Spring & Fall 2018
Yosemite Sunrise Olivia Popp
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LELAND QUARTERLY VOLUME 13, ISSUE 1: Spring & Fall 2018 EDITORS IN CHIEF Erin Woo Zuyi Zhao FINANCIAL OFFICER
Lily Nilipour
POETRY STAFF Elizabeth Dunn Fernando Hernandez Linda Ye Lily Zhou PROSE STAFF Evan Kim Enshia Li Andrew Lin Olivia Manes Lily Nilipour Mei-Lan Steimle VISUAL ARTS STAFF Arielle DeVito Lorena Vazquez Olivera Young Fenimore Lee LAYOUT STAFF Lily Nilipour Mei-Lan Steimle Zuyi Zhao
Cover Art by Mike Breger Granular Synthesis
Copyright 2019 by Leland Quarterly | All Rights Reserved Stanford University | Giant Horse Printing, San Francisco 3
Leland Quarterly | Spring & Fall 2018
SMOOTHIE Julia Espero
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Leland Quarterly | Spring & Fall 2018
EDITOR’S NOTE Putting together a literary magazine is, in a lot of ways, a terrifying thing. So much depends on factors outside our editorial control: on the success of the emails we spammed your listservs with; on the staff of eager frosh we accosted at the activities fair; and, most of all, on the fact that we sent out a call for submissions and you responded wholeheartedly. To our staff, our contributors, our partners at the Stanford Storytelling Project, and you, our readers: thank you. The process that ended with this book in your hands — or on your computer screen — wasn’t easy, and it definitely wasn’t smooth, but it would have been impossible without everyone who helped us along the way. Thank you for lending us your words. Thank you for lending us your art, your photography, your editorial eye, your time. We couldn’t have built this without you. We hope you like what we did with it.
Erin Woo and Zuyi Zhao Editors in Chief
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Leland Quarterly | Spring & Fall 2018
CONTENTS Poetry
Two poems, Leela Srinivasan Two poems, Angela Lee Bees, Becca Nelson Two poems, Tony Hackett Come, Sasha Landauer in the morning, Angel Smith Two poems, Kimiko Hirota eye contact, Mac Taylor Бабушка Моя, Julia Freels Citizen (to a Teacher), Marisa Lin Pool, Melina Walling
Prose
9, 67 10, 44 18 20, 46 27 29 30, 50 42 48 56 60
The Undertaker, Olivia Popp 12 Two stories, Thomas White 23, 63 On That Bright Loveliness in the Eternal Cold (Blink by Blink), Serena Zhang 32 Parroted, Jacob Langsner 52
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Leland Quarterly | Spring & Fall 2018
Visual Arts
Granular Synthesis, Mike Breger Three photographs, Olivia Popp Two pieces, Julia Espero Four pieces, Angela He Three photographs, Melina Walling Two paintings, Cathy Yang Untitled, Becca Nelson
cover 2, 14, 62 4, 19 8, 28, 43, 55 22, 34, 66 38, 51 45
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Leland Quarterly | Spring & Fall 2018
Wind Angela He
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Leland Quarterly | Spring & Fall 2018
A Priori
Leela Srinivasan It’s late: I am confusing name with truth, holding red in my mouth, letting it bloom over tongue. Displacement has its own politic, but lately I’ve only felt time while lying still. Each hour reinvents itself, sending me scuttling to uncertain shore, passing through sandcastles that collapse into pulp as soon as I turn my back. Now it’s become a dream again, the memory of touch, but I’ve known no conduit better than my manufactured ribs. Crooked heirs of the present, they heal and leak and it feels the same damned way. And I consider how to lonely is a verb, how other people’s emotions handcraft fatigue, how I can only watch like fog through paper-thin glass. I can see it happening from here. I only tell you this so I can trust myself again. I only consider people who I don’t know exist, obsess over the where of their becoming, how the night bleeds on, how if I am quiet enough it might wring itself to rain
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losing language
Angela Lee maybe if i opened my throat i would find it: china tones like a teacup ringed blue, white and gold lilies painted into scratched white ceramic, chipped at the edges from a stumbling child’s soft hands still learning to pour grandmother tea.
hearing but not hearing her voice swirling warm and worn around the room, steeped in the stories she told me of leaving, or losing, or longing for her home lost to rain, the summer marsh lotus rising triumphant from the floodwaters that soaked wood into rot and bent a home into hush, the silence of beds, or blankets, or babes rushed away in the sweep of the storm. in half-phrases we stumble her to speak, i to listen and guess at the river with its tongues of rain like fire, like fish seething under the door through the cracks in the wood, claiming every splinter for their own in the rising, or release, or the wrath of the season of returning the earth to the earth in the rain.
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losing language | Angela Lee
she cradles her cup, fingers the lilies and speaks roses to me. bitter-fragrant tea seeps into her sleeve and drips to the floor, something lost to the oak, or the maple, or the pine. deep in her throat she swallows the something steeped in my bones that i can’t taste when i speak.
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Leland Quarterly | Spring & Fall 2018
The Undertaker
Olivia Popp
The spine-crackling wind blustered outside, the shaking windows glossy with the brushstrokes of phyllo-dough sheets of frozen moisture, but the small, bizarre three-story house had held itself up for the past 147 years and it insisted on continuing to do so for another 147. Sitting at the end of the eight-mile driveway set comfortably at the banks of the soft matte painting hills in the distance, the old homestead had only become a home for Sam when she started clearing the crumbling wooden-paneled barn of its meters-high of boxes and cloth sheeting preserving the decades of unknown content. She sat, nose inches away from the frosty cold glass, staring lazily at the snow piling up on the thin-eaved roof of the barn, the glass catching an opaque cloud on the pane every time she breathed out. Her wavy brown hair was cast haphazardly behind her as she leaned forward and squashed her nose deeper into the window, back stripped clean off her stiff, high-backed chair. Sam had moved out to the homestead barely three months back, the abandoned estate falling into a state of disrepair after her great-grandmother died. She didn’t tell anybody after she found the key buried in the back of the family’s safe deposit box, but she felt obligated to do something about the old Montana house after finishing school again. She fancied herself a early-twenties city girl, disdainful of rural living that her father’s family so blindly treasured, unsure of how to proceed after making that first eventful trek to the hills and down the drive. Sam had never lived in this remote of a location, privately bemoaning the loss of the comfort of suburban living in her childhood and edgy adventure of young career adult city living. She lived out the past months at the homestead on hastily-purchased cans of soup and boxes of pasta at the general store a few miles out, refusing to let herself leave and settle back into that familiar state of insecurity, need for escape, and gentle despair that haunted her.
