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RETROSPECT AN ARTS AND LITER ARY JOURNAL OF THE OSBORNE WRITING CENTER
PLEASE JOIN US FOR THE FIFTH ANNUAL
NOVEMBER 3-5, 2016 FEATURING
Alexandra Fuller, Sarah Kay, Naomi Shihab Nye, Jamaal May, David Giffels, and more. Festival logo by Brady Furlich ’15
2016-2017 VISITING WRITER SERIES
Clint Smith, Heather Christie, Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib, and H. William Christ Keynote Speaker Anchee Min.
Osborne Writing Center
The Osborne Writing Center and its programming is supported by The William McKinley and Jessie M. Osborne Writing Center Fund, The Horvitz/Rosenthal Family Fund for the Young Writers and Artists Festival, The Grace Wood Bregenzer 1927 Memorial Fund, and the Hathaway Brown School Colloquium Fund. These endowments support an atmosphere at HB in which student writing can originate and evolve. The entire school community is indebted to and grateful for the outstanding programming that has been launched as a result of this generous philanthropy, including the publication of this annual arts and literary journal. For more information, visit www.hb.edu/write or contact Osborne Writing Center Director Scott Parsons at sparsons@hb.edu. In 2016, Retrospect was the only student literary magazine in Ohio to be awarded the Highest Prize by the National Council of Teachers of English. We are thankful to AGC for bringing our vision to life and to Clyde Henry for his grammatical prowess. Hathaway Brown student writers also received wide acclaim for their work, including 59 different students in grades 9-12 winning 132 regional Scholastic Writing Awards and three national medals. For more information, visit www.hb.edu/write or contact Osborne Writing Center Director Scott Parsons at sparsons@hb.edu.
Dear Reader Welcome to our gathering of voices. The following pieces, whether crafted in bustling workshops that operate under the aroma of baked goods or in quiet bedrooms spinning with acoustic music, are distinct to each person’s perspective and expand how each of us can see the world. The Hathaway Brown community creates a space where human beings can experiment on the page, canvas, pottery wheel, stage, whatever medium they wish in order to share a glimpse of their experience with the rest of us. However, none of this would be possible without the risk-taking and openness of the creators, Ms. Sadler’s constant championing of these voices, and Mr. Christ’s overwhelming support for the furthering of arts at Hathaway Brown. Simply having the opportunity to read and see hundreds of creations from our peers has left us in absolute awe (both from the sheer amount of creation and the resonant quality of many of the pieces). We hope you will fully submerge yourself into the stories of this issue and that you will close this magazine with them still swimming in your thoughts as they do for us. The Retrospect Team
Retrospect Editors photographed with visiting writer Billy Collins and speaking agent Eliza Fischer: first row left-to-right: Aarathi Sahadevan, Caroline Jobson, Kavya Ravichandran, Isabella Nilsson, McKenna Ritter second row left-to-right: Alley Keresztesy, Kacey Gill, Molly Sharpe, Evie Schumann, Anna Lietman
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67 ORIGIN
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ON THE COVER Daydreams by Zoë Solt
TABLE OF CONTENTS
06 She never apologized for her past by Leia Rich ’17
Profile Essay by Mackenna O’Hara ’17 Daddy by Isabella Nilsson ’16 Family by Melody Buca ’17 Velociraptor by Amanda Merritt ’16 Taking a Look Back by Gina Bompiedi ’16 Bosphorus Strait by Madi Brady ’16 Wind Runner by Farah Sayed ’19 Arezu by Caroline Jobson ’16 My Perfect Harmony by Oriana Cruz ’17 West Virginia by Rosalie Phillips ’17 Inside Looking Out by Eliza Judson ’16 An Unknown Journey Through Familiar Beliefs by Isha Lele ’18 Move Over Charlie Brown; It’s the Great Pumpkin, Areklett Version by Catherine Areklett ’17 Acorn Squash by Alison Xin ’19 I Promise to Treasure My Roots by Natuwa Basalirwa ’17 Golden Sunset by Madeleine Kattan ’16 We Were Gods by Hannah Keyerleber ’17 Stuck by Eliza Judson ’16 Alien Writer American Dream by Maria Perilla ’16 Tandoori Turkey by Lina Ghosh ’17 Remembrance by Millie Privitera ’17 Flamingo Herd by Erica Kahn ’18 #5 by Francesca Ferri ’16 Oreo by Cartier Pitts ’16
EXPEDITION
22 The asphalt tattooed her heels black by Kristina Mullen ‘17
Autumn Time Walks by Owen Healey ’16 Dishcloth Stitches by McKenna Ritter ’16 The Road Trip by Madeleine Kattan ’16
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70 St. Peter’s Basilica, Vatican City by Monique Girgis ’16 Coastal Journey by Owen Healey ’16 Hope in Umiujaq by Nell Bruckner ’17 The Unspeakable, Rolled in Pizza Dough by Nell Bruckner ’17 Down By the River by Owen Healey ’16 Gondolas by Regan Brady ’17 Public Transportation by Grace Burleson ’17 Streetcar in Milan by Regan Brady ’17 Herby by Zoë Solt ’17 Trusty Suby by Anna Lietman ’16 The Junkyard by Evie Schumann ’16 Maximum Point by Ela Passarelli ’18 Clouds by Kimi Kian ’18 Contemplation by Grace Rossi ’16 Uncharted Territory by Anna Lietman ’16 Daredevil by Sophie Richards ’17 Adrenaline by Kate Snow ’18 Reveling in the Unfamiliar by Aarathi Sahadevan ’16 Night Sky by Owen Healey ’16 Melancholy Cold by Julia Felderman ’16 Negril, Jamaica by Alexia Jones ’17 Even More Waves by Owen Healey ’16 breath by Julia Felderman ’16
TERRA
36 Only green grows after the storm by Maria Perilla ’17
Orchid by Leia Rich ’17 A Spring Morning by Molly Sharpe ’16 Budding Fuschia by Anna Lietman ’16 Elixir Vitae by Chloe Schwartz ’17 Life of Montana by McKenna Ritter ’16 Swedish Forests by McKenna Ritter ’16 Broken Bones as Sewer Pipelines by Coco Liu ’18
Smoke and Silt by McKenna Ritter ’16 To Be A Crow or a Hummingbird by McKenna Ritter ’16 The Pond at Morning by Molly Gleydura ’18 Dragonfly by Jenna Hahn ’17 Aurelia by Arielle DeVito ’17 Seasonal Metamorphosis by Molly Sharpe ’16 Maple Leaf by Eva Yeh ’18 Flower Ceramics by Elise Leneghan ’16 A Haiku of Seasons by Madeline Shade ’16 Velvet Waves by The Tortoise Shell Collective Soleil by Grace Burleson ’17 Mountain at Dusk by Megan Dorogi ’16 Tahoe by Carly Wellener ’17 February by Olivia Leslie ’16
JUNCTION
46 She tangled her words around art by Kacey Gill ‘16
Genealogy Poem by Grace Rossi ’16 Painting by Amanda Merritt ’16 For a Short Moment Poem by Cartier Pitts ’16 Painting by Arielle DeVito ’17 The Sleeper Poem by Kelsey Rich ’16 Photography by Andreanna Hardy ’17 A Letter Home Prose by Chloe Schwartz ’17 Painting by Amanda Merritt ’16 Stepping Stones Poem by Francesca Ferri ’16 Photography by Andreanna Hardy ’17 The Lost Girl Poem by Halle Leneghan ’16 Graphic art by Madeline Shade ’16 Illuminated Manuscript by Madeline Shade ’16 and Arielle DeVito ’17 Stacked Poem by Francesca Ferri ’16 Photography by Kat Holleran ’16 Centipede Prose by Toni Thayer Etching by Zoë Solt ’17
78 Waves Poem by Julia Felderman ’16 Watercolor by Arielle DeVito ’17
FLOW
56 There will always be more waves by Molly Gleydura ’18
#10 by Francesca Ferri ’16 Bond by Kat Holleran ’16 London by Kerry Gnandt ’16 In the Morning by Ela Passarelli ’18 Redundant by Grace Homany ’17 Joy Rides by Owen Healey ’16 I Should Live in Salt by Morgan Whaley ’16 This I Believe by Grace Homany ’17 Tentacles by Melody Buca ’17 Your Blood is Too Thin by Kacey Gill ’16 Farming in San Antonio, Bolivia by Alexia Jones ’17 “Feathers fill the pillows” by McKenna Ritter ’16 Samuel by Kate Snow ’18 I Am My Body by Gina Bompiedi ’16 Christmas Lights at High Speeds by Alanna Brown ’17 Do You? by The Tortoise Shell Collective Pockets by Grace Homany ’17 Second Station by McKenna Ritter ’16 Sound Stopped by Cartier Pitts ’16 Time by Molly Sharpe ’16 #11 by Francesca Ferri ’16 Kite by Sonum Jagetia ’18 Arno by Maria Perilla ’17 Feeling the Warm Air by Maggie Gehrlein ’17
(DIS)ORDER
66 We want order we choose chaos by Ela Passarelli ’18
Harnessing Chaos by Nelle Bruckner ’17 Burning Trees by Madeleine Kattan ’16
106 God Made Science by Kelsey Rich ’16 Hosts by Sophie Sacks ’18 A Sense of Motion by Madeline Shade ’16 Anyone’s Ghost by Morgan Whaley ’16 Overhead by Anna Lietman ’16 Indisputable by Carly Wellener ’17 City of Lights, City of Darkness by Maya Razmi ’18 Illusions by Kimi Kian ’18 Aftermath by Rachel Lowrie ’16 Funkytown by Grace Burleson ’17 How Not to Interview for a Job You Don’t Want by Zoë Solt ’17 for certain by Julia Felderman ’16 Linear Curve by Coco Liu ’18 Untitled by Libby Fletcher ’16 Reincarnation, Energy Beads, and Cul-de-sacs by McKenna Ritter ’16 Funkytown II by Melody Buca ’17 Empty by Jordan Elhindi ’16 Art, Art on the Wall by Ela Passarelli ’18 Observations from an Occasional Insomniac by Jen Wang ’19 The Great White by Lizzie Crotty ’16 Sand in My Teeth by Kacey Gill ’16 Bars by Amanda Merritt ’16 Melody in Technicolor by Melody Buca ’17 The Thinning by Alanna Brown ’17 Don’t Sleep With Mechanical Pencils by McKenna Ritter ’16 The Day the Coffee Maker Breaks by Isabella Nilsson ’16 What A Way to Go by Maria Perilla ’17 11730 by Alley Keresztesy ’16
METAMORPHOSIS
82 We search for ourselves in others by Noni Akintunde ’18
#4 by Francesca Ferri ’16 Life Cycle of a Camp Lover by Evie Schumann ’16 Teagan by Sophie Clark ’18 Vans by Andreanna Hardy ’17
116 Two Friends Too Close by Anna Lietman ’16 Confessions of a Senior by Evie Schumann ’16 Life of a Speck by Anna Lietman ’16 Gaming, Gift-Giving, and Going Ham by Alison Xin ’19 The Cockroach by Eva Yeh ’18 The Water-Stained Photograph by Lane Chesler ’17 Ocean by Sonum Jagetia ’18 Honey by Maria Perilla ’17 Covalent Bonds by Sam Scott ’17 The Asterisk by Catherine Areklett ’17 Rock N’ Roll by Savannah O’Sickey ’16 Drums by Kate Snow ’18 Tan Line Blues by Graci Homany ’17 Reel Life by Gabby Valdivieso ’16 The Girl Behind the Curtain by Lekha Medarametla ’18 Blanket For Sale by Katy Kaufman ’16 Digging Deeper by McKenna Ritter ’16 Cityscape by Zoë Solt ’17 Nemo, Charlotte, and Me by Anna Lietman ’16
EMPOWERMENT
98 Stood together shined brighter than stars by Cynthia Wang ‘18
Akilah-Marie by Melody Buca ’17 Questioning Myself by Alex Margulies ’16 #9 by Francesca Ferri ’16 Dancing Queen by Andreanna Hardy ’17 Iris by Julia Felderman ’16 Unknown Aura by Erica Kahn ’18 #5 by The Tortoise Shell Collective My Adoption by Gina Egan ’18 Don’t Dirty Your Dress by Ellen Young ’17 Lady Sings the Blues by Kacey Gill ’16 Big Hair Big Dream by Andreanna Hardy ’17 Reflection by Gabby Valdivieso ’16
Fisherman’s Wharf by McKenna Ritter ’16 Defiance by Hanna Keyerleber ’17 Colorful Women by Amy Brahler ’18 alive by Maaryah Malik ’16 black hole by Maaryah Malik ’16 I can breathe by Sam Scott ’17 Enamorado de la vida by Oriana Cruz Echeverria ’17 When I Grow Up by Olivia Leslie ’16 Word IV by Brice Bai ’18
INSIGHT
110 Learns to read begins to fly by Hanna Keyerleber ’17 Questions Not Crises by Evie Schumann ’16 Johnny Cash by Mackenna O’Hara ’17 Think Big by Eva Yeh ’18 On Reading and Writing by Alanna Brown ’17 Pi, Presidents, and the Pursuit of Knowledge by Margaret Broihier ’17 Hunger by Molly Sharpe ’16 See it Closer by Owen Healey ’16 Old and New by Madeleine Kattan ’16 Bookworm by Jenna Hahn ’17 Exodus by Chloe Schwartz ’17 What’s in a Lullaby by Maaryah Malik ’16 A New World by Brice Bai ’18 A Walk in the Woods by McKenna Ritter ’16 Light the Way through the Ruins by Monique Girgis ’16
BACK COVER
Tell me where the stories begin by Rosalie Phillips ’17
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PROFILE ESSAY MACKENNA O’HARA Atlanta, GA 1968
Chicago, IL 1993
All of the late nights that fifteen-year-old Cathy Jones had spent sneaking out had caught up to her. She was one of six children living in a single parent home after her father had disappeared during the Korean War. Michael Maddox, a biracial boy from the other side of the train tracks, was from a family with a history of alcohol abuse. The two of them grew up with hardship which didn’t make Cathy’s pregnancy any easier. She was shipped off to an all girls Catholic school for unwed mothers where she was forced to carry her baby until it was born and put up for adoption—an idea that was entirely her mother’s. Michael’s family wished to adopt the baby; however due to the racism of the time Cathy’s mother wouldn’t allow any connection between the two families. On December 12, 1968 their baby girl was born and spent the next two years of her life bouncing between foster care homes until the day had come that she was adopted by the Goese family and given the name Katherine. The story of my mom’s adoption is one that I have heard many times but never took the time to ask questions about, so when I got the opportunity to interview her I was shocked to hear all of the effects adoption has had on her as an individual.
Kate met Gregory O’Hara at twenty-one when she mistakenly barged into him at his buddy’s apartment thinking it was the party one floor above. She was a college dropout with a love for art, the city, and Pilates; he was a graduate from Pitt who a shared an apartment with three of his best friends and spent the weekends at the bar on the corner. Although they didn’t always get along as they fought, broke up, made up, and repeated several times, they made each other better versions of themselves. Greg was around for one of the hardest times of Kate’s young adult life. She was twenty-five the first time she heard both of her biological parent’s voices tell her the story of her birth. That day was the clearest day Kate had ever experienced, “I actually found out correct answers and not just the ones that were put on my birth certificate, not the ones that the department of child services in Atlanta had told my parents—like facts came out of the mouth of my biological mother and my biological father. It felt like someone lifted the biggest cinderblocks off my shoulders.” Genetics seems so insignificant on a grand scheme of who you consider yourself as a person, but Kate never shared the same genetic make up as her family. She never had someone tell her that she looked just like her beautiful mother or that she had her father’s green eyes. She was never told that she belonged to something.
Chicago, IL 1984 The day that Katherine Goese crested fifteen into sixteen was the day she became independent from her past. She says that her family jokingly cheered on her sixteenth birthday that thankfully history hadn’t repeated itself, but for her it just opened the door to more questions. Kate received pieces of her adoption story from her parents when they felt she could understand them. It was like putting together a puzzle of her life and the most important pieces were missing. When her parents first adopted her they were told that she was African American and Indian, though it wasn’t until twenty-five years later that she discovered that the latter was untrue. In her all-white, one-hundred percent Irish Catholic family she stuck out among her eight brothers and sisters as the only one adopted. However, among the general public Kate faced a new obstacle, “While I have the curly hair and my skin is a little more olive, certainly the things you think of when you say you are biracial were not entirely visible to other people. So then you spend a lifetime being accused of lying about your genetic background and when you don’t have concrete answers, you then begin to question, Well am I?” While Kate was desperate for answers, she had no desire to reach out to the people who had them. Her mother always urged her to connect with her biological mother but negated the thought of talking to either Cathy or Michael. But while Kate didn’t feel the need to pursue a relationship with her biological mother, she was grateful for the decision that she made, “I am proud of a woman that I don’t know that chose me instead of herself.” To Kate, that was the only feeling she ever associated with her biological mother.
April 1994, seven years after Kate and Greg began dating, he finally proposed. She mentioned to me that when she and Greg were thinking about starting a family that her desire to have children of her own was not strong. Kate said that she always imagined she would pay it forward and adopt. However it just never happened in their lives. Soon after their marriage, Kate and Greg welcomed their first child Conor into this world. To the both of them, seeing their genetics in someone that they are directly responsible for became a sole focus.
Cleveland, OH 2016 The O’Haras are a family of four living in the suburbs. Greg is a partner in an investment banking firm and Kate is her children’s biggest cheerleader, “I’m profoundly proud of my children and it’ll make me cry but you know you love deeply when you realize how lucky you are to have kids and how quickly they can be gone.” Today, at almost fifty, adoption has left Kate with an underlying fear of being left. While anyone can say that she spent the majority of her life with a family that loved and guided her, she is reminded daily of the endless places she could be—both good and bad. The final question I asked Kate during the interview was, “How does being adopted define you.” To which she responded, “My being adopted defines so much of my strength and who I am as a woman and how I care for others and my loyalty and my dedication. But mostly my pride and what I actually am and what I finally found out what I was.” Kate had to spend twenty-five years of her life without answers of who she is and where she came from, and while that hindered the way she discovered her true self, she eventually realized that she didn’t need to know where she came from to know who she wanted to be.
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Daddy ISABELLA NILSSON
I
knew my father wasn’t my father the day he refused to say that he loved me. We had this routine—he’d tuck me beneath spaceship sheets and kiss my forehead, sticky with candy and fruit juice and childhood sweat, and sit there for a while, indenting the bed, holding my hand. He wouldn’t read. He’d just sit, and tell me that he loved me. And then he’d get up, and turn out the lights, and I would fall asleep. And then, one night, he didn’t.
I had grown two inches in the past three months, and reached his chin, now, tall enough to grasp the jar of pickles on the second shelf in the kitchen without climbing onto the counter. “Tuck me into bed,” I asked him, one night. “And tell me you love me the most in the world.”
Ingredients for a ritual, I thought. He wants to banish me out of his life. Or himself.
“No,” he said, drinking a bottle of something dark, and heavy. “You’re too old for that now.”
The father-creature triumphed on my eleventh birthday. I had sat behind my desk that day at school, doodling, dreaming of a blue cake with rocket ships and robots. But when I returned home, everything was wrong. My cake sat, squat and crumbled, on the dining room table. They had written “Erica” on it, instead of “Ethan.” It was pink. “They wrote my name wrong,” I told him.
It was in bed that night that I considered for the first time that my father had been co-opted by some sort of father creature, that this was not daddy at all. When my mother died when I was seven he had taken me out for pancakes after the funeral, and when I asked him to stop crying in the restaurant, telling him that people were staring, he only smiled and ordered me more pancakes and slid next to me to make an indent in the red pleather of the booth, so that he could hold my hand. He didn’t make pancakes any more. “Cook for yourself,” he said. “You’re old enough.” The father-creature was winning the war. And he wouldn’t drive me anywhere, so I rollerbladed, even in the rain, and he wouldn’t wake up in the mornings to go be a fireman, so I poured cups of cold water on his face so he spluttered, and at night I would watch him from a dark corner because the electricity was abrupt and uncanny and off more often than not, and the way he stood in front of the dresser, staring into the mirror with his hands pulling on the skin of his face, suggested to me only that the skin and face of my father was a mask, something the father-creature could pull off. And when he staggered away, sometimes there was white powder on the dresser and sometimes there was a dark bottle and, sometimes, nothing lay there at all.
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“It’s not yours,” he said. “I got it on discount,” and sat in the half-lit light of the dining room watching me eat my cake, alone, surrounded by unopened newspapers. He rested his glass potion on the gut of his stomach and in the shadows it looked like his mask was slipping off. The creature stalked me that night, pathetic, stumbling, slurred. In the dark his true face was old and wet and gaping. “It’s never been you,” he said, sitting on me, making an indent on my stomach. “It’s never been you. I love your mother.” And the father-creature cried. It sounded like busted-out nostrils and smoke inhalation and crushed glass. I took pity on it. What a sad, strange monster, impersonating my father. I would take it in, and feed it, and make sure it was loved. I saw my old father, again, in the morning. Turned away from me, sitting in his chair in the cleaned-up dining room, humming along to Italian opera on the radio with his paper and firefighter’s coffee mug and morning cigarette. The kitchen smelled like sausages and orange juice. But when I called out his name, the humming abruptly stopped. And he didn’t turn. He didn’t say anything at all.
GINA BOMPIEDI
Taking a Look Back
M
y grandmother smiles at me with a grin larger than one I could ever conjure. Next to her, friends cluster on top of one another, holding their wine and brimming with laughter. I don’t know who took the photograph, but seeing my father’s mother in the center staring straight at me, I hardly care. My grandfather is also in the photograph. Sitting away from his wife, his quieter demeanor can be found at the far right of the group. On his chest is a nametag which reads, “arl”, the ‘C’ blocked out by Rhette’s arm. Beside her, Dick, Kay, Paul and “uth” attempt to be ready to have their picture taken. My grandmother, “uth” (the ‘R’ much like my grandfather’s is blocked out by a thick glass of wine) sits with poise and charm. I want to say she was holding a glass of whiskey, but she seems far too elegant to be caught with a glass of whiskey in hand. The photograph tells a story of warmth and joy. The vignette holds a grey haze stuck in the frame, forever looming in the air. However, like smoke, it keeps the warmth from the 60-year-old fire which once burned, stuck, suspended, in the frame. I can only imagine what must have taken place that night… April 10, 1943 7:48pm
02
The smell of cologne and perfume floats about in the mirthful air. A young Victor phonograph sits in the corner of the room playing Tommy Dorsey. All about, young guys and gals swirl about the wooden floor, holding smiles and full glasses of whiskey. A murmur of voices, laughter, and glasses clinking fills the air over the sounds of sweet, easy white jazz. My grandmother, a woman in her late twenties, makes her way across the room with a decorated glass in hand. On her cotton pleated shirt rests a nametag, as it rustles and sways with her every step. My grandfather, to whom she is walking to, stands in a casual suit as his own nametag, longing to sway with hers. She approaches him, and in doing so, the room’s lively hum settles to the sound of I’m Getting Sentimental Over You beginning on the record player. Soon couples are pairing and swaying softly in the heavy air, getting drunk on the sounds and smells which surround them. After the song completes, they laugh, clap and then resume the night’s chatter. 7:55pm
01 Family by Melody Buca 02 Velociraptor by Amanda Merritt
The room’s air is getting warmer now. The last bit of sunlight begins to fade away. However, few lights come up to take its place. In the dim air, the smells now less noxious, everyone is feeling alert and excited. While the day may have ended, the night has just begun. Soon the music becomes louder, and as the rhythm picks up over the phonograph, so does the sound of footsteps dancing. More people begin to flood the room now, skipping the pre-party affairs and go straight to the climax of the evening. The room has a golden glow to it now, lighting up the white and beige shirts, dresses, and suits. 9:00pm
The dancing fades now, inviting room for more chatter. Nametags are barely hanging on now, and their owners are swaying just as much. Breaking the haze, a man’s voice resounds through the room, offering to take photographs. At this sound, my grandmother gently herds her friends and husband onto the wooden bench sitting quietly at the side of the room. Trying to be careful to not waste film, the photographer attempts to capture them all in one go. A quick flash, a small click, and big smiles freeze forever on the black and white film.
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03 Bosphorus Strait by Madi Brady 04 Wind Runner by Farah Sayed
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Arezu
CAROLINE JOBSON
Five sets of eyes rested fixedly upon me, turning my face red. “You’ll never guess,” I stammered, flashing a nervous smile through my burning cheeks. Stranded in a sea of Marys, Elizabeths, and Catherines, I questioned whether or not to reveal my own middle name. In the split second it took me to catch my breath, I was transported back to a time where such a dilemma did not exist. The sweet scent of cardamom, sumac, and saffron whisked me away as the comfort and belonging of hot tea fresh from the samovar carried me back in time:
I sat, huddled next to my babajoon in his living room in Texas, my dark brows woven together in the middle of my forehead in frustration. Feet dangling over the edge of the plush plum chair, I could not quite reach the intricate Persian carpet that seemed to anchor every detail of the room. My fingers gripped the thick crayon in an intense bout of concentration, cracking the stem of the waxy stick in vain. Laughing, he squeezed my tiny hand in his, smoothing my hair back as I furiously pressed on. We worked in tandem as he patiently guided me in writing my middle name: Arezu. Mine in crayon, his in ink, we sat suspended halfway between native tongue and foreign language, bound by love between grandfather and grandchild.
Snapping out of my midday reverie, I was once again surrounded by the gaggle of curious girls. “It’s Arezu,” I divulged, waiting for the inevitable void in conversation to follow. “Arezu is the Farsi word for wish I continued. Meeting their puzzled, pensive gazes, we locked eyes: mine primed with a layer of blue from my father and coated in the deep rich mocha of my mother, theirs also an amalgam of unique and rich heritages and stories.
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Although I consider myself to be an American Northerner born in the South, claiming Persian, English and German descent, these one-off distinctions do not so easily communicate every aspect of who I am. Simply stating that I am, in part, Persian does not fully convey the experiences it has fostered. Poised on the polished mahogany of my grandfather’s desk, the framed slip of paper of my Farsi writing reminds us both of the shared blood and memory that courses through our veins. The flowing lines of script that so gracefully curve and connect remind me that there is, in fact, more than one way to create language, sentiment, and sound. Though I would once wish for a simple, easily communicable name to tell the Marys, Elizabeths, and Catherines, I now would not trade my nuanced name for any “wish” that might come my way. The discussions I now have with my peers are ones full of color and light, where stories and backgrounds are swapped in a more holistic understanding of the world and the people in it. Today, when I face my reflection, I know who I am. Whether it be the shades of lineage that fuse to create eye color or the reflection of thought that comes with any and all cultural identities, nothing worth understanding is simple or easily defined. As such, I have transformed my “wish” into a will to expose myself to diverse channels of thinking and being, for it is within this space that I best understand myself and others. From laughing over Chinese tongue twisters with Hu lăoshī and watching “tv5monde” with my mother in the morning to bonding over broken German with my cousins Hendrik and Gregor in Frankfurt, I look forward to exploring the world and the wealth of possibilities, differences, and opportunities that lie within.
MY PERFECT HARMONY “¡Mija despiértate que vas a perder el bus!” I groan as I open my eyes to see, my grandma, Habita’s worried face. She has the hefty job of taking care of us while our parents are away, and seeing the anguish reflected on her face, I jump into the shower and get dressed as quickly as possible only to see the kitchen clock glaring a budding 6:20 a.m. Of course this isn’t my grandmother’s fault, in Colombia, everyone goes to school as early as 5 a.m., but in the third grade in Cleveland, Ohio, things are quite different. As I attempt to tell her about this, she force-feeds me breakfast, and being the proud woman that she is, she refuses to hear even a word come out of my mouth in protest. What comes next, however, is one of the highlights of my day. She lets me crawl back into her bed, and I sleep snuggled up while she keeps watch for the bus. This morning situation lasted for the entire week she was taking care of us, and I adored every minute of it. It was an ordinary day in my 4-year-old life; Habita had stopped by for a visit and walked in to the apartment looking very elegant or as we would say, pinchada, with high heels and a long jacket as usual. This time, however, she had abandoned her purse, which laid on top of the kitchen counter. This was my moment; everything I had been taught had come down to this, I thought to myself as I got a hold of the purse. Seas of thoughts were running through my mind: Would I blow it? I couldn’t, I wouldn’t and I wasn’t. Grinning I searched through the entire purse until I found that tiny metal and plastic container. Would this put an end to all our present and future suffering? I clearly thought so, which is why I threw Habita’s lighter into the trash. Who was to blame for her terrible addiction? After all, smoking had grown popular during her youth and later as an attorney had only increased. Yet, both of my parents had taught me from the earliest age, that smoking was dangerous and that she eventually would die from terrible lung diseases, so I decided to take control. I wake up early on a Sunday morning to the perfect tangy and sweet smell of freshly squeezed orange juice filling the air, and the sound of my parents in the kitchen. I hear the clanging of the cooking pans as my parents making huevos pericos. Rushing to dress up my favorite stuffed animals in the playroom, I then bring them into the kitchen. Then, my fellow companions (the stuffed animals), sit at the end of the table with us while my parents read El Tiempo. After breakfast my parents take my sister and me to the cycle route of Bogotá and we ride our bikes through the city. Reflecting on these memories, I still feel nostalgia for this joyful time. Even though it truly was short compared to the other six days of the week. I was, however, spending time with my parents, something that rarely would happen normally. Which is why I think there is a real truth in George Moore’s statement. My parents, during those years in time, were travelers who were so busy “traveling” for them to notice, what I already had, the importance of a home. Home isn’t just the literal apartment or furniture; it consists on building memories on being present and being a family. This is why young Oriana enjoyed the weekends, and why even now, I can remember them clearly. February 18, 2005. The day of my sixth birthday, everything was perfect; I had a SpongeBob cake and was playing with my best friend Maria Paula. Yet, it felt wrong. My parents had practically disappeared from the planet, as they were visiting the then unheard cities of Toronto and Cleveland deciding on our future, while the rest of my family was singing and celebrating. Ten years later I still remember feeling as if a part of me was missing during the party. The atmosphere although joyful, lacked a sense of harmony, as celebrations are never complete without family around to make it special.
