ink. 2012 ––
Ink. is the student-run creative arts magazine at Hotchkiss. It was founded in 2012 by Vivian Xiao, Irisdelia Garcia, In-Kyu Chung as an outlet for student expression. Its first issue appeared under the name INKredible, a name in which we have since reduced to Ink. Ink. has undergone changes in aesthetic and in tone, and will surely continue to evolve. This exhibition aims to provide a retrospective of past work, a tribute to alumni artists and writers, and, in keeping with Ink.’s core aim, a platform for emerging voices to be heard. Themes in these selected pieces include self-discovery and expression, centered around the notion of what it means to be young in this world.
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POEM Victor Skarskedt ’17
The limit’s thistle blurred A line no guide for tauter leaves Like near stone beckons them Closes the stick the ant over its opposite fire Lies the upper grasses tips of kneaded leaving shade upwards bluer past the (blare) rubbing sky the hardness Flashed — This lash pushed through mist the quandary's wind the outer spinning crest of Mountain’s*
9 *One day in the fall of 2016, living in Stockholm, I chose to experiment with my writing in a new way. I journeyed during my 25-minute, morning recess to the Sankt Johannes kyrkogård (a churchyard). I sat on a bench and looked and heard and felt for ten minutes, using a timer, and with a certain focus — a pebble, say. Then I wrote for ten minutes, again using a timer. To my surprise, the observing was the hard part. I (we) have a tendency to ignore ‘sameness,’ to move on once we have become accustomed to something. In other words, we seek a novelty we think has passed, when, in fact, the novelty remains, regardless of how long we look at ‘a pebble’ (as if it were just that). To paraphrase Heraclitus, that pebble I saw was never the same from moment to moment. I realised, if only briefly, that the pebble was always, though itself, something else. The pebble began to unfold on itself, and out of itself, anew. Then, in writing, I attempted to disclose that unfolding, to demonstrate the other side of the pebble (which has, endlessly, another side) in language. And like the pebble that has another, undisclosed life, the words I used were not just mine; I didn’t have to invent them. They arose (and arise) out of the convergences of infinite circumstance, where I am looking at a pebble and writing not ‘about’ the pebble but after perceiving the pebble, in conjunction with that focus. The words came not of conscious intention but out of the observing. They were not an imposition of my own self-centeredness; I did not will or expect them to happen. They came from elsewhere. In this way, I discovered a new process, and a new perspective. This discovery led to a series of daily exercises over the course of a season that transformed me in more ways than one. I have become, to a fuller extent, more aware of becoming, in my perceiving, my writing, my being. I have also become more aware that this becoming is not mine alone. I am only being with the pebble, or with the bench I am sitting on, or with the words that come to me, or the words that don’t. Sometimes when it is sunny, I stare into the light until I think I cannot. I sit on the bench’s snow in the winter, and my pants get wet. Everything is everything else. I find myself moved by the recurrence of a word, by the pealing of the church bells by the bench, by the bench, by the roots of a word like ‘confusion,’ by the graph of some asymptote, by the sudden thought of Jack Spicer. I once read, though had understood differently, that in Zen language, the thing one realises when one is enlightened is that one always has been. And so enlightenment, then, is not an arrival at any place, but rather an arrival at a process, in a life, a beginninging. As I act, the world does. A self and world entangle. For an instant, I am thinking. There is poetry.
10
My grandmother's favorite movie was Fargo. The Dakotas, Minnesota, I've never been. Certainly not Norway of old, unlikely I'll ever see the fjords. Oslo only exists as an ancient past of maybe photos and Viking lore. Of widowed Earl spending his remaining days reaching back through ancestory.com searches to some Nordic purity of lilting language and limited vocabulary. Uff-da. Victor told me that. Swedish. Easy to learn. Dictionaries like pamphlets. Earl, happily browsing the archives in a home that smells of Cetaphil and toast, named something that conveys the end, but gently. The Heritage, I think. Our heritage, Uff-da.
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Dorothy died in Nashville. As will he. I only remember that she could not remember, how to say, how to say, not uff-da. And maybe something earlier too, fretting flesh and chicken necks traded for blue crabs at Rehoboth Beach. Fargo though. That's a good one. I like to imagine her eating popcorn in '96 while Steve Buscemi's dismembered body is put through a wood chipper. Oh my stars, never a goddamn. That Minnesota-nice to the end even when the snow's stained with blood. I never knew her. Uff-da. But I do try. Uff-da. No hardship worth more than an uff-da. Uff-da, make me the bunad girl of Bergan with blonde braids and a bucket of freshly spilled milk to uff-da over.