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The Undertaker | Olivia Popp
Her gaze drifted to the tall, simple gate and fence that sat at the foot of the driveway, its wooden column on each side teetering in the wind but refusing to let any snow sit on top. The thick inches of even pillowy snow piling up on the ground revealed nothing but Sam’s obstinance over leaving the homestead until her beloved Screamin’ Eagle 1200 was fixed, and the creaky blue pickup truck, color peeling in unnatural patches on its doors, was clearly out of the question. She didn’t want to get stuck three miles down the drive like two and a half weeks ago. A flash of red interrupted her reverie as it ungracefully plowed through the snow, tires marking up the pristine blankets carpeting the typically barren open yard in front of the residence. Sam stood, casting a scornful glance at the old metal clock hung tilted over the wallpapered wood opposite, frustrated over having to sit for an extra hour and seven minutes later than expected. The clunk of a car door and a subsequent rapid knock pierced through the silence. She groaned, her excitement masked by the anticlimactic time spent waiting. She couldn’t bring myself to enjoy this encounter—not even tolerate it. Sam groaned again, attempting to bring last week’s enthusiasm back to no avail. Nevertheless, Sam plastered on a blinding smile as thick as the snow outside that the guest so gruffly plowed through and pulled roughly on the curved brass doorknob, taking a couple of brisk tugs to get it open. “What do you look so happy about?” A large soft coat brushed past Sam’s left shoulder, wet boots smacking on the thin paneled floor. Sam didn’t even flinch, continuing to stare out the door at the barn before squeezing her eyes shut, turning the knob, and hugging the door until it clicked into place as she closed it. “Seeing you, obviously.” Sam about-faced to look at her. “Settling in, I see.” “Nice place. I see you’ve done some decorating.” The intruder brushed off her bulky protective jacket hood, looking around and smirking when she saw the clock nearly falling off of its thin nail on the wall. “I like to keep it cozy.” Sam wasn’t having it today.
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Leland Quarterly | Spring & Fall 2018
Yosemite Fog Olivia Popp
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The Undertaker | Olivia Popp
“Just for my arrival, I assume.” It’s been three years, and she’s still the same. “It’s the most I can do around here by myself.” The visitor sighed. “Good to see you too, sis.” ——— After wading their way through the knee-deep white fluff, the two now found themselves throat-deep in boxes. The barn was resistant upon discovering that it needed to accommodate two more people, but they pushed their way in. Sam still wasn’t used to having her sister there, and even her presence sometimes freaked her out. Always a shadow over her shoulder, and escaping that of her sister was enough of a job for years-ago Sam. Escape it she did, but now she found her brain forcing her body into submission, willing herself to engage. Her sister certainly made herself at home. Sam peered at the lines of teetering boxes that she piled up days before, her half-finished cleaning job quite apparent. Her sister nosed her way around, wandering hands leading the way. “I bet this trash is all worth a fortune.” She picked up and sniffed the nearest ancient artifact, wrinkling her nose before breaking into a hacking cough. “Nat, just come over here.” She shuffled grumpily over to Sam, backed hunch from the cold even in the protective grips of the barn. “You never know until you try.” Sam waited until her older sister was desperately close before even trying to speak. “Natalie, it’s true.” Natalie laughed, eyebrows cocked. “What’s true?” She took a breath. “All of it.” And another. Her sister’s face fell faster than her brain even processed the information, but Sam didn’t flinch. She paused, letting Natalie shakily sit down on the nearest rotting crate, her eyes scanning the room wildly like a spooked horse. “I had to see for myself.” Sam spoke carefully, softening each fricative at the tip of her tongue. “And you know you did too.” Her sister said nothing. Sam discreetly picked up a thin, crumbling folder from the nearest lemongrass-colored box. Natalie visibly
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flinched before reaching out a trembling hand to take it. The silence was only broken by the fwap of the folder as she flipped the cover over into her left hand. Sam wanted to wait for her to respond, the seconds ticking by. “It’s all here?” The tentative inquiry was backed by the small voice of a child, relief nowhere to be found in her voice. “I think so.” Natalie paused. “Okay.” Sam stepped back, letting her sister take in the almond-tinted folder. She placed her hand lightly on another box, and suddenly, the barn seemed to swell with the towering columns of boxes, their boxes buckling under the weight of their shielded truths. Natalie looked up, spotting Sam’s hesitance at showing her more. “How many are there?” Sam didn’t reply. Her sister stood, her breath coming out like a ragged stream of tormented memories from so many forgotten subjects before. “How many?” “5,000.” Natalie could do nothing but look up and up into the infinite rafters filled with boxes, their contents dying to spill out, their occupants willing to stay forever hidden in shame and futile defiance. “All of them…the same?” “Yes.” Natalie slowly unfolded the folder again, feeling the heaviness of the shadow’s history hanging in her hands. She saw the crispy lines, taunting her from the page, the boxes filled with numbers and scribbles and test results, their family’s terrible legacy wringing out her deepest sadness. Sam’s search had led her here, and Natalie understood. She could see that these boxes would give Sam the edge she needed, she wanted, she craved, a certain fulfillment that personal relationships would never truly give. “Don’t you want to save them?” Sam said nothing. She could nearly feel her sister’s radiant generosity pulsing off of her, a far cry from the cold shoulder she turned
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The Undertaker | Olivia Popp
to Sam for so many childhood years, yet this only made her feel worse. She tried to wrap her head around what this history meant for Natalie going forward, but couldn’t. Sam stared sharply into her sister’s dark eyes, and she saw that Natalie knew what she stood to gain from this. “It’s your secret to bury, not mine.” Natalie stopped, but her eyes hardened. Do it, they said. Sam felt the dare deep at the back of her neck, soothing her over, numbing her spine and paralyzing it. She locked eyes with Natalie, and suddenly, Sam didn’t care anymore. She didn’t care how much she searched, how much she spent, how much time she took to find this. In one swift motion, she struck and lit it all, the fragile wooden coffin of secrets awash with brightness. It didn’t matter how much snow there was outside. She let the whole place burn. And then she ran. ——— As she stood outside in the drizzling mist, feet firmly planted on the stiff concrete ground, she thought to herself. The brisk, biting New York wind whistled in her hair and the rain dripped down the side of her left cheek as the perfectly, silently still air neither froze nor warmed her body, but enveloped it as her small fall jacket held her so close. She closed her eyes and still saw the wavering glow in the back of her eyelids, the heat boring into her lungs’ every breath as she sped away. Sam looked up at the dirty gray sky and asked herself—as the clouds went by but didn’t ask, didn’t tell—as the mist hit her thin lips and the slim right side of her right eyelid. She couldn’t think about leaving and all that she’d done and didn’t do. Sam instead asked why she couldn’t think about her successes but rather found herself wondering if she had done something wrong. She saw her life’s work, her precious life’s work splayed before her eyes, and still yet the rain became tears and still the water poured down harder, both from her face and still harder from the deep, deep sky.