ORIANA CRUZ
La Piragua – A Classic Cumbia Song “Me contaron lo abuelos que hace tiempo, navegaba en el Cesar una piragua, que partia del Banco viejo puerto a las playas de amor en Chimichagua. Zapoteando el vendaval se estremecia e impasible desafiaba la tormenta, y un ejercito de estrellas la seguia tachonandola de luz y de leyenda. Era la piragua, era la piragua, Era la piragua de Guillermo Cubillos, era la piragua, era la piragua. La piragua, la piragua, la piragua, la piragua... Doce bogas con la piel color majagua y con ellos el temible Pedro Albundia, en las noches a los remos le arrancaban un melodico rugir de hermosa cumbia. Doce sombras, ahora viejos ya no reman, ya no cruje el maderamen en el agua, solo quedan los recuerdos en la arena donde yace dormitando la piragua.” This song, written in 1969 about a navigator, Guillermo Cubillos, who sold merchandise from one place to another, is one of the few memories that I share with my grandmother Helena, who suffers from vascular dementia. It is amazing to think that when I was little, she used to remember details such as where we lived at the time and how old I was. Now, I cherish this traditional song, remembering one afternoon in Santa Marta, Colombia. I decided to go down to the beach and asked my grandmother if she wanted to go with me, at least to keep me company. Surprisingly, she said yes. So, we went down to the beach. I brought a magazine and for a while, my grandmother looked at the scenery. But then she started asking me who I was and if we were family, something common for a person suffering dementia. She said she was too comfortable for me to not be family. I told her that I was her granddaughter, and after 20 minutes of explaining who I was and where I lived my grandma looked at me and smiled. She told me stories about her childhood, telling me how she was a cachaca just as I was. Eventually, we went into the sea and she demanded that we sang songs. So we sang La Piragua, a song so old (a classic Colombian song) yet felt so new because of energy and youth my grandmother brought to the song. Colombians are very family centered people; from the time they are born until they are married they are expected to live with their families. It is simply a tradition that has occurred for centuries. I remember the conversation my mother and I had in the car a couple of weeks ago about my two-year-old cousin Anna. She is my only American-Colombian cousin and lives a completely different life than the one my other cousins and I have lived. With her parents out at work and no grandmother or aunt around, will she ever have memories as deep or ingrained as mine? Who will teach her about her heritage? I want my little cousin to experience and value family as much as I have learned to throughout my life. No matter where I go, I will always have the memories of my family; they are a part of my identity, of my culture and my customs. I will try to be present in Anna’s memory just as my family is in mine.
W W W. H B I N R E T R O S P EC T.CO M
x 11
05
West Virginia ROSALIE PHILLIPS A tree bends over to steep its leaves in the cold creek, coming to a boil beneath the sweating sun. But tea is not the drink of the efficient, so in West Virginia we drink coffee. The earliest riser brews for the family. Water flows left to right. Brown, gold, and orange leaves drip into the river and are carried helplessly away. The organisms that live beneath know better than to ever get swept away. We lie on our backs and watch cotton balls drift through the sky, the smell of cow manure too close for comfort. Together we drank tea that day. My grandfather places a hand to his back, groaning like a hinge as he steps in the water almost ready to become ice. The wind is cool now whistling between the water and branches. After one trip to the flea market, I return home with a wind chime embellished by small blue glass dolphins. My grandmother smiles when I gifted it to her proudly but hangs it by the fireplace. Never to move. Never to make a sound. Looking across the solid creek I can’t help but wonder, where do all the crayfish go when the water freezes? And are they simply below the ice, awaiting spring’s next coming?
05 Inside Looking Out by Eliza Judson
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R E T R O S P EC T: A P U B L I C AT I O N O F H AT H AWAY B R OW N S C H O O L
An Unknown Journey Through Familiar Beliefs ISHA LELE
R
eligion was never important to me. I prayed alongside my parents almost everyday since the second I was born, but it felt like a routine habit instead of an understanding of life. The language and complex structure of Sanskrit writings had always been music to my ears, familiar tunes similar to the nursery rhymes my mother sang to me at night. My little understanding and ability to speak Hindi was only a tool for bragging to other Indian moms, but it had never actually helped me further my understanding of what we were clasping our hands for every morning. Hinduism seemed so distant and so unknown to my 21st century American lifestyle that I had realized that I was nothing like my parents. They were the ones that thanked the Gods everyday for what they had accomplished, and practically lived their whole lives just to praise them. It had soon become my mission to explore Hinduism for the sake of my family and learn to honor it, while finding my place on this planet as a believer of anything that suited my personal morals. I have been raised by traditional parents, yet ones that were open minded to new cultures and societies. Although conservative in many social aspects, my parents were willing to give up a stable life in their known, homeland of India. They escaped to an unknown place just to further understand the culture of the unfamiliar, Western world. Their first decision to try their new ideas was to raise their children as non-vegetarians. A prime reason why I felt so different from my own parents was the fact that we didn’t even eat the same meals at some times. My dad, after coming to America, had dabbled into meats quite a few times, but my mother has still yet to this day tried a meat product. My sister, brother, and I had been at restaurants alongside my parents, eating food that was completely against what they practiced back at their home. We had never eaten red meat because that was too big of a sacrifice my parents could make, but it was un-assuring that I was eating products my mother had not even ever tasted. Since I was younger and still today, I feel comfort inside of me knowing that if I try something new, I know it’s safe because my parents have done it. It gives me a feeling of relief and warmth to know that my parents let me do something because they know it’s healthy for me, but it made me nervous knowing that I was experiencing something that neither of them choose to experience for themselves. I remember sitting at school one day and my mom visiting me to eat lunch together. I asked her why she didn’t eat meat and she said because it was against her beliefs. I asked her then why she let her own children eat it, and she said it was because she didn’t want us to miss out. I started to cry just moments after because I realized I wasn’t a dedicated Hindu. I felt lost and as a disgrace to my parents. A few years later I decided to become a vegetarian, the first step of my journey. I felt that following the rules of my religion would help me feel more connected. I still did not know what many of the stories or songs meant or stood for, so my diet has ended up being my only hope to kindle my relationship with God. My parents were shocked, yet proud about my decision. After just a few months of living off my new diet, I became a more sensitive and aware person. I learned about how animals were treated and the decreasing number of certain species for the value of humans, and came to realize my decision was correct. Preserving animals became one of the first thing I agreed with in Hinduism, and taught me how to control myself when making a change, knowing it’s for the better of my relationships with my family and God. Praying was not crucial in my life, but for my family it was. Praying for my parents was crucial, so it was my goal to at least learn it. Everything my parents did and believed in was right in my mind, so in order to have a successful, fulfilling life I needed to take my actual knowledge of Hinduism
to a further extent. As a result of this, I had now started taking weekly Indian Day School classes, the second step to finding my faith. When walking into my first lesson, I immediately realized why I felt so different from my family. I was Indian, meaning, in my head I should have had dark brown skin with matching eyes, and thick long black hair to finish the stereotypical look. My whole extended family had it, and I looked like an adopted child. I had very pale skin during that time, with light green eyes and brown hair with many lighter, natural highlights. My mom said it all came from my dad’s Marathi side, which was more than true, but I was now taking a class with people who looked more like my family than I did. In order to feel a stronger connection with my family now, it was once again necessary for me to find my parents moral beliefs. I needed to match them because the physical traits were already holding me back. I had come to learn about many values that my parents had already started to teach me. Among them were respecting your elders, never lying or cheating, and keep an honest lifestyle without cheating or lying to get ahead. Hinduism started teaching me how I should live my life, without dictating me to do certain things at all time. The specific Gods were very confusing to me, especially since there are hundreds of them, but I soon came to realize that you didn’t have to believe or even understand the Gods. I could experience my own, altered, American lifestyle yet live with customs and the moral code that Hinduism had taught. When my parents started switching over to their Western lifestyle, they became more lenient on wardrobe. Growing up in India, around the age of 13, most women had stopped wearing short-shorts and spaghetti-strapped tank tops. Although not as conservative as other religions, Hinduism taught that a human’s body was beautiful but it should not always have to show off everything. My parents, both strong feminists, always believed women were just as equal as men so the covering of the whole body was something they always disagreed with. They thought it showed a sign of weakness. However, since they were born, they appreciated being modest in clothing. Until I was 11 I had worn small shorts and tank tops, but soon came to be aware about the Hindu ways of dress when I was 12. For a couple months, I started to comply with the rules to show to my parents that I was a dedicated believer. This was the third step in my journey. However, after going to an all-girls school for 10 years, it made me question if I actually believed in covering my shoulders or even upper thighs. I started to switch back to my usual dressing, and I came to realize that my decision was okay with my parents. Although I’m not following the exact Hindu code at this point, I realized that my own morals and beliefs were more powerful than what a book told me. I figured out that my parents didn’t need my life to be controlled by an unknown force, but I could be my own ruler. Now, the only conservative American clothing I wear is a full-piece swimming suit. That however, is for my own sake for comfort and dedicated to what my parents believe in bathing suits, not what was taught by the religion I was trying to follow. Still today, I have not fully completed my journey. I have yet to figure myself out, and where I stand with the fairy-tale-like Gods that Hinduism teaches. Although I’m not a full believer, I have outlined my behavior to the ones of the stories of the Gods. My parents still don’t know that I am confused about my religion, but our discussions over specific stories and morals have brought us closer together. I don’t feel outcasted or unaware of my religion anymore, and feel that I finally, truly belong under the Lele name. I live modestly, help others around me, and choose to give up things for the better of others because of my own decisions. Religion hasn’t dictated my life, but has taught me to live a better one.
W W W. H B I N R E T R O S P EC T.CO M
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Move Over Charlie Brown; It’s the Great Pumpkin, Areklett Version CATHERINE AREKLETT
I have a collie named Bunny. We got her from a puppy mill, which to the outside world generally throws my family into either one of two categories: do-gooders who slap “I Love My Rescue” stickers on their bumpers or implicit co-conspirators of inhumane backyard-breeders. We don’t have a sticker but we do have a conscience, and I prefer to think that we fit in our own special category: fiscally conservative, not too-picky, collie buyers. In other words, the price was right and we knew from the get-go that she’d never get a blue ribbon at the Westminster Dog Show. She looks like Lassie but smaller because (spoiler alert) in real life Lassie was played by a boy dog. But, other than the equipment, Bunny and Lassie could be twins, massive shedding machines of mahogany and black and white hair that resembles the hues in a Starbucks’ pumpkin spice latte—if you also order a pump of chocolate syrup and extra whipped cream. Bunny is two now. She adores American cheese, nibbles my sleeves, steals my socks, and I swear she laughs with her tail. And what she lacks in a pedigree, she more than makes up for in eager-to-please devotion. Never far from my side, she listens to me while I talk about myself, keeping up the appearance of being interested in the conversation. I accept her admiration as conclusive evidence that I am wonderful. Collies are working dogs, traditionally bred to herd sheep in Scotland. This herding instinct comes in quite handy in our backyard, particularly in the fall when we harvest the pumpkins that we planted earlier in the spring. Let me stop you before you start to picture John Deere tractors in our backyard. The closest thing we have to farm equipment is a leaf blower, and, the last time I checked, Old McDonald doesn’t own one. And lest you think we are suburban wannabe weekend farmers, going organic and composting and occasionally throwing around the word “vegan,” let me assure you that is not the case either. In fact, we prefer store-bought food, preferably microwaveable. And, not to throw her under the bus, but my mother’s green-thumb is quite black, a virtual Grim Reaper for many generations of geraniums, impatiens, and roses. Despite her graveyard gardens, there is a success story, which started as a bet between my mom and dad. Over a decade ago, they were desperate to start a family tradition, and they decided upon an annual pumpkin carving party. My mom thought it would be “fun” to grow the gourds themselves. My dad laughed (because he knows my mom), and that made my mom mad (because she knew exactly what he was thinking), and thus was born the Areklett family pumpkin patch. Here is a brief primer on pumpkins, a “What to Expect When You Are Expecting: Pumpkin Version.” Pumpkin seeds are smart. Buried in late spring in fish emulsion soil that smells like low-tide, the seeds always know which way is up, and when a seed sprout cracks the soil, two succulent oval baby leaves unfold, at first like opening hands and then like low-flying butterflies. If they could speak, the leaves would say, “Gimme water,” a command to which I slavishly defer nearly every summer morning. In early July, the greedy toddler pumpkin plant begins to crawl outward and upward, using its curly tendril sticky fingers to investigate its neighbors. Its pudgy leaves, gorged with water, hover like mulch, mediating ground and sky, shading the soil and keeping it moist. By late July, the plant finds its legs and acts like an adolescent, bursting with energy, going places without
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R E T R O S P EC T: A P U B L I C AT I O N O F H AT H AWAY B R OW N S C H O O L
permission, growing six inches overnight, and dressing in lemon and tangerine colored blossoms to draw the attention of bees, those tireless matchmakers who guzzle the flower’s sweet nectar and release its citrusy pollen perfume into the air. Eventually, the mature vines settle down, and grapefruit-sized, fuzzy green-skinned pumpkins appear, the weaker ones sacrificed with gardening shears to allow the stronger ones to develop into plump orange orbs. Around mid-August, it is the time to perform pumpkin chiropractics, sitting the young adult pumpkins on their bottoms to encourage the classic pumpkin look. Settled in place, it’s then time to leave them alone. The fruit ripens over the next month, trapping summer’s energy inward and focusing on the fruit and seeds in its belly. When only the fiery skulls remain, rising regally above their now scraggly and tattered skeleton vines, a sharp knife and no mercy finish the job. My dad never bothered to build a fence around the pumpkin patch, relying instead on Becky (our first collie) and now Bunny to keep the critters away. An elegant introvert, Bunny spends the summer in a Sphinx-like position, eyeing the growing pumpkins and the woods beyond it. She merely cocks her head when catbirds screech “Eric! Eric!” thinking perhaps that someone wants my little brother, whose name just happens to be Eric. She also permits butterflies and hummingbirds and bees to flirt with the flowers uninterrupted. However, at the mere hint of a black squirrel’s bushy tail or a rabbit’s twitching whiskers—BOOM. Bunny transforms into a heat seeking missile, a million-mile-an-hour bolt that sends these trespassers scampering up into trees or down into underground tunnels. For good measure, her high-pitched bark warns them that she means business, and once she inspects the garden, satisfied that all is clear, she returns to her sentinel’s post, and crouches down once again, locked, loaded, and ready. The rhythmic cadence of this summer dance between Bunny and the intruders reaches a feverish tempo during the fall, particularly when the pumpkins are swollen and the squirrels risk Bunny’s offense in their frantic scramble for fallen acorns. What had once been a tango is now a tarantella, and the latest party crashers are bucks, madly in love and on the loose. Bunny waits for these Casanovas, squinting her eyes into the lingering sun that kisses outstretched wings destined for warmer places. I often catch her following the fall of crimson sugar maple leaves, see-sawing their way back and forth, back and forth, as if God pressed a slow-motion button, until they gently come to rest upon the ever-changing mosaic carpet below. She uses these growing, crunchy piles as her personal burglar alarm. Waiting, waiting, waiting, until the unmistakable crunch of hooves trips the siren and propels Bunny into super fast-forward as she chases bobbing white tails that streak through the woods and beyond. It is then that Bunny disappears, sometimes for an hour, and I like to imagine that somewhere along the way, she and the deer stop to breathe in the loamy air and to settle their differences. If they do, the détente is brief because Bunny is right back at it when the next offender appears. And it is in this setting, where autumn’s sweet breath chills the air and jewel-toned leaves turn brown, that we haul the pumpkins into the kitchen, brag how they are the best batch ever, and proceed to honor
06 06 Acorn Squash by Alison Xin
Henry Ford in our own way by setting up an assembly line. My dad slices away the skull caps, lops off the fibrous strands and seeds hanging from the lid, and passes the pumpkin down to Eric, who dips his hands inside the cavity’s goopy brains, angling for elusive slimy seeds. The pumpkin coughs up hundreds of them, which we will later dry and sprinkle with sea salt and then shove into our mouths on Sunday nights during the jumpiest moments of The Walking Dead. After Eric’s seed extraction, I’m next. I’m in charge of removing the meat that sticks to the pumpkin’s ribs. As a seasoned scooper, I know that the trick lies in those cheap, serrated plastic trowels sold in supermarket aisles around Halloween. Strong forearms and wrists help too, as does a willingness to walk around for three days afterwards with Oompa-Loompa stained hands. By the time the first pumpkin receives its autopsy, the air hangs with the smell of, well, pumpkin. A clingy, vegetal odor, not the “pumpkin spice” Bath & Body Works version, which is really just cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, vanilla, and cloves–not pumpkin at all. I once read that the flavor behind movie-theater butter occurs naturally in pumpkins. However, after gutting the twentieth pumpkin, I never detect buttery undertones, just plain and simple pumpkin. The final handoff is to my mom. She methodically rolls the pumpkin meat into balls and drops them onto cookie sheets, where they will cook in
the oven for the better part of the evening, giving off a malty fragrance. Once the pumpkin balls cool, my mom tosses them together with eggs and salt and dry milk and wheat flour, working it with her hands into a dry and stiff dough. As the dough piles grow, each of us, by now done with our individual tasks, meld into new roles. My mom and dad knead and spread the dough into half inch sheets, which Eric and I attack with cookie cutters, creating nearly thirty dozen deer, squirrel, and bunny rabbit cut-outs. That’s nearly one for each day of the year. This mini-menagerie bakes for forty minutes, emerges piping hot, and dries into a hard biscuit. It is here that I would love to claim that the biscuit is scrumptious, perfect for soaking into ice-cold milk and enjoying as an afterschool snack. Or that it emerges from the oven with the tint of a perfect “burnt-orange” Crayola crayon. Or that it leaves the kitchen smelling for days like a gingerbread house. The truth is that the biscuit is a beigey, tooth-cracking, sawdust-flavored failure. Utterly tasteless and spit-out-able. At least that would be the opinion of the average person. Luckily, the average dog is nicer than the average person. And Bunny is nicer than the average dog. Every day for the next year, Bunny will gobble a squirrel or a rabbit or a deer—the biscuit version, since she never stands a chance with the real ones. All our hard work, through soggy springs, sticky summers, and cornucopia colored falls, is worth it because, in the end, our faithful friend and family member Bunny catches every crumb.
W W W. H B I N R E T R O S P EC T.CO M
x 15
I Promise to Treasure My Roots NATUWA BASALIRWA At the age of six, a shy, little Ugandan girl, I never imagined that there would be a point at which I would live in America for most of my life. It never occurred to me that I would grow so used to white people and the particular way they smelt. Who would have known, that I too would start rolling my r’s… For a long time, being raised as a privileged, but pretty normal Ugandan kid, America, to me was a place that I for sure knew existed, but couldn’t help but think that there was possibility of it just being dreamt up. I wasn’t alone in this. Many of my friends and other young Ugandans who had never been to America thought so too. Could such a place exist? America was where the white people came from. They all had extremely flat bums, sharp noses, and hair that seemed unnaturally straight and discolored—yellow, brown, red….(so unlike African hair which was extremely curly and black). They had a funny way of talking—always rolling their r’s. Those Americans, who seemed so out of place in such a place as Uganda, who got burnt easily. (They were always nice though!) If you had been to America and back, or had family who lived or visited often there, you were seen as privileged. My father traveled to America a lot. He would bring back American clothes, American school supplies, American toys…. Not many children were that lucky. Though I’d never been, I knew that a place that made cool toys and stationery, and where the white people came from could not be anything less than awesome. I was six when I finally got the chance to see America for myself. It was 2005. My mother had told me the good news the morning we were planning on leaving. All our workers: the servants, the maid, the nanny, and the guard were summoned that very morning to receive their last payment. I didn’t feel sad. Nor was I happy. It hadn’t quite hit me yet. I just knew we were leaving… My father was already ahead of us in America. He had been given a job and a scholarship to Case Western Reserve University. Although, he was already a physician it was a great opportunity. Determining that it might take a longer time than previously thought to graduate, my mother had decided that we should join him in America. He would eventually graduate in 2013 with his PhD in epidemiology (otherwise known as a research analyst, an epidemiologist studies the distribution and determinants of a disease or event in a certain population and makes charts with the findings). (That would also be the year that my elder sister would graduate from high school. And the year, that I would start high school.)
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We were limited in the amount of luggage we could carry, and therefore left many of our belongings behind. In less than a day, we were gone… forever. Just like that. Ready to start a new life in America.
Left Behind Constant, radiant, sun. Cool Nights. Rainy season. Big birthday parties at the amusement park. Caterpillar Roller Coaster. Friends And Friends of friends Invited. Nicole Who used to be my best friend. Adriane Who got his tongue stuck in a bottle. Fhene(Jackfruit) Plantains Sumbusa Sun cooked grasshoppers. The dogs Patti and Satanta. Kitty the cat. Rides in the back of my uncle’s truck. Motorcycle rides through trafficMy little arms gripping big, firm bellies Hanging on. Home A tall red fence surrounding our property The Veranda Chickens and rabbits The simple life. Forever.
We flew. First class. It was beyond, beyond. My little kid self fell in love with the personal TV in front of me, which I knew my mother was not too happy about… the free pillows and blanket... the food… the bathroom...with the nice white couple who sat next to me, and gave me candy (and marveled at how thin my arms were…). My first and only airplane trip was a pretty grand experience. I would not have left the plane had we not been landing in America.
R E T R O S P EC T: A P U B L I C AT I O N O F H AT H AWAY B R OW N S C H O O L
When we finally arrived, it was November, and really cold. I experienced a cold that I had never known in my six years of life, living on the equator. Cleveland Heights, Ohio, was where we would reside for the next two years. My First Snow It had been at least a month since we’d arrived. My parents paid rent for the house. We were all inside, when I noticed little white specs falling from the sky. Somehow, I knew to call it snow. My father had sent pictures and told us about it from his visits to America. We ran outside with such joy to examine the snow… you would have thought it was Jesus come special to take us to heaven. We were so excited. But once outside, my sibling and I were hit with a horrid gust of that cold frigid weather, which I now know is not uncommon in Cleveland. We tried to brace the cold in thin cotton clothing. We watched the snow collect… then I decided to grab it. My hands were bare. And you can imagine the shock experienced when I scooped up a handful…. My hands pulsed in agony! Such cold I had never felt before! We were back inside in less than ten minutes. School In Uganda, the school system is a bit different, and children tend to start school at a younger age. There are 7 years of primary education (P1-P7), 6 years of secondary education (S1-S6), and 3 to 5 years of post-secondary education. Primary one (otherwise known as P1) is the equivalent of first grade in America, and I had completed it in Uganda. My parents, though, determined that since we had come in the middle of the American school year, it would be better to finish the remaining few months of first grade, than move on to second. Additionally six years of age was too young by American standards to go to second grade. Ms. Kaar was the name of my teacher. She pitied me for being African and often gave me packs of crayons and colored pencils, as her way of charity. I didn’t know that I needed supplies for school (At the school that I had gone to, in Uganda, most necessary school supplies were provided. I brought my American stationery supplies to school, of course, but mainly to show off.) She was surprised that I spoke and understood English. “Where did you learn English? You’ve only been here for a few months,” she asked me. “I spok it in Uganda. Wee spok inglish at scool ahnd olso aht hom…,” I responded, in my thick accent. But I could read the clear shock painted on her face. Since English was my second language. The teachers treated me differently. I had to take my tests away from everyone, alone in a separate classroom. In addition, I had to meet with special teachers who met with children with special
07 Golden Sunset by Madeleine Kattan
07
needs. Most of the time, I ended up taking a bunch of standardized tests. It surprised them when I performed above average on everything. The American kids, mostly, left me alone... but at times, not being able to contain their curiosity, would bubble over and ask me genuine questions that they had been saving. Did you live in a tree? Did you have a pet tiger? How did you afford the ticket to America? How do you know how to speak English? I was clueless as to where these crazy questions came from and often answered with a blank stare. Later, I would find out the pitiful position in which African kids were portrayed. They were poor and malnourished. They had malaria. They were orphans. Children drank dirty water. They didn’t go to school. And how, even a few dollars could improve and change an African child’s life forever… I was disgusted that these videos that were meant to stir up some sympathy and a bit of guilt among the average Americans to get them to dish over money, brainwashed people to think that all Africans were facing these dire situations everyday. Although many of these situations are true, in several parts of Africa, it is obviously not the case with every child. I for one lived in the city of Kampala, which being the capital of Uganda, was rich and lively. There were some poorer areas, but my family was pretty well-to-do. My mother was a lawyer and my father a doctor. I had never seen or experienced such poverty that the Americans talked about. Even when we would visit relatives in the village, things were not that bad. But despite this, because it was all that was shown on TV, I too began to think that all there was to my home country was poverty, sickness, and violence. The kids at school might have had even more questions, but they only voiced a few of them. If I had known that their questions came from being misinformed, I would have answered with more than just a blank stare. It was now “those Americans” who laughed at this poor African girl… Who spoke with such a harsh accent, you couldn’t understand a word. Who wore unisex clothes and didn’t seem to mind. Who was so awed by crayons and stationery that the teacher gave to her out of pity. Who must have lived out on the savannah with wild animals. Who had no friends… I had to get used to spelling Mummy with an ‘o’ even though, it didn’t make sense to me. I called my mother Mummy, like the British–not mOH-mee... I had to get used to sarcasm. Sometimes ‘yes’ meant ‘no’ and ‘no’ meant ‘yes’. I learned the word ‘sure.’ There was no such thing as sure in Uganda. It was either ‘yes’ or ‘no’. I had to learn new body language, like shrugging of the shoulders. I had get used to referring to the rear end as butt and not bum. I learned that in America, chutex, was nailpolish. I had to learn that English words were not spelt the same way they sounded. I grew used to the way that [white] Americans smelt. As the year went by, I unearthed a passion for writing and drawing. I mostly drew pictures of white happy kids. If I drew myself, I was reluctant
to use the dark brown crayon to fill in my skin color. I used a very light sandy brown, instead, because it resembled tanned white skin. I convinced myself I would become a famous author, just like the American ones who wrote the stories we read in class. I often wrote of princesses…but was it an effort to cling to the past, of privilege and simplicity that seemed to slowly be slipping away? Who would have thought that I would grow to resent my skin color? That I would grow ashamed of my nationality? I let people call me African American. Though, people could sense the difference. I let myself believe that being pure African was a setback. That it meant poor, and unintelligent, even though I was everything but. In wanting so badly to fit in and isolate myself from being just a poor African, I began to change myself to become more “American.” I began talking ‘white,’ which just consisted of pronouncing—more like rolling my r’s, and saying sure, and using sarcasm. I also mastered the art of talking ‘black’ so that I passed for African American. At home, though, I still spoke with my African accent. I grew to be more and more embarrassed of my parents who still dressed like, looked like and spoke “African.” I often compared the way they looked and parented to other white friend’s parents. Moms are supposed to text their kids! They pack lunch for their kids. I had to pack my own….Kids my age don’t do serious chores. My parents did very few chores. They split most of them among us kids. Some American kids got paid to take out the trash. These American kids don’t know how to fry eggs or cook: while I knew how to cook several meals and main dishes enough to serve a whole family. Why do I have to cook dinner? But no matter how hard I tried. I felt that I was still, African. I was able to fool some people that I wasn’t, but most others could just sense it. I couldn’t be African American. In an effort to separate myself from all that truthfully made me unique, I lost touch… I became like a tree without roots…. And in turn, my insecurity grew from a small seed, into a stem and a flower. It wasn’t only insecure because of the shame I had for my nationality. I knew that I didn’t belong anywhere! I was not fully accepted in America. And if I went back to Uganda, I wouldn’t be fully accepted as African, either. I was too different. I felt the burden of a whole nation, in everything that I did. If I got a bad
grade or performed poorly, I wasn’t just disappointing myself, I disappointed a whole nation… and my family as well. In this way, I grew distant with my country and my people. I grew distant with my parents–who represent everything African.
I am now sixteen. I have lived more than half of my life in America. I don’t remember my best friend’s last name. I don’t remember my cousins and relatives. I don’t remember the smell of our compound. I don’t remember that I ever spoke with an accent with my American friends. I don’t remember that I sat in my father’s lap. Nor the comfort and warmth I felt while closely held and wrapped in my mother’s arms. I don’t remember that I laughed at the white Americans for rolling their r’s. I don’t remember that I shunned my nationality. I say I don’t remember but I do. Maybe just a little. Of a past that now, seems like a dream. Though it sometimes feels like Uganda is a dream, I know that I was born there. That I really did live there. That I have counts upon counts of relatives and extended family living there. I am proud of my ethnicity. I also now know that ‘American’ does not mean white. Or talking and acting in a certain way. In fact it means the opposite. America is made up of people of different ethnicities from all over the world. It is a mix of cultures. Now, I take pride in stating that I am 100% African. No, it doesn’t mean disadvantaged. I love finding ways to express my African ethnicity and culture. I love when people sense that I am different. I pronounce certain words differently. And that’s okay. I cherish the fact that my parents stand out, often laughing at the awkwardness they create in society. I love my excessively thick, curly hair. I love how my skin glows and darkens to black in the hot sun. I am a mélange swirl of ebony and alabaster, of pure African culture and an acquired American culture…. I understand that my ethnicity is not something that I can fake or just as easily throw away and get rid of. It will always define who I am, no matter how white I talk or act…. I promise to remember my African roots. I promise to love and treasure what sets me apart from everyone. I promise to remain, Natuwa Michelle Basalirwa Sanyu Bakaki, forever.