Uff-da Sylvie Robinson ’16
Elisa Xu ’17
Frida
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My dear Frida, you are mad. Mad as the rain that drowned me on the patio mid September, fatefully reminding me to miss the change when I leave you for good, I won’t take the portraits you drew for me, not the one with my arms wide spread, and my breasts blue, not the one of my bloody green wings, not my fat clumsy tears in drops and streaks because I hate how you scribble Diego all over me; I hate your dying roots how they grow from my feet, and I especially hate how you thicken my eyebrows to match the Devil’s, the Peacock, and the Farmer. All those floating faces like ticking bombs
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harass my wake, and if I dream, the ghoulish, jeering, bulging, pissing and even content dispositions are soulless monsters who screw angels into pinnacles, who pronounce my Disintegration: whose flushing arm shred and falling to reach my decapitated head, where a fire of yellow, orange, green, and colorless flames dance among blackened eyes, yours, which I always turned from, sun piercing ones shedding too many tears. But when I slumped against my bedroom wall that night and my gaze fell to the broken glass, I saw you, my dear Frida, how can I leave my own?
14
I never meant to be mean, Though it happened. When I threw the plant across the kitchen counter, I never meant to crush its unstraight stalk crude with green sureness, cracking pottery chips across the tile floor. I meant to scoop handfuls of dirt, warm damp premise, hold the sweet amaryllis bulb in my hands, the soft promise of a newborn’s fragile skull, mold a knuckled cavern, reopen birth, soften the black from where it came, arc Its partial sun, soak the water’s light, and raise shoots peeking out like fingers.
Natalie Kawam ’15
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the dream i had last night involved a parade of devils little spirits full of dark. One held my hands down and baptized me with spit from a pool of rusted blood in her belly. one named me eden i opened to a truth i could no longer detangle i think the beasts were telling me a story. but weren’t they real biting me and kissing me weren’t there theories behind hell and why when i woke i took my red hand to hair full of sweat and fluster and slit it from my very head?
red room Charlotte Buckles ’17
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when i get back Elliot Wilson ’17
and i can hug you
17
You tell us that you went to the doctor, a routine check up. It’s around seven on a school night, and we sit down to a couscous and carrot mixture. The words hang before us, waiting to be pushed into direction. You had tests taken to make sure you are healthy. I don’t know why you are telling us. Dad is silent, watching you. Towering above sprawling valleys, the lodgepole pine stands proud. Robust boughs tether it in equilibrium. Its uppermost branches wave to the wind but its trunk sits firm. Wind, snow, and rain pummel it through the eight months of winter, but the pine is unyielding. Nothing can take it down but fire and lightning. You have appointments a lot. You return from the hospital, and I ask, How were the tests? Did the tests say anything? We don’t know yet. I worry. On the days that I know you are having tests done I focus on the lingering marker smudge on the whiteboar, that no one erased, and the ant that makes its way across my desk, and the scratching of that hedge against the window, and the way the poster that says “Math Counts” curls at the corner because the tape has fallen off. My thoughts become tuned to a frequency between two channels, and like hot gas a static blur fills every space in my mind. My eyes stay on the ground; I don't talk much. My grades sliped. It’s winter and the cold keeps me inside, stuffy and constraining. Days blur and it all feels like yesterday.
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The mountain pine beetle is smaller than a grain of rice. It has a flimsy exoskeleton, and six spindly legs. We talked briefly about them in class, about how it’s a real problem because they’re so invasive. They attack the pines. Normally, they target the old and weak trees, but when there is an outbreak, they attack any and all they find. It crawls up the bark aimlessly, seemingly without purpose. The beetle starts by burrowing its way into the bark and laying eggs. They implant a fungus, which prevents the pine from releasing sap to flush the parasites out. But then the tests say something bad. Sometimes, like a drop of milk into tea, fear and hurt and uncertainty explode in obscurity. Dad says it means that the cancer hasn’t been able to spread, that it’s good news. But nothing is certain, really, and I’m scared. Cancer makes you bald and weak. I’m scared for you, I’m scared that you will become like this and of what could happen. I don’t know. Maren begins to cry. Dad tells us it’s not invasive, that they’ve caught it early, that there is a good chance it will be completely fine, but it isn’t fine.