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Bees
Becca Nelson We were the pulsing, the bumbling, dark pollen on a warm wind, two wings, a fumbling, a thirst for honey as sticky threads between us, a trembling, a buzzing, a stuttering of stalled summer, delayed sweetness. We passed by each other on currents of wind like water unraveling behind a hovering rowboat. The sky’s nectar reflected and skimmed blueness, in an almost blooming of all the things we couldn’t say to each other, a swarm of words alive and unattainable.
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Leland Quarterly | Spring & Fall 2018
we are happening right now Julia Espero
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Leland Quarterly | Spring & Fall 2018
Untitled
Tony Hackett he looked into my eyes like he was looking for stars & told me they were dead inside concrete tongue and chalk-white teeth tell him to fuck them back to life a body cuts itself in half so many times i am dust & letter shreds & leather hands dance on aching skin to fix shatter. half-life; smoke in the lungs furling like body ferns tendrils of life ooze from sidewalk glass and through gossamer fingers as he rolls over & in a language he knows but i understand asks if i’m a zombie now.
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[he looked into my eyes...] | Tony Hackett
next time, he stitches me together with carnality & palm fronds & offers me my choice of coffin he jokes, “if nicki’s pussy will put your ass to sleep mine will probably kill you.” words forked like snake-tongues gave warning that alchemy made and unmade.
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Leland Quarterly | Spring & Fall 2018
Monarchs Melina Walling
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Leland Quarterly | Spring & Fall 2018
New Year’s Resolutions
Thomas White
Maybe this year will be better. Maybe I’ll finally publish a novel. Maybe I’ll get my grades up. Maybe I’ll sleep enough. Maybe I’ll get that internship. Maybe I won’t. Maybe I’ll give up on this whole engineering thing. Maybe I’ll join robotics. Or do something more than Netflix. Maybe I’ll crash my car again. Maybe I’ll lose more family. Maybe I’ll be good enough to get on the tennis team. Maybe I’ll spend several completely unremarkable days in the library, starting at my textbooks and whispering ‘focus’. Actually, that’s a definite yes. Maybe I’ll pick a different language. Maybe I’ll start social dance. Maybe I’ll transfer out of Stanford. Maybe an earthquake will destroy Stanford and the semester will be canceled. Maybe I’ll wake up in high school, the day before the admit deadline, and the whole thing will turn out to be a dream. Maybe I’ll ask somebody out. Maybe they’ll say no. Maybe they’ll tell their friends. Maybe I’ll run into someone at my internship who can give me another internship. It’s not like I’ll get one otherwise. Maybe I’ll try to join a string quartet, fail completely, and give up. Maybe I’ll room with my roommate again. Maybe I’ll find someone different and hate them. Maybe she’ll tell me that I’ll never be an engineer and I’ll succeed just to prove it to them. Maybe I’ll write my own short play and it’ll be good. Maybe I’ll start composing again. Maybe I’ll get into a fist fight. Maybe I’ll get transported. Maybe I’ll be sitting with someone in my dorm lounge one night at 3 am, and all of a sudden we’ll just be kissing one another, and I’ll be a bit awkward but it will be okay, and the next morning the song that was playing when I first kissed a boy in a parking lot will play on my playlist and I will laugh and laugh. Maybe I’ll lose my virginity before I’m twenty. Maybe I won’t. Maybe I’ll have sex in a dorm room, maybe in someone’s house, maybe somewhere really stupid, maybe with multiple people. Also, you know what, maybe an asteroid will hit me outside Green. Maybe I’ll stop
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writing this journal. Maybe I’ll forget for a day, which will turn into a week, which will turn into a month, and from there shame becomes self-sustaining, and I’ll only get back to it a quarter later, when after a week where every day feels the same I once again vow to change. Maybe I’ll have a really terrible Halloween costume. Maybe I’ll have a depressing 20th birthday. Maybe I’ll have a really wonderful one. Maybe I’ll get too drunk. Maybe I’ll do something stupid. Maybe I’ll sit down and sign slurred campfire songs instead. Maybe I’ll learn to enjoy parties. Maybe I’ll write poetry again. Maybe I’ll be a protest where someone gets hurt. Maybe my friends will stay my friends sophomore year. Maybe they won’t. Maybe I’ll be in a play that does terribly. Maybe I’ll embarrass myself in front of everyone. Maybe I’ll go to Full Moon on the Quad. Maybe I’ll even understand it. Maybe one morning I’ll be so tired I’ll just walk to the art gallery and spend a whole day there. Maybe one day I’ll spend just driving, for eight hours straight, piling up Starbucks and gum on the passenger seat of the car. Maybe my car will break down, and I’ll spend the night sleeping in Denny’s parking lot, listening to the song that was playing that day, in a different parking lot, the time a boy kissed me and I realized that people could like me. Maybe I’m missing something. Something big, some secret that everyone else got when they were little, but my letter just got lost in the mail. Maybe I’ll find religion, maybe in my parent’s church, maybe one quiet night while I’m on a walk, maybe when sitting next to a hospital bed. Maybe I’ll lose it again, when my parents say the word cancer again like it’s a fifth member of the family. Maybe I’ll run into a future best friend at social dance, at a traffic intersection, in the bookstore, at Late Night, sitting next to me in lecture, reading a book outside Roble, deliberately, because I go after them. Maybe I’ll have a screaming match with them two years later in a dorm hallway, and by the time that someone comes out another friendship will be gone. Maybe this year Putin dies, maybe Trump dies, maybe Kanye dies. Maybe there’ll be a war. Maybe I’ll be walking in San Francisco for July 4th when a semi-tractor trailer plows through the crowd. Maybe I’ll get to make an important public speech. Maybe I’ll screw up an interview and almost
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New Year’s Resolutions | Thomas White
run out, trying not to cry. Maybe I’ll run into that guy again, the only guy who’s ever kissed me, and we’ll feel horribly awkward and walk in the other direction. Maybe I’ll fall in love with that one guy in section who I hate right now. Maybe my financial issues will be solved. Maybe they dramatically won’t. Maybe my game idea works, and my friend and I will start a Kickstarter, maybe I’ll have an actual startup, but maybe I can’t work on it because I do end up losing my virginity and get an STI in the process, maybe it won’t matter because the recession finally hit and the economy is collapsing, so maybe I’ll go back to school after a gap year and try and write again, and maybe I finally write something that people want to read. Maybe I’ll spend this year bouncing endlessly between my dorm and the library, biking listening to the same music in the same order, grasping at the clouds of maybes as they condense, one by one, into reality, regretting each one without quite knowing why. And maybe one night I’ll be working late to finish a PSET, but on the way back on my bike I’ll run into someone, and maybe both of us will end up in the emergency room, and maybe on the way back she’ll try and call an Uber, but maybe it will be late at night and the Uber guy will miss an exit and end up on the highway and maybe it will be like an hour before we get back to campus, so I’ll give that girl my phone number, but then forget to follow up and end up not meeting again until a trip to CoHo nearly three years later, but because I was so late I’ll need to finish my PSET, so I’ll end up in the SLE lounge all night writing, until at seven in the morning I’ll pass out with my arm in a cast, and be woken up by someone who will get me to class three minutes before the due date, so afterwards I’ll go after him to say thanks and we’ll start a conversation, and maybe it’s because of my concussion or my general state of panic and adrenaline and sleeplessness, but I’ll think, this is it, this is who I’ve been looking for. For ten minutes, while we walk outside, everything that has gone wrong for me will rush through my head, everything that could go wrong, everything that might go wrong, every person I could be, every life I might live but didn’t, the endless chain of maybes that led me here. And then I’ll stop.