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W E R E
GODS
HANNA KEYERLEBER
W E
Everyone in my family is an ass. We’re headstrong creatures, steadfast and an impassable force to be reckoned with. We argue easily and we argue often. You think some disputes would be more severe than others, but from my childhood the biggest debates I remember were over who would host the holidays. Everyone had something to prove. Great Grandma wanted to remind us her skills in the kitchen were unparallelled. Her daughter, my Oma [German for grandma], aimed to gather the generations in her cozy, aggressively grand-parentsy house in Concord. Her son, my father, wanted to show that he was just as great as past generations. In reality, no one had to prove anything; the rest of us loved them unconditionally, yet the debate generated enough strife to move mountains. [“You hosted Thanksgiving last year.” “Well yes, but you just had everyone over for Easter.” “Mom, that was half a year ago.” “But you shouldn’t be able to host two in a row.” “I agree, that’s not fair.”] As serious as it may have sounded, the arguments were always good in nature and faith. Frankly, I feel as if they were a tradition in itself. They would eventually resolve the issue and share sandwiches and drinks afterwards. Someone always ended up hosting the holiday, whether it be in April or November or December. The entire family, from Great Grandma Udowdow who could remember the Great Depression down to my brother, barely a year old, would gather and share stories and laughter and food. For all the obstinance my family held, for all the petty arguments that could shake the earth, we were a family. Together we were as good as gods. [And they certainly acted like it, too, yet they wonder why I’m so reckless. I’d tell them that I had learned from the best, if I could.] Great Grandma Udowdow grew flowers with every step, the mortal form of Demeter, love in one hand and determination in the other. Her vegetable and flower garden grew, unrivaled by her neighbors. Every frost-bitten March I’d travel to St. Clairsville to help her plant rows and rows of potatoes. Mashed potatoes were her favorite Thanksgiving dish, made specifically with more butter and heavy cream than actual potato. Her recipe is a staple of our annual meals, in all its artery-clogging diabetes-inducing glory. She was positive, kind, encouraging. She taught me how to gamble. She had lived through immigration and a world war, had learned the price of peace, yet still sought out the good in everything. For all that she had lived through, she couldn’t be anything less than a goddess. [I once lost $4.00 to her in a game, which was an impressive feat considering we were playing with pennies and nickels. My mom banned anything larger than 5 cents after I won $12.00 in a half an hour.] Opa [German for grandpa], a cool and calculating man but by no means uncaring, was the Hades of our family. True to his immortal counterpart he was intimidating and a bit gloomy, yet honest to god one of the nicest and straightforward people I’ve known. I loved to play with his moustache. He
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hated vegetables but loved Coca Cola and lighthouses and cigarettes. My family loved his recipe for stuffing, from the seasoning of the bread crumbs to the cherries on top. He’d carve the turkey, prep it for stuffing, and offered me and my brother the wishbone shortly afterwards. Sitting at the head of the table, he led prayer and was always first to dig in. Afterwards, you could invariably find him asleep in his leather chair, next to the crackling fireplace and brick-stone hearth he build. Despite his brooding looks, he was a caring man and a rock stronger than us all. [I have a lot of his Coca Cola memorabilia now, including but not limited to a bank, a monopoly board, a thermometer, a window light, and a model car. I do not have his passion for cigarettes.] Oma took the seemingly irrefutable nuclear family values to heart, earning herself the title of Hera and position of queen. Born in the baby boom generation, she became the personification of exploration, finding unique explanations for everything. With her remarkable ability to translate that skillset to anything, it’s no surprise that her pies were delicious. From pumpkin to apple to chocolate pecan, she could churn out perfectection in an eight inch dish. She’d even let me help out, albeit with an eye watching closely as I rolled out the dough or puréed the pumpkin. Everything she did with such care and finesse that she couldn’t have been anything other than divine. [She’d watch me work on pies with a camera in hand, wanting to capture all of my “ best” moments. I think we’d agree to disagree on what best constituted.] To young me, we were immovable, impassable, a force to be reckoned with. We were gods and goddesses gathered around a table, the greatest family in the history of time. It was an honor. I baked pies with Hera, asked Demeter to pass the potatoes. I worked on crossword puzzles with Athena and built a lego monster with Hephaestus. Together we could move mountains, flood the desert, turn the Antarctic into paradise. My thoughts were immortal. My family was not.
Alien Writer American Dream MARIA PERILLA
I am four years old. Mama and I are at our first Real American Birthday Party. There are so many little girls just like me, but nothing like me. We line up to play a game with a clown. Time after time a little girl walks away from the game with a stuffed animal. I wait in line while everyone around me talks as if they’re underwater. I nod and say okay when anything is directed at me. More underwater talk; I say “okay, okay, okay.” It is my turn and I am so ready for my Real American Birthday Party stuffed animal too. I play the game with the clown like all the other little girls and am handed a coloring book. I don’t understand. I point at the stuffed animals, but the man talks and talks in tongues. He won’t give me the stuffed animal. I am crying now. In this moment all I know of America is a cold winter in a cold house, where people talk yet saying nothing at all. Mama picks me up. I tell her about the game and the coloring book, but she doesn’t know how to help. We are a different species it seems. This is the earliest memory of my otherness.
08 Stuck by Eliza Judson
08
I have had this desperate love affair with words as long as I can remember. When I was younger it was a puppy love, a schoolgirl crush at best. Nowadays poems only seem to crawl into my covers between the hours of one and four in the morning. Poetry these days is an impatient lover. I let it seep into my mouth and stay there like it owns my tongue. I have never written poems in Spanish. Spanish has been a better friend than poetry. She has always been kind, even in my stubborn formative years. Years ago, we would fight all the time when I twirled her and English together carelessly, when I stood her up, when I stopped calling. I know better now, I treat her well. With me she knows she is always at home.
I start translating waiters at restaurants when I’m seven. I explain permission slips, TV shows, American names, directions, jokes and books. I help my parents write emails at 12. “People think I’m wise because I wait to talk,” Papa says. “Really, I am just trying to find the right words, but I could sound so smart if I could speak like you and your brother. Now that would be a different story wouldn’t it?” Papa reaches for my hand across the dinner table and squeezes it tight. My hands look just like my father’s. We share the same winding veins with the same insatiable hunger to take things apart just to put them back together. My father makes use out of this hobby. He is our resident handyman. I make poems out of mine. I will go through layers until there is only bone. I take things apart just to see what it is to be deconstructed. How it must feel to be so easily assembled and unassembled. I ask you reader: Are you
satisfied knowing you are only a little part in a machine more important than you? Does your life start when you figure out your purpose as part of a whole? Are you whole yet? Are you lonely? Are you afraid?
I step out of the taxi. The rental car place is empty on this particular Sunday night in California. The rental car place is not a nice spot. It has broken-up asphalt and a chain link fence. The cars are curiously parked in only one corner, each one in a different direction. The same way you put away crayons in their box, and as an impatient child I wonder, what kind of person parks cars like that. Anyway...so the rental car place is not very beautiful, and the cars are a nervous mess, but I look up... and there it is. This magnificent sky, this obese heaven, and it is fading into blacks and blues like one big bruise to take pride in. They say everything is bigger in America. Whoever “they” are, whatever “they” have seen or heard, they are right about this. For if the holiest person I know tells me that what I saw getting out of that taxi was the spotless cheek of God, I would have shouted “yes!” and “of course I knew it was, I knew it was, I always knew it was!”
I remember reading this story once when I was little about the word “please” and how it was a little elf that lived inside of a boy’s mouth. And when the boy stopped saying it, the little elf got bored and left him to find someplace more polite. I like to think that maybe poetry is like this too. It comes to live inside your body but only for a little while. So maybe I’m the bed and breakfast on the side of the road that only hosts the weary traveler for a night. At least I can bill him for whatever he breaks, and I am not totally responsible for whatever mess he makes inside these walls. I mean, how was I to know that this one would be such a troubling houseguest anyway.
The first piece of poetry I discovered was on YouTube. It was Sarah Kay’s poem “Point B.” In that moment something reached out from within the cosmos and took a hold of me. And so, since then, I have not stopped writing. I write in search of that thunderous grip, I write trying to give it a name. I write because the day before I heard that poem it was just another day but the moment poetry stormed into my life, that was it. I was on. I was awake. Before, it had been as if I merely existed. Waiting restlessly for her to find me, hand me a flash light, and say, “Go where it feels like something has always been missing. Write down what happens next.”
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Tandoori Turkey LINA GHOSH
*Names have been changed to protect the identities of the characters in this essay Shoes of all different sizes and colors are lined up neatly by our front door. Most are winter boots, weathered from countless encounters with the Cleveland weather, but interspersed among them are a few dress shoes belonging to those who were daring enough to challenge the ice covering our driveway. I open the door to two faces beaming down at me and a third one hiding under a much too large winter hat and very pink scarf. The Chatterjees are here, I say to myself. I quickly usher them inside as the little figure huddled in her winter gear hurtles forward and attaches herself to my left leg. It’s only after a few minutes of coaxing that she reluctantly lets go and takes off her shoes. Her mother cups my face affectionately, cooing about how nice it is to see me this Thanksgiving, while her father offers me a hearty pat on the back, commenting on how much I have grown. I take the covered dish from his hands and lead the three of them towards the kitchen, smiling at the thought of the pair of small, fluorescent Velcro strapped sneakers amidst the row of larger and duller shoes. There is an exponential relationship between the number of people in the house and the volume inside of it. There is also a direct relationship between the pain my cheeks are experiencing and the number of aunties who have come to pinch them. The booming laughter of the uncles merges with the chattering of the aunties while the children sit silently in a circle clicking away at their Nintendo DS’s. In spite of having eight different last names among us and not sharing any blood-relations, it feels no different than being with family. The Bengali language does not differentiate between our true relatives and those who are close to us; for example, my father’s brother and my friend’s father are both called Kaku or uncle. Thus, it is even easier for me to believe that I am surrounded by a family made up of seven aunties and seven uncles. For the first time ever, I see my mother with her feet kicked up on an ottoman and my father cooking in the kitchen. He is accompanied by several uncles who are now trying to force him into wearing an apron I made in third grade for Maa. It says “Princess of the Kitchen” in hot pink cursive. Just then, a tiny woman emerges from the living room with her hands on her hips and an expression on her face that screams no-funny-business, “I hope you’re working on those luchis, Nabin.” It’s hilarious to see the large statured and usually boisterous Nabin uncle grinning sheepishly and cowering behind the counter, replying to his wife with a short, “Of course we are!” They get to work soon after. Nabin uncle rolls the dough already kneaded by my mother into balls, handing them over to Arijit uncle who flattens them into pancakes and simultaneously sings Bollywood tunes extremely off-key. Baba fries the dough while using his spatula to direct his assistant (me) around the kitchen. I watch the assembly line with amazement as the dense balls of dough get tossed into three different pairs of hands and transform into flakey, golden balloons placed neatly in our traditional tin katori. The assortment of dishes on our kitchen countertop grows steadily as more families arrive through the course of the night. The mismatched containers in front of me, show how in spite of not physically cooking a full meal together, each one of us has contributed in some way. Just by looking at the spread of food on our table, I am easily able to recognize that our Thanksgiving is not a traditional one. We have no turkey on the table, no mashed potatoes, and no cranberry sauce. Instead, in a buffet style set-up, we have bowls of bright red Tandoori chicken, steaming hot aloo tikkis, and
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tangy green apple chutney. Garlic naan replaces dinner rolls, and sweet carrot halwa takes the place of pumpkin pie. We do have green beans, but I suspect the dish is a lot spicier than its American counterpart! I impatiently wait for all our guests to fill their plates, and stare eagerly in anticipation at Maa, who eventually gives me the nod of approval and holds out a serving spoon heaped with vegetables. An inordinate amount of food gets piled onto my plate, not that I mind at all. Overeating is customary during Bengali meals. I know my mother would feel ashamed if she sent away a guest with “only” a full stomach. I take a seat across from my father at our large dining table and look around before digging into my heavenly food to appreciate how united we feel in spite of sitting apart from our conventional families. Our fingers are our spoons, dancing around our colorful plates mixing curries like colors on a paint palette. I can practically hear a collective sigh of satisfaction as we each take a bite of chicken wrapped in a cocoon of butter slathered naan. People are already up for seconds by the time I take my second bite of my aloo tikki. Baba ruffles my hair as he too passes by me to fill his plate again, teasing me for being such a slow eater. I shrug and continue to savor every bite of my meal. A multitude of conversations are occurring around the table, some about the disappointing performances of the Browns thus far and others about the newest Webkinz on the market. A flurry of questions barrages me, and I just smile and nod at appropriate intervals to ensure everyone that I am alive and listening carefully to their words and definitely not in a food coma. It is well past 11 p.m. by the time everyone is finished and conversation is dying down; not a single morsel of food is left behind on any of our plates, a testament to how full our stomachs and our hearts are. Three pairs of shoes remain scattered by our front door: a pair of men’s leather dress shoes, some ladies’ boots, and two small light-up sneakers. I lean my head against Baba’s shoulder, listening to Maa tell some joke about how every day should be Mother’s Day rather than just the one celebrated in May. The Chatterjees say their goodbyes and head out the door, their daughter in between in a state between sleep and wakefulness, groggily waving back at me. While watching her sneakers flashing against the dark winter sky, I wonder what it would be like if we treated every day like Thanksgiving, and whether it would continue to be as special as the one we had shared today.
#5
FRANCESCA FERRI As the teapot whistles you open the door to a face you’ve never seen before, greeting you like an old friend. You find that you let it (in). And as the steam rises you talk about the past until you can’t recall your own childhood without the thought of this non-stranger’s face in the mirror, or the sound of metallic screaming in the foreground as you play. The water dries up, is gone, and still you never leave.
Oreo CARTIER PITTS
When most people hear the word Oreo They may think of a delicious cookie With a hard brown outside And a sweet, sugary inside To me, it brings back painful memories of being alone As alone as the white sheep in a dark flock Because I spoke in a way that was not “Black Enough” for the kids in my elementary school And even when I was DUNKED Into the glass of milk that was my high school My personality did not match what they believed I should taste like But you know what? If being an oreo means that I take myself, my studies & my history seriously, Then I will say it loud, I am an Oreo and I am Proud!
10 09 Remembrance by Millie Privitera 10 Flamingo Herd by Erica Kahn
Who wouldn’t want to be an oreo anyway? I am a delicious cookie with a hard brown outside and a sweet sugary inside who is extra special Because I was made with brown sugar And cinnamon spice Which makes me all the more nice
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01
Dishcloth Stitches
MCKENNA RITTER
If something takes your breath away Be sure it deflates the right lung Cut along the dotted line of vertebrae Curve around heart Learn to copy with your left hand Mache blue eyes with Times New Roman Not rising cataracts tinting trees Orange of pine needle floors
02
03
01 Autumn Time Walks by Owen Healey 02 The Road Trip by Madeleine Kattan 03 St. Peter’s Basilica, Vatican City by Monique Girgis
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04 04 Coastal Journey by Owen Healey
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HOPE IN UMIUJAQ The homes were standard issue, government subsidized sheds. Dogs slept on the ends of industrial chains, left outside all day and all night. When 26 of us descended on the First Nation settlement of Umiujaq, we thought that hope had shriveled away like overstretched canvas on a cedar canoe. The Canadian government took their sleds and killed their sled dogs, decimated their trap lines and forced their children into residential schools, and left them with a run-down square mile to live. They banned alcohol and took the swing sets down to keep people from killing themselves, but the suicide rates in northern settlements are still some of the highest in the world. We came with the preconceived notion that we weren’t going to feel welcome; that we were going to be scorned and avoided like the electricity, tycoons, and oil companies that came in with hopes of exploiting their land. But this wasn’t the case. When we came we were welcomed with open arms. People offered to drive our gear down the 9 kilometer road free of charge, simply because they had a truck and some free time. They brought us into their homes and cooked us traditional meals (including beluga liver), and let us hold their babies and play basketball in their community center. Even after so much loss, they still held on to their compassion and warmth. During our trip I read a book called Three Day Road by Joseph Boyden. It is a novel, documenting the struggles of two First Nation soldiers in the First World War: how their roots affected their experiences, and their recovery upon their return home. Traveling through the places that Boyden writes about helped me form a better connection to the story. Boyden describes the winding rivers that my section and I have paddled, the woods that we have portaged through, and the towns that have welcomed us. However, there is a certain aspect of the forest that inclines the traveler to feel much like a voyeur, a reader of a piece of writing too masterful for any one person to comprehend. In the expanse of the wilderness, a group of 26 people is as insignificant as a piece of dust on the kitchen floor. It can almost leave you feeling like an intruder, someone who doesn’t belong with the conifers, the caribou moss, or the glassy water. All you are is a force causing footprints and ripples, leaving no lasting impact on the world around you. A large premise of Three Day Road is the experience of the native children during the time they attended residential schools. Boyden did extensive research on the residential school system to be able to most accurately depict what life for a native student was like. He refused to sugarcoat or skirt the details. He documents beatings, unheated rooms with cotton blankets in the dead of Canadian winter, hunger, starvation, and death. He is not biased; he simply portrays the scene directly from what the records tell him. The Residential School was a system put in place initially to more accurately count the First Nation population of Canada. It quickly snowballed into a Catholic, Anglican, Methodist, and Presbyterian mission to “tame the ignorant savages” of the north. The last residential school closed in 1996. Two years later, the Canadian government issued its first formal apology to the former students of residential schools. For the First Nations people of Canada, the wounds inflicted by the “Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development” are still very fresh. The town of Umiujaq has one modern school. I have been there. It has a hockey rink and a playground out back, as well as a full gym, athletic equipment, and Wi-Fi, much like HB or any other school. The children who attend the Kiluutaq School will never feel the pain of a wooden rod on the back of their hand, will never have to live in fear that the people they are to entrust with their education will physically, psychologically, or sexually abuse them. They are free to aid their parents and grandparents in their process of healing.
NELL BRUCKNER
I first met Gilbert in his hand-built shack on the beach, so remote he lacked even an address. He didn’t say much. He smiled a lot and motioned with his hands. Gilbert is a master carver, one of three in the town. Gilbert, like many of the older residents of Umiujaq, attended the residential school, the “Federal Hostel at the Great Whale River” in Kuujjuarapik. The records for that school have been lost, and no one even knows when it was officially closed. Once he had warmed up to us more, we started asking him about his childhood. He told us a story about a friend of his whose mother came to see him. “Xavier’s mother lived in Kuujjuarapik (Great Whale), but the school didn’t let her see him often. He had been in the infirmary for a while, and the last time his mother came to see him, that’s where he was. The school would not let her see her son. They sent her home day after day, telling her he was ‘deep in his studies’ and ‘needed to rest.’ Finally, after a week of walking back and forth across town to see him, she wouldn’t take ‘no’ for an answer. She ran past the sisters, through the gate, and bolted for the door. She ran up the stairs and down the hall, not knowing where she was going, just knowing she had to go, fast. Gitchi Manitou (Great Spirit) must have led her where she needed to go, for before long she was in the infirmary. She flung open the door and the sisters pounced on her, wrestling her to the floor. They forced her up and she got a glimpse of her son: bruised, freezing, swollen, and close to death. ‘What have you done with my boy?’ she screamed. ‘What have you done?! You’ve killed my son! Manitou curses you and your hateful God.’ Sister Evangeline landed a forceful blow right into Xavier’s mother’s diaphragm. She doubled over in pain, and got one last glance of Xavier before they dragged her out to the churchyard and left her there. That’s what my childhood was like. It was pain.” I was stunned. I had never experienced a pain as deep as this. I’ve felt loss in my life; I lost my grandfather last year, my great aunt, and a close family friend, but I hadn’t felt systematic loss. Unlike my paternal grandmother, I didn’t become separated from my family in an internment camp in Serbia, and unlike Gilbert, I didn’t have to stand back while people unlike me allowed my best friends to die. In Cleveland, I will never feel the pain of neglect. I will always have enough to eat, a place to sleep, and someone who loves me. My government, as dysfunctional as it may be, cares about me and my well-being. Can the people of Umiujaq say the same thing? As a writer, I can pull stories from my personal experiences: the unfairness of the college process, the difficulty with excess, and the pay gap between men and women. If I were from Umiujaq, what would I pull from? The feeling of complete isolation, being cut off from my governing body, my lack of representation? My parents and grandparents being beaten and assimilated into the same culture that later abandoned us? We all sat around him in silence. He started to cry, we tried to comfort him. He started to shake, we tried to calm him. I have never felt more like a voyeur in my entire life than I did in this moment. Not even the wilderness can make you feel more worthless than another human’s suffering. I would never know what his pain felt like. I was likely never to experience pain as pointed and unrelenting as his. Sometimes the problems of the world daunt us to the point of not doing what we can because what we can never feels like enough. During my time as a writer, no one has said anything that’s touched me as deeply as what Gilbert said next. “Tell only stories that need to be told. That’s the purest form of justice.”
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The Unspeakable,
Rolled in Pizza Dough NELL BRUCKNER
A section of campers on a Keewaydin Canoe Trip works as a cohesive unit. There’s the strongest paddlers, the strongest portagers, the fastest ones to set up the tents, and the ones who scrub the pots until they shine the brightest. Another important part of the whole is the sect of campers who can cook and bake the best, using the least number of dishes, in the fastest time. I was not a part of this elite squad of master chefs, the ones responsible for the section’s nutrition and the combatants of a Keewaydin section’s worst enemy: hanger (hungry anger). I did not know how much pasta the section would eat, nor did I know how many cups of flour were needed to bake a bannock. I couldn’t describe to you the differences between a kidney bean and a garbanzo bean apart from one being red and bean shaped, and the other being beige and butt-shaped. I didn’t know that you should drain all the cans for chili except tomatoes, and I certainly didn’t know the ratio for macaroni to water, let alone quinoa, cous cous, or bulgur. It seemed to me as if the section chefs were specially trained in a field-cooking program that turned them from mere mortals into super-human bakers and cooks. Another integral part of a Keewaydin section is the crew rotation. The way my section decided to divvy up chores was as follows: 3 nights on Wood Crew 3 nights on Pot Crew 2 nights on Dish Crew, and 2 nights on “Whatever” Crew. Whatever crew sounded nice at first, it made the section think of two nights off where you could read, do laundry, and spend some leisurely down time around the campsite. It didn’t take long until “whatever crew” became “the kitchen’s bitch crew” where your two nights off were actually spent cleaning peanut butter jars, transporting wood from the chopping block to the kitchen, and mincing onions. Much to my dismay, we also decided that not only did you have to cook for the two nights on dish crew [plus your mandatory two nights on bitch crew], but you also had to provide “kitchen help” when you were on pots as well. Oh my god I thought to myself, that adds to a whopping 7 whole nights of cooking. It was essentially my worst nightmare. For all the other trips I had been on, we had only to prepare dinner for the two nights you were on dishes; now out of the ten day rotation, seven of those days I had to face my worst enemy: the kitchen. Thankfully, my first three nights of the trip were spent on wood crew, where I and two of my amigas could walk off into the forest, fell, saw, and chop some trees, before giving them to the kitchen to be burned. Then came the first night of the week of agony: pot crew. Pot crew was an interesting dichotomy where you had to set up all the camper tents, come back, do whatever dish crew told you to do; then after dinner you had to scrub the pots until they went from black to silver. The first night wasn’t so bad, and my section knew to limit my tasks in the kitchen to simple things like chopping, grating cheese, opening and draining cans, and measuring dry
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ingredients for bannock, even when I was on dish crew. I kept to these simple jobs for the first 3 rotations or so with little complaint. Soon my staff members caught on to me, and a night where they knew I was on kitchen slyly asked me my least favorite question: “So Nell, what’s for dinner?” It was at that moment I knew the gig was up. It was time I graduated from remedial kitchen hand to chef status, and it was of utmost importance that I stunned the section with a spectacular meal. Luckily, it was a day where we pulled into the campsite earlier than normal, granting me maximum planning and preparation time. My partner on dish crew that night was Katie. Katie was the second worst cook in the section, so this pairing was bound to be interesting. Together we pulled out the world famous Keewaydin Cookbook and began rummaging through the pages. Then an evil thought started inching its way across my conscience. “Katie,” I said “We’re making calzones.” Now, you might say “Calzones? What could be so hard about calzones?” You simply roll the dough, add the sauce, cheese, and pepperoni/bacon, and fry it, right? Well in the bush it becomes a little more complicated. There’s no pre-packaged dough, you have to mix it yourself. By hand. Once you clean off your hands you have to open cans of tomatoes and heat it over the fire with spice to make the sauce. I was in charge of dough and sauce. At first the dough was too watery, so I added flour. Then it became too thick, so more water had to go in. I eventually had doubled the recipe in the effort to make the perfect consistency. The sauce was pretty straightforward; my experience with opening cans had prepared me well for this task. Katie was in charge of grating the cheese, cooking the bacon, and slicing the pepperoni. I put flour over a cutting board and rolled out circles of dough (not too thin or they’ll rip, not to thick or they don’t cook correctly, not too big or there’s not enough room in the pan, not too little or there’s not enough room for ingredients). After an agonizingly long preparation time, we started frying our calzones. The second the first calzone hit the frying pan, a member of pot crew came up and sheepishly asked: “Did you guys make some vegetarian ones?” Oh god I thought. I’ve failed them. Two people don’t like
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05 Down By the River by Owen Healey 06 Gondolas by Regan Brady
mozzarella, two people are vegetarians, and almost half the section doesn’t eat tomatoes. At that point we had to repeat the whole process again: only white. New sauce, a roux, more dough, and Parmesan cheese had to be hastily thrown together in our best effort to fulfill the whims of the section. As Katie and I sat by the fire throwing uncooked calzones on the oily frying pans and plating finished ones, the rest of the section began to trickle in to the kitchen area. People began offering to make dessert, man the pans, and even begin washing dishes. It had been a pretty busy night at the campsite, with a rainstorm fast approaching and boats to be patched and wood to collect, so pretty much all of the cooking had been between the two of us, and everyone was tired. In spite of the exhaustion, everyone chose to sit with us in the drizzling rain to help out and chat cheerfully by the fire.
It was Christmas in July that day, so after dinner and dessert we exchanged secret Santa presents and quietly went off to our tents. I walked away with more than a hand-made friendship bracelet; I had a newfound feeling of confidence that came from accomplishing a goal and making others happy. The calzones were a resounding success, but it wasn’t the tackling of my fear that necessarily made that day a memorable one. It was the people I got to share the meal with that made it, and all 53 other days, the greatest of my life. My section is a collection of my closest friends, my sisters by choice. Family is truly what you make it, and I will never forget my summer facing fears and stirring tomato sauces with them by my side.
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07 Public Transportation by Grace Burleson 08 Streetcar in Milan by Regan Brady 09 Herby by ZoĂŤ Solt
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THE JUNKYARD EVIE SCHUMANN we would visit a place full of things whose lights no longer turned on, during a time when daylight was fleeting we left behind security and trodden paths for emptiness and wilderness scraps of twisted metal overused, abused tires and once-loved cars surrounded us but no matter which way we twisted things the cars would never run again
Trusty Suby ANNA LIETMAN
The car shakes as I screech to a stop at the green-turned-yellow-turned-red traffic light. From the passenger seat, Eric, future mechanic—he claims to know a lot about cars, and I believe him because he can explain their inner workings using fancy terms like piston—says the whirring of my Trusty Old Suby (the affectionate name I’ve coined the 1989 clunker) isn’t “normal.” Even if it means I can’t stealthily sneak out at night, I like the purr of the engine. To him a sign of dysfunction, to me a statement of arrival, heard coming from miles away and minutes in advance. He, Eric, seems impressed, nevertheless, with the age of the car. It has aged well indeed, like cheese. And, oddly enough, a spot on the front bumper looks suspiciously like cottage cheese. Disclaimer: it’s not [edible]. No, that’s where GB performed a patch job using superglue. He, GB, still likes to claim, or joke rather, that the car is “nearly new.” The cassette tape player, however, begs to differ. As does the scratchy radio. But the arguably dire state of affairs doesn’t lessen my boundless fondness for this car, nor does it stop me from blasting “Renegades” from the faulty speakers as I drive up Big Mountain each morning. 106.3, the BEAR, announces the radio show host in an unnaturally deep voice, epitomizing the essence of Montana huskiness. I come to associate that song—”Renegades”—with the mountains, sight blurring with sound until they morph into one single memory, time skewed in the process of remembering which is something I’m not very good at. It’s odd how this vehicle, whose purpose I purport to be transport, can come to symbolize me. Or rather, Montana me. Back-home I drive a Subaru much shinier and newer (it would be hard to be older and still operative). Back home, though, I have no mountains to mount, no cottage cheese to lament, no Eric to explain, and no 106.3 the BEAR to blare.
never push pavement behind them the way that we push pine needles and tree roots into memories never feel the rush of a police chase or a drag race but then again, neither did we my brothers would have liked to twist the metal to make the cars run they like overused, abused punch lines and once-loved guitars no one likes to visit a grave and I don’t think they have pushed enough pavement behind them to feel the same rush of running from the place where things meant to move go to die
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MAXIMUM POINT ELA PASSARELLI
The last time I came to New York, I looked out of the plane window and saw the beam of light commemorating the anniversary of 9/11. I saw it and wondered how the light from the memorial could stretch all the way up to the sky, further than my plane, further than I could even see, when my flashlight beams back at home seem to disappear the moment I pointed up. Today there is no light, no flickering city under a night sky. Right now, it is morning and the sun is rising. Now I understand why red, yellow, and blue are the primary colors. The three, and no others, dance on the horizon. Red at the bottom, yellow in the middle, blue at the top and stretching, dark, into a sky. Time warp. In between night and day. Sitting at the maximum point. Sometimes I wonder how we got so far in so little time. The seats on our airline are more comfortable than usual today, and I feel content to sit and stare out of my window. My clock says 6:45, and normally I would be tired and in a different wavelength; somewhere in between awake and asleep but today, today I am pulsating and radiating and energy flows through my toes up to my dry eyes. The sky bleeds more red and I search for the sun, not finding it but seeing its light everywhere. We are so high that we are flying above the clouds. They stretch on for miles. I can’t see a break anywhere from my window and because of this it looks to me like I am soaring above a rippling landscape of snow. Invisible mountains, fireproof air. Rolling hills that I could fall through. The sky is so beautiful it is almost melancholy to land in the city that I love so much. When the plane touches the ground I feel less clarity than I did in the air. The airport, confusing. People with luggage. Children. Grandmothers. Couples. I had forgotten how overwhelming it is here. Every person jumps out at me, their eyes flashing different colors, their mouths making different sounds. Everyone has a story and I want to know them all. I clutch my bag handle and count. Coat-phone-glasses-purse-suitcase. Escalator, hallway, no windows, more people. As much as I know I will soon be in love with my city, I miss the clouds.
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UNCHARTED TERRITORY
ANNA LIETMAN
At the age of eighteen I left the comforts of my Cleveland home in favor of uncharted territory. My new destination: Whitefish, Montana. Why did I venture to the opposite end of the country, one might ask. And one (many) did ask. Also frequently demanded of me was “Why Montana?” with the implication of the state’s apparent randomness in the eyes of my fellow Ohioans. Ironically my co-workers—Whitefish natives—failed miserably to place Ohio on a map (“That’s the one that borders Georgia, right?”). But a response was difficult to formulate, as I myself grappled with this question. What drew me out west? It wasn’t so much an escape, although I did wish to flee a summer spent swaying mindlessly to loud country music, surrounded by selfie-taking, lip-locked teens with unfamiliar faces. Still, though, the impetus was more of a pull than a push. I opted to spend two months in a foreign place in search of some deeper connection. Connection to people? Connection to myself? Connection to nature? That was unclear. All I knew for certain was that eighteen years did not seem to have provided me with sufficient life experience. So sheltered “Anna from Ohio” embarked upon a clichéd adventure. Vegetarian Anna made friends with the hunting crowd. And, working at Big Mountain’s ski resort, inexperienced Anna certainly met people with ample experience. They all had stories to share and advice to dole out. People like Denise, who talked of cattle branding as if this were a perfectly condonable practice. Like Allen who told tales of solitary treks as a park ranger and Doreen who fought fires in the same forested lands. Judah possessed 33 guns and adorned his home in animal heads. Amanda admitted her gap year had prolonged to five years of putting off college. Austin mentioned his [lengthy] criminal record and Eric swore ghosts were real. Despite a sense of belonging—a deeper connection—I was remarkably different from each of my co-workers. Whereas Eric claimed to have never read a book from cover to finish and Amanda shrugged away the prospect of attending college, I’ve grown accustomed to those around me placing a premium on education; everyone I know has a college degree or plans to go to college. Back in Ohio, I’m asked where I plan on going to college, rather than if I’ll go. While Judah was born and bred to appreciate the sport of killing animals and Austin appeared genuinely baffled by the concept of vegetarianism, I had strongly opposed eating meat since the age of five (at which point I renounced tuna melts after taking Finding Nemo’s mantra “fish are friends, not food” quite literally). Before meeting these people with fundamentally different values, I believed in open-mindedness. It was in practice rather than theory, however, that I realized what should have been obvious all along: not going to college or not understanding vegetarianism wouldn’t deter our friendship. The personal relationships I formed allowed me to see alternative views as equally valid, for the individual stories my coworkers recounted legitimized their contradictory outlooks. The adage “put yourself in someone else’s shoes” never truly resonated with me until I was exposed to the people believing in the very ideals I so vehemently opposed. I initially yearned for acceptance into this community in which I could only be perceived as a nerdy naïve vegetarian, and, against all odds, I was accepted. Despite starting on the fringes, after two months that seemed inadequate, I no longer felt like an outsider. I was a part of something bigger, now able to identify as that same scholarly vegetarian, though with more experience under my belt (both job and otherwise), and connections to a newfound group of refreshingly non like-minded people.