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Slowly, more and more beetles infest the tree. The tree fights them, but they insist. The tree becomes fragile, crippled by the incessant beetles. In some cases, the beetles only make it onto one branch of the tree. With time, surely, the beetles will encroach, spreading their disease and larvae to the rest of the tree. The pine notices, though, and deprives the infected branch of nutrients. The branch dies and falls, a sacrifice necessary to the life of the pine. A small mark is left, remnants of the lost branch, coated in sap that seals the wound. Faced with more treatment, you decide to get surgery. A big operation at Yale-New Haven. Your doctors reassure you, and you are confident. You have to spend the night at the hospital with Dad so Maren and I stay home. The house creaks and groans with hollow echoes that night. Maren and I exchange a few hollow words, words that bounce off each other because they don’t matter.
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to the eternal go robert frank a based on robert frank’s “the americans”
holy american angels of the side-of-highway crucifix in the shimmering halo morning of idaho— the black l.a. factory spaces of old voiding street corners and entire pavementless blocks littered city like big smoking gutters— tattooed no shirt no one shoe face kissing plaid button-down top two buttons unbuttoned makeshift pillows on towels under trees in the grass of public park cleveland ohio morning, dreaming of Holy Eternity and listening to the wheezing dew-sweated skin of the Single Mother of america with too many hungry children— bumper sticker chevy straight out of gleaming detroit saying —”christ died for our sins” “christ came to save sinners”— yes but the bohemian lovers soaking sweltering in sun sex sweat and kissing in underwear cock and breast in the parks saved sinning man and they giggled high and clutched backs and l o v e d in the flesh— and the naked road
dsouls of nd jack kerouac
on the road to Eternity of Heaven shot over the landscape of God with no genesis into the perpetual reincarnation of golden lines kissing horizons dipping over Earth and into the timeless conception of perspective and space and the jesuses’ Wilderness asymptotic to Pacific Dream— whipping through ethereal nebraskan sky of cobalt and the One Solemn Mailbox in the leafless-trees and personless barrenness into rodeo cowboy bars or sifting over midnight trains of bum or box, or the desert day blistering trolleys of the American sad sanctity of suffering, eyes the no-pearl oyster— and the top-hat-hatted thin White Film of banker governor inheritor slick-hair materialists and women, bubbles flittering on the steaming black Americano surfaces of Capitalism— and everyone running around in maniacal frenzy and Idiotic Oblivion in the hot and caffeinated city streets and television sets (one in every room) but oh how cool and majestic the queers of downtown greenwich brooklyn Somewhere! Anywhere! America! and hipsters with marker eyebrows funky sprouting baldspots haircuts, sloppy Whitman slouches of the New Great American Poet—
or of the Perfectly Good American Poet…
and gayer than Whitman! And the hungry lonely jalopy mexican of the endless nevada midwest desert who is poor in empty bar of beer and is brown and America and singing bliss twanging folk ditties in taco afternoon steaming marijuana shacks everyone sweating and yakking and little great guitar and little mexican children giggling among dishwashing mothers rolling r’s and poppa’s cigarette— and the sudden midnight past midnight Miracle of the pretty black indianapolis waitriss turning and peering out the fog window into the tranquility of rainy night and the stacked napkin solemnity of dark and neon a.m. coffee shop— beatific drunkard slumped in dumpster truck towns pissing on bibles susurrusing divine recitation of Spontaneous Prayers of nearly not night and in the vast quietude flood of rising sun and waning gleam of lamp post the pink child eye… (sockets of the fantastic vision of Things through refraction of car window Lens of Robert and windshield) transfixed on that denim wearing Shepherd (of Lamb) stumbling to liquor store in soft highway dusk of l.a. Angeles the salt shaker pepper shaker shaking next to each other—(Which is taller?)—metal
tips touching quivering in the timeless tension of the white-black tv screen of blackwhite faces arguing killing dying and the wondrous gust experience of ecstasy in the yamaka jews and cigarsmoking cowboy boys of the saloon and solemn bowties tied africans at st. helena funerals and the irony of the white priest preaching over Holy Soul of negro mutilated by kkk— and the gossamer curtain hazes over the city haze of smothering smoke that is Air and atmosphere of almost No-Ozone— and old suburban middleamerica man in the middle of the greenery of garden patch in the flapping umbrage of stripes and stars— until finally but never finally the hot sleeping bag sleeplessness of wandering family in dusty Depression trudges forward into the incomprehensible no-word wonder and eternity of the heavenly america… that is my soul in heaven—heaven in the soul!——reincarnate of ecstasy and god in timeless nothing the WOW of holy everything and that floating golden dust illuminated by moon disappears into the solemn night sands forever
Victor Skarskedt ’17
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