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He’ll be about to get on his bike. I’ll take a deep breath. He’ll raise his eyebrows. I’ll smile. He’ll smile, uncertainly. “Want to hang out sometime,” I’ll say, “when I get my painkillers and some sleep?” And maybe, maybe, he’ll even say yes.
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Come
Sasha Landauer Come I will show you The place the owl hides And nighthawk passes Find the hollow places Ribs, spine, sternum Hear the wind wail through Exhale, Fill them with your breath And hum To pass the time The moon a sliver Come, There’s room enough, The winter was a cold one Freezing, thawing The cracks widen I sense there’s more to give The hollow grows behind the knot Reach in And place Beside the cork and twine and whispers Your palm.
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Love Angela He
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in the morning
Angel Smith you wake up to the smell of pancakes and bacon. light blocked by curtains hanging between bedroom walls doesn’t reach your eyes; you don’t know she’s already dead until you do and you wonder how to bring yourself to the kitchen. will the floor still creak like it used to does she still smile with pain behind her eyes. you correct the present tense to past, like an afterthought to a film you just saw but can’t remember the characters. you remember her in everything that never was. picking outfits in dressing rooms for graduation, you leave space for her in your reflection. apologize for taking up space, until the sun sets and you realize you never stepped out of bed.
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ALL NATIONS
Kimiko Hirota I am knitted from two nation states. they are tied together only by their oppression from the place that becomes the only home I know diaspora— staring at water’s edge unable to distinguish blue from blue where land and sky never let go imagine if we had never let go d i a s p o r a— dreaming in one language unable to hear mother’s voice outside colonizer’s tongue our lips bleed and teeth rot d i a s p o r a— heat that no longer sticks to the skin melanin like rain drops falling from clouds hanging above mountain and valley
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ALL NATIONS | Kimiko Hirota
mother splashes cold water in my face. she asks me why I don’t love my family pushes her finger into my chest threatens, you’ve forgotten who you are she does not know I have never known who I am where my breath was first stolen how to be all nations land and sky mountain and valley unraveling knots that have always burned inside my gut and bones.
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on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold (blink by blink)
Serena Zhang
PART 1: THE QUINTESSENCE OF STARS, SAND, AND DUST It’s always been my dream to see a sky full of stars. To see pinpricks of light against a blackness so dark it swallows itself. On the last night of our sojourn in Death Valley, the stars indeed saturated the sky, but they seemed muted somehow, opaque, as if someone had wrung out their light and left the edges frayed. It was disorienting to look at because you couldn’t tell up from down or left from right because the whole earth was draped around you and everywhere you looked was sand/star/sky and there were no skyscrapers or even trees to break the flow and before you knew it it was gonna consume you–– … .. .. .. …. . …. .. . . . .. .. . .. …. . . …. . . . . ––like drowning. It was like drowning. Like I was looking into an ocean determined to smother its own fish. The giant maw of the earth. ∞ “It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn’t feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.”1 ∞ — 1
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Quote by Neil Armstrong about looking back at the Earth from space.
on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold (blink by blink) | Serena Zhang
“Memory is a fickle siren song.”2 Your mind plays tricks, don’t think it won’t. One minute you’re living life and the next you’re wondering why you can barely remember any of it. There are flashes, brief moments that stand out among the rubble. But are those enough? What was I doing last Wednesday? Let me check my calendar. Statistics class in the morning. Lunch. Another class afterwards. A film screening. Those are six hours I can prove were real. But what about the rest? Was I not doing something useful with those other hours? Is that why I can’t remember them? I’m terrified at the idea of coming home one day and realizing my mom has aged twenty years overnight. That suddenly she’ll have a face full of wrinkles and faded white hair and walk with a slouch in her back that I never noticed because I was too busy living my own life to notice that she, too, is living hers. I have a video recording of my mom’s voice on my phone. I took it when I was 10 years old, right before I left for Disneyland, my first trip without my mom by my side. “What do you want me to say?” She grinned. “Anything,” I told her. “Wish me a safe trip.” Immediately after she started to speak, I felt all the anxiety drain out of my body. I had lain awake the night before, paralyzed by the realization that I could not recall my mom’s voice in my head. I just remembered thinking that if something happened while I was away, I would have hundreds of photographs to remember her, but nothing of her voice. That voice that used to sing me to sleep, that woke me up in the mornings, that soothed my tantrums when I was frustrated, that would scold me and tell me how much it loved me all in the same breath. The most special thing. When I got to Disneyland, I didn’t end up listening to the recording even once. To this day, I still haven’t listened to it. I don’t even remember exactly what she said. But that’s okay. I have it, and that’s what matters. — 2
From the song “He Doesn’t Know Why” by Fleet Foxes.