10 Clouds by Kimi Kian 11 Contemplation by Grace Rossi W W W. H B I N R E T R O S P EC T.CO M
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DARE DEVIL SOPHIE RICHARDS
I have always believed that I am invincible. I grew up on a flaming red Honda dirt bike. My dad would scold me for whipping around corners too quickly, and I finally learned my lesson when I somehow steered off a miniature cliff. During the air time, the bike and I parted ways to avoid wrecking my grandpa’s new barn, and I have the scar on my right elbow to prove it. At age ten, I went bungee jumping. Without a second thought, I volunteered myself to stand on the edge and lean off the one-hundred-foot lip, accelerating with a sureness that caused doubt for a second until the bungee cord swooped me and my shrieks back up. With cliff diving, there’s a lot more that could go wrong so it’s better to not think about it until it’s over or you’ll psych yourself out. Standing on the bitter edge, I realized that I actually did have fear. My body warned me, but my mind propelled me forward. Legs quivering and mind filled with turmoil, another person inside of me must have forced my legs into that soaring pose that plunged me into the lake. Laughter is all that I could muster when I emerged to the surface. On an ATV tour through the mountains, I spotted a thin piece of dirt and rock that dropped off thousands of feet, a beautifully deafening and deadly cliff. On the edge, knowing that with one wrong spin of the steering wheel I would fall forever, my muscles stiffened as I raced forward.
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The legality that came with my eighteenth birthday only excited me for one reason: I could go skydiving. As I copied the paragraph that pronounced my life insurance void, I signed my life away. My heart fluttered as the 2x4 plane somehow got itself afloat, and I realized that I had a much better chance of dying from engine failure in that piece of tin than from the skydiving itself. Strapped to a man I didn’t know, I was too preoccupied to even notice the 14,000 foot vertical until I was told to prepare for descent. My guide dangled me over the side of the moving plane. For some reason, the longer I gazed out into the vastness, the more at peace I became. It was the most incredible feeling I have ever experienced. I was frozen, hanging in the air with nothing, the wind my only friend. Then he shot us both out into the openness. Bursts of frozen air bombarded me; I wanted to close my eyes so that I could capture the feeling, yet I needed to visually witness it all. My heart as a hummingbird, permanent bliss, letting go of all control.
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The key is knowing just how much control is necessary. Speed skiing: I’ve gotten clocked going sixty miles per hour. It’s pure terror, but I dread the day when my legs cannot support the pressure of the motion anymore. The secret to going fast is to make yourself as small as you can, into something of a ball, to put your head toward the ground until you have to strain your eyes up so much that you get a headache from your bulging veins. You must go as straight as possible. You must be willing to be out of control, to look a little ugly, to be reckless, on the brink of explosion. You stay just enough in control to be able to make it to the bottom in one piece. Reckless is not necessarily not caring about the consequences; it is about doing things anyway to get that feeling that you are alive. I know the consequences, but I also know that I won’t face them because I am in control. Thirst for adrenaline has fed my entire existence.
Reveling in the Unfamiliar AARATHI SAHADEVAN
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In the summer of 2011, I traveled with my family to Santorini: a gem amongst the Greek archipelago, studded with rocky shores overlooking the Aegean Sea. We stayed in a cozy, Cycladic bed and breakfast that was embedded into the cliff, positioned so that each window perfectly framed an intense view of the coast. The mother and son who operated their establishment made it their utmost priority to welcome each of the few guests who shared their home as family, and we were no exception. I still fondly remember those lazy summer mornings spent in their kitchen, talking about the history of Santorini and their family over spanakopita and coffee. They pointed us to the best restaurants on the island overlooking the sea, and told us about the must-see attractions, including the famous blue domed Church of Panagia, the hair raising mule-ride up the precarious path etched into the cliff side, and the volcano out of which these serene islands erupted so violently. Yet, although I reflect on these adventures fondly, my warmest memory was from the last morning of our stay, when the woman of the house prepared her famous creamy pumpkin soup and served it to my family and me. That delicious dish, an authentic symbol of her compassion and her culture, was an olive branch: a token commemorating our overlooking of obvious differences in favor of mutual understanding and appreciation. As we exchanged goodbyes, she handed me a Greek cookbook from her personal collection, smiling knowingly as if she could foresee the crazed, passionate foodie I would grow into. It is still amazing for me to think that sharing a few plates of spinach pie was all it took for me to crack open the door to a different world. In my life, I had numerous opportunities to travel and this privilege has become essential to how I assess my place and perspective. Each trip I take transports me into another world, seeing how circumstances so different from mine mold lifestyles, opinions and values of the people who call my destinations home. The intimate, seemingly inconsequential encounters like the one I had in Greece are what provide the most profound insights into what it is like to celebrate that country’s culture and to be a member of their community. I will never forget seeing the Louvre or Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia, but just as valuable are my memories of broken Spanish conversations with cab-drivers in Madrid, vibrant shows by street performers in the Paris Metro, late and lively nights filled with music and dance in Ohrid, Macedonia, and bargaining with Indian market vendors.
12 Adrenaline by Kate Snow 13 Night Sky by Owen Healey
Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle tells us that in quantum physics, one cannot observe a particle without altering its behavior in some sense, and in the same vein, it is difficult to observe and understand a country solely based on the controlled, sanitized and incomplete snapshot my trip will inevitably procure. To meet people, share their food, and talk about what is important to them is, in my experience, the best way to counteract this discordance between perception and reality, and to ensure that my sensory experience is authentic, memorable and impressionable on my opinions about the world. Our differences make us individuals, but our fundamental similarities make us human and to discover both of these truths is, I believe, the root of my wanderlust. Almost all of our current conflicts and political unrest have arisen from our inability to understand and tolerate each other and our inflexibility to consider varying backgrounds and perspectives. Travel is not a panacea for problems of international importance, but my time in Greece and other places around the world have given me a glimpse into the incredible variety of the human experience and opened my mind to be excited rather than fearful of our diversity. As I plan and obsess over the details of my next great adventure to Cambodia with my school, I am not only looking for the excitement of food and a change of scenery, but rather, I am awaiting another priceless moment or opportunity to learn something new about my world.
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Melancholy Cold JULIA FELDERMAN
The gung-ho attitude is contagious as we realize it’s one of those nights. Forget homework, we’re going to Garden Hill. There is this unwritten but deeply felt obligation to spend this time with each other because we won’t ever have it like this again. By this point, walking on the polished ice that covers everything is something we are accustomed to, although not necessarily good at. When one of us slips it’s a reminder of nature’s superiority. Louis, Eliza, Adam, Katie, Bradley, Ella and I sprint outside clad in as many layers as I have fingers on one hand. Boots break through the half-inch layer of crunchy ice as we scamper up the hill. Spreading our body weight out, we attempt to leave it intact. We fail. Passing the hexagonal shed halfway up the path, the moonlight reveals sheets of pure ice to us. We laugh at our below par performance as we carefully stumble our way up to the top of the ice blanket. Darkness surrounds us, without relenting, but it’s not suffocating. Liberating more than anything else. My eyes fixated up, and I don’t worry about blinking. Putting two and two together, it doesn’t take me more than a few seconds to immediately dive down the sheet of ice. Penguin sliding. No real steering. Just run and flop. Limbs flying, we dissolve into hysterics as we smash into each other. That feeling that always comes in powerful waves hits me for the millionth time as I look around, that sinking feeling of knowing we have to leave in three weeks. That’s the melancholy piece that shouldn’t have to exist, that constant, nagging reminder of the sadness in this amazing place that comes with having to leave it. Opposites attract; it always makes itself known when I’m this ecstatic, reminding me that it must end soon. On top of the hill, we don’t go all the way up for there are stars in store just yet. Heads on shoulders, we have nowhere to look but up. Arms under necks, it’s everywhere. Legs intertwined, dark and cold and stars. To really see the stars on Garden Hill, I have to look in front and behind and up and all around, I feel like I’m in a dome. We can see everything without the handicap of light pollution because of the 650 people with no streetlights that live in Vershire. I didn’t know infinite stars and galaxies existed up there. I’ve done this every time I look at the stars here, but still I take a deep breath and try to take it all in. The flaming balls of gas hurdling towards something unknown never fail to amaze me; it’s become a reflex for me to look up every time I walk outside in the dark. I know the stars won’t look like this anywhere else and I’m hit again by not just a little bit of melancholy. Lying in the snow is bitterly cold, Vermont in December is not friendly to those who aren’t familiar with seasons, but it doesn’t register with any of us. The stars and each other capture all of our minds all at once, so swiftly and completely that there’s no room for thoughts of cold to sneak their way in. Darkness encompasses us but right now all that’s important is the more immediate-- we encompass each other. Come December 14 this will no longer be true. It hurts more than anything to admit it to myself. The dim, greenish light of Ella’s watch reminds us that a world exists outside of Garden Hill, revealing to us that it’s 9:27, three minutes before we’re supposed to be in our dorms. We can’t be late. Stumbling, we try to find our unstable footing once again, this time running sliding falling down the path that takes us to the library. Not one of us makes it down without falling at least once. Screaming with laughter, we sprint into the brightly lit
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wooden library, vacated by all, save a few abandoned tea mugs, their strainers revealing themselves only by their circular wire end. We shove our books in our backpacks, constantly checking our watches. 9:29. Bouncing off each other like particularly active electrons, we race outside and head for the short but steep hill that goes to the downtown dorms. Daunting when covered with ice. We know each other so well at this point that it doesn’t matter that we can only vaguely see each other’s faces as we let ourselves be enveloped by darkness. We know who is who by their outdoor gear, the way they move. The blend of cold and dark and stars still very much on all of our minds; that’s the kind of thing we can’t forget, no matter how hard we try. We’re all very used to going home in the complete darkness at this point, lit by nothing other than the stars and maybe a big beautiful moon. We could do this walk in our sleep. If one goes down on the ice we all do, that’s the advantage of linked arms. Laughing, I let my body fill with emotion uncontrollably. Melancholy slips in, as it always does, but I’m lighthearted. Content and vulnerable as I completely let go. I have surrendered myself to feeling everything. Full is the only word I have come up with so far to describe this particular miscellany of emotions. My lungs burn with cold as I gasp for air between deep exhales. Laugh. Run. Surrender. It’s exactly 9:30 as we get to the doors of the dorms, Tobold and Miles for the girls and guys respectively. Dissolving into hysterical laughter that we miraculously made it back in time, Eliza, Ella and I run upstairs, our lungs relieved to be breathing air that feels like air again. Cold air has always felt like something is missing to me, it doesn’t feel full. The three of us walk into the warm, orange glow of the common room to see every Toboldian sprawled out around the couches that line the walls. Still I am full, emotions spilling over through my mouth, trying to make themselves into words, but it’s all coming so fast, and still mostly in laughter; at this point I know that’s not a bad thing. I’m trying to make sense of ecstasy and melancholy simultaneously but even I don’t know exactly what I’m saying. By some miracle, these people that I’ve lived with for the past three months understand me, they recognize the complete mashup of everything that is my mind right now. I am articulate not in words but somehow in feelings, and I know every single person in this room knows exactly what I mean, because this mix is something everyone here knows.
breath
JULIA FELDERMAN
14 Negril, Jamaica by Alexia Jones 15 Even More Waves by Owen Healey
15
the first time I saw it I lost my breath, like how I do after 18 hours in the car on the way to Maine when the salty air first comes crashing over me like the waves on the shore 100 feet away, but right now I am not on a rocky shoreline in Maine, I am in Vershire, Vermont searching for my breath like I search for sea glass on the beach, among people I don’t really know after only three days but will soon become very close partners in crime, people who will let me open myself up so they can see what’s in my brain, what runs through my veins, what pulls at my heartstrings, what makes me sing. but as I stare at the immenseness in front of me consuming my vision, my eyes scramble from peak to peak, trying to take it all in. each mountain looming up towards the sky, each summit competing with its neighbor like my sister and I when we were little on the playground, who will pierce the sky first? my eyes try to see everything at once, my senses on high alert like when I first walk into Tommy’s and hear plates clanking and people laughing and the milkshake machines whirring. but I settle for lazily gazing across the horizon, my pupils tracing the peaks like kindergarteners trace the continents. the mountains turn blue as they fade farther and farther away. the first time I saw it it stole my breath, refusing to return it to me until I admired its beauty, even though it knew I would anyway. I am a worrier but here I can’t help but let my mind drift, my insecurities fading away with the blue mountains in the distance. like that piece of sea glass that escapes my grip on the walk home from the beach, when I returned home from Vermont, a piece of myself remained behind.
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01 Orchid by Leia Rich 02 Budding Fuschia by Anna Lietman
02
A Spring Morning MOLLY SHARPE
A crisp cool breeze Resonates like the crash of the ocean Accompanied by the melodic medley Of high-pitched bird chirps And the steady pitter-patter Of water droplets jumping From the oxidized blue rain pipe To the square concrete saturated tile below. Each tree has been stained two shades darker By the early morning downpour, And the red, white, and blue flag Whips around with each gust of air, Yet remains folded, Stuck to itself by the thick, adhesive rain. The patchy kelly green blades of grass, Usually graced by the delicate dance of morning dew, Have been soaked by a drench at dawn, Now joined by the sporadic puddles of soppy mud. Above, in the slate grey haze Known as the Cleveland sky, Birds flutter from branch to branch, Excited by the arrival of sunrise, As though they might catch a rare glimpse of summer In a never-ending spring.
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04
Elixir Vitae CHLOE SCHWARTZ I lie facedown on the tallest tree branch, hair bleeding into greenish-brown wood that tastes like dark rain. I reach my hand up and curl it, ring finger to thumb, just within my sightline. My fingers feel soft against each other, slick with moss and the places between the bark that glisten with last night’s rain. The circle I form with my hand fits perfectly around the edge of sunlight melting over the horizon and I stare until my eyes begin to burn. My grandmother once told me that the cure for anything could always be found somewhere in the world. “It might not be five minutes away,” she had said, pinching tea into bags that had gentle embroidery along the edges. “But it’s out there. Be careful what you give away to find it.” I close my eyes. Open them. Smile at an aphid making a home for itself on a twig near the sun between my fingers. I like this silence before my house and my friends wake and take away the light. I like the cadence to the world, the light between my fingers, the water against my cheek and the rhythm of my heart slowing down. I put down roots with the old oak tree, drinking in the medicine of the mineral rain.
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SMOKE and Silt
MCKENNA RITTER
Hypnotic spiral of painted plywood Amusement park haunted house Shriveled head driving a semi-truck And it’s shitty of you to assume that I’m afraid of secondhand smoke Or that I couldn’t possibly listen to coughs of small spiders and frogs Extinguished highway lights And did it occur to you that caring about anything Is like sailing your soul on a paper boat During hurricane season Dead trees without termites Spitting cardboard and watered down vinegar And trees are good places for refuge It’s ok to lose faith But I promise every day Tectonic plates shift you six inches lower on the mountain Coca leaves burning And maybe I don’t want to care largely I just want some dogs in Ireland grass A sheep or two Sometimes hearts have limited capacity And that’s ok I think 03 Life of Montana by McKenna Ritter 04 Swedish Forests by McKenna Ritter 05 Broken Bones as Sewer Pipelines by Coco Liu
Let the crayfish be under the silt of creek They like to be left alone W W W. H B I N R E T R O S P EC T.CO M
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06
TO BE A Crow OR A Hummingbird MCKENNA RITTER The hummingbirds hovered on sand dunes A ripped crow’s wing bone spread like salt on road kill it was eating And I don’t know what I’m trying to prove with that Fiddling with flowerpots I will try to mutter something dear A ripped crow’s wing bone spread like salt on road kill it was eating I prefer the weeds growing from under the front porch as seasoning Fiddling with flowerpots I will try to mutter something dear Fix a perfectly poisoned salad for the wind I prefer the weeds growing from under the front porch as seasoning Use the veins to braid bracelets Fix a perfectly poisoned salad for the wind It will fall nauseous with flecked nights and stray black-eyed cats Use the veins to braid bracelets When my heart pulses 1,263 times per minute It will fall nauseous with flecked nights and stray black-eyed cats I’m afraid When my heart pulses 1,263 times per minute I am thinking of their vulnerability I’m afraid Their feathers were sifting the breeze when grill swallowed them I am thinking of their vulnerability And I don’t know what I’m trying to prove with that Their feathers were sifting the breeze when grill swallowed them The hummingbird hovered on sand dunes
06 The Pond at Morning by Molly Gleydura 07 Dragonfly by Jenna Hahn
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Aurelia ARIELLE DEVITO
When a caterpillar has gorged itself upon leaves and small insects, it finds a safe place to fasten its body to a dot of silk, hanging head-to-the-ground as its skin splits and falls off. Underneath, a hard external shell protects the now-pupa as its body melts into something new. Despite its apparent security, this chrysalis is not enough to keep the pupa safe from the outside world. Though it may be disguised or hidden in a protected place, birds and large insects who find the chrysalis will still prey upon it. And regardless of its apparent strength, the chrysalis can be easily crushed by a wandering deer or a child lumbering ignorantly through the garden. Throughout these perils, the pupa rests cozy warm within its chrysalis, blissfully unaware of the danger it’s in and focused on recreating itself. If it can survive its long, ponderous metamorphosis, it will one day thrust a hesitant antenna out to the world, tasting the air and searching to be reborn.
07
When I was little, my grandmother called me her little butterfly. My sister was always a lovebug, small and cute as a button and practically overflowing with generosity and love. But I was a butterfly, wrapped up selfishly until I deemed it time to emerge and steal the show with my colorful wings and my brilliance. Beautiful, elegant, a work of art in human form. Or so I imagined. I got one last email from my grandma before I left for Paris, complete with her... unique spacing and odd spelling of her own moniker. remember that your granma loves you even as you fly off to new places and experiences you’ll always be my little butterfly love granma. I glanced over it one final time before I shut my phone off entirely, instead switching on my iPod and putting on the bounciest, most cheerful music I could find to counteract the waterlogged dullness I’d been feeling ever since I hugged my father and sister goodbye at the airport. The excitement of leaving the country for the first time had already hit hard and then flown swiftly away, leaving me aching from the blow and trying not to feel the slow panic creeping across my body from the impact. And even though my mom sat behind me on the plane, shuffling notebooks as she munched on a handful of raw almonds, our imminent separation weighed heavily on my limbs. I’m embarrassed to say that I slept through most of the flight. The United States fell away behind me as I drooled onto my thin airplane blanket, dead to the world. I woke up over the Atlantic Ocean, and squinted out the blinding window with eyes crusted over by sleep. If I craned my neck, I could catch a glimpse of the American border giving way to the endless sweeping blue of the sea. I shut my eyes once more against the glare, drifting back into uneasy unconsciousness.
Half a dozen nights later, though it felt like I blinked a few times and missed half the sights of Paris, I was sitting once again in a bus seat watching the trees flash by. Headed north to Normandy, and to my new boarding school. The chatter and laughter around me was incomprehensible, the languages ranging from Russian to French to Chinese and every word hitting my ears and sliding off like beads of water on a lily pad, incomprehensible and meaningless. Nobody spoke English, and while I’d learned French for years, the structured syllables of my teacher’s monotone voice had nothing in common with the dynamics of the girls around me spitting slang and shrieking their excitement in verb tenses I’d never even heard of. I remember, for the first time in my life, feeling lost, untethered from everything I was familiar with. For the first time, I was oceans away from my family. Everyone I’d ever been close to was continuing on with their lives unimpeded by my departure, and here I was, cut loose and floating free but floundering, unable to swim. Later that night, as my tongue stumbled over basic introductions and simple conjunctions, I wondered whether it was too late to give up and go home. My pillow grew soggy from my tears, although there was something comforting in knowing that I wasn’t the only one to cry myself to sleep that night. The sobbing from my roommate’s bed was quiet and whimpery, but I didn’t have the courage to comfort a girl I’d barely had one conversation with. Instead, I fell into dreams of emerging from the blankets cocooned around me and flying back to my familiar house, curling up with my family until I felt safe again. When a butterfly first breaks free from its chrysalis, it is a pitiful creature. Its wings are crumpled and thin, useless enough that no matter how much it may beat them feebly in the sky, it can’t even lift itself up. Wings wet and exhausted from its long transformation, the butterfly clings to the empty shell of its chrysalis desperately, pumping hemolymph into its fragile wings and flapping them until they dry. The butterfly doesn’t know about how many times it came close to death. It has no idea that the only reason it wasn’t crushed by a curious sniffing dog is because the dog was distracted by a bee tickling its nose, no idea that a booted foot came centimeters from smashing it to a pulp. The butterfly only knows that it can feel its wings getting stronger and stronger, and it can plan ahead just enough to set its sights on a brightly-colored flower on a bush just over a ways, and that if insects can feel excitement, it’s excited to know the rush of air under its wings. I have always yearned to fly, ever since I would wake up gasping with delight from dreams of falling off the surface of earth and tumbling endlessly into the cloud-covered sky. Yet I worry that if I take the plunge, I’ll find that my wings are still dead lumps flapping pointlessly as I fail to calm my flailing limbs. My heartbeat races every time I look out over the precipice—on the other side, I soar, but below me lay shards of jagged regrets and harsh failures—and I don’t know if it’s from excitement or fear. I’m not sure I want to know the answer, just as I’m not sure whether my wings are still dripping with uncertainty. I still cling to the familiarity of English and home, sending late-night texts to my family and wishing daily for my return, too afraid to let go of my chrysalis.
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Seasonal Metamorphosis
08 MOLLY SHARPE Silent Emerald Butterflies Rest perched Upon a spurned stem – A single vine Somersaulting Down the side Of a ceramic pot – The last remembrance Of warmer days. As the bright light Of summer Fades into The dim glow Of autumn, The olive wing Butterflies Transform Into monarchs, Adopting The fiery ember Hue of fall.
09
A Haiku of Seasons MADELINE SHADE
Autumn Crunches underfoot Of dried apples and red leaves These be for munching Winter Settled for some time Quiet inside snow banks Far too high to climb
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Velvet Waves THE TORTOISE SHELL COLLECTIVE
MARIA PERILLA, MORGAN WHALEY, CARTIER PITTS, OLIVIA LESLIE, MCKENNA RITTER “Once while playing in the overturned barrel” or in the closed closet the wave sweeping back to the sea i was tangled in night dresses of seaweed, drowning in the velvet waves of your skin on my skin and my skin on black rock Fish beneath me tickled my feet and fed on my dead unwanted skin And above our heads is a dark blue sea with tiny bright lights 08 Maple Leaf by Eva Yeh 09 Flower Ceramics by Elise Leneghan 10 Soleil by Grace Burleson
blinking at us unseeingly Once while playing with blue fire
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February OLIVIA LESLIE
Back when my glacial world was my lifeguard and we trekked through snow arduously but days recklessly; Back when hot tea in mismatched mugs thawed hands, noses, and frozen hearts and the sun rose between my toes and we lent each other our souls and pilled wool socks;
11 Mountain at Dusk by Megan Dorogi 12 Tahoe by Carly Wellener
So I wrote it down in the wood furnace and when it burned to cinders I buried it in the ground. Maybe it will surface again in a frost heave. So, like our frostbitten toes, my frostbitten heart will shed its skin to illuminate living cells.
The heat finally reached me and I breathed again, a snowwoman melted, a real woman learned to love.
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01 Painting by Amanda Merritt 02 Painting by Arielle DeVito
01
GENEALOGY PAINTING BY AMANDA MERRITT INSPIRED BY POEM BY GRACE ROSSI
One of my parents was a listener,
the other was a yeller
a kind soul,
a twisted SOB,
a doer,
a dreamer,
a saint,
an ass,
calm,
crazy,
honey,
one of my parents I loved
vinegar, the other I hated
How they yelled In the carousel of my being
one left
one stayed
thus, my troubled childhood my endless pain I was embarrassed they hated each other, Ashamed I never loved them both I was a girl calling across the parking lot to a family she didn’t have.
02
For a Short Moment POEM BY CARTIER PITTS INSPIRED BY PAINTING BY ARIELLE DEVITO For a short moment sit, while I search the heavens On sugar-filled clouds For a strong answer To my question: Is this real? This endless blue view Since beauty flees fast like birds in the breeze, savor This short, sweet moment W W W. H B I N R E T R O S P EC T.CO M
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The Sleeper PHOTOGRAPHY BY ANDREANNA HARDY INSPIRED BY POEM BY KELSEY RICH
She always fell asleep Curling her body around the space heater, As the snow of the night buried the world deep. In the sunrise, the transformation complete, The grey lines of the naked trees made softer. She always fell asleep Faster when the world was thirty degrees And the crunch of tires on the street mutter. As the snow of the night buried the world deep, Droplets of water began to seep While the house sweated in a fever. She always fell asleep, To wake to the crash of ice released, Slipping to the ground. She was a hibernator As the snow of the night buried the world deep. Wood and wool are the surest escape From the biting cold of the winter She always fell asleep As the snow of the night buried the world deep.
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A Letter Home
LETTER BY CHLOE SCHWARTZ INSPIRED BY PAINTING BY AMANDA MERRITT
Dear, There will always be a place for us: for the scars starch-white on the webbing between your fingers, for the blood that drips from my lips in the parch of winter, for flowers, crumbling against the wall where you taped them to dry. You are standing at the top of the stairs, feet pushing into the oak beneath the worn white carpet. You are an imprint of rain left on the wall, rubber boots filled with water enough to hatch a tadpole, sticky cantaloupe fingerprints that I never wiped away. I see you there, past the briar and brambles and stone, where the water meets the shore. You are looking, out and up and over, at the place where the sun used to be. Now, starlight and moonshine mingle and flow from the stratosphere, and you are bathed in light like milk, light that’s better for the soul than for the bones. Once upon a time, you shone with sunlight, precious and dusty and warm. You looked like you were made of water’s refractions, of dune silt and sea glass and algae, drifting towards the surface. Now I see you there, and you look like the froth of waves, a gull’s lost feather; something fleeting, at the edge of being lost. You step onto the water, surface unbroken. Starlight, better for the soul than the bones because it makes both lighter, and there’s only one that’s meant to go unweighted. And as you walk to where the moonshine puddles in the gaps between the waves, seaweed curls around you, and breakers lap by, never crashing, only shattering in your wake. I am here, when you are ready. I am standing by the kitchen window, running a cloth over and over the baking pan. I am a click of a reading lamp, conversations drifting through the open window, a tea kettle screaming from endless heat, dark circles that have collapsed into laughter lines. There is nothing but myself to give to you; nothing but the roots I’ve sunk into the oak beneath the worn white carpet, the chamomile steeping, growing cold, air that smells like jazz and candle smoke and broken crayons. If you are never ready, that is okay. It is okay because you are here, in the place in my chest where I feel the sadness draining out, in the fingerprints I never wiped away, in the tadpole that I will find between the rocks tomorrow, gasping for a tidal wave. It is okay because you are not here: you are mixing yourself with the water, with the sky, with the seaweed and the world, pulling yourself up onto the edges of the horizon. There will always be a place for us: the waves will always crash against our rocky shore, light misting down from the clouds like rain. There will always be the places where the edges of my reading light meet the darkness; there will always be a worn white carpet for you toes to sink into and there will always be me, smiling in the doorway, even after I am gone.
03 Photography by Andreanna Hardy 04 Painting by Amanda Merritt
When you are ready; if you are ready: Welcome home. Yrs,
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POEM BY FRANCESCA FERRI INSPIRED BY PHOTOGRAPHY BY ANDREANNA HARDY
STEPPING STONES Please read in any order, despite numbering.
I.
II.
She could walk on water With her feather feet
IV.
Then when she lost her sea legs She could walk on land
V.
Her earring isn’t pearl, But it doesn’t have to be
III.
She’s a different person When she turns her head
She never looks you in the eye, but you Can tell she knows when you’re approaching
05
VI.
When she grows tired of this place Her long legs will grow
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VII.
When she sits her earrings shine Reflecting the light of the sky
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She’ll step over the ocean, Not through it
IX.
She doesn’t hear you approach And doesn’t flinch when you sit down
The Lost Girl POEM BY HALLE LENEGHAN INSPIRED BY GRAPHIC ART BY MADELINE SHADE Wandering in Neverland with no way out. Her wings, Tattered to rags, Torn to shreds, Tainted to ruins, Ground her to this unwanted life, As if they are personal chains to prisoning isolation.
Her mind swirls in the colors of death and decay. Abandoned Red Disgusted Brown Troubled Yellow Dark hues for a harsh reality of permanent shadows and scars.
She has a heart of the golden North Star And a mind of a painter’s palette, blended to obscurity. But her internal light is Fading, Diminishing, Vanishing…
06 05 Photography by Andreanna Hardy 06 Graphic art by Madeline Shade W W W. H B I N R E T R O S P EC T.CO M
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Illuminated Manuscript
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ILLUSTRATION BY MADELINE SHADE INSPIRED BY POEM BY ARIELLE DEVITO
STACKED
PHOTOGRAPHY BY KAT HOLLERAN INSPIRED BY POEM BY FRANCESCA FERRI
07
Chipped glasses sit precariously on stacked pizza boxes When they fall to the ground— Hit the countertop on the way down Nearly scrape my eyes— I think of when I breathed in lungfulls of water just To see what would happen. Pain is momentary. The papercut from old books in faded colors It will heal. Except for when it doesn’t. You’re left with a festering line inside of your skin Throbbing as if it wants to remind you that your heart Is still beating That your heart is still there Even when tires scrape against gravel and the Burnt Smell Of rubber Fills your nose When you watch your life fade Away In the back of a truck you didn’t know Existed until twenty minutes ago. When your father denies you entrance Into his life even though that Girl from school offered you a hug and Whispered “It’s okay” Fifteen minutes before the truck appeared. What were you thinking about ten minutes ago? Were you thinking about the pain? Were you thinking about me? Maybe if the glass had shattered right I Might have Had an Excuse not To look Into your Sorry eyes Damp darkness and papercuts bloodied would have hurt less than This
07 Photography by Kat Holleran W W W. H B I N R E T R O S P EC T.CO M
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08
All the wonder
masked by
FEAR.
