food Co-Op!

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