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Down Blyde River Canyon Melina Walling
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on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold (blink by blink) | Serena Zhang
∞ “To see the earth as it truly is, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold — brothers who know now they are truly brothers.”3 ∞ This memory is one I remember well. I am in second grade, sitting at a table at the back of Mrs. Hennessey’s classroom with a girl named Morgan. We are not really friends, but since neither of us feel particularly strongly about the monkey bars that day, we are playing together during recess in the diplomatic way only young children can. She is making her sparkly purple Jelly Bear keychain pretend to talk to my sparkly green Jelly Bear keychain when I say, “What happens when we die?” She ignores my question at first, but when I refuse to continue our little Jelly Bear charade she looks up at me and shrugs. “I don’t know. Probably heaven.” Never one to let a situation resolve quite so easily, I counter: “What if heaven isn’t real?” Morgan looks annoyed now. “I don’t know.” “Well, something has to happen. It can’t just be nothing.” I try to imagine a world of nothing. No second grade. No Mrs. Hennessey. No Jelly Bear keychains. What does that even look like? I think maybe it would look white, since hospitals are white and people die in them a lot. But then I remember that people die with their eyes closed, so I close my eyes like I am sleeping and everything looks black. Is dying the same as sleeping? But no, you’re not supposed to wake up. Morgan must take pity on me after sensing my inner turmoil because she pats my shoulder and says, “Don’t worry, you’re in second grade. You’re not going to die for a long time,” and leaves me to go color. Even though I eventually figured out that people can die at — 3
Quote by Archibald MacLeish, American poet and writer.
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any age, her words were somewhat comforting to me as I grew older. But sometimes, lying awake in bed, the thoughts would suddenly arise again and I would begin to panic, remembering that no matter how hard I tried to rationalize things, they never seemed to add up. I just couldn’t process the concept of nothing. It’s just… nothing, forever. You can’t… you can’t even count “forever” because it literally has no limit. And meanwhile the world keeps on turning forever, people keep on living and being born and then they die too forever and no one who is dead will ever be alive again ever and that’s a pretty crappy deal if you ask me. For the first time, I had questions that no one knew the answers to. Not my mom. Not my friends. Not my teachers. This solidarity in not knowing should have been comforting to me, but it only served to freak me out more. This was a reality that I couldn’t escape. Even today, I still find myself unable to come to terms with death. ∞ Everything, to me, is an act of creation. ∞ The sandstorm was the closest I’ve ever felt to dying. Logically, I knew there was very little that could kill us in that situation, no matter how frightening it was (although at one point in my hysteria I was half-convinced we were going to be sucked up into a tornado and flung into the mountains). Thus my fear was not directed so much at the actual threat of death as it was at facing my own mortality; realizing, for the first time, how fragile human life truly is. The darkness. It was so intense. So unforgiving. I did not sleep the entire night because I was afraid that if I did, I would slip so completely into that darkness that I would never be found again. “But I have lived, / And now I do not sleep.”4 Oh, but every moment I spent awake was another moment terror could grab ahold of me. It sunk its claws into my neck, smothered me, shook me. It rattled my teeth in a way that had nothing to do with — 4
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From the novel Grendel by John Gardner.
on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold (blink by blink) | Serena Zhang
the howling wind outside and everything to do with the insidious way with which it snaked into my bloodstream, eating my courage from the inside out. You’ve reached the end of your tail, it taunted. The desert revealed a secret to me that night. It is thus: every evening, after the sun sets, the terrain does something strange. It transforms. Morphs from a landscape into a creature with fangs and gnarled flesh, tearing its way through the womb of the universe in a birth most vicious and chaotic. Creation out of destruction. For in the daytime, the dunes are tranquil, almost idyllic. I can see each gentle slope as it stretches on into eternity. I feel grounded and in control. But frozen in my sleeping bag, the tent whipping and flapping and quivering all around me, I felt so utterly small, like I was nothing. “And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?”5 One last thing. In the desert, time moves inexplicably slowly. It crawls. Almost comes to a standstill, an eternity of nothing. ∞ Space, to me, is very much like a desert. Vast beyond all comprehension, much of it unknown. I remember once floating on my back in a pool at night, and when I squinted I could block out the trees in my periphery so that all I’d see were stars against a black nothing. It was at once spectacular and incredibly unnerving. I felt like I was the sole person on this earth. I heard once that there are more stars in the sky than grains of sand on earth. The universe is constantly expanding. It is infinite space. How do you create something out of nothing? What is it about distances, about things vast and unexplored, that captivates us? Scares us? Why do we chase things that scare us? The next time I go to a beach I will grab a fistful of sand. The — 5
From Shakespeare’s Hamlet, taken from Hamlet’s monologue in which he praises man as the greatest of all species. Afterwards, he immediately backtracks: “And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?” He is saying that for all of mankind’s supposed superiority, we are still subject to the same cycles of life and death as any other creature. We are not gods; we were made from dust, and to dust we shall always return.
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Figures in Ochre Cathy Yang
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on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold (blink by blink) | Serena Zhang
grains will scratch at my palm and run through my fingers like water. I will close my eyes and think, here is part of the universe in my hand; here is how I hold the stars. PART 2: THE CREATION OF THE UNIVERSE –– OUROBOROS On our last evening in the desert, we all split off into the dunes for some free time before bed. I was one of the last people to head out, deciding instead to watch the sunset for a little longer as I finished my tea. The sunset in the desert is layer upon layer of color, a lazy oil painting of dust particles and light. Starting with the mountains, which blush a deep, dark indigo, the tops of their ridges a luscious magenta. The sky above that fans out into a dusted pink, sweet with a hint of orange marmalade. That, in turn, diffuses into a white-gray shade and a blue more bruise than color. When the last of the light tucks itself behind the horizon, I diligently wash my mug and place it back into the tent before slinging my day pack over my shoulder and setting out to join my peers. I used to think I knew what darkness looked like. Could close my eyes and pretend it was the same shade of black for everything. But out in the desert, darkness has a whole other meaning. A whole other sensation. Like digestion. There is a consumption in it. I saw myself swallowed into that black. Saw each part of my body –– my waist, my legs, my feet –– guzzled up by that hungry, relentless dark. What do you do when you are no longer you? When your very essence is leached away to become part of one endless, indistinguishable nothing? You do what any other naked, helpless thing would do: You look up. The first thing you see is everything. All of it. You can’t just see one thing, you see, because nothing you see can actually be seen. It has to see you first before you can even begin to see what it is you’re seeing, in which case whatever you’re seeing has already seen you and it can then choose whatever it is you now see because it has the upper hand now, see?