ETCHING BY ZOË SOLT INSPIRED BY PROSE BY TONI THAYER
I’m a creature of the darkness and the damp, crawling through spaces so small you don’t even know, scaling walls and walking upside down across the ceiling. I watch you. I live long—years, growing, reaching out in all directions, caressing the world with my many and many legs, too much, too many, an overwhelming plenty of touch and movement—but if you can be calm, you will see my legs trace the unstoppable rhythm of waves, rising and falling, perfect oscillation across the octagonal tiles of your bathroom floor. Have you noticed, too, I’m so smooth and flat that if you try to crush me, you can’t? I hug the ground so closely I am the ground. You can’t make me any flatter. I’m quick, unpredictable. You don’t know when I will appear or where I will go. You don’t know, but I do. I am not chaos. I am an order beyond you. My world takes up the same space as yours but you do not even know it is here. Think of the possibilities. All the places inside one place. My curled young grow safely housed, my alien den safe inside your house. I see you. And sometimes you see me, too, in the corner of your sight, sudden movement in the night, racing down the center of the upstairs hall. Your heart skips. This is a gift. A moment to remember everything, everything, everything you cannot control and will never know. Welcome me as I cross from darkness to light and back again. For your life is also so.
08 Etching by Zoë Solt 09 Watercolor by Arielle DeVito
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Waves
WATERCOLOR BY ARIELLE DEVITO INSPIRED BY POEM BY JULIA FELDERMAN
I still don’t know who it was I was trying to save was it your heart or mine? when we went to watch the rolling waves
we were young when I first gave you my shapes, concave you outlined the soft curves of my waistline I still don’t know who it was I was trying to save
but still, it’s you that I crave I can still trace your neckline I still don’t know who it was I was trying to save
your love for me rolling over in its grave you telling me it was mis-assigned the last time we went to watch the rolling waves
it was our place, on the shore, the little rock cave where we spent endless time intertwined and where we went to watch the rolling waves
but now my mind won’t behave between love and the last time there is no line I still don’t know who it was I was trying to save every time we went to watch the rolling waves W W W. H B I N R E T R O S P EC T.CO M
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01
#10
FRANCESCA FERRI I grew slowly to curve My body around yours Forever. And if I had a Spine, it would fit the Outline of your figure. I would have housed you from The end of the world— If you’d let me. Now I stare at the sun until I cannot see. Your faux brilliance Resonates, and if I had skin, I would still carve your name into It with my fingertips. You should apologize.
London KERRY GNANDT
“I can’t sleep.”
“I’ve noticed...” “...why not?” “I think I’m sleeping on the wrong side of the bed.” “But you’re against the wall.” “I know.” “Do you want to switch?” “How about tomorrow night?” “But how are you going to sleep tonight if you aren’t on the right side?” “I don’t know…” “...maybe I don’t want to sleep. I feel like I’m wasting time.” “What do you mean?” “Come here.”
In the Morning ELA PASSARELLI
Real lovers don’t make beds it would be inefficient she says we are just going to get back in, tonight no reply but a kiss yet he pulls up the covers a little bit, on his side his steps ricochet like little bombs down the hall her hands shake, like sparks from hot coals they both light cigarettes when the sun comes
01 Bond by Kat Holleran W W W. H B I N R E T R O S P EC T.CO M
x 57
02
REDUNDANT GRACE HOMANY Over and over announcing your place, like a high school quarterback on a cold Friday night in October. Does it hurt when your head hits your helmet? Or does your helmet hit your head? Physics was never my strong suit, but I’m trying to understand how equal and opposite, does not mean, that if you punch me, I hug you. I’m trying to understand how shorelines erode, and rivers change course, and how fish still know to swim upstream. Cool rain tickles my face, hugging my eyelashes like tears. But I am so happy to be here, with the dirt turning to mud beneath my calloused toes. How easy it is to change like this from dirt to mud and back again. Carrot sticks and yellow mustard. I scrape dusty cracks of mud off my socks, and scratch my head when it itches.
58 x
02 Joy Rides by Owen Healey 03 Tentacles by Melody Buca
I Should Live in Salt MORGAN WHALEY
The gates were opened from a stolen key and in came madly rushing through the uninvited waves of the Sea of Love. Consuming space it needed and stealing the air it dreaded. It slaps down scriptures in mahogany tower red shelves, throws chairs of dirt oak. All is warped and ruined. After it eats the floor, and belittles the sky, it swallows the mind and spares the heart of bodies of consumed lovers as they float down, twirling and dancing to the waltz of the current,
R E T R O S P EC T: A P U B L I C AT I O N O F H AT H AWAY B R OW N S C H O O L
like blanched rocks are in their pockets and soon they settle, like the dust on attic toys, to the new found sea floor. Breaths they take bring in rounded belly seeds that burrow in the throat, eyes, lungs, and when the blurry cascading mutant rays of the embalming sun hit the stillness of their cosmic dark pupils, rippling petals bloom from their slow beating hearts and out their mouths. A beautiful sight hidden by the blue hue of the sea of love.
This I Believe GRACE HOMANY
I believe in movement, big or small, momentum, forward motion, progress. I believe in road trips in which the arrival and departure takes longer than the stay. I believe in 10:30 pm stops at Target and Giant Eagle for important things like jumbo marshmallows and birthday cards. I believe in long runs and short jogs, because I have legs and I can. That’s what I say to every punch to the pavement, I can I can I can. I believe in the movement of bodies, fluidity, serenity, and grace. I believe in mapping the terrain of another body through movement, sweet movement. I believe in dance, in unembarrassed movement. I believe in the freedom to move however, wherever, whenever. I believe in little adjustments. The hike up of a pant leg, the fixing of hair, because adjusting is adapting and we all need to do a little more of that. I believe in nervous movement, twitches and fidgets because being nervous means you care; means you’ve got something to lose. I believe in moving on, because staying in one place for too long is toxic and I’m done hurting myself. I believe in the power of movement because it’s the swing of the wrecking ball, not the ball itself that knocks down burning buildings. I believe in slow movement because it must be fast for someone or something, and any movement is progress. I believe in driving, and train rides, and biking in the rain because sometimes we need help with movement and that’s okay. I don’t know why I believe in movement, but I know why I have to. I know that I do not, will not, cannot, believe in God because to me it feels as though He doesn’t move. It’s the same people in the same place asking for the same things: love, forgiveness, praise, acceptance. Only for themselves. When I put my faith in movement I know its more than myself. It’s basic science that every action has an equal and opposite reaction, so every movement, every push away or pull closer or foot pounding on pavement is reciprocated. I may not feel it, I may not know it, I may not see it, but it’s as real as any God could ever be. And I don’t have to pray or sin or royally screw up to get movement to listen. I guess I believe in movement because I don’t believe in standing still. We never truly stand still. Standing at all requires so much. The muscles straining between skin and bone to hold me up, my heartbeat, that’s movement. Standing truly still has a name, it’s called dying and I don’t want to die, so I just keep moving. I think I believe in movement because it’s easy. Inhaling, and exhaling, and driving, and walking, doesn’t take much, if any, effort. I believe in movement because I believe we were born to move. Every fiber of my being has evolved from fight or flight; fighting is movement, fleeing is movement. And either way is a means to an end, an end to what I don’t know, but I believe it’s that end that we move from. Whether we move through fists flying or feet flying makes no difference. I understand why some people fear movement, but I live on a rotating rock in the middle of infinity fueled by a larger burning rock. So if anyone wants to tell me why they shouldn’t embrace movement; embrace ephemerality and change and momentum. Please do. But the sun will set and rise and prove them wrong. So I believe in movement wholeheartedly with every breath, step, and beat because I believe in living and I hope you do too.
03
W W W. H B I N R E T R O S P EC T.CO M
x 59
04
Your Blood is Too
KACEY GILL
I traced the scar with a fingertip wishing love could heal wounds, But love, like stitches, only stops the bleeding, Your blood is too thin. I watch it run like you ran after the broken taillights with bare feet – they bleed. But love, like stitches, only stops the bleeding I know, and yet I keep the needle moving, tacking on pictures of fuzzy faces. I start to run like you ran after the broken taillights with bare feet – they bleed. You tried to speak, but your larynx was tight and too dry, I know, and yet I keep the needle moving, tacking on pictures of fuzzy faces. You hung the rules of being a man on the wall next to your mother’s rusting crucifix and tried to speak, but your larynx was tight and too dry. I caught the whispers in a jar like fireflies. You hung the rules of being a man on the wall next to your mother’s rusting crucifix, broken ribs with no crown of gold, but a crown of thorns pricking your forehead. I’ll catch the whispers in a jar like fireflies, And watch your heavy lids flicker. Broken ribs with no crown of gold but a crown of thorns pricking your forehead, I’ll trace the scars with a fingertip wishing love could heal your wounds. And watch your heavy lids flicker. My love, your blood is too thin.
“Feathers fill the pillows” MCKENNA RITTER
Pieces and parts Of what it takes to fly Rest beneath your quiet cranium Tear open the pillow Rip at its seams Peck at its insides Now glue one feather Onto your goosebumps One at a time Filling your skin carefully The Jenga of nest-building on skin Under the warmth of my lumpy cloud blanket Because what if we spent less time sleeping
(Title of piece came directly from “Fraction” by Hannah Stephenson (Stephenson, Hannah. In the Kettle, the Shriek. Boston, MA: Gold Wake, 2013. Print.))
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05
I Am My
Body GINA BOMPIEDI
Clumsy in my steps Graceful in my walk I am my body. Unclean and uneven Yet no different than Earth itself You may look at me, And see this ugliness The same ugliness which made Mountain ranges And great oceans Climb the hills of my vertebrae Or roll like water droplets down my breasts Find salvage in my lungs And artistry in my brain Float in the red sea of my blood And Climb the branches of my nervous system
04 Farming in San Antonio, Bolivia by Alexia Jones 05 Samuel by Kate Snow
I am my body. Heart and Soul. W W W. H B I N R E T R O S P EC T.CO M
x 61
06
Do You? THE TORTOISE SHELL COLLECTIVE MARIA PERILLA, MORGAN WHALEY, CARTIER PITTS, OLIVIA LESLIE, MCKENNA RITTER “The saddest note in this place fills each one of our heads with sorrow goodbye” I read once that you can die of heartbreak that the tendons in your heart can snap Aorta, like closed throats pinched on clothesline: Do you think of me still? Do you think of our dusty apartment? Have you called your mom lately? Are you with her now? I think I’ll leave too, but the dust can’t take care of itself Do you?
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POCKETS GRACE HOMANY
His hands rest in his pockets because they feel empty in the open air. He cannot ask to hold her hand now, his hands are too nervous, he is too nervous, his heart is beating like a jackrabbit. No lucky rabbit’s foot. She looks disappointed, shit. Hands fumble, tearing from pockets, but they snag on belt loops and awkward silence that’s too heavy. He can’t hold her hand now because he can barely hold his arm out. Paralyzed. Yet they’re still walking, her disappointment deepens, a river of confusion erodes a canyon above her brow, she’s not frowning, but she’s thinking. He’s thinking too, about how badly he would like to hold that hand and watch the canyon fill. Her hand remains empty, his hand remains empty, rivers run; they walk.
Second Station MCKENNA RITTER
Fingers find scalp Melt palms, Heart atria ventricles Dancing into the space of lungs Deflated at the desk Muscles folded over Wonders if fingers Curl as skin cools Yellow capsule Said you’d fog Windows Meld the plastic over lighter See the vermilion beetle Overcoming mother’s purple petunias Blue toppled silos Wisconsin-quilted Patchwork of cornfields and cul-de-sacs Tornado sirens Heard from playgrounds Tumors in one twin Skating on the pond Calligraphy dots The “I” Stands in military Formation yellows and purples on the priest’s Jawbone to ear lobe Swimming through stained Glass stations of the cross Seeing the crown Isn’t feeling the thorns
Sound Stopped CARTIER PITTS
“The harmony wanted words to fit the feelings Heaven had on the night you Got something finer than pleasure The song flew” High butterflies became lost and trapped in my tummy, where they crashed into one another continuously You crashed into me or was it the other way around? I don’t know I just knew that I wanted to go with you on a voyage through the abyss that encompasses our tiny world
But I’m not Sinatra I can’t take you to Jupiter and Mars So I hope you don’t mind Venus because we will finally be in the right place to experience the rich tastes that this looovvve–(l)ust will create
I hate that all of our sounds stopped and the silence pulled us apart So hopefully as I release this poem into space It’ll one day come your way And just in case you like what it says I won’t be too far behind, So maybe we could... Crash into each other again
06 Christmas Lights at High Speeds by Alanna Brown W W W. H B I N R E T R O S P EC T.CO M
x 63
TIME MOLLY SHARPE
Closure is elusive As a singing sea nymph. In a never-ending moment, Feel pause but never stop. Incomplete. A succinct halt allows time enough for half a hurried breath Never truly breathe. Strangled by the noose of time, trudge along in this infinite discomfort. Weighed down by the heavy hands of a clock, crawl instead of walk. Keep moving. To lay is to waste. We are not wasteful. Serfs of the wise revolving. The only relaxation Must accompany death.
You speak a foreign language when you sleep Your words garbled— They have travelled far— And when you tell me about your Dreams in the morning I listen to your heart stutter in Your chest. That was the first time I noticed that When conscious, you skip over Certain names. I wonder why It comes so naturally. And I used to imagine how The light would look— Translucent— On your skin. You always sweat when you Sleep. I saw Orion in the Drops on your temples. Now I’m more curious about Where I’ll put my Too-thick legs on my new Down-sized bed. You cried when I described how our Tombstones would look lying— Side-by-side— I flinched—always feeling— You looked scared—said you Didn’t like to think of me— Dead. I should have screamed Spit flying in your face When I had the chance.
#11 FRANCESCA FERRI
It’s too late now I’m Not allowed to feel anger when I notice Your body smells like someone else’s And I understand why. I hope they Touch you like they did in your Imagination. I avoid pointing out That I was there when You were dreaming. Your blood flows smoother than my Words—words you caused but Didn’t understand. I should have gotten rid of you when I had The chance. Instead I dug Your name into my bones. I would Break my arm if the scars wouldn’t Remind me of your hair. I wonder if He—for the betrayal tastes so acrid— Might ever appreciate the things You do wrong. I have never been in love.
07 Kite by Sonum Jagetia 08 Feeling the Warm Air by Maggie Gehrlein
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07
Arno
08
MARIA PERILLA
The lazy champagne river flowed deep through the heart of the city, romancing every bridge’s cobblestone belly. The river giggled against the sun for a little while, basking in the virgin touch of midmorning heat. The river, with her impatient mouth, ate all the pastries that morning, took a child’s flute and played her favorite lullaby while flirting the mountains in the sapphire sky. The river showed a lot of skin that night. Let a handsome man sing her to sleep and wash him off before he could offer her coffee. Left him damp with the memory of a start night. The river flowed through the heart of the city, and as the baker opened up his shop window, she picked out a cake to send to her mother, smiled with her teeth, and hummed all the way home.
W W W. H B I N R E T R O S P EC T.CO M
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01
God Made
SCIENCE KELSEY RICH God made the world in just seven days It must have been chaotic To make order out of the chaos Or if it was not His work But rather the Big Bang It most definitely would have been Chaotic Hydrogen atoms crashing into each other Combining to form helium Which in turn led to Lithium
02
The nuclei of atoms grew heavy With their heavy proton load Carbon and oxygen The stuff of life, Bonding with their neighbors Sometimes sharing Their electrons Other times, they grabbed Electrons for themselves So selfish to feel whole That the robbed atoms Drew themselves closer, Smaller, kept what remains As close to their center As can be. Next time, they won’t Share so easily
01 Harnessing Chaos by Nelle Bruckner 02 Burning Trees by Madeleine Kattan
She slapped the canvas With fat dollops of pigment Alternating the path The angle, the force The ways of weaving brushstrokes Into a pattern-less wilderness So that life emerged in the chaos Mother and child On the cusp of embrace. W W W. H B I N R E T R O S P EC T.CO M
x 67
03
f nse o A Se
MADELINE SHADE
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on Moti
03 Hosts by Sophie Sacks 04 Overhead by Anna Lietman
I float. I wander. I ride. The invisible line test is indivisible from disaster in my mind. My mind. I find. The thing that keeps you upright sends me tumbling. Tumbling through tight spaces. Stars become discernable faces. Motion erases. Any sense of the concrete places Where the sun goes down. Down where I can’t falter Because I wobble to walk where others saunter It’s balance that I want to conquer If only I were slightly stronger Look to the horizon they say. They know I can’t tell the break of day.
Anyone’s Ghost MORGAN WHALEY
I know at best I’ll be a myth, to tempt to frighten children to be good. Because if anything, we are all just pictures, captured in the movement of time, that will be put in a ripped shoe box and stored in a damp and molded basement to be thrown out when it floods the next spring.
04
IN DIS PUT ABLE
CARLY WELLENER
Meanwhile the world goes on In spite of the pressure on your temple Pushing oppressively on the trembling walls Of your mind and soul Trying desperately to escape Into the quiet din of the grass and the dirt. You’ve always wondered How it has carried on so long Straining against the weight of it all— All of the emotions and castles and universes That you clutch tightly in your hand And keep in your limited head. The thoughts and regrets and plans Churn into a hailstorm. But outside the wind Playfully tickles the trees in the night Clings the wind chimes In quietly beautiful cacophony. Waves lap at the shorelines of your dark eyes Tugging sleep closer, then further; Closer, then further A tidal system contained In a clump of cells About the size of two fists Clenched and dry and cracked Grasping for what they can only dream. A car wizzes past in the dark Its engine an abrasive sputter A reminder of the indisputable fact: Meanwhile the world goes on
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x 69
05 MAYA RAZMI City of City of DARKNESS City of Lights she stares out a window at the city of lights the sky shades of night stars strung up like lanterns she sits at a dinner table wrapped in a cocoon of love laughing, chattering, smiling without a care in the world she wanders down a dusty street markets bursting in vibrant color vendors bargaining, cars honking children playing she sits in a battered red car putt-putting down a dusty road truly content, because she is home she stares out a window at her city of lights the sky of shades of night stars strung up like lanterns she smiles
boom she turned away before she saw the fire, the blood, the sorrow she stares out a cracked window a city burning in darkness the sky cloaked in ashes is black with rage the window shatters she turns away City of Grey she is a stranger among the shattered glass of the ebony night sky scattered with glimpses of hope she is a stranger to the eerie lack of sound on the empty streets the deafening silence almost too much to bear she is a stranger to the lack of vibrant color no more black or white caught between shades of grey
City of Darkness she stares out a cracked window her city drowned in darkness the sky cloaked in smoke is black with rage
she is a stranger to the battered red car from so long ago putt-putting another little girl down another dusty road
she stands by the broken walls shadows of a world once was a tear slides down her cheek some memories too painful
she is a stranger to the light within the dark the silver lining the hope of a new beginning
she wanders down the dusty street desolation, sadness, hunger high-pitched screams begging for someone, anyone
she smiles ever so slightly as she steps away from the shattered glass and into the grey
she sat in a battered red car putt-putting down the dusty road
a stranger no more
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05 Illusions by Kimi Kian 06 Funkytown by Grace Burleson
Aftermath The neon light glows on my cheeks as I walk out of the building. Smith’s Pub has become my refuge these past few months—taking me in, filling me up with Stella and Belvedere and then spitting me back out like a bad taste in the mouth; I retaliate each night and end up bent over the toilet.
This is the routine. My father was diagnosed with cancer the March before last. He’d stopped taking his medicine before any of us that loved him could notice, and eventually the disease won. He left the world after a last few months of seeming to barely inhabit it at all. Sometimes I wondered why it wasn’t me instead. And then I drink until I stop wondering. This is the routine. Walking carefully around stale rain puddles and through the thick air that November was already promising, a cigarette makes an appearance between my index and middle finger. It’s a new habit. The flint strikes and I feel my chest tighten and shake down loose. The New York skyline still seems lonely in the absence of the towers—light pollution from down below sympathetically fills the void that was been created only a month ago, and the softness of the yellow-white mist seems almost like an
06
RACHEL LOWRIE
apology. It’s 2001, and ever since September 11th, people have begun watching each other instead of watching out for each other. I hate who this has turned me into. There’s this thin reflective film over the city, pushing on the chests of those of us who can even bear to leave their homes, and creating a faint mirror above the street lights and taxi cabs in which you could see one another, slightly distorted, from anywhere you stand. I think I hear footsteps, and turn over my shoulder, but they turn out to be nothing. It’s just my mind playing tricks on me in the light. Each noise sounds like a bomb, and every person bumping into each other on the sidewalk feels like a plane crash—a collapsing building. Our heightened senses have us looking up and left and every other direction at the slightest sound that exceeds a certain threshold of comfort. Jackhammers hurt. For a while, I couldn’t even leave the house. For days it was like this. My apartment became the entire world around me and it still felt threatened, like a war zone. I wanted to keep the blinds closed, but I couldn’t bring myself to get so close to the window. If I die, I want my ending to come as a surprise. I don’t want the time to think—the time to look around. I spent a lot of time in the lobby, but I never left. I took the stairs. I’d make excuses in conversation—I was checking the mail, waiting for a friend. In a way I wasn’t lying. I was waiting for something, but I didn’t know what, or if it was even coming at all. On the nights I could bare to shut my eyes, I would have dreams. By definition they were nightmares but that word has a new reserve. The real nightmares are for when I am not asleep. Max insisted on saying that he’d take the case himself when I told him I was leaving him. He works as a divorce lawyer at a firm downtown and was sleeping with my cousin. I wanted to stay, but couldn’t bring myself to. I couldn’t take it anymore—his infidelity felt like another bomb. He had walked through the front door one night and said there was something wrong with the divorce papers or the documents—I couldn’t remember which, and hardly wanted to read them. He spoke in words I didn’t understand. I told him I’d stay a little longer. He was as afraid as I was. The streetlight above is flickering. I’m lighting another cigarette. Strike the flint. Shake down loose. Let it burn like the tears in my eyes.
W W W. H B I N R E T R O S P EC T.CO M
x 71
How Not to Interview for a Job You Don’t Want ZOË SOLT
The interviewer adjusted her spectacles and pulled up her lips in a grimace as she pored through Garret’s resume, a gesture that Garret found both rude and extremely unladylike. He thought the interviewer had a rather witchy look about her—with that no-nonsense grey bun, those perfectly round metal spectacles, and that stodgy, old dress that she wore, which hung down to her black pointed shoes and was the color of spoiled beets. She even smelled of cats! With a start, he realized that she might indeed be a witch, especially given the nature of the place he was attempting to get a job today. Would the ESP Corp hire witches, I wonder? Garret thought nervously, staring out the window into the snowy streets. He could see the tracks he had made in the snow leading up to the building, though they were quickly being filled by the new snowfall. “I am not a witch, Mr. LeClaire,” the woman said, lips turned in a permanent disapproving scowl. Reminds me of my granny, Garret thought, with a shiver. “And do check your thoughts around here, good sir. This is the ESP corp, after all.” She pulled herself higher in her chair, slightly miffed. “And I’ll have you know I am a proud grandmother of three darling grandchildren.” Remembering his last thought, Garret laughed inwardly. This interview was not starting off well. His mother would be so disappointed—how wonderful! The old woman returned to her reading, one eyebrow cocked in an expression of disbelief. He thought it was rather unprofessional of her not to have read it beforehand. At this thought, the woman made another disapproving clucking sound in the back of her throat. Go on and cluck, he thought, fully aware the interviewer could hear him. I’m only doing this to please my mum, anyway. I don’t even care if I get this job. Bored with the slow pace of the interview, Garret looked around the office. The interviewer seemed to be an accessory placed in the room specifically to match the décor: everything was old and musty, hearkening from the “good ‘ole days” when furniture was meant to be seen and not used. The walls were lined with bookcases filled with useless but interesting artifacts, each with its own placard describing its origin and supposed purpose. “Well, your past exploits are rather… interesting, Mr. LeClaire,” the woman finally proclaimed, adjusting her spectacles yet again, observing the scruffy young gentleman in front of her. Who wears a trench coat to an interview? she thought, somewhat disgusted but subconsciously amused. I’m pretty sure he’s wearing mismatched socks, as well. How disgraceful. She shook her head, trying to keep an open mind, and cleared her throat, continuing, “Your resume says you’ve worked at…seven separate fast-food chains in the
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past two years?” “Eight,” he drawled, looking out the window. When would this be done? “And you were banned for life from at least one,” she mused skeptically. “Yeah, well, that Burger King manager was acting like a Burger Dictator, if ya know what I mean,” Garret said, emotion rising in his voice. “Got mad at me for accidentally mixing up the condiments on a few orders. Called it a ‘Condiment Calamity,’ I quote. I thought he was being a bit overly dramatic, so I decided to help him put it into perspective by showing how much worse a ‘Condiment Calamity’ could be.” The interviewer stared at Garret, spectacles hung low on her face. She was too shocked to adjust them. “…Mr. LeClaire, I assume you know of our organization’s prestige?” she finally managed to stutter out. “This is no place for a joke interview.” “Eh, that wasn’t a joke, it took them two days to clean it all up,” he answered seriously. Patience, Dolores, the interviewer thought, rubbing her temples. Just speed through the rest of the interview, and then you can send him away. Protocol is protocol, after all. “All right, well, that’s…good to know,” she muttered, flipping through the pages. “How about we skip past a few questions…probably don’t even need to ask about former references, now, do we?…Now, can you tell me about your skillsets?” “I can make a damn good omelet,” Garret answered, elbows resting gently on the table, chin resting on interlaced fingers in an expression of the purest innocence. “I meant of the Extrasensory kind, sir,” she replied, patience worn down to the quick. “This is the ESP corp, after all.” “Eh, you know. The usual,” he said, sounding sarcastic even to the interviewer’s hard old ears. “I know what people are going to say before they say it, mild telekinesis skills, dreams that tell the future.” She raised a skeptical eyebrow, disbelieving. Garret leaned in close, and whispered, “Once, I had a dream that I shit my pants in public, and then the next day I had to go so badly on the subway I thought I was going to. Now, if that’s not prophetic, then what is?” “Mr. LeClaire!” she shouted, rising out of her seat. “I am through with your disrespectful conduct! You are a fraud, and you mock the nobility of our organization! The ESP corp was founded more than a hundred years ago, to protect the public from threats yet to come and to preserve the stability of our nation! And yet, you come here and believe it prudent to make a mockery of our abilities and duties? How utterly disgraceful!”
She continued chiding him, but Garret was no longer listening. He had begun to feel the familiar chill down his neck, the one that had plagued him since childhood. The one that always happened before the visions did. Oh, god, not again, he thought, groaning inwardly. He clutched his stomach, feeling queasy, as the vision washed over him. “And furthermore—Mr. LeClaire, are you even listening to me?!” Garret was staring off into space, a vague look on his face. “A bomb,” he muttered, as the vision dissipated. He smoothly got out of his chair and strode over to the window to see several masked men running away from the ESP building, one of whom clutched a detonator in a sweaty glove. His eyes widened, and he lunged for the phone on the old woman’s desk. “Excuse me, what are you doing?!” she cried, trying to grab the phone away from him. He pushed her aside without thought and turned away, eyes closed in concentration. One of Garret’s best psychic talents, besides his random and unpredictable prophetic visions, was his Psychometry, or his ability to gain information about an object just by touching it. He immediately was able to divine the number that linked the phones to the intercom network, and quickly punched it in the phone’s keypad. “There’s a bomb in the building! Quickly, everyone get out of here! This is not a drill, I repeat, this is NOT A DRILL!!!” he shouted through the earpiece. His voice bounced from the phone up to the intercoms that were placed in every room of the building, for emergency measures just like this, and his booming voice echoed in every room of the place. He could hear a tumult on the floors above and below him, as well as the sound of people pounding past in the hallway outside the closed door of the room. Good, they’re taking me seriously, he thought, smiling. He was surprised to find he felt a modicum of pride for this. Garret grabbed the old woman by the wrist and, against her outraged protests, he flew out of the room and into the hallway. While running down the hallway, Garret thoughtfully pulled the fire alarm on his way out the door, causing a hell of sirens and screams to raise up on every floor, ensuring that anyone not reached by his intercom message would still know to flee the building. He flew down the stairs, heedless of the elderly woman he dragged along behind him, and managed to exit by the back of the building in less than two minutes flat. He stood outside, gasping in the snow, surrounded by a stream of other panicked office workers and ESP agents who were also fleeing the building.
However, before she could finish an enormous explosion ripped through the building behind her, cutting her off mid-sentence. The crowds screamed as the bomb blew an enormous hole through the side of the first floor, blowing out windows with mighty crashes and throwing rubble and dust high into the air. The explosion was so intense it shook the very foundations of the building, and the escapees could feel the rumble in the earth. “Please, do not panic!” one of the agents cried, using a hypnotic wave to lull the crowd into calm. “We’re professionals, we can handle this situation!” Garret felt the wave wash over him and felt a little woozy, as if he wanted to take a nap. “How did you—how did—” the old woman stumbled, trying to find the right words. Garret ignored her, and sat down on the ground with his fingers to his temples, feeling light headed. Slowly, carefully, some of the more seasoned agents approached the building. They poked through the rubble, assessing the damage. “That was a damn huge bomb,” said one of their A-team members, who was codenamed “Parsnips” for unknown or unremembered reasons, and who spoke with an incredibly annoying machismo brogue. “Musta had some sorta psy-shield on it. That’d explain why none ‘a us A-teamers sensed it coming. I bet it was them terrorists again, tryin’ ta stir up panic. Seems no one was hurt, though. Ey, chief,” he said, spotting the older woman. “Who psychick’d it out in the end, anyway? Probably saved a whole buncha lives today, they did. Can’t believe they were able to sense through a shield I couldn’t. Probs a really powerful dude.” The old woman stared blankly at the settling rubble of the explosion, contemplating. Finally, she turned to Parsnips with a crafty look on her face, and said, “Oh, it was just our new recruit, Garret LeClaire. I’ve interviewed him, and I am, suffice to say… quite impressed with his abilities.” “Hey, hey, whoa,” Garret said, walking over to the pair, his palms up in a gesture of no. “Look, I didn’t even want this job. My mom made me apply. I was trying to botch that interview.” The chief looked at him icily. “And you failed.”
