Leland Quarterly Vol. 17, Issue 1: Fall 2022

FALL 2022

LELAND QUARTERLY

VOLUME 17, ISSUE 1: Fall 2022

Copyright 2022 by Leland Quarterly | All Rights Reserved Stanford University | Giant Horse Printing, San Francisco

MASTHEAD

EDITORS IN CHIEF

Malia Maxwell

Lucy Chae

PROSE EDITOR

POETRY EDITORS

VISUAL ART EDITOR

EDITORIAL STAFF

Matias Benitez

Ben Marra

Katherine Wong

Kristie Park

Lynn Collardin

Brett Chy

Khusmita Dhabai

Jessica Ding

Damian Drue

Lyle Given

Matt Hsu

Lily Kerner

Karin Kutlay

Khristine Ma

Neil Rathi

Caroline Wei

Melanie Zhou

FINANCIAL OFFICER

LAYOUT

Isabelle Edgar

Malia Maxwell

EDITOR’S NOTE

This quarter, Leland Quarterly owes a big thank you to the Creative Writing staff for allowing us to host our weekly meetings in Mariposa House’s conference room. Under the watchful eye of Eavan Boland’s portrait, LQ met on Wednesday evenings to review submissions, work on edits, and talk literature and art—or whatever else was going on in our lives. For those unfamiliar with Mariposa House, it is the newly appointed physical home for Creative Writing here on Stanford campus. In addition to housing Creative Writing faculty members’ offices, Mariposa also hosts readings, events, and workshops. (When the weather’s a bit warmer, there is also a beautiful front porch that attracts students looking for a quiet place to work and squirrels alike.)

I joined LQ in my first year at Stanford looking for a space where I could get to know people who enjoyed Creative Writing as much as I did. It’s very fitting that now, my senior year, LQ has grown large enough that it can carve out physical space (at least for an hour once a week) as we discuss the merits of a photo’s composition or a few line breaks in a poem. We hope you enjoy this issue as much as we enjoyed putting it together. May it be a pocket-sized space for creative writing and art that travels with you through your day.

Malia Maxwell Editor-in-Chief

A NOTE ON THE COVER ART

This quarter we used DALL·E 2, an AI system that generates art based off what written prompt a user gives it, to create our cover art. DALL·E 2 creates a single square image that the user may expand upon by feeding in more words. This image started off as the two women in the bottom right with just a single tower. We then added several more sections to the “painting.” (“Doom,” for example, was the only input we gave with respect to the top left corner.) We hope you enjoy looking at the image as much as we did creating it.

Visual Arts

Fall Leaves

Tai Kao-Sowa

Old leathery men fly from far away

Guiding writhing metal into the earth

Drill the hole, drive the pump

Gloves and soup for tough cold mornings

Trucks drive through the night

Swollen and sluggish from their load

Down carved highways into town

Midnight radio wards off sleep

Steel pipes churn tar

Workers in hazmats guide gas into tanks

At the station, two for one deal on onion rings

A leafblower rumbles in the street

A hundred degrees in the sun, dammit Dry leaves cartwheel over hot driveway pavement

Orange vests cough fumes, spit, carry on Cash on the other side of the window, waiting

The fall breeze

Slowly blows leaves Back

Northbound

Kaitlyn Choe

Let’s take a trip on the northbound train. You’ll refuse to buy a ticket because your optimism bias is wrought with iron. I’ll slot my credit card into the faded machine because mine is flimsy at best. When I do, you’ll peek over my shoulder. You’ll make fun of me for being a scaredy cat, and when I lean back to elbow you, your hair will spill over my shoulder.

This will cause my muscles to freeze, which will make for a terrible elbow jab. You’ll ask if that’s all I’ve got, in that easy, teasing lilt of yours, the words so close to my ear. I’ll press the sticky buttons while I inform you that I am paying not only for the security of the ticket but also for the scrapbook material, and that in twenty years, when you are drinking like a fish after your second divorce, I will be there to pick up the pieces. Because, in twenty years, you will be lying on my couch, asking me what happened to our youth, and I will roll my eyes and pull out a box, and in it will be this ticket, among so many other things.

“Other things?” you’ll repeat. “Like what?”

Your voice will be quieter, as you ask this. I will invest a lot of mental effort in grabbing the ticket, still warm from the printer, and my credit card, which I will slot in the wallet you gave me for my 21st. I’ll still remember the tissue you stuffed into the bag—the way you’d sheepishly shrugged when I’d looked at the glittery, star-speckled paper.

“You tell me,” I’ll reply as I turn around, as lightly as I can. For a moment, silence will suspend itself between us anyway.