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Maybe you don’t. Fine, we try again. Imagine: You’re in a plane. Going somewhere. Maybe you have some luggage, maybe you don’t. That’s not important. What’s important is that you’re going somewhere, but you don’t know where. You don’t know how long it’ll take to get there. You’re just sitting, letting space and time pass you by, and, I don’t know, maybe there’s a baby crying in the seat behind you because your luck is just that shitty, but the point is you’re moving and moving and moving without the faintest idea of when to stop. How long do you think you could sit on this plane for? An hour? Two hours? A day? I couldn’t last a minute. Not because of the screaming baby, but because my life has always been a series of destinations. If I am moving, I must know where I am going. Otherwise there is no point in action, and if there is no point in action, then life ceases to exist. A flower does not bloom to be admired; it blooms in order to reach its wilt, to spread seed, to reach finalis. That night I watched the sky. I watched its dying stars warp time in valiant efforts to interrupt its nothingness. (Did you know that when we look at the stars, we are in fact looking into the past? This is because the light we see has travelled hundreds, thousands, millions of light years to reach us, so it is entirely possible that many of those stars have already burnt out, yet to us they still appear to be alive.) I would make up games for myself, such as pinpointing specific stars and staring at them until they disappeared. This is called Troxler’s fading, an optical illusion in which fixating on an object for long enough eventually causes objects in one’s periphery to disappear. (I did this for the first time at outdoor camp in fourth grade. It was nearly dusk, and our counselors made us pair up and stare at each other in the low light. After about twenty seconds, my partner’s face had disappeared completely. But it was not simply darkness covering his features. It was more wrong than that, like an absence or a vacancy. An eating.) And I realized that what I sometimes thought was a fixed star was in fact an airplane moving slowly across that great expanse. It was during these moments that I began to think about flight, about desti-
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on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold (blink by blink) | Serena Zhang
nations and imaginary crying babies. I would follow those planes until they shrunk out of sight, and I would wonder, as I always do, where they were headed. How much longer of their journey they still had. Are they going someplace warm? (A welcome thought in the chilly desert air.) Someplace I’ve been before? Are they leaving or coming back? Is every action a leaving or a returning, or both? Maybe now you can understand what I meant by seeing. Because when I watched the sky that night, I didn’t just see planes. I saw people. Distances. Homes. I saw a young man chasing after his sweetheart halfway across the world. I saw a family hoping to find a better life in a foreign land, counting oceans like we count sheep. I saw heartbreak and desire and jealousy and faith. I saw all of it, all their stories. How awful would it be if they never got to where they wanted to go? To be stuck up there, tens of thousands of feet from everything they’ve ever known, just circling around the earth and never reaching it, never touching it? What if we are all stuck on such a flight? What if we are all little marbles rolling down a bottomless slope, zoetropes that repeat the same simple motion ad infinitum? What if what awaits us is not, in fact, a something, but a nothing? “Tedium is the worst pain.”6 Ouroboros. The snake eating its own tail. Creation out of destruction. The cyclical rhythm of the Universe. “The world is all pointless accident... I exist, nothing else.” I am the boulder and I am Sisyphus. I create the eternity I live in. “I create the whole universe, blink by blink.” … .. .. .. …. . …. .. . . . .. .. . .. …. . . . . And so it goes. 6
…. . .
— The three quotes on this page are all from the novel Grendel by John Gardner.
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eye contact
Mac Taylor when someone looks into a window and they are looking at you, at you, but then they turn to touch their own face and you understand that by looking at you they are really seeing themselves and though they touch their own face it is your face they feel and there is, you realize, an entire world transfigured in this single spectacular moment where you mistook a stranger’s look for eye contact and a stranger’s vanity for a profound and delightful hello
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Nike Angela He
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nansi [楠西]
Angela Lee amma presses wrinkles into her soil wipes dirt off her brow, scratches twice and then spits into the earth to bring rain, the first drops must be salty like her womb and her bones. holy pact with the universe, she trades a bit of herself for the blessing of three spirits of discipline, calls upon them to tame headstrong bamboo shoots, ply them soft and obedient, supple yet strong like the good family, good children she will feed every season. amma shakes spring pollen off of sun-leavened sheets, thick woven blankets still scented of passionfruit seeds and childhood games baked deep into fabric, thrown over sisters that called each other jie and swaddled tight in the winter whispering dreams of a-mer-i-ca to papaya leaf rustling and cicada song hymn, that took off in the breeze scattered like peaflower dust through the world planting seeds in new lands where children don’t play tag in mosquito netting and don’t pluck guava too early while laughing and don’t taste the sweetness of rice wine-soaked paper and don’t know how to say am-ma quite right but they practice each year, the lilt and the melody, and each cycle she hears a little more river in their throats when they come.
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nansi [ćĽ čĽż] | Angela Lee
amma taps two times at the barrier breathes out through her nose, and steps into temple expelling bad chi before entering, clean to take in pure ancestor air and she hiccups, feeling a presence in incense and she mumbles a greeting to her mother, her father long out of this cycle, this churning of life so thrumming in everything, and she places fruit at the altar, best of her brood, like the prayers she sweeps over bamboo stalk over ashes for her babies so far over oceans so far from the mangos, the soil of nansi.
Untitled Becca Nelson
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Untitled
Tony Hackett when i was young, every Sunday my mom and me would walk to church disguised as a Chinese bakery. we would tear into the pink box & find God in pork buns & egg tarts & we took turns tearing from loaves stories with neither beginnings nor ends. walking back i was tugged past a thin man in one of grandma’s nighties who I called the Priest & his watcher who choked cigars in a lawn chair on the porch. threadbare gown & scarved head the Priest would look up from watering petunias whose petals wrapped secrets & smile a jagged skyline. face cleft by canyons, his bones sang of discord & bleach.