Out of breath, the interviewer stooped over with her hands on her skirts, gasping. Finally, she drew herself up, planted her feet in the snow, and shouted, “MR. LECLAIRE, I WOULD HAVE YOU KNOW—”
W W W. H B I N R E T R O S P EC T.CO M
x 73
07 Linear Curve by Coco Liu 08 Funkytown II by Melody Buca
07
for certain JULIA FELDERMAN
there are only a few things I know for certain. one is that my dad’s wedding ring needs serious coaxing to be removed from his finger because of the callous around it, it used to have a pattern too, although I guess I don’t know that for certain since it’s been worn off for so many years. two is that I have just recently figured out the difference between loving and being in love, how I have never before been in love but I know with complete certainty that I have loved someone before. three is that the aux cord in my car cuts out sometimes but I don’t care because there will never be a time I drive without listening to music. four is that little things scare me more often than they should and sometimes they’re big things. five is that I think about things that are bigger than me probably more than I should and six could be that maybe that’s not a bad thing. seven is that I get attached too quickly, creating emotion around a book or a little box from when I was a kid that shouldn’t have any meaning whatsoever but sometimes they do and eight is that I don’t like throwing things away because the dark black of the garbage bag feels too permanent.
UNTITLED LIBBY FLETCHER I am in the solitude of my room alone, but together with myself. Keeping my windows open of course, feeling the cool breeze and the smell after rain. The clouds make their way into my room lifting me up so slight. An ethereal feeling they give, while I am suspended above the covers, surrounded by grey, which I love. A floor board creaks or a leaf falls. I just open my eyes to the white ceiling above, from my ephemeral sleep, overcome with a feeling of homesickness, for a home I can never return to, or that never was. I’m sitting in my house but not my home. My house on West Park, my room of red, that I wished was grey.
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R E T R O S P EC T: A P U B L I C AT I O N O F H AT H AWAY B R OW N S C H O O L
Reincarnation, Energy Beads, and Cul-de-sacs MCKENNA RITTER Inspired by Sanganar Ledger III by Sharon Horvath Racetracks Phagocytosis of bruise Squashed chick peas Pursed lips of glasses Tunnels for winding shoelaces Peruvians trapping guanacos for chest fur Mountains from airplane windows Airplane windows Undropped mirrors Children’s games
For some reason, it gives me hope that the sun faces mortality A conclusion of darkness Its particles turned into dust that no one completely understands And I’m never jealous of the girl to my left That outlines perfect circles on calculus graphs Because a steady hand means you aren’t partaking In the miracle of endlessness Sharking at the suffocation and comfort The multi-tasking of embraces
08
W W W. H B I N R E T R O S P EC T.CO M
x 75
E JORDAN ELHINDI I like the hollow hall of the art museum because it reminds me of the hollow inside of a tree before you cut it down. How the tree hole is like an eye socket of a skeleton who had lived brightly and has now decayed, and that’s essentially the art museum and what I am too, insisting to feel full even though I can see my reflection in the mirror only to feel transparent or something like the plastic on a water bottle. I’m taking a walk, aiming to find a reason why I can’t walk on water. I’m looking up at the sun, and see the bright light flashing through the cracked headlight of my car, shining on a list
76 x
09 that is split in two of regrets and things I someday shall do. I want this list to govern my being and lead the way, like the man leads his horse down the dirt path and through the blinding fog to the place where it finds openness, and the freedom to run, fast and far toward the light, the kind that can only be reached in movies.
R E T R O S P EC T: A P U B L I C AT I O N O F H AT H AWAY B R OW N S C H O O L
It’s absurd looking at art on walls of the museum, and thinking about the weather. Someone please pry open the roof that covers their ancient preserves, and let the light shine in on the empty hall. It’s amusing how light eliminates darkness, just like answers eliminate questions, only to result in more questions. Light is temporary there is always darkness, so can someone please explain why the hell I’m here.
Observations
from an Occasional
Insomniac JEN WANG
As I sit here at 2 in the morning, there’s a certain serenity in the thought that no one else is awake. The sky is a deep pure blue covered in freckles. The stars are just millions of inhuman eyes, watching me bumble around all day so that I can attempt to take my WebMD-prescribed 8-hour coma every night. But in this moment, silence is a silky cloth draped over the worn minds of workaholics and laggards alike. It’s beautiful. The world seems so candid, real, untouched. I started to have sporadic bouts of insomnia in 8th grade, and I hated it. I hated myself for falling victim to it. It seemed like such a waste of time and would always leave me exhausted the next day. I thought of it as a curse, a neurological fault that left me glaring at the glow-in-the-dark stars on my bedroom ceiling. I would devour Wikipedia pages or watch shows and movies—anything to distract myself from the inundation of thoughts that kept me awake. But then one day, I gave up, and submitting to my anxious mind, I just thought and thought. Somehow, I had never had a calmer mind. During the day, all of my thought are engaged in a wild tango. A dip here, a spin there, a quick duck under some stranger’s arm as I share a world full of people with bustling minds as chaotic as my own. There’s so much thinking that is obligatory. Thinking that’s required for doing well on tests, thinking that’s put to worrying about our futures, and thinking that’s stolen by innate human sociability. There’s often so much going on that I think that there are so many thoughts being thought that I think I get confused and think that thoughts are confusing. Late at night, everything’s different. As the sole conscious person within a reasonable span of space, I am firmly the proprietor of my thoughts. In a sea of darkness, I’m alone. The world is quiet and peaceful. It’s then that I can decide the values of my life, the contributions I want to make to the world, and the methods by which I will achieve my ambitions. Far from outward influences, it’s then that I can truly observe what I want, that I can clearly define who I am and who I want to be.
The Great White LIZZIE CROTTY
I relax, and it spits me back out. I land on my stomach with my face in the grass I can smell the freshness of day and feel the dew moisten my skin And I can feel the bump in my mouth where the wound used to be, But it hurts much less now. Everything is going to turn out okay.
Away from the rest of the world, my insomnia has brought me to a world where I could escape mandatory thinking and contemplate my life on a grander scheme. Though reluctant to accept it at first, it soon dawned on me, and all too literally at times, that despite the negative impacts insomnia may have, benefits are possible as long as I allow them to exist. So from an occasional insomniac who should probably go to sleep, take some time alone to ask yourself what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, and how you can do it better.
09 Art, Art on the Wall by Ela Passarelli W W W. H B I N R E T R O S P EC T.CO M
x 77
11
Sand in My Teeth
KACEY GILL
I hold the five-dollar wine in my hands, gritting the sand in my teeth. It tastes like salt smoked with the sweat of the earth. It’s bitter, I don’t mind. The woman in front of me chews a piece of gum and rolls her eyes. She’s trying too hard. She knows it. I look down at my hand, seeing a blurred reflection in the bottle of the Moscato. I can barely make out my eyes – bloodshot, or am I just imagining it? The woman in front of me says something to the cashier. His blond eyelashes flutter in response, casting shadows on his cheeks. He barely lifts his eyelids. This job doesn’t pay enough to find the energy to see. The bottle starts to slip. My hands are sweaty. The woman leaves, I step forward. We don’t try to make small talk. I slide my tongue over the groves of my molars feeling the grit. He looks down, scanning the bottle. I keep my gaze on his eyelashes. I recognize them. He whispers, “$5.41.” I reach out to him, dollar bills in hand. He doesn’t move. He’s staring at my hands. My knuckles are split and scabbed. He recognizes them. I know those eyelashes from the same place he knows these knuckles. The automatic door slides open and an old woman walks in. He’s unfrozen and moving quickly now. He hands me my bag silently. I accept it silently. My hands are shaking. I turn and walk out the door trying to forget the ache that just appeared in my hands. My bones can feel the guilt. I take a deep breath and taste blood. Walk faster, I think. I can’t outrun a memory. Purple and blue face. Swollen and bleeding. Almost unrecognizable. Except for those eyelashes, long and blond. The bitter in my mouth overwhelms. My hands are too sweaty, the bag slips. The yellow bottle of Moscato smashes on the concrete. I keep walking. “Not caring takes practice,” I say out loud. Only the stars are listening and they don’t look like they care. But they’ve sat in the sky for billions of years casting light when there was none, so they must. Take a lesson from the gods I think. But God doesn’t exist and I don’t have a choice. I keep walking, gritting my teeth.
10
10 Bars by Amanda Merritt 11 Melody in Technicolor by Melody Buca
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R E T R O S P EC T: A P U B L I C AT I O N O F H AT H AWAY B R OW N S C H O O L
Don’t Sleep With Mechanical Pencils MCKENNA RITTER
Rest with stuffed animal shark and ukulele You should sing sea life to sleep with chordless renditions of “I’m Yours” Salty strings Musical oar That sips the current into its belly Absorbing the melody of ocean tides That isn’t waves crashing at shore Or breaking in the boat’s wake Something else entirely Carry with fin to the humans For they need to hear the ocean Not through shells Not substituted by xylophone of creeks They need the sound of the ocean More than alarm clocks Clicks of car doors And the grass stealing back wasted oxygen From closing windows More than our thoughts
The Thinning
ALANNA BROWN
My hair falls out in clumps and pieces Gathering on the floor like thin snakes threatening to sting me. They float as graceful as an acrobat, But the only thing to catch them is the cold floor of my bathroom. I watch the black thread holding my life together Tumble down, never to be found again. It is destined to be lost with the incessant lines of my bathroom floor Or float away with water in forgotten sinks. I’ve done everything to my hair— Heat, blades, braids, and ponytails. But it’s still there. It stayed. It’s as if the strands of my hair are flowers that grow from my thoughts, So it makes sense then that every ounce of negativity in my brain Is pesticide to the weeds. W W W. H B I N R E T R O S P EC T.CO M
x 79
THE DAY THE COFFEE MAKER BREAKS ISABELLA NILSSON
G
reg lunged on Robert first. Snarling like an animal, he bit into the pulsing flesh of his cartroid artery; freshly oxygenated blood splashed all over his Brooks Brother collar.
Mary squatted on the counter, shrieking wildly and pounding her breasts, the hem of her business casual lady’s suit in daffodil yellow riding up. Joanna had prostrated herself on the floor, sucking on the gold crucifix of her necklace and weeping silently. The coffee maker had been broken for almost thirty eight minutes. After the Great Keurig Holocaust, only fifteen employees remained in the office break-room. Samuel had promoted himself to chief by a ritual of violent ceremonial dancing and a clever powerpoint, tying the patterned ties of the conquered around his arms and legs, blood splattered prizes. The pockets of the dead were searched for illicit powdered coffee—any caffeine, caffeine that could be snorted or mainlined or swallowed still in the plastic, gaspingly. Martha the secretary was bent over the trash receptacle, shining pantyhose displayed, feverishly snuffling the used K-cups like a salt lick. A tribal hierarchy developed: females genuflecting to the great God Decaf while the men hunted for anything vaguely coffee-flavored in the office mini-fridge. A bag of crushed Cheetos was stepped upon, and the powdered orange dust rained over everyone’s heads. It was hailed as a miracle.
Time passed. No one remembered anymore what KOFEY stood for, why the machine in the corner was worshipped, why the door was locked. Why they shouted “KOFEY!” as an expletive and a prayer, why the chief was called Starbucks and the lowest slave Dunkin Donuts. This was the way it was—the way it always had been. There was no other way. The path of deprivation, of enslavement to an addiction unbearably distant in the past. It had been two hours since the coffee machine had broken. The Great Stapler was clenched. The Ceremonial Conference table was decorated with bones. The KOFEY chant resumed eternal. “Hey guys,” said Pete, the intern, opening the door to the break room. “Sorry I was craaaaazy late, some moron in a Humvee ran into a billboard on 42nd and Green, and we were stopped for ages, so the coffee’s cold, but—” They turned to him, mouths agape and dripping. “Coffee?”
you are underwater your mother left the sink running your father is screaming
MARIA PERILLA
What A Way to Go 80 x
R E T R O S P EC T: A P U B L I C AT I O N O F H AT H AWAY B R OW N S C H O O L
angry bubbles form from his mouth as he squeezes his eyes shut tight like the elevator doors in the building where the man jumped off last Tuesday and as the water fills up the rest of your cookie cutter house, you watch your underwear float up from the oak cabinet across your nightstand, dancing like the tropical fish you wrote a report on in the seventh grade. And so, your eyes shut tight too, your lungs sad deflated birthday balloons, and all you can think is how you left the toaster plugged in, and that one time with the concussion and the nosebleed and how beautiful it all was when red ran down the snow.
11730 ALLEY KERESZTESY
S
omething about that house on Pinewood Trail has burned into my memory, making it impossible for me to forget it. Maybe it was the way our house stood at the peak of our property, overlooking the gradually sloping hill protruding outward from the front of the house, showing off its bumps and holes, proud of the land that had so far raised four children. It could be the way the sun looked, peeking through the thick, colored foliage in untraceable patterns, the little patches of sun warming my arms through my thin, white blouse as I made my way up the driveway with my sisters, each of us exhausted from our days at school. It was the Sunday mornings when my mother would come home from working the night shift, carrying a flimsy cardboard box, contorting with the shifting weight of its twelve sugary rings, tipping as if to give us a glimpse of the treats it contained. It was my neighbors, all of them adults except for the two young boys next door. It was me, memorizing every detail of the house when we finally made a deal to sell, walking through it in my head whenever I left and checking myself when I came back, until there was no more coming back, the family rolling down the driveway for the last time, tears welling in our eyes as we passed not our house, but a house, sending silent goodbyes while memories began collecting in the reserve of my mind, never forgotten since.
Each part of that house is tagged to a random memory from my childhood. When I think of the laundry room, I remember climbing between a bookshelf and the washing machine to reach my favorite puzzle, placed on a high shelf so that the baby couldn’t reach it. The front porch reminds me of the first time I had watermelon, the family celebrating the rare occasion of me eating something healthy with a picture of ‘the girls’ on the front porch, a favorite family portrait for years to come. No place at this house sparks memories so vivid or plentiful as those in my driveway. My ‘angsty tween’ days were spent on the roof in the summer, climbing up the birch tree caddie-cornered between the outside of the garage and the front porch, a clear view of the TV set in our family room visible from the ground. I would spend time alone, lots of it, reading the American Girl magazines I started to outgrow atop the blazing shingles, often bringing a towel to buffer the heat between myself and the rooftop. I didn’t just grow up in that house. I grew outside of it, on top of it, under it, anywhere I could find space. Our family didn’t stop growing either. Eventually, we outgrew the three and a half bathrooms and four bedrooms, every year adding a puff of air to the ever stretching balloon of our family’s size. Coming home on the bus one day, I knew my mother had had a doctor’s appointment for the baby that afternoon. My parents decided they wanted to know the baby’s sex, a first for them. Our classes had taken guesses at school, our personal choices secretly hoping for a boy, a change, something new and different. It didn’t take long for us to make it up the driveway, passing each
cement block faster than the last, using all our energy to get to the driveway as my mother got out of her car, parking just before we got off the bus. Sweaty, panting, and excited, we demanded to know. A smirk was glued onto my mother’s face trying not to give away the answer we thought would be obvious. “It’s a boy?” “No…,” she answered trailing off as we then assumed, as any person would, that a sixth girl, first name starting and ending with A, middle name beginning with M and ending with E, would soon join us. “Well first you have to guess how many,” my mother clarified. Quickly, we learned that our home would be extending by more than just one little boy. My reaction was exclaiming “HOLY CRAP” over and over for several minutes until my mother shushed me, trying to keep herself from laughing at my immature overreaction. As a sixth grader, I didn’t know what else to do but use the worst possible word I could think of and put the word ‘holy’ in front of it. The driveway is one I will likely never drive on. I’ll never park in the garage or in the extra space next to it. My garage door opener won’t ever be capable of letting me enter my childhood home, where a new family now lives. Instead, I have the memories, treasures guarded by what I hope is maximum security inside my head. These are the times I reminisce upon with my siblings, each story funnier than the last, our version of a high school reunion. We can go on for hours, hearing everyone’s perspective from the moments of great joy and sadness that molded us, explaining how we got from Point A to B, defining us as the people we are. A picture now sits on my dresser, where it appears to be mid-August, two or three weeks after the fifth consecutive Keresztesy baby girl was born. By this time, the yard décor had been taken down, the small grassy part between the street and trees covered in pink bottles and a large sign boasting our newest addition. We were still obedient enough to actually put on a helmet when my mother told us to, the thick Styrofoam shells covered in decorative plastic cases, the straps never quite fitting right over our ears and chin. We smile, mostly because we’re told to, but partly because whoever listens gets a turn to push the stroller. These kids, ghosts of our past lives, know nothing about who they are or who they will become. They didn’t know two more siblings were in their future or that one of them would be an amazing saxophonist. They couldn’t have guessed that one would go to Northwestern and another would have ADD. They had no idea that one would be perfect and another, a horrible teenager. The future is the most unpredictable part of the world. You can guess and hope all you want, but what the future holds can’t be changed. You can never know until it has already happened, now a memory, a far-away glimpse at what there once was. Even now, nine years later, I have gained little more perspective on life than eight-year-old me had. I’m still clueless, thrown into the hectic chaos that is life, doing my best to figure it out.
W W W. H B I N R E T R O S P EC T.CO M
x 81
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R E T R O S P EC T: A P U B L I C AT I O N O F H AT H AWAY B R OW N S C H O O L
Life Cycle of a
#4
FRANCESCA FERRI To sit by herself at the kitchen table And ponder whether life is worth These dreary sleepless nights Spent thinking instead Of the sunny day to come. The fact that if she went outside She, herself, would not be able To see the colours of Her favourite flowers, Slowly dying as the earth turns And maybe they consider, too At night when they can’t see Their own brilliance whether Life is worth these dreary sleepless nights. And she, herself, shivers, Her bare feet now padding through Dew covered grass Rather than to sit By herself At the kitchen table Towards that tree where She would swing As a child. Perhaps she, herself, Will swing again.
Camp Lover EVIE SCHUMANN
Camp always came easy to me. I sang at the top of my lungs, despite my deficiency of pitch. I was friends with all the girls you would expect me to be friends with, but also with many of the ones you would not. I played every sport, volunteered for every optional mountain hike, and participated in every talent show; needless to say I had no particular talent in any of these realms. But camp had taught me it was not about my ability in these areas themselves, but my ability to put into each of them enthusiasm and excitement that had made my eight camper summers the most memorable of my life. Time moves sneakily and steadily forward, however, and before I knew it my time as a camper had expired. I was left to choose between leaving the place that had undeniably shaped every aspect of my life or continuing on to the more behind-the-scenes role of counselor. The choice was easy, but I knew my relationship with the place I called home would change. I was drawn back to camp with little doubt and few reservations in my mind, only a sense that I was fulfilling my duty. I felt I owed it to my counselors to come back and give kids the same unforgettable experiences they had given me. My time at camp had always centered around me. Yet, as a staff member, I had to transition to it being focused on my campers, their parents, my bosses, my coworkers—everyone and anyone but me. I had to go from being cared for to being the one that was caring for others. I eagerly accepted this selflessness, ignorant of how difficult it would be to uphold. Opening day came and I was no longer constantly surrounded by my best friends. Instead, I found myself dancing alone with eighteen pairs of perplexed eyes fixed resolutely on me. My goal was to get every camper to join me, but for the more homesick few this was less than appealing. I reached for the hand of one girl with dirty blonde hair and tear-filled eyes, but she was reluctant, glued to her seat. For days she defied me; she did not want to dance here or be here, this was not her home. But, it was my job to make it her home. To make it a place where she could be comfortable and happy, a refuge from the outside world. To make it for her what it was for me. The next seven weeks were exhausting yet exhilarating, drawing on ingenuity and patience I didn’t know I was capable of. I never stopped brushing hair, making beds, applying Band-Aids, or teaching the tricks to a perfect friendship bracelet. Alongside those crucial life skills, I tried to intersperse lessons on how to be inclusive, confident, honest, and positive as well. While this may not have been in my job description, the girls I was responsible for became my own, and I wanted in every way for them to succeed and be happy and genuine and wholesome. That was where the job became no longer fully selfless, and the nights spent awake dispelling nightmares or the grueling piggyback rides became worthwhile—that was when seeing my girls reach their potential became the most rewarding thing camp had ever had to offer me. I did not know it was possible to forge such strong connections with seven and eight year olds, but somehow I did, and months later I find myself missing them, missing being wanted and needed and loved so purely and innocently and unquestioningly. My job this summer, so seemingly simple, was harder than I had ever imagined, but all it took was a fleeting moment to reassure me I had done it, and hopefully, done it well. Watching the girl who had been miserably homesick cry as her bus pulled out of the long, pothole-filled road left me with a feeling only comparable to seeing the two best friends willingly invite the new girl into their canoe. I know these girls will grow up and forget most of what I said and did this past summer. In ten or so years, when they are in my position, they may only remember my name and face and the weird dance moves I deemed it imperative to teach them. But, if there’s anything I could have achieved from this summer, it is that the love and energy and passion camp has brought out in me will be instilled in them.
W W W. H B I N R E T R O S P EC T.CO M
x 83
01
01 Teagan by Sophie Clark 02 Vans by Andreanna Hardy
02
Two Friends Too Close ANNA LIETMAN
I picked up the home phone, now obsolete, and dialed the number of a phone of a home two streets away: 3386465, only 2 digits apart from my own. Two girls, Grade 2, talking on the telephone. I arranged to meet her at our usual spot: the tree we aptly (naïvely) named BFF, not knowing it would later be chopped down. Not knowing she would later move houses, no longer separated by a mere two streets. We didn’t know, then, separation of two of the best of friends was not only possible but inevitable. But then, in that moment, in Grade 2, we were happy. She in her sparkly pink pig shirt and I riding my razor scooter, climbed up the tree equidistant from our houses. Ascending higher and higher, testing the sturdiness of the ever-thinning branches, we took risks, back then. We went up and up until there was nowhere else to go but back down. So we swung from those high branches—the highest—and let go, bracing ourselves for the collision of earth and limbs. Suspended in midair, before we learned the physics of freefall, we anticipated sore feet (mine bare, hers Converse-clad) but jumped anyway, because back then we took risks. Back then we used home phones. Back then we were neighbors, two streets away. Back then we were best friends who named a tree “best friends forever.”
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R E T R O S P EC T: A P U B L I C AT I O N O F H AT H AWAY B R OW N S C H O O L
Confessions of a Senior EVIE SCHUMANN This time, leaving doesn’t mean back in five days It doesn’t mean one large carry on, be back soon, or “I’ll clean my room when I get home” No, this time it means leaving and separating, losing and good-bye It looks like the remnants of what once was my closet converted into storage space like my mother’s thin face standing in the rain, engrossed by a too-large pair of sunglasses she wears to hide her tears It sounds like our car hitting the pavement after climbing the giant bump at the end of the driveway one final time like the thump-thump, thump-thump of a giant duffel bag that’s too heavy to carry down the stairs This time, I will be surrounded by things that are new I will be excited, nervous, alone It will look like fake texting to avoid having to stand with nothing but my own awkwardness like giant campus maps sprawled across the floor because I haven’t memorized street names and can’t find my way to class It will feel like a sharp desk corner, jutting into the space where my belly meets my hip because I can no longer stumble to the bathroom in the dark It will smell like my roommate’s perfume, which slowly encompasses, nauseates, suffocates. I pretend to like it anyway. It will taste like the 2 am pizza guy’s lips pressed against my own after a dare by my friends. I will have friends. This time, leaving doesn’t mean forgetting Forgetting sounds like when you have to introduce yourself to your grandma like the rapid writing and rewriting and erasing when you’re stuck on an answer during a test I am leaving, but I am not forgetting. I am sharing and discovering and exploring. I am loving.
ANNA LIETMAN
LIFE OF
A SPECK
My Dad calls me Speck. This nickname is not as intuitive as most— Elizabeth shortened to Lizzie or Katherine to Katie - those are pretty self-explanatory. Anna to Speck? Not as much. So let me explain. The nickname came about for two reasons: one, at an earlier stage in my life I was the youngest and consequently the smallest player on my hockey team, just a tiny speck out on the ice; two, around the same time I failed an eye exam, prompting the purchase of glasses, or spectacles. But beyond the quirky nickname itself, I more so like the inflection in my Dad’s voice when he addresses me in this manner. When he excitedly recounts stories that supposedly prove his hipness, often using a favorite line, “See how I know these kinds of things, Speck?” Don’t be fooled, though; he says this ironically, only when it’s abundantly clear he is not, in fact, attuned to the pulse of contemporary trends. When he demands my fashion advice, asking “Speck, what do you think of this look?” Admittedly, I don’t refrain from brutal honestly when this question references athletic shorts so short my mom mistakenly (understandably) sorted them into my laundry pile. When he, like any father, critiques my clothing choices with a quip: “Hey Speck, did you get a discount because that shirt is missing fabric?” Another one of his common phrases in regards to my attire: “Are those pants or body paint?” prefaced by an inevitable “Speck” that softens the sarcastic nature of his words. When he shouts a resounding “Go Speck!” from the sidelines, I’ve become accustomed to the natural embarrassment that follows. By now, though, he knows that certain cheers of which he is an ardent proponent are expressly forbidden. For instance, he’s no longer allowed to chant, “Bubble gum, bubble gum, stick it on the wall. Come on, Speck, get that ball!” Unlike the state of embarrassment I was previously acquainted with, by now I’ve come to accept this unique term of endearment. As I’ve matured, I like to think I have realized the abundant love masked in the undertones of the word Speck. So, as he drops me off at college this fall, and as I hear the last resounding “Speck” amidst glances of confusion among my new dorm-mates, I know my heart will swell with overwhelming love rather than mortification at my Dad’s sweet parting words. I may have a few things to clarify, however, to my baffled fellow collegiates.
W W W. H B I N R E T R O S P EC T.CO M
x 85
It was the autumn of 8th grade, and I was about to jump face-first into the most intense social responsibility known to awkward tweens—selecting the perfect birthday gift for my friend, Timothy. I expect that for normal, well-adjusted people, this was not the Herculean task I was making it out to be. Timothy was not a particularly hard person to shop for. He’s not picky, or snobbish, or ungrateful. He’s a nerd, which opens up the door to a wide variety of gifts, as well. And he also likes video games.
Gaming, Gift-Giving, and Going Ham
I thought it was perfect—but then again, I was (am) a slightly deranged adolescent whose rational reasoning skills haven’t completely developed yet, so take that how you will. The helicopter was small and unobtrusive, but still constructed with grace and style. The polished aluminum frame intersected with stylish blue plastic to complete a slim and defined form. Directed by a handset reminiscent of old game console controllers, the helicopter had the quality of a video game with a twist. I wrapped it in green and blue striped wrapping paper and tied the package with a shiny silver ribbon. To finish off the gift, I wrote a personalized card with a hand-drawn cartoon of Timothy as Toon Link shouting “FOR POODIS” and charging victoriously into battle. Basically, it was, as Timothy would say, utter pwnage. Victorious, I stowed my gift away safely until the day of the party.
ALISON XIN
I mean, he really likes video games. You can name any popular game, and I guarantee he’s either played it or tried to pirate it. Anything from Portal to DOTA 2 to Call of Duty is no match for his might. He’ll spring random video game slang like n00b, gg, and git rekt during casual conversation. On Halloween, he dressed up as Link from Legend of Zelda. And he can play Super Smash Bros. Brawl like nobody’s business. One time, at a Science Olympiad tournament (if you don’t know what that is, it’s basically a competition to see which school can effectively out-nerd each other), there was a Smash Brothers tournament for anybody from 6th to 12th grade as a way to pass the time before the awards ceremony started. As a measly 6th grader, Timothy was able to crush the competition and win his section. Keep in mind that Science Olympiad is basically 100% mega-geeks. So now I was faced with a predicament: It was absolutely certain that a video game-themed gift would be perfect: personalized and useful. However, I was absolutely, positively, completely certain that everyone else going to the party knew this too. And I was also absolutely, positively, completely, one hundred, totally, unanimously, entirely, wholly certain that everyone else was going to give him a video game, too. And that would be disastrous. What kind of message would it send to Timothy if everyone gave him the same type of present? I had a feeling he would be slightly disappointed in all of us; he had all these friends, and the only thing we could think of was video games. Additionally, it would be even worse if I accidentally mimicked a gift because I just knew that Timothy would passive-aggressively hate me for being “that kid” who lacked the originality and empathy to figure out how to give him a proper present. But if I tried to opt out of the entire fiasco and just give him money, it would be immediately apparent that I didn’t care about friendship as much I cared about the cake at the party. (Which isn’t true, I swear.) It was at this moment that I went slightly obsessive. Desperate to find the perfect balance between personalized and unique, I parachuted directly into the jungle of Amazon.com. For weeks, I trained my Google-fu in the Chrome temple, repeatedly searching and tagging and filtering millions of results. I even dared to venture into more exotic territory like “Dude I Want
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That!” and thisiswhyi’mbroke.com. After cutting down swaths of possible ideas I finally settled on a gift: a simple remote control helicopter.
R E T R O S P EC T: A P U B L I C AT I O N O F H AT H AWAY B R OW N S C H O O L
It wasn’t long before the date rolled by. At that point, my anticipation had grown to the point where, instead of just feeling like bursting with anticipation, I had formed a class G star of excitement on the Hertzsprung-Russell Diagram that had shed off its outer layers in a planetary nebula and was now a white dwarf siphoning off the mass of a larger star until reaching the Chandrasekhar limit to explode into a Class IA Supernova. I carefully guarded my package during the car ride to Timothy’s house. At that point, I had depended so much on the gift that I might have even sacrificed my own life in an auto accident if it meant getting Timothy’s present out unscathed. When I finally arrived at the destination (thankfully, without any flashy heroic sacrifice with a slightly embarrassing obituary), I hoisted the covered helicopter above my head like the Ark of the Covenant and marched up the driveway. By the time I made it to the front door, Timothy’s smiling mother had already spotted my grandiose arrival and opened the door, gesturing me inside. Entering my Final Destination, I scanned my surroundings to deduce the location where I would deploy my supply drop. I quickly spotted a gift basket, filled with confetti and stuffed with multi-colored envelopes and— Envelopes. It took a moment to process this, and when my mind had caught up, I was horrified. Envelopes could only contain two things: gift cards or money. I was absolutely disgusted. Did these people have no shame? Timothy was their friend, someone they’d known for years. How could they have possibly messed this up? Out of almost a dozen people, was I the only one that braved the social terrors of gift-giving to obtain anything significant? Indignantly, I set the package on the table, a monument to friendship among a barren landscape of materialism. As it stood there, a lone monolith among fragile scraps of paper and plastic, I briefly wondered who was actually right.
W W W. H B I N R E T R O S P EC T.CO M
x 87
03
The Water-Stained Photograph LANE CHESLER Thirteen years ago the world was halved by a horizon: hard, crisp, defined. In this water-stained, curving photograph we are standing on top of the world, my brother and I. A world of browns, blues, and golds. Swallowed by the earth that wraps itself around us, his hand is in mine, and we stand in tiny Timberlands rooted into the ground as sure and as strong as the trees beyond. A cell tower stands unaccompanied in the distance. Fragile. One gust of wind would whisk it away, but as sure as it would fall, the two of us would not. We are unaffected by the clear skies and hard cold. My hold on him is light, he doesn’t even grip back, but it doesn’t matter. We are so young, so dependent, and so inseparable. In the picture the plains of Saskatchewan are strong. The trees defined, the grass has character. The entirety of the earth is accompanied by itself, and all behind us is not alone. In the picture we stand together. But in the distance stands my future, the seventeen year old cellphone tower alone and fragile looking back at who she was and the brother who always loved her.
Honey MARIA PERILLA Can you own the sky? You can name the stars after your children but children were barely yours to begin with Can you hold a summer’s day in the your clammy palms? Maybe but not a summer’s night, wide like hips, like parted lips long like the walk from the ice-cream parlor to your driveway to the porch steps After dinner, when you run through sprinklers on the football field, the cotton candy sky sets slow like honey down the rim of your favorite coffee cup Slow and gold, pink then purple then black
Now she stands alone, slowly falling down without his hand holding hers rooting them both into the ground.
After the football field when the fireflies come out, you walk home in the dark, count the kitchen lights left on, list names for your children at each bulb hope they come sweet and leave slow Slow and gold, pink then purple then black.
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R E T R O S P EC T: A P U B L I C AT I O N O F H AT H AWAY B R OW N S C H O O L
against pavement, the huff and puff of their young lungs hard at work, and the soft chirping of birds high amongst the curvy trees, it is quiet. The path they follow lightens in color and thins in width. The curvaceous trees begin to diminish as small shrubs and wispy grasses replace them. When the walkway vanishes entirely, their feet sink into infinite grains of ancient sand and they shriek with excitement. Cara kneels down to further examine the substance, a fascinating texture she has never seen before. What is it? she wonders. It is a liquid made of solids, that shapeshifts to fill the gaps her small body makes in the ground. Marie, having visited the beach before, does not share in the revelry of her little sister, and bounds ahead towards the vat of blue Cara has yet to notice. The sun is bright, so bright that if you look at it, you’ll see kaleidoscopic shapes when your eyes close. The water appears endless, as if it leads off the face of the planet. Like a pool of liquid sapphire, it sparkles from the massive orb of light in the heavenly blue sky. Cream colored wisps of clouds are scattered above and reflect off the surface. “Um, ugh, wh-RIE!” Marie hears her nickname and immediately runs to her yelling sister. “What’s wrong?” she asks breathlessly. With wide eyes overflowing with confusion and marvel, Cara inquires,“What is that?” Laughter floats out of Marie’s voice box. “The Atlantic Ocean,” she retorts matter of factly. “The Atlantic Ocean. The Atlantic Ocean.” Cara repeats. She has never seen an ocean before. The waves are colossal and awe-inspiring. Unsure of what to do, she is frozen. Marie finds the situation comical and decides to take control. She grabs Cara’s hand and yanks her towards the sea.
03 Ocean by Sonum Jagetia
Covalent Bonds SAM SCOTT
The air is filled with water. It smells of salt and surrounds her, thick and sticky. In and out, in and out, she breathes shallowly. Her curly brown hair bounces energetically. She is running. Beating against the winding obsidian asphalt path, her bare feet move quickly. Many trees line the passage, all with distinct personalities, curving every way; their leaves create a chlorophyll canopy, occasionally letting the sun’s golden rays warm her face. Her four-year-old legs stop moving to give her heart and lungs a moment to recuperate. In a tomato red shirt and skirt, brown ponytail swaying with every movement, her older sister runs ahead. “Marie!” the smaller of the two shouts. The hazelnut ponytail hears her name. She turns around to see her little sister, leaning forward with hands on her lower thighs trying to catch her breath, removing her yellow and tangerine striped sweater to tie around her waist. The older sister snickers at the disheveledness of her other half. “Cara, let’s go! We have to make it before dinner.” Cara considers this statement and is slightly confused by her sister’s urgency seeing as it is only three in the afternoon. But four year olds rarely argue their logic simply because they don’t care. Their minds are consumed with feeling and desire, they do what they want, regardless of reasoning or regulation. She does not dissent, takes a deep inhale and runs to catch up with Marie. The pair joins hands and continues their journey. Except for the sound of bare feet slapping
They reach the tide. The foamy edge of the ocean is mere inches from their bare feet. The soft sound of rushing water soothes any nervousness Cara has. She can see no end to the glittering pool. She looks at her big sister. Marie smiles, “C’mon.” Flinching slightly from the chilly March temperature, she wades into the ocean one foot at a time. Cara follows suit and is surprised to find the water so cold, but is refreshed as she is still flushed from their run to the beach. It is glorious. The water undulates calmly, splashing Cara’s dark blue jeans with the gentle crash of each wave. Marie bends down and rummages through the liquefied sand right below the water’s surface in search of shells and other sea trinkets. Cara does the same, and splashes her sister accidentally in an aggressive attempt to grab a specific seashell. Marie shrieks from the initial chill of the water. “Cara!” she laughs, “I’m soaked.” “I’m sorry!” Cara replies, “I didn’t mean to....” Marie smiles mischievously and proceeds to use both hands to push as much water as possible onto her little sister. Sounds of purposeful splashing and perfectly childish laughter ring through the air. “Uncle...uncle…UNCLE OKAY! I give up!” Marie shouts, dripping from head to toe, smiling ear to ear. Cara, equally as drenched and happy, is quite satisfied with her victory. None of her wildest dreams could compare to the reality of the ocean. Chemically basic, the sea is simply a myriad of hydrogens and oxygens bonded covalently, sharing their energy in order to exist; add some mystery, salt, and ancientness, and that’s the ocean. It is absolute magic. The sisters look at one another and can’t contain their laughter. Soaking wet, bare feet, messy hair—and not a care in the world. She dials the phone number. It rings once and goes to voicemail. She dials it once more. It rings the full course but goes to voicemail again. She receives a text message in response, Later I’m in class. She replies with :(, remembering a time when she needed to talk to her sister: all she had to do was walk across the hall and spew out whatever words she felt necessary. It was a time when her best friend lived in the same house, same time zone. They are two halves that had the fortune to complete each other very early in life, balancing one another’s egos and sensitivities, their dark and light, sharing energy in order to exist. It is hard to be water when you are hydrogen and no longer have any oxygen, when your covalent bond is broken.
W W W. H B I N R E T R O S P EC T.CO M
x 89
The Asterisk CATHERINE AREKLETT
On the corner of Lander and Cedar Roads in Mayfield Heights, Ohio, an enormous real-estate sign rises above waves of knee-high grass, advertising in three-foot tall block letters to call Brad Kowit at Kowit & Company for the opportunity to own twelve prime acres of land for commercial development. Years ago, someone took a chance on the property, going so far as to plat the land for condominiums and lay a winding asphalt road. But the economy tanked, the condo deal went belly up, the grass started to grow, and all that remains today are wayfaring Canadian geese stopping by to cool down in deep watering holes and cops pointing their radar guns at early morning commuters from a tucked away, potholed ingress.
I wonder if Brad knows the history behind his eyesore of a property. My mother does. Nearly forty years ago, my grandmother routinely dropped my mother and uncle off at the corner during the summer, handed them twelve dollars, turned around, and left for the day. Doing the math, that would make my mother ten and my uncle twelve, and bear in mind that back then there were no cell phones or plastic water bottles or lectures about applying sunscreen, which basically means for someone of my generation that my grandmother was guilty of child endangerment. And I haven’t even mentioned yet that the only other people on the corner were old men who chain-smoked unfiltered Camels and guzzled Pabst Blue Ribbon beer. This hell on earth (my assessment) was called Locust Grove, aptly named for its sixty-foot tall honeylocust trees that dotted the entire property, gifting sweet fragrance from their perfect, white, pendulous flowers to offset the odor of octogenarian sweat and Aqua Velva. This “slice of heaven” (my mother’s assessment) was where my mother learned to play golf. Locust Grove was a par-three golf course. According to my mother, if the driving range in Tin Cup had a golf course attached to it, this would be it. The players were hackers; the greens were chewed up because soft spikes hadn’t been invented yet; cigarette butts littered the tee boxes; and the one and only sand trap on the course looked and smelled suspiciously like a latrine as it always had a puddle in it, even on the hottest days. The greenskeeper was the same guy who shot bull behind the desk with the customers, and he seemed to think that mowing every third day was good enough. There was nothing manicured about the place except for the sandwich counter girl, whose long fake red fingernails fascinated my mother so much that she would keep going back for more
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ketchup packets just to catch a glimpse at them again and again.
Most importantly, on June 28, 2009, my mother gets a hole-in-one.*
The shortest hole at Locust Grove was 100 yards. The longest one was 174 yards, which seemed like a mile for my mother, who carried only four clubs with her—a wooden driver, a seven-iron, a sand wedge, and a putter. She doesn’t remember ever hitting that green from the tee box, but she does remember developing a golf swing. Hips firm, feet shoulder length apart, head down, left arm straight, lithe shoulders, interlocked fingers. Then, like a mime in a strong wind, draw the club back with a taut left arm, rotate the hips, and slightly bend the left knee. At the top of the swing, no pause, only what might be termed a poise, sufficient to permit the recovery of the club head and to start its downward path without checking its momentum. Upon impact, right hand and forearm straighten out the left wrist, and then follow through until the pull on both arms becomes so strong that the finish with the club over the left shoulder becomes absolute. Then, and only then, look.
It happened on the fifth hole of Kiawah Island’s Ocean Course. There were five witnesses. My father, my mother, my brother, the forecaddie, and me. There is no dispute that my mother approached the tee box with her five wood, placed her ball on the tee, swore (I believe it was “G---damn it, I hate this game”), announced that she had nothing to lose so she would use the “stupid ass swing” she learned at a lesson the day before, used the stupid ass swing, carried the ball over 134 yards to the green, whereupon the ball somehow found the bottom of the hole. We have photographic evidence of the occasion, namely a snapshot of my mother, standing above the hole, her left hand steadying the flagstick from the wind’s assault and her right hand raised in celebration, pinching the golf ball. I love how tan she looks, how fit she looks, how happy she looks. The kind of candid camera moment that if she dropped dead right then and there, people would say, “Well, at least she died doing what she loved,” and that cliché might actually work in this case.
It was the summer of 1979. My mother was ten. Jimmy Carter was president; the Ayatollah Khomeini assumed power in Iran; nothing came between Brooke Shields and her Calvin Klein’s; and Sony Walkmans appeared just in time to introduce everyone to America’s future favorite wedding song—the Village People’s “Y.M.C.A.” And, on the dumpiest course in Cleveland, Ohio, my mother fell in love with golf, calling it one of the few cruel and honest instant assessments we ever get in life. Fast forward. It is June 2009. I am 9 years, 11 months old. Barack Obama is president. The Middle East is falling apart. Again. Smoking is now taboo. Coppertone generates seven billion dollars in sales. The invention of polyethylene terephthalate and the marketing geniuses at Coca-Cola skyrocket single-bottle water sales past milk sales. Millennials drink Pabst Blue Ribbon to be hip, but also fork over big bucks for expensive craft beers with names like Smooth Hoperator and Duck Duck Gooze. Apple releases its iPhone 3GS to the public. The “S” stands for speed, and another “S” is born as the term “selfie” first appears in the American lexicon. Michael Jackson dies, and I tell my mother that I have no idea who Michael Jackson is. Singing “Billie Jean” off key doesn’t jog my memory. Neither does a botched moon walk.
R E T R O S P EC T: A P U B L I C AT I O N O F H AT H AWAY B R OW N S C H O O L
But, like all Areklett stories, it cannot be that simple, that clean cut, that Hollywood happy ending. There has to be an asterisk. I should have known it. In the photo, a shadow lies across my mother’s face, a sure sign of controversy. Let me back up and set the scene of the crime. Kiawah Island is a barrier sea island on the Atlantic coast, about twenty miles from Charleston. It has been the home of Indians, pirates, plantations owners, manumitted slaves, the Kuwaiti royal family, and now American multimillionaires, whose trophy houses pop up here and there among a mixture of lush maritime forests, brackish water ponds, expansive salt marshes and picturesque dunes. A lonely one lane divided road called Bohicket Highway leads to the island, canopied by mammoth, centuries-old oak trees that choke out the sun, mangle the sidewalks, and dangle Spanish moss like cobwebby marionettes. Run-down shacks, intermittent vegetable stands, and “Word of God” one room churches appear from time to time. Children play barefoot in their front yards, which are more dirt than grass. Laundry hangs low from lines that only a drunk could possibly have strung up. Dogs hug shadows for relief from the heat, and sticks prop open windows, a poor man’s version of air-conditioning. This is rural poor. And it goes on and on for miles. When
suddenly, without warning, a roundabout appears, and much like Dorothy landing in Munchkinland, the black and white monotony of the last thirty minutes gives way to a kaleidoscope of brilliant colors, as the trees thin out, the sun shines, and pink bougainvillea and red leaf hibiscus draw attention to the entrance of the Kiawah Island Resort. The Oz inside the resort gates may as well be a million miles away from anything on Bohicket Highway. Likewise, the Ocean Course is in another universe compared to lowly Locust Grove. Hackers aren’t allowed here. Just ask Jack Nicklaus, who consistently rates the Ocean Course’s difficulty as a “12 on a scale of 1 to 10.” My parents cannot wait to tackle it, and on the fifth day of vacation, they pay the outrageous greens fees for the opportunity to walk where the USA won the Ryder Cup in the infamous “War by the Shore” match in 1991, and where, more recently, Rory McIlroy won the PGA Championship. My brother and I are tagalongs, but excited ones because my parents, with the forecaddie looking the other way, let us drive the golf carts. The course kisses the Atlantic coast, offering views of the ocean from every hole. Relentless breezes whipsaw the thick and salty sea air across fairways and greens that are cocooned by towering sand dunes and haphazard stretches of sea scrub. Seashells carpet the fairway edges and tee boxes, from starchy white angel wings to twisty top horse conches to tiger spotted giant cockles to imperfect sand dollar pieces. Blue herons, long-legged egrets, white ibis, and hooded mergansers hold court in tidal marshlands, while loggerhead turtles, those massive strong-jawed prehistoric crawlers, conspire along the ocean’s edge to lick away their tracks with each breaking wave. Every hole or so, an alligator sunbathes, much to my brother’s and my delight, but not to my mother’s. The forecaddie enthusiastically points out a deer to us on the fourth hole, which isn’t exactly exciting for two kids from Ohio. And besides, by this time in the round we are already too hot to care. It seems like perspiration perpetually surfaces on our foreheads, our cheeks, the bridge of our noses. It trickles in rivulets down our necks and backs and between our thighs, like warm chicken broth. My mother’s mascara melted off an hour ago, and the sweat pattern on the front of my dad’s golf shirt is an exact replica of Mickey Mouse’s head. It’s easy to see why every bird, cloud, tree, and human in this humidity succumb to the talons of indolence. Mother Nature is literally boiling our brains and leaving us half-dead.
And that is how we approached the fifth hole. Awed by beauty, but wringing wet and wilted. After four holes to the east, the fifth hole turns back to the west, and wind becomes a serious factor, requiring players to use as much as a three club difference. In front of the tee box is a 10,000 square foot hourglass-shaped undulating green, running away diagonally from the right. It’s so big that it may as well be two greens. An enormous natural sand area, punctuated with thickets of pampas grass, runs from tee to green, ending in a steep face that cuts into the middle of the hourglass. The pin placement that day is right over the steep face, and the top of the flagstick peeks up, waving like a surrendering soldier whom we cannot quite see but know is there. My mother tells me that she is not sure if she can carry the ball over no-man’s land, but she will try. As I said before, there were five witnesses. My father, my mother, my brother, the forecaddie, and I. There is no dispute that my mother approached the tee box with her five wood, placed her ball on the tee, addressed the ball, and swung the same swing she taught herself years ago at Locust Grove. It’s not the prettiest swing. As my dad describes it, she underturns her hips during the backswing and overturns coming down, drawing the club in a large arc behind her body and pasting her elbow against her right hip at impact. The result is that she looks like a one armed golfer using an axe to kill a snake inside a telephone booth. Or, as my then eight-year old brother put it, “an octopus falling out of a tree.” In any event, when my mother hit the ball that day, it shot off the tee, traveled up, up, up, gaining altitude and distance, flying. It hung against the blue sky, and if it could talk, I imagine it might have said, “Boy, you guys should come up here and see the course from this angle.” But then. Disaster. The wind grabbed the ball, causing it to pirouette in mid-air, and then shoot straight down, quickly, like a loon surface diving towards a flying fish in the sea. The ball landed maybe 110 yards ahead but to the extreme left and into dense clumps of thorny brush. My mother looked hopefully at our forecaddie. He just shook his head and said, “Nope. Lost.” And this is when the aforementioned script played itself out. The part where my mother approached the tee (again) with her five wood (again), placed her ball on the tee (again); swore; temporarily abandoned the octopus axe killer swing for the “stupid ass swing”; hit the ball; and got a hole-in-one.*
my dad had a hunch and gunned the golf cart towards the green. I remember him braking hard, running towards the hole, and yelling, “It’s in the hole!” My mother did the honors of pulling the ball out of the cup, and I got the camera. I have to give my dad credit. He actually gave my mom two minutes to celebrate her hole-in-one,* including the photograph I took that captures the moment that all golfers dream will happen to them. But then, because my dad is my dad, he dropped the sledge hammer, saying “Hey! Congratulations on your par!” You see, the rule in golf is that if a ball hit off the tee may be lost, then the player takes a provisional shot, which only counts if the first one cannot be found. Since my mother’s first ball was lost, she was actually hitting her third stroke from the tee. Technically, therefore, she got a par. Or, as she has heard a million times since, “a hole-in-three.” My mother is 46 now. Obama is still president. The Middle East is in worse shape than ever. After gaining peer recognition as the “best large brewery company of the year,” Pabst Blue Ribbon just sold for $700 million dollars. There are 292 sunscreen brands in America. In the past six years, per capita water bottle consumption in the United States has risen from 26 to 34 gallons. And, generally speaking, good mothers never drop their ten year olds off at golf courses because there are 400,000 registered sex offenders in the United States and 100,000 of them are missing. Clearly, a lot has changed since 1979. Except my mother’s love for golf. Unfortunately, my mother’s rotator cuff is one step away from surgery, and she has no illusions of coming close to getting another hole-in-one.* In fact, she wonders if it’s even worth the greens fees for her to ever play the Ocean Course again. I don’t know the answer. But, I have hope for her. I hope that when Apple introduces the iPhone 18, when the Middle East finally gets its act together, when plastic water bottles become passé and Pabst Blue Ribbon goes out of business, that my mother will take her grandchildren to a par-three course and show them how to get the ball into the hole from the tee. Without an asterisk.
No one knew instantly that it was a hole-in-one* since the hole was invisible from the tee box. But,
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Rock
Roll
Slouching in the back seat of my dad’s Audi station wagon, I begin to cover my ears. I am ten years old and I want nothing more then to be like everyone else. Part of that means, listening to the pop music my friends constantly push in my face and that they claimed to be melodic perfection. Yet, as I sink into the white leather of my dad’s car, the sound I dreaded most began to blare out of his stereo. Today, he had decided we would be listening to Led Zeppelin. The moment we take the sharp left out of our hazardous driveway, we are flying. My dad’s reckless driving coincided greatly with his taste for music I thought. “Hey Mama, said the way you move, gonna make you sweat, gonna make you groove.” My ears are vibrating, my dad’s hands beats his steering wheel like a drummer pounding his drums while exuding a passion for this music I did not know possible. “Turn it off! This is not fair! Aaaaaah!” I scream these words and phrases over and over again until the song is over. Out of breath and frustrated I want this mysterious music to stop. Every time my dad had to drive the same routine ensued,
SAVANNAH O’SICKEY I would sit in the back shouting from the depths of my lungs in hopes of making the music stop. Yet, each time I tried this strategic plan, Robert Plant would beat me to it, belting about the flame in his heart as well as others like Pete Townshend, and Roger Waters singing songs that I had yet to realize meant so much to my father. If I were able to go back in time, I would erase my words of hatred and disgust and replace them with silence. Silence that would allow me to better understand my dad and his passion for classic rock. Seven years later and I find myself listening to The Wall album on repeat at least once a week and I often make an ode to The Who, Led Zeppelin, and other rock & roll legends from time to time. However, it almost seems as it if it is too late. The connection I thought my sudden fondness of this music would mend fell short. My dad had tried to ingrain in me for years his passion for rock and roll that even the rock gods would be proud of, Yet today there are missing notes in our relationship that are waiting to be filled in order to compose the perfect song.
04
04 Drums by Kate Snow
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Reel Life GABBY VALDIVIESO
Tan Line Blues
GRACI HOMANY
In the summer we fry like eggs on the sidewalks, and rooftops, and pool decks. We age like wine, rot like fruit. Get carried away by the little things, like ants at a picnic. We cry sweaty, happy tears, and laugh in the face of our empty brick school, with arms draped over tan shoulders and toes rooted in green earth. We are barefoot and connected. Holding on for dear life. Because the second our toes uncurl the jokes aren’t funny anymore, and the tears are salty, and the rinds of our wasted time are carted back on wagons. Accompanied by every would, should, and maybe We flicker like moths by a porch light until someone inside flips the switch. And we wander aimlessly into the night.
Raiders of the Lost Ark once cured me of a stomach ache. It was early November of second grade, a few days after a successful trick-or-treating marathon. I moaned and groaned my way out of bed in order to request the use of my family’s communal TV and pull my collector’s edition bundle of all three Indiana Jones movies out of the cardboard box that barely held our vast assortment of VCR tapes (the DVD revolution had yet to hit our household). So I listened to the familiar buzz of a rewinding tape before flopping under my covers with a glass of ginger ale and a makeshift hot water bottle made of an old canteen wrapped in one of my grandpa’s thick size 12 socks resting on my stomach. Like the rest of the world, I knew that Raiders is the best of the trilogy. I had already seen it hundreds of times, but it never lost of bit of excitement. This was a time when my best friend and I had decided that we would either be daring archeologists like Indy or waiters in a fancy restaurant. If you want to travel without leaving your room, I’d suggest watching a movie. My family could not afford to take many trips, so I relied on the transport of the Millennium Falcon or Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Gradually, the screen spilled over into my life. It began with a childhood love of dressing up and acting out characters and scenes—an attempt to live through the eyes of others. Eventually, it evolved into the creation of my own characters, forts built of my design, and mismatched costumes collected from thrift stores and garage sales. It’s a passion that I still carry with me in a love of theater. However, though it never occurred to me at that age, I was relying heavily on a stranger’s voice, and setting my own aside. Too often, film is considered only an escape from the normalcy of daily life. We forget, however, that storytelling is not exclusive. My favorite movies reminded me that my own story was valid. It’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment that I recognized the production of my own film. Perhaps it occurred while driving down the Cleveland Memorial Shoreway the night of the Fourth of July. I sat gazing out at the sky, imagining the moment as a feat of cinematography. There’s a twelve year old girl with her hands perched on the frame of a car window. She’s got short hair, effective because it doesn’t block her vision—even with the wind rolling off the lake. There is a color wheel of light bouncing off her face and reflecting on the gold shine of a ’98 Ford Escort. The pop of fireworks has faded out and been replaced by her parents singing along to Nina Simone. She realizes that these seemingly insignificant moments are actually extraordinary. If there was such a thing as a cinematic memory, I’d like to the think I have it. My two eyes, expertly trained in watching film, now make an excellent tool of observation. Right now, I’m more interested in being a different kind of archeologist—the kind that can craft her own narrative, uncovering bits and pieces as she goes along. So I watch movies to remind me. Remind me that it is the smallest details that can transform a scene, and that within a busy and hectic life there is always time to take an adventure, whether it is to a distant land or right around the corner. Setting coordinates for the next four years of college.
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FOR SALE KATY KAUFMAN Blanket for sale 7 dollars Yellow, knit, worn, edges frayed Blanket for sale 4 dollars Used Not gently used Aggressively used Overused Loved to be used Blanket for sale 8 dollars Corner ripped Truck door ate it Please don’t feed her to cars or trucks But sad and lonely 4 year olds are okay Blanket for sale 12 dollars big enough for three comfortable for 2 very comfortable for 2 on rainy days on queen sized beds on chilly or sick children Blanket for sale 12.50 dollars littered with sand crystals because your favorite blanket deserves to go to the beach even if that wasn’t what it was made for it will still hold the memories just like I do Blanket for sale 18 dollars
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DIGGING DEEPER
Blanket
MCKENNA RITTER
After storms, when I was young, I used to walk up and down the block picking up worms and tossing them back into the soil. Sharing an afternoon snack with the ants, I would pour Honey Comb cereal onto the front stoop of my house. I cried at the white butterfly that I couldn’t save, drowned in the collected rainwater on our primary-colored kids’ table. I met with my priest to discuss heaven. During my eighth grade school year, three students died. A football player in a car accident on Thanksgiving. A boy with autism that lived up the street due to seizure complications. A quiet girl in my brother’s grade with a terminal illness. The father of the boy with autism told me to eat extra pizza on the 8th grade Washington D. C. trip. When I see him mowing the lawn, all I can think about is how he shouldn’t have to refer to his smiling son in the past tense. As I realize that the world is a multitude of towns and their own misfortunes, the scope of possible fears expand. Tamir Rice is shot in my own city while playing with a toy gun. ISIS beheads reporters and bombs the Temple of Bel. Children die every day from preventable causes such as hunger or curable illnesses. Talibé in Dakar beg for daily wages to avoid beatings when they are supposed to learn the Quran. The meat industry genetically modifies chickens to the point that they can’t even walk in order to profit from more breast meat per chicken. Humans are bought and sold. Sweatshop workers are abused for the products worn throughout the school cafeteria. Pictures of a drowned Syrian refugee boy washed up on the shore of a Turkish beach find their way to every news website. At 11:14 pm on a Wednesday in the fall, there was a break in my monotonous worrying. Completing my English homework, I read this passage in My Ántonia: “I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become part of something entire.” And I felt it lift from my chest and throat. A thousand homilies could not have removed the futility that had flattened me.
The next morning I began to feel the October pine air inhabit my lungs. I saw the trees. I noticed the way my mother’s purple petunias huddled around the mailbox. I watched ants carrying pieces of tree bark. Little green bugs sprouted wings on my notebook. I smiled at the smell of cornfields and farmer’s market lavender. I recited “Come Little Leaves” by George Cooper like my Nona used to do each autumn. I read bright abysses and poems of Saturn proposing. I potted yellow Kalanchoe and raked soil under my nails. For years, I was crippled by the horrors of the world. I lost sleep. I cried. When I read that passage, those fears didn’t disappear. No one answered my complex, unanswerable questions. I realized that I didn’t need the answers. The immensity of death and of the expansive universe and of all in this world that can make us feel small and insignificant is the weight that once took the air from my lungs. But just because those things exist, doesn’t mean they deserve your power or attention. I can make the small things I do meaningful. I can water the Aloe Vera growing in the sunbeams on my windowsill, assist young children with disabilities, listen to the hum of gray clouds, cry at the beauty of poetry podcasts, make beauty in this world for others to find and find some myself.
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05
05 Cityscape by Zoë Solt
Nemo, Charlotte, and Me
At the age of four, I renounced tuna melts. Not because I didn’t like the gooey cheese, fresh tomato and tuna laden sandwiches—believe me, I did. Rather, I made this decision because I sympathized so much with the characters in Disney’s Finding Nemo, albeit animated creatures, that I took the mantra “fish are friends, not food” to heart. For me, this simple movie quote proved revolutionary.
At the age of five, I stopped eating meat altogether, transitioning to vegetarianism. My mom’s nightly bedtime stories featuring farm animals led me to question carnivorousness. I wondered, for instance, how the cute cock-a-doodle-doo-ing chicken from my picture book could be related to the nuggets on my plate. And surely I didn’t wish to see my literary friend Charlotte in bacon form. A young animal lover, I couldn’t moralize the slabs of bloodied meat destined for consumption. Although the initial reason for my transition to a meatless diet was not a particularly noble one—justified by a single line from a children’s movie— the legitimacy for my eating habits has evolved throughout the years as I have adopted a more practical, humane position against carnivorous eating. Though I won’t contend my young mind was cognizant of the intricacies of the cruel process that is animal butchery, I knew I preferred to consider those [cartoon] fish as friends rather than food, or, more simple, alive rather than dead. It wasn’t until later that I’d discover further ethical opposition,
ANNA LIETMAN
learning the specifics of the appalling conditions of slaughterhouses. Still, my rudimentary logic stands true to this day; my reasoning for remaining a vegetarian for 14 years hinges on my love of animals, hence my aversion to their slaughter and consumption. On a fundamental level, animal rights matter to me, as do the basic rights of every living being. There’s a stigma that exists with vegetarianism and I worry about being perceived as that crazy stereotype forcing tofu on everyone. But, as strange as it may sound, my diet plays an integral part of my core identity, and I like to think not eating meat is my way of showing solidarity with animals. Deep down I know that my individual boycott of the meat industry is ultimately inconsequential, and yet I continue naively to hope my actions, of altruistic intent, will somehow benefit the cow defecating in the same windowless box where it’s force-fed antibiotics and inordinate amounts of food. I’m deeply concerned by the deplorable plight of animals in slaughterhouses, but I feel powerless, unable to instigate significant change or rectify the tragic situation. I care! And I so desperately want to liberate caged hens, fenced in pigs, cows so tightly packed in they are physically unable to move—all admittedly unfeasible goals. I can, however, display pride in my stance, defending my reasoning for converting to vegetarianism when people [unfailingly] ask. I know I shouldn’t be ashamed of my own beliefs, but I’m hesitant in professing them at risk of offending my friends eating pepperoni pizza at lunch, for instance.
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01 01 Akilah-Marie by Melody Buca
Questioning Myself ALEX MARGULIES I am six feet tall and weigh more than seven bowling balls. I am two inches tall and weigh less than the air on Venus. My beliefs are deeply rooted but the truth can’t seem to find ground. The Earth shakes beneath the unsteady beating of my heart.
#9
FRANCESCA FERRI I hold the solar system behind my Eyelids and the ocean in my veins. Stardust is nothing to the universe, Darling. And in my universe, you are Nothing but stardust.