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[when i was young...] | Tony Hackett
mother didn’t have answers to what i would ask, but each time reminded me that “men who lay with men were certain to receive justice.” i would continue on & walk between tree branches hanging thin like arms off the sides of the sky-bed. palms up; seeking forgiveness. later i am brave & i walk to church with only a bulb on my tongue & find a silhouette aching in windows bandaged with plea-deal prayers with Jesus & the Devil & hear the whisper-weep of the petunias’ leather skin. i get my pink box of God & hurry. the last time i go to church i just pass by empty-handed & watch the thin man lip a cigar & water dead petunias in-justice. 47
Leland Quarterly | Spring & Fall 2018
Бабушка Моя
Julia Freels She asks for her mama, long dead. Burns dinner. Loses her cap. Can’t find it. Cries. Before the edges of her brain Feathered away She said she’d never forget my name Because it’s the same As her mother’s. Laughs when I talk to her, My accent, my wavering declensions. She burns котлеты, splatters grease. The Cold War paint stained light brown. Eats peaches. I feed her peaches, But she thinks she’s eating mango, She tells me so. Eats porridge with berries. Hates the porridge I make, Eats the porridge from little packets.
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Бабушка Моя | Julia Freels
Shouts, When I walk into the room, Красавица, Surprises herself every time, Eyes like a baby cow’s. The hardest thing Was massaging her legbones. Smoothing into her love and lotion, My palms on her cheesecloth skin, And looking at her body. Seeing where it looked like mine.
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roommate
Kimiko Hirota she texts me in the late afternoon, “what should I do with your stuff that you left? like your automan?” she spells it like auto-man, not ottoman. I reply in the early evening, I don’t correct her spelling, say, leave it with your ex but still boyfriend, my best friend, leave it sitting in his garage then shut the side door hard so it’ll lock right. somehow I know then that she will not be with me the next time I reach for my stuff that I left that it will feel weird to imagine that she was the last one to touch it, to throw clorox wipes and dryer sheets back in after the lid falls off like it always does, that she once stared at it, sitting in our room months after I have gone, and wondered where it all should go.
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Untitled Cathy Yang
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Leland Quarterly | Spring & Fall 2018
Parroted
Jacob Langsner
Business school was hollow. John’s degree fell within the gilded orbit of Stargaze Capital’s pay, and the gaps in his studies were filled with the fine caulking of white-collar employment. As a junior sales analyst, John could just afford his own apartment—if he also chose to skip lunch, which he did less under the glacial duress of financial responsibility, and more from the sheer loss of appetite over a growing certainty: his life would contain few surprises from this point forward. Following one of the many days he spent careening from work to classes, John found himself in a bar. He quite literally found himself on the barstool, half way through a drink he did not recall ordering. On his mind were spreadsheets, cleaning the apartment, and tomorrow’s breakfast, which would be today’s dinner. Instinct had seduced his consciousness. Routine begged little more than pressing Start on the Xerox, then dreaming as a rising tide of repetitions swept his form along. If John’s body acted on the whim of some primal urge, it would take time to swim above the current and see. And on that night, soured by the fact that his most intimate recollection of the day’s affairs included a moment of childlike glee at having accidentally blocked a woman’s path at the office, only because it gave him the rare opportunity to actually meet her eyes and remember that other people were alive as well, he decided to indulge. Several more drinks landed John in a pet store. He found himself staring at a ferret, in a more traditional sense of having no recollection of how that came to be. It was still night, and that was good because if it were morning, he would need to be at work, and then preparing for class, and at that moment, things were spinning far too emphatically to allow for either of those activities. John had begun drinking at nine o’clock, and he had lost track of time around eleven thirty. His last memory was a vague notion that pet stores shouldn’t stay open all night, because anyone who wants to purchase a ferret after sunset is doing it for the wrong reasons.
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Parroted | Jacob Langsner
Then, when his alarm went off at five o’clock the following morning, John quickly discovered that he had spent two thousand dollars on a large tropical bird. A quick internet search told John that he had purchased a newly marketed breed, reputed to be one of the smartest known species of Parrot. It was particularly famous for an uncanny talent in mimicking human speech. John decided to keep the bird. It was company with just enough skill to slaughter silence, but no real sense of its words as weapons. Because the bird was entirely grey, John named it Beautiful. After five months, the bird remained completely silent. At work, John’s boss overheard him mention that his favorite movie was a romance. The following day, John was advised that he would not be promoted, as his fondness for love stories reflected a weakness of character. That night, coming home to silence, John knew the bird was even smarter than advertised. The next time John found himself at a bar, the drink he did not recall ordering was still mostly full. This was because his mouth had been occupied in conversation with a woman. She sounded young and vaguely interesting, but he had not actually looked at her. The intimacy might feel like satire. When John finally had enough drinks to feel safe seeing her face, he could not remember it after looking away. John realized he was more drunk than he wished to be, and he suddenly regretted skipping lunch. At one point, seemingly from underwater, John thought he made the woman laugh. This was only because he could hear a sound louder and more repetitive than words, and John assumed she would not have stayed if he had made her cry. Regardless, he apologized. When John mentioned work, he decided it might be fun to pretend that he had been promoted. He could not earn a better home, or three meals, or joy, but declaring his ability to do so almost immediately earned him a hand on the upper thigh. Soon, John tasted the flavor of a drink that was not his, on lips that could have belonged to anyone. Then, they were back at his apartment. When she saw its size, she asked they proceed with the lights off. As they drowned in each other, John thought about what it might be like to one day give someone else a promotion. Meanwhile,
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she screamed another man’s name. In the end, cigarettes kissed better. The lighter cast a toxic orange scar across her lips, and it lingered. John knew only a scorched portrait of blind affections, and yet, he had to say it. He turned to face the void where humanity had glowed, if only for an instant, and he said the only thing that felt true: “You’re beautiful.” The silence that followed was so absolute that John doubted whether anyone else was ever there. Then, a puzzled chirping echoed through the darkness: “No, she isn’t.” With some dismay, John realized the bird might be right.
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Gorg Angela He
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Citizen (to a teacher)
Marisa Lin We came in confined by the labels that taped our worlds shut. We came in resting in complacency, the dim lighting comforting us. We came in and you were there. In a moment of weakness, we had let you in, unaware that you would dismantle our defenses, deactivate our shields, poke
holes in the translucent gel through which we viewed the world.
The holes widened until they gaped and were not holes anymore, but a chasm that left us defenseless.
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Citizen (to a teacher) | Marisa Lin
The wind swept us, gusts battering our naked, vulnerable selves and we gasped and we cried and we flailed our arms pale streaks in the darkness. We saw you, looming above, a phantom yet when we reached out you were solid; you were warm. You beckoned us further. And when we surveyed the damage, sifting through our old worlds, we mourned the wreckage of our shattered kingdoms, the lies that had distorted our vision and mirrored in the scattered bits of sticky covering were our reflections, and they seemed like thin ghosts.