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02
Iris
JULIA FELDERMAN
this small triumph of purple and yellow and stem and leaf and petal her physical eloquence demanding to be seen, admired but silent, she’s shy you know of course, self-conscious of her bright petals how they leap out and up and around though I know she’s beautiful of course she’s beautiful with a heart bigger than mine she’s made of beauty and of gentle and of kind
the kind that makes me stop and try to place her smell cool, almost like a riverbank with small pebbles big enough to play intruder in my shoes they like to do that sometimes she is fleeting and I will miss her like may flowers miss the rain april brings like a little girl’s rainboots miss puddles in winter like her snow boots miss january in spring I will miss her grace, her music
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#5
THE TORTOISE SHELL COLLECTIVE
MARIA PERILLA, MORGAN WHALEY, CARTIER PITTS, OLIVIA LESLIE, MCKENNA RITTER “If I were sky literate I would have read” gospel right out from God’s twilight mouth and it would burn holes in my eyes and spill tears of joy but instead I walk among the beautiful people disguised as devils because my eyes were clouded and ears deaf to salivated raindrops knees to church floor, hands pressed, AMEN AMEN HALLELUJAH AMEN.
02 Dancing Queen by Andreanna Hardy 03 Unknown Aura by Erica Kahn
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MY ADOPTION GINA EGAN
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Don’t Dirty Your Dress
ELLEN YOUNG
Little toes on the kitchen floor, Little fingers gripping to the window Just tall enough to peek her eyes out the raindrop-covered window. Through the wet glass, boys are playing in the rain and stomping in the mud. “Mommy, I’m going outside to play,” says the innocent eyes “Oh no sweetie, you’ll dirty your dress.” “Stay inside.” “Who’s my pretty girl?” say her parents about her. “Who’s my smart boy?” say her parents to her brother. Learning within the first year of life, Looks are more important for her Than intelligence. On Halloween her eyes light up at the sight of the fireman costume With the shiny badge, But her mother’s gentle hand guides her towards the pretty princess costumes With the shiny necklace. In middle school she starts to push her plate aside, Already depriving herself at an early age As she wonders What if my “brain food” makes me fat? She misses the first 45 minutes of history class on a Tuesday, She was sent home to change her shirt. Because even if she has the weight of the world on her shoulders, She shouldn’t dare reveal them to the boys in her class Because her own skin is a distraction to those whose education is more valued. In high school she no longer wants to be a scientist, but a model, Because the media that suffocates society Tells her that the numbers on her report card are not as important As the ones on the scale.
“That job is too physically demanding for you,” And “Wouldn’t you rather be a mother?” Are statements she hears far too often. How come the boys around her are being told “You can be anything you want to!” While she is not. Her perfectly painted nails turn on the television And she sees male politicians making “statements” and “claims,” Being critiqued on their beliefs and ideas. Click, the channel changes to another politician. She see’s a female, who is “complaining” and “nagging,” Being critiqued on their hair and outfits. In the office she works twice as hard as the man next to her desk But still gets paid less than him. She quickly learns when the same amount of assertion is projected through a woman, rather than a man, She is not a boss, but a bitch. Grown and with a round belly, She manages to greet her husband everyday with a pink-lipped smile and a warm dinner waiting at home for him. She stares blankly into her plate and smiles as he tells her About what happened in the world today, while she was locked behind their pretty white picket-fenced house. Soon she is blessed with a baby girl. Today her child runs up to her with an eager smile “Mommy! Mommy! I’m going outside to play in the rain!” She kneels down to her daughter and replies, “Stay inside honey… we don’t want to dirty your dress.”
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LADY SINGS THE BLUES KACEY GILL There’s something addicting about the grunge… the risqué blended with original grit. There’s something about the edge that I dance on, tightrope walker tip-toeing the line, when the sound of the blues leaves my lungs. I breathe—then honesty echoes through the room. Vibrations shake the chandeliers, sending dust heavy with forgotten strife swirling in circles. I hit that note, that minor cord, that Etta James “All I Could Do Was Cry” note, and something inside of me breaks. The cage that I keep hidden somewhere between my lungs, locked behind ribs and skin, shatters… Shatters spilling soul through amperes into the ears of unsuspecting listeners. That cage holds it all. It’s the source that I draw from. It is what allows me to walk into the smoky jazz club on Cedar, snake around the tables filled with black velvet clad women and men in dull gray suits, run my hands over the dingy white and black keys of the piano that 50 years of soul artists have found solace in, dig my heels into the red carpet under my feet and stare up into the lights, head held high—undoubtedly a proud black woman. There’s a moment of silence. The faces at the tables are hard to make out from the too dim lights. It feels like my heart stops beating. Boom Boom Silence Then the steady rhythm of the drums, layered with the hum of the bass starts. The piano peppers out a melody made for the harmony of this girl turned woman. Breathe. My jaw drops, muscle clench, then E, C, D, A. Call it soul. Call it blues. Call it jazz. I call it the key to unlocking the photo album in my mind where I store the image of the 12-year-old boy’s body bleeding out on a west-side sidewalk, next to the pre-memories of being chained to a tree for days, reduced to nothing
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more than a nigger who talks white. I call it the vehicle for grappling with the weight of 350 years of not even being human. They try not to remember the 3/5th’s of a person kind of days. I call it my way of explaining how it feels to wake up, look in the mirror, see black breasts and be reminded you’re already set back two steps. I call it the only way I can wrap my head around knowing that I will either see my black babies dead or in jail by the age of 20. When the blues swings through… When the air fills my lungs and my diaphragm shakes and I wail to a God I’m hoping exists, my cage breaks. You can hear it in the timbre. You can feel it in the fade of the bass, the build of the drums. That one minor note holds it all.
REFLECTION
NOITCELFE R
04 Big Hair Big Dream by Andreanna Hardy 05 Fisherman’s Wharf by McKenna Ritter
GABBY VALDIVIESO Restless figure stands transfixed Before a silver pane Examining white-threaded hair Dim, clouded eyes Rivers and borders mapped Across her face and throat Turning her head this way And then the other She strains to see The image beyond the looking-glass Snow bird perched on a window’s edge Precariously on the brink of freedom Sharpest white against an ebony frame Once upon a time A queen marveled at the same forest Distant fog-embraced mountains Now she reaches out To grasp the watery reflection Tempted to shatter her cage But she knows better Shards reflect both light and dark
05
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Defiance HANNA KEYERLEBER My mom and I fought over my outfits. I obsessed over breaking the stereotype that girls were creatures of pink glitter and proper actions because I was none of that. Instead I ran through mud, hop-scotching across ideas deemed beyond a girl’s capabilities. Stereotypes built themselves up around me but I’d run around, climb over, or barrel through, because I was defiant. I would disregard the feminine stereotype. I would not wear dresses. My co-ed school life felt like a competition between me and my male friends. Between the boy’s egos and my aspirations, things could turn heated at a moment’s notice. Switching to an all-girls school presented an easier environment for me to resist the standards and explore everything. I could focus more on me, instead of the constant defiant front I had to previously maintain. There weren’t guys to tell me what I couldn’t do, so I did everything. I played basketball. I learned geometry. I got my first F on a test, and I learned how to accept failure. Most importantly, I joined robotics and stage crew, because no one ever told me I couldn’t. Other girls don’t have the same opportunity early on, nor does it get easier as time goes by—that much is obvious. As Eileen Pollack, author of What Really Keeps Women Out of Tech, explains, “After four years of studying physics at Yale … I became extremely uncomfortable about my identity as a woman.” She then elaborates on sexism at school and in industry, chauvinism from her male peers and co-workers which eventually drove her to abandoning her work in favor of a “safer” occupation. No matter who you are or what experiences you’ve had, for girls to hear stories like this from industry professionals is disheartening to say the least, and above all a deterrent from pursuing a career in fields such as engineering or computer science. The experiences I’ve had while participating in things such as robotics can attest to the lack of an “ambient sense of belonging,” as Pollack phrases it. For every person encouraging me or someone in my position on, I can point you in the direction of two more who would take us for granted solely because we are women. Though people’s intimidating words only encourage me to work harder, I don’t blame anyone who would rather drop out instead. Sexism isn’t exactly a walk in the park, especially if it’s coming from peers or co-workers. And then there are stereotypes. Society has a terrifying obsession of branding everything with its own “norm,” so to speak, which easily does more harm than good. Pollack discusses how “at a young age, girls already hold stereotypes of computer scientists as socially isolated young men whose genius is the result of genetics rather than hard work.” This situation poses so many degrees of removal between girls and occupations in STEM that to break through it seems as though they’ll need a near toxic mix of sheer will power, talent, and luck. The author then mentions how it doesn’t come as a surprise that girls can’t picture themselves in such careers, and I couldn’t agree more. From Bill Gates to Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs to Elon Musk, I dare you to find a female engineer or computer scientist who people and pop culture idolize. Don’t hold your breath. Recently, during a long road trip down the Pacific Coast Highway, I realized that my goal in life had evolved. No longer do I avoid the color pink. No longer am I set on defying the feminine stereotype. Instead, I want to change it. Just because I’m growing up in a world where it’s difficult for girls to get involved in engineering or computer science doesn’t mean that future
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06 generations should fight the same fight. I want women to experience an “ambient sense of belonging” in these fields, to grow up with female role models encouraging them to make the next best thing in the science and technology industry. More than that, I want women to understand that to be in these fields doesn’t mean they have to sacrifice their femininity. I want women to understand that masculinity isn’t the way to success. I want men to understand that women are equally intelligent, equally bright, and equally capable of doing the same jobs. Part of me knows that it’s damn near impossible for one person to make so much change in the world. Whenever I think of that, however, I remember those cheesy sayings of how a small pebble can create a tidal wave, or how a butterfly in Africa can cause hurricanes halfway around the world. As I look up to my role models, I realize that there’s no reason why I can’t be a role model for others. My mom and I no longer fight over my outfits. I am making the new stereotype. I will wear dresses.
alive MAARYAH MALIK and now i am crying the beautiful kind when flowers wilt and the drought ends i am alive
BLACK HOLE
06 Colorful Women by Amy Brahler
MAARYAH MALIK
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I can breathe SAM SCOTT
the world is an ocean overflowing with vibrant creatures that vary in color and capabilities hands and hearts dripping with insecurities, treading against the current of shattered dreams and broken souls striving to just stay afloat. but i am drowning in the fear of not being good enough my lungs are shackled by the prison of my mind my eyes burn with the salt of a love i can no longer find, i am blind. numb. but i am not done, because every thump of my beating heart is a place i have not been and a person i have not met so i will open my eyes and my lungs will break free and i will keep swimming.
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When I Grow Up OLIVIA LESLIE
First, it was a hairdresser. That was my infantile response to “What do you want to be when you grow up?” People have stopped asking me what I want to be when I grow up, but if anyone asked, my reply would be a gender therapist. The summer before eighth grade, I went to camp, and met James. James and I became very close and stayed in touch after we left. Freshman year, James came out as transgender, and began using male pronouns. This was the first experience I had had with anyone who identified as trans, but I was happy for him. James has recently rediscovered that he is a man, and hopes to begin transitioning soon.
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James and I got back in touch in the fall of our junior year. We continued to talk on and off throughout the fall. One day, I said something about how going to a single sex school, I am sheltered from any sexism that exists in the outside world. James replied “I know. The worst push-back I get for my gender at school is people using the wrong pronouns, but in the real world, I could be
killed.” I said “I know.” James’ response was “To be honest, I just really don’t want to deal with it.” What he really meant by that was “I’m scared.” I promised him that I would do whatever I could so that he would never have to deal with transphobia, never be afraid to be himself. Shortly after we had this conversation, Leelah Alcorn, a 17 year old transgender girl from Cincinnati, committed suicide. There is a part of me that reads every article titled “LGBT teen commits suicide” to make sure I don’t see James’ picture under the caption. Yet, seeing someone else’s picture does not make me feel any better. I have always had a good imagination. One of the most impactful teachers I have had told me that she believes it is imagination that makes us compassionate beings. I have come to share this belief, but have also been forced into the realization that it is both a blessing and a curse. I did not know Leelah, but I would have loved her, as I try to love all the people I meet. It has proven difficult to support LGBT rights as my dedication has caused my parents to question my gender and sexuality more than I ever have. They have in turn been presumptuous, rude, accepting, and loving. They have feared for my safety as I have canvassed for trans rights in Cleveland, eventually telling me I wasn’t allowed to continue with that work. However, this gives me insight—be it unpleasant—into the lives and real trials of the people I want to help. They have also given me many resources to figure out who I am and to help others do so as well. It is thanks to them that I have been able to discover how important this issue is to me. In the wake of Leelah’s suicide, a friend told me that all she wants is for LGBT kids to stop killing themselves. I agree, and would extend that. I just want LGBT kids to stop hating themselves and being hated by others, and to stop having to fear for the future. I want to carry out my promise to James, and all other transgender and non-binary people, that he will not have to deal with transphobia. That is a tall order, yes, but I think it is easier to have hope for something that may be difficult than it is for me to be completely hopeless.
07 Enamorado de la vida by Oriana Cruz Echeverria 08 Word IV by Brice Bai
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Questions Not Crises EVIE SCHUMANN
Last year, I would cry during English class. I was neither distressed by a bad grade nor moved by a particularly poignant passage, instead struggling with my own internal conflict. Our class discussions and my teacher’s constant quest for meaning were its main cause. I simply didn’t understand how one’s own desires could be compatible with a desire to help others. If I believed the value in living came only from making a difference and helping others, which I did, then how could I justify my own dreams whose cornerstones were self-interest? I was torn between devoting myself to altruism, something that although admirable seemed daunting, or giving up and pursuing my own happiness. Because after all, if I couldn’t fix all the problems of the world, and attempting to do so seemed infinitely stressful and disappointing, I may as well strive to travel and eat good food and fill my own life with dopamine, right?
wish to see, but I don’t. And part of what I’ve learned is to be okay with that, to know that I’m still figuring it out and will continue to figure it out. This was a situation with no perfect solution. It was a life question, but it did not deserve to be a life crisis. I know in the future I will be faced with questions of similar scope. There is a reason some people turn to introversion, isolation, or substances. But I refuse to let ethical dilemmas or philosophical debates leave me cynical or shattered. I refuse to let every life question turn into a life crisis. I will work to change what I can and accept what I can’t. So, in the meantime, I don’t really need to cry in English class.
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This is where the tears usually hit. I knew my own happiness was reliant on my ability to positively impact others, but I didn’t know if I was capable of doing so. I also knew I didn’t have to choose myself versus others to such an extreme, but finding a balance between the two appeared unresolvable. Likewise, I didn’t want to live solely for the future, working hard and sacrificing daily happiness just to reach an end goal, because this cycle was endless. The goal just moved higher up, my happiness simply delayed to a time whose existence I couldn’t guarantee. I couldn’t let the weight of the world and the future and my goals impede my ability to live my daily life. At this point, a classmate had already passed me the tissues, my tears being somewhat more controlled. Looking back, I’m not sure what had led me to this state when, minutes before, my mind was absorbed by Beloved or Into the Wild, yet somehow I was still trying to fathom how it was considered acceptable to be sitting in this classroom, living so ignorantly and uninhibitedly. I thought of those I had met in Senegal, seemingly happier than my peers and I, but whose lives were so fundamentally unconcerned with the material interests that drove ours. I also thought about the new pair of shoes I wanted. I was caught between worrying about the privilege and happiness afforded to others and striving to maintain my own. I didn’t know where to draw the line, however. At what cost did giving become self-sacrifice? When did working hard and rewarding yourself become selfish and narcissistic? Clearly I was trying to reconcile the responsibilities I felt I had with aspirations for the type of person I wanted to become. Yet I had no godly revelation, no defining moment of truth where they came together in harmony. I was equally if not more confused than before. I wish that from that experience I knew how I was going to make the changes I
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02 Think Big by Eva Yeh
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On Reading and Writing ALANNA BROWN
I learned to read before I started kindergarten and was placed in an advanced class with one other girl named Rebecca. I wish I could say I had some kind of epiphany where I found out I loved books or wanted to be a writer in this room, but I didn’t. Rebecca and I read easy stories and entered Reading Rainbow competitions. We found out the meaning of our names and tried to see who could write the smallest. It was fun. This was a time of no long passages, intense journeys, or deeper meanings. We sat and played with words and somehow knew that everything would turn out all right. I read the backs of cereal boxes and the backs of DVDs. I devoured the words on introductions and manuals when I was bored. My primary school years were spent with Roald Dahl and Accelerated Reader quizzes. We got prizes after we read a certain amount, but that’s not why I did it. Of course, the heart-shaped stress balls and color-changing pencils were cool, but I read because I liked it. I stayed up late with a flashlight under my blankets and melted in the summer because we didn’t have air conditioning. With words I had no facts to memorize or equations to remember, and I could say whatever I wanted. It was freeing. And then there was middle school. At the lovely St. Martin of Tours School, I had a reputation to uphold as the smartest kid in the class. My entire grade had less than twenty students until late junior high. If I didn’t finish my test first, there was chaos. I would kick myself for it later, but this made me a terrible reader and writer. I learned how to write the information I needed to get an ‘A’ and where to put commas and capital letters. I read with speed, but I hoped that if anything was important, it would jump out right away. That’s not how things work. Sometimes you have to read things more than once before you understand it. Sometimes it takes you longer than normal to finish your English homework, and that doesn’t make you stupid or thoughtless or unteachable. It makes you human. I didn’t know everything then and I don’t know everything now, and I never will. This was a lesson I had to understand before I could even think about writing something good. The second lesson I learned is that you can’t fake good writing. Back then, an essay in school meant a series of fragments that came out of our brains or our notebooks that we pieced together and handed in because we wanted to pass a class. An essay can either be a work of art or forgery. In eighth grade, I wrote a fifteen page biography of my great-grandfather for a family tree project. I think the minimum was three, but it was easy writing about something that actually mattered to me. I didn’t realize how long the paper was until I wanted to print it. The words flowed freely from my great-grandfather’s mouth to my mind to the notebook to my fingers to the keyboard. I liked it. I got one hundred percent on almost every essay I did in eighth grade, but it wasn’t because I was good. I wrote what the teacher wanted to hear. I took notes in class and wrote fluff around it and turned it in. When I turned in that essay, I didn’t feel that flutter of excitement and embarrassment that so often comes when you expose a piece of yourself to someone else because those words weren’t mine. The biography was easy to write because my English teacher handed us a list of questions and I talked
to my great-grandfather, jotted down the answers to the questions, and built them into sentences and paragraphs. I did very little if anything special. The next lesson I have learned from my reading and writing journey, and perhaps the hardest for me to accept, is that no writing can be perfect. I once tried to read the entire Bible when I was about eight years old. I didn’t get very far, but I tried. Reading the book of Genesis where God spells out some guy’s ancestry for hundreds of lines was not appealing to me. Even some of my favorite books have moments where they drag on or become too boring. I spent so long wanting it all and longing for perfection that I didn’t appreciate everything I came up with in the process. There are thousands, maybe millions of lines of text in the trash bin on my computer or a landfill somewhere (let’s hope they made it into the recycling bin) that have infinite amounts of potential. I have probably thought a thousand good thoughts that are gone now because I didn’t think they were good enough for this essay or that journal entry, and I always have to remind myself to stop and listen to what exactly I want to say. When you spend so much time searching for perfection, you can throw away all the present feelings and emotions that are wholly yours and can make your writing great. Whenever I’m at a loss for what to write, I fake it until I make it. In this case, I try to sound smart and knowledgeable until I come up with something I can actually use. I think I have two different writing modes: Professor Brown and Alanna. The good professor sounds really great and knows what she’s talking about, but that’s usually because someone else told her. Alanna is Alanna and she knows what Alanna is thinking and feeling. She knows what she wants to say, and it won’t always align with what her English teacher or friend or mother would say. The difference now, though, is that Alanna knows this is okay (even though she really wants an ‘A’ in English class). My first words were, “Thank you,” which really shows how polite I am. These were my first words, and this was my first essay. Sometimes I think writing, “Sorry,” at the bottom of my essays would be much more appropriate. People can tell you that you’re a great writer and you can get a perfect score on every piece of writing in your entire life, but those things will never make you confident in your writing. When I write, I leave a piece of myself on the page, and it’s always a little uncomfortable to open myself like that because my stories may never seem interesting or funny or smart enough. But the most important thing is that I don’t listen to that little voice and release my work anyway. The last lesson I have learned is that you can’t seek approval from others; if you made it and you like it why does it matter what everyone thinks? Embrace that sliver of doubt because it lets you know that what you wrote is yours and you didn’t play it safe this time. I didn’t always know how to write, but I’d like to think I do now.
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Pi, Presidents, and the Pursuit of Knowledge MARGARET BROIHIER I am seven. Clad in my favorite silky nightgown, my bony knees curled up to my chest, I am about to embark on a re-reading of one of the true American classics, The Essential Book of Presidential Trivia by Noah McCullough. Did you know that Calvin Coolidge had a pet raccoon named Rebecca? That William Taft, our fattest president, got stuck in the presidential bathtub and had to be pried out? Or that Jimmy Carter was the first president to be born in a hospital? At this time in my life, my parents probably did. I was always too shy to share these facts with my classmates. I wasn’t entirely naïve after all; I knew they probably wouldn’t care. But my parents were a loving and attentive audience, even if they had heard all the facts already. However, my parents were busy people. So, in the same way that many children play doctor with their stuffed animals, I would play presidential history expert. (I didn’t take it easy on them either.) “What’s the longest term that any president served?” I drilled them. Some poor well-meaning pupil would probably respond that the most a president has ever served was two terms. I would have to remind them, kindly of course, that FDR was in fact elected four times, and although he died in office, he held his position for three terms and eighty-three days. “Did any president ever serve non-consecutive terms?” (I tried my best to theme the lessons.) The classroom is silent; my students have quickly learned to expect the unexpected when it comes to presidential history. I inform them that Grover Cleveland served as both our 22nd and 24th president, and that after he lost out to Benjamin Harrison he told his staff, “Take good care of the place. I’ll be back!” And he was.
and Alice, Roosevelt’s two daughters. Or that I was joining the family pranksters, brothers Kermit and Quentin, as they snuck their family horse up the elevator to pay a visit to their sickly younger brother, Archibald.
It is some two years later. I am sitting in math class; Dr. Looman is presiding over the classroom. We have been reviewing diameters and radii of circles all class, and with every passing minute my thoughts are drifting farther and farther away from the classroom. Then, suddenly, Dr. Looman draws a funny looking symbol on the whiteboard, and informs the class that it is called pi. It is irrational and it is infinite, he tells us. This is a number that has no pattern, that never ends. I am too young to fully grasp just how big infinity is, but then Dr. Looman recites pi’s first twenty digits. I resolve to also memorize twenty digits; this seems like something a serious student would do, which, as a fifth grader, was a serious concern of mine. Upon returning home I found a webpage that had the first 100,000 digits of pi listed out in a miniscule font, with hardly any spaces between the lines or the digits themselves. Feeling somewhat overwhelmed, I printed out only the first page. Then I grabbed some Cheerios and proceeded upstairs to my room. I colored the first digits with a bold flourish of my favorite yellow highlighter and then focused intently on those twenty numbers. Within a minute or two, I had them memorized.
I recently flipped back through the book, and discovered that while most of it was in excellent condition, Roosevelt’s page was dog-eared and highlighted. That chapter had always been my favorite. And though Roosevelt definitely had his diplomatic and political merits, the adventures that he and his six children led were what gave his presidency precedence.
Since those initial digits had come so easily, I decided that I wanted to have the first hundred digits memorized by the time my mom came home. I divided the digits into groups of ten, and then began the hunt for patterns. Some groups I saw as colors or as shapes; some were special because they contained a series of prime numbers; other sets I memorized simply because the spoken sound of the digits flowed so smoothly together. In the span of an hour or so, I had those hundred digits loosely memorized, floating around my mind in rows of ten. To secure them more firmly, I bounced up and down on my bed and said the digits aloud to the rhythm. “3.1415926535….”
I would read those pages and close my eyes and imagine that I was sliding down the White House stairs on cookie trays among the ranks of Ethel
When I heard the familiar whoosh of our back door opening and my mom’s footsteps in the foyer, I rushed down the stairs and handed her that sheet
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of paper, which at this point was fairly wrinkled and very heavily annotated. Then gently tapping my foot to simulate the rhythm of jumping on my bed, I tore through those hundred digits. I’m sure I concluded that performance grinning, maybe even taking a bow.
The guide then projected a roaring T-Rex on the planetarium screen, met with screams of delight and laughter from the audience. I, on the other hand, was silent. My heart was pounding and my hands were trembling. How could anyone be laughing at a time like this?
Facts have always given me confidence.
I had truthfully never thought about our inevitable end before then, living the eleven years up unto that moment in some state of blissful ignorance. In that moment, I remember feeling consumed by the idea of not mattering. Not just me, but also all the things I cared about, all the things I had learned and had yet to learn about.
I cannot honestly remember when outer space began to worry me. But I can clearly remember the day in sixth grade when it moved from a nagging worry to a fear that would keep me up at night. I am squished between two classmates in the back row of a school bus; we are going to the planetarium. The presentation started out how those presentations always went. Our guide progressed through the planets in our system, explaining the difference between the gas giants and the rocky planets. I could tolerate this. I focused on the colors of the planets, their moons, the Roman gods that they were named after. When he began to talk about the constellations, I traced the Big Dipper and Orion onto my uniform khaki skirt with my slightly clammy hands. But I guess because we were older and more intellectually mature—we were approaching our teenage years after all—our tour leader decided to take our planetarium visit in an entirely new direction. With a few taps of his control board, we left Earth behind us and began rapidly zooming out of our solar system. Seconds later, we left the Milky Way behind us as well, our sun no more than a tiny speck of light, barely distinguishable against the creamy glow of our galaxy. We were now hurtling through space- galaxies flying by us on either side. And then suddenly the planetarium screen went dark. I grasped the seat’s armrests. Our presenter then cheerfully explained to us that we have reached the end of the known universe–that we do not know if matter exists beyond this point or not. Perhaps, our universe isn’t all that’s out there; perhaps our universe is contained in some other distinct entity, which is contained in something else, which itself is contained in something else! This scientific quandary is unlikely to be solved in our lifetimes he reassured us, as naturally we will all be gone long before then. But our ever-charming guide wasn’t done. He continued by remarking on the fluid nature of matter in our galaxy—how we are made of those who came before us. That when the sun is exploding, and swallowing up the Earth, their respective matters will churn together as one. And in this moment our earthly bodies will be sent off into the universe, and we will be reduced to stardust.
I went home that night and dreamt that I was trapped outside of our universe—in that dark nothingness that we know so little about. I did not sleep much.
It is a little past midnight, I am rolling out my pink and white striped towel onto the damp sand of Middlesex Beach, shivering and pulling my oversized hoodie close. My family and I are spending a week at the beach with our cousins. While we have spent our days there relaxing on the beach, visiting the nearby Dairy Queen, and playing Scrabble around the house, tonight we have different plans. Our visit there happens to coincide with the Perseid meteor shower, which occurs every year in August as the Earth passes through the stream of debris generated by the Swift-Tuttle comet. I lie down on the towel and gaze up at the nighttime sky above me. Almost immediately after doing so, I see a meteor fly across the sky. It is followed by countless others, their bright tails burning intensely for a moment or two before fading into the starlight. My family around me exclaims with each meteor that they see. “Did you see that one? That was the best one yet!” I lie there quietly, but my mind is firing fast. I think about how all the stars that I am looking up at will die just as our sun will. And how big, potentially even limitless our universe is and how inconsequential our galaxy, our solar system, and our Earth are. I think about how virtually meaningless that makes me. And I think about how the matter that makes up my body will one day be reduced to stardust. I think about how in that moment all the things I’ve ever learned will cease to matter. But it is beautiful: the stars, the planets, the meteors that dance above me, the fact that we all look up at the same sky. And just because the things I learn and care about won’t always matter, doesn’t mean that they don’t matter now. And although my fear is never fully quieted, although I am still plagued by uncertainties, I do not look away.
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Hunger MOLLY SHARPE
Hunger is a red pencil Gripped between small, dirt-encrusted fingers, Trembling, As graphite screeches Across paper for the first time. Thudding, racing heartbeats Fabricate the soundtrack Of verdant etched letters, And the page is consumed By the desire to learn.
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03 See it Closer by Owen Healey 04 Old and New by Madeleine Kattan 05 Bookworm by Jenna Hahn
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EXODUS CHLOE SCHWARTZ
The old man chip chip chipped away at the star, orange peel shavings pooling ‘round his feet like molasses. He looked at me and sighed out Aeolus, drifting towards me through a wall of undecided fruit trees. “Sometimes,” his hair murmured at me, “you learn that gray’s the only color.” He paused. And paused further. And the not-pause became silence. I picked at the Stairway to Heaven with my eyes ‘til it turned black and blue. “What about your fireworks then?” He cut himself on the chipping knife and the not-pause was more. “Other times,” he disjointed, hand dripping copper taste in with the orange slices, “We paint over the gray and forget.” I lit the fuse and blew up the sky, streaking it with sparks of gold. The clouds smell like molasses and rain and all I can see is gray.
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WHAT’S IN A LULLABY MAARYAH MALIK
“Lullaby: a quiet, gentle song sung to send a child to sleep.” Yet for me, It’s a little different. Instead of melatonin pills, Or the sound of my mother’s voice, I turn to ink on a page. Ink on page, Whether it’s written about The depths and despair of the oceans, Or a joke book that I shouldn’t be reading Because I’m way past the “recommended ages 7-12.” I’m 6 years old again, The sound of my mom’s voice correcting me, Mixed with my small voice, Telling the adventures of Jack and Annie In the Magic Tree House, I so desperately wish that I could visit. I’m 9 years old again, Ripping through the pages of the Harry Potter books Like I am a dying woman signing her will for the final time. I’m 12 years old again, Sitting at my cold desk, last period, In Mrs. What’s-Her-Face-With-The-Monotonous-Voice’s room again, Holding back tears because I just finished My Sister’s Keeper, And I found out that books hold an emotion in them that feels a little bit Like someone took a millimeter of your heart, And threw it in the dirt for you to try and desperately search for, But to no avail. I’m 13 years old again, 3:14 a.m. tear streaked pillow. Gus has just said “I hate myself I hate myself I hate this I hate this I disgust myself I hate it I hate it I hate it just let me die.” And that night I clenched my teeth, Held back sobs, And learned what it meant for a book to be “relatable.”
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I’m 15 years old again, 1:39 a.m. summer night. I’ve just finished It’s Kind of a Funny Story, And Craig realizes that he’s okay. And I realize, that I’ve been okay for a while now, And I can’t remember, When did I let myself believe it? I’m 16 years old, Kindle at hand, This time it’s not tear streaked, I’m laughing at the screen before me, Because Mindy Kaling’s baby picture is just so true, And I know At 12:04 a.m. tonight, I won’t need anything more.
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06 A Walk in the Woods by McKenna Ritter 07 Light the Way through the Ruins by Monique Girgis
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