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We looked up and saw you standing behind us: solid warm. We felt your tender grasp as we explored this fresh, larger world, strove toward the broader horizon that stretched, like an inviting infinity which strained to bring us further. And we strained. And we stretched. And we strove. And we wondered how we could have inhabited our spheres for so long, thrillingly content under the humidity of our old worlds -
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Citizen (to a teacher) | Marisa Lin
with billboards that proclaimed our supremacy, declaring daily victories over the trifles that occupied us and in turn made us trifles; and so we lived insulated, away from the painful sharpness of reality We were emperors, and you came and you showed us that we are only citizens.
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Leland Quarterly | Spring & Fall 2018
Pool
Melina Walling We fourteen sat around the pool, a strange sort of watering hole for a strange flock of birds, all feathers in different shades of polyester. A chill ruffled the climbing vines and then it hung back silent just as we did. A light tiptoed on as dusk slunk to the west and still quiet held court, all sly eyes whispering glances, noses like detectives hot on the trail left by ants in the cracks of the concrete. And then we began to speak. Some of us, eyes pooling like they were filled with burning chlorine, others with the tremors of tectonic plates moving within us, others firm and still as the beams of the trellis above us. We scanned the insides of our scared-stiff skulls for smatterings of tattered memories, little shards of terra sigillata almost back-hoed to rubble.
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Pool | Melina Walling
It was our own kind of Delphi, our tripods filled with the fumes of broken sulphur, our cloth straps hanging what we had seen heavy from our necks and shoulders. It was our own yellow weaver in the mine shaft all fluttering neuron firings, each of us lost in the black of police batons of lost love of what if I’d never been born, hallucination-bright-yellow breaking through in specks of shared feathers floating in the pool alongside curled brown vine leaves and shivery flip-flopped skin.
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Burney Sunrise Olivia Popp
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On Friday, the Sun Didn’t Rise
Thomas White
On Friday morning, the sun didn’t rise. I work up and thought that the alarm had gone off at the wrong time. My iPhone said it was 8:42 AM. The moonlight cast everything in fairy-tale silver. I rolled off my couch and turned the TV off, checking the news offhandedly. The sun had not risen, anywhere. It was trending on Facebook. NASA didn’t know why. I made myself cereal, got dressed and went to work. We had a client meeting today, so no way I was going to miss that. Everybody on the street drove cautiously, partly because of the low light and partly because it seemed wrong not to. Is this the End of the World, demanded the newsstands. If the sun was gone, what was causing the moonlight? I wondered why it had taken me so long to ask that question. Work was busy. More than normal. People came into the office in droves, even the remote workers. I went to the water cooler, which seemed colder than normal. Or maybe the room felt warmer than normal. Or maybe I was seeing everything slightly differently, bathed in that gleeful blue light. Everything seemed more tactile than it normally did, more real. I found myself moving deliberately, oddly aware of how precarious the functioning of my body was. I checked Facebook again. Still no word from NASA. I tried to call my parents, but the call went to voicemail. I answered email instead. This whole sun thing was mucking with our operations to no end. Someone in the restroom was crying. I washed my hands quickly and left. The client meeting went really well. We delivered the slides and they didn’t have that many critiques. When it was over, there was a long
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pause, as everybody surveyed each other in the moonlight. “So,” said my supervisor, “Is this the apocalypse?” “Seems like a pretty stupid apocalypse, if you ask me,” replied the client, which was a fair point. We paused for a moment longer, but nobody really had anything else to say. That’s what it felt like, everywhere, I finally decided. That’s why there weren’t riots, that’s why we were all at work. Nobody had anything to say. What can you say about the fact that there’s no sun? We had a strategy meeting and talked about the firm’s five-year plan. Apparently we’d be moving towards housing markets. I doodled drawings of the sun on my notepad. The President came on TV and told us to go shopping Saturday morning. I decided to preempt him and drove to the mall after work. The cars were a little faster on the way back. Maybe the novelty was wearing off. Maybe people were used to a little dark while driving home. An SUV rear-ended a Prius, and both drivers just kept going. Which, again, seemed fair. The moonlight was really bright. Was it always this bright and I just hadn’t noticed? I realized that I hadn’t even tried to answer my question about where the moonlight was coming from. I wondered why. There were fewer kids at the mall than I was used to. The Gamestop was empty. But there were plenty of adults, standing and chatting and walking with smartphones. Shopping, just like the President said. New theory: everybody was calm because nobody had told them to be otherwise. At the mall, I bought a new dress and a couple books on leadership I’d been meaning to read, and then got a coffee. NASA said that the planet was still orbiting. Scientists were trying to understand, looking just a touch panicked. I stopped reading. It was depressing. Instead, I watched people walking around, smiling a little too broadly, laughing a little too loudly, glancing around as if they had missed something, as if they were waiting for someone else to catch
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On Friday, the Sun Didn’t Rise | Thomas White
their mistake. Someone had laid down on the floor. They were still breathing and had a peaceful expression on their face. Eventually I stood up with a vague sense of purpose. I’d go home and do something meaningful with the rest of the day. I was leaving the building when I overheard two people were saying something about black holes. What if that’s what ate the sun, and it swallowed Earth next? Black holes, I thought, standing there on the street corner, watching all those thousands of people going about their lives, shuttling home to their families, glancing in increasing apprehension at the sky. Seemed kind of beside the point. All of this was unsustainable already. Eventually the crops would die. Eventually the trees would be gone. Long before that, humanity would be banished to bunkers at best. But in that quiet, calm light, all I could think was: I mean, that was going to happen anyways, right? So I went home, made dinner, and streamed Black Mirror on Netflix.
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Future Melina Walling
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new predictive
Leela Srinivasan i don’t hold these memories in my hands. i think they exist somewhere above me, like strands of weeping willow woven into a crown that vanishes when i awaken. the sun should be so lucky. we play word games in different countries, send warmth through twelve-hour time zones. and sometimes then i feel like i am living in a key change. i was rendered human by insatiable thirst for years. lulled to sleep by the pounding of latent sins. i had never loved a thing that would last, had always built my houses out of smoke. memory was a ticket tucked into a dusty scrapbook, a notch on a wooden frame from which i’d long moved on. i can usually forecast how i will remember things, i can usually mourn prematurely. but not this: not the way we drive with both our hands on the gearshift, awash in broad swaths of western sky. the past doesn’t get the honor of this. this one will stay mine tomorrow.
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Cover Art Granular Synthesis By Mike Breger
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