“I don’t know. Probably the papers from my first divorce,” you’ll say eventually, your eyes somewhere away from mine, your fingers tapping the top of your iced coffee. “I wouldn’t trust myself to hold onto those.”

“This is a box for our youth, you dummy,” I’ll tell you. “Not for your adult adventures.”

You’ll drain the last of your drink then, your front teeth crushing the tip of the plastic straw. You’ll turn to toss the empty cup in the trash can behind you. If you have a response, I won’t ever know, because the train will be arriving, its rumble morphing into a roar as the metal cars, two stories high, rush towards us.

I will worry, as I always do, if, by some incredibly improbable odds, the train won’t stop. That it will just keep going, on and on, leaving us behind—or, worse, if it will stop too far away ahead, and we will run to catch up but it won’t be enough, and we will be left panting as the train restarts its journey north, without us. You will know exactly what I am thinking. You’ll swipe my chin and say, “Stop worrying. We’ll get on in time.” For a moment, I won’t know exactly what you mean.

The universe will be on your side, as it always seems to be. The doors will open, right in front of us, strangers of all shapes and sizes and smells spilling from the cavity they create. You’ll hop up the stairs first. I will follow, my hand grasping the metal railing.

You will wait until I’m with you to find our favorite seats– the ones with the small, blue tables attached.

You’ll let me have the window seat without me having to ask.

“So,” you’ll say as you slide into your chair, your bag thunking onto the floor beside you, “How many divorces do you think I’ll actually have?”

I’ll sigh, stretching my legs underneath the table. “Wouldn’t you like to know?”

You’ll tell me that you do. That if the answer is more than three, I have a moral obligation to tell you so. And what will I say in return? That I just have a feeling? That I thought it was funny? That I think your heart is the biggest and flightiest thing in the world, and even if you did get married thirteen times, to thirteen different people, it wouldn’t matter, because the slices of time you’d spend with each of them would be tender and solid and sweet?

But who am I kidding. I will toss you a joke, something about how marriage isn’t for everyone. And you will toss another back to me, as if we’re two children mastering a game of catch and not college students running away from one of our last Saturdays on campus.

After Belmont, or, if we’re feeling chatty, San Mateo, the conversation will slow to a stop. You’ll pull out a book from your bag, some old novel for class, and I will listen to music. By Millbrae, you’ll have given up on your book and settled for stealing my left earbud. I will act nonchalant about this. It will feel like a form of deceit. The whole time your breathing slows, I will stare out the window, watching the world around us change. The buildings and the people and the trees.

By the time we get to the city, you’ll be fast asleep. I will nudge you gently, tell you it’s time to go, and you’ll nod, rubbing your eyes and grabbing your bag and stumbling into the aisle. I will follow you, the more steady one this time.

“We’re here,” you’ll say when our feet are flat against the platform. Around us, businessmen in suits and commuters holding their bikes and mothers with their children and college students just like us will be moving towards the exit. You’ll grin as you say those two words.

“We’re here,” I’ll repeat. And although your relentless optimism is not infectious, your smile is, because I’ll be grinning, too.

Let’s take a trip on the northbound train—who knows where we’ll go.

Maybe we’ll be the tourists we swore someday we would be. Maybe we’ll walk the Golden Gate Bridge. Maybe you’ll insist we walk the whole length of the Golden Gate Bridge, even though the fog and all its insulated chill will have long since burned off, even though we’ve almost been run over by three bikers, even though I hate many things and one of them is walking long distances, to which you will argue the Golden Gate Bridge is not long, it is 1.7 miles, a fact you’d prepared for this very moment.

But even as we argue, you’ll have that look in your eyes, the look I am never quite prepared for. And when you finally let that look travel down your throat, into your mouth, and then off the tip of your tongue, and you ask me if it’s really okay—because we can stop, you remind me, gently, we can always go back—I will say: No. No, let’s keep going.

Let’s keep going. And when we slow down, when that familiar dull ache blooms in my ankles, your hand will briefly touch the small of my back. I will not tell you this, but I will think, briefly, ridiculously, that if I could move through the world like this, with your palm supporting the base of my treacherous spine, I could go anywhere.

When we finally make it to the end, you’ll buy me a magnet, which you know I will love, and I will force you to take a picture, which I know you will hate. You’ll insist we take it together or not at all, the ultimatum so silly and so serious all at once. When I concede, you will snatch my phone out of my hands and snap a couple shots quickly from overhead. I will think that’ll be the end of it, but you will surprise me, and ask some nearby tourists if they can take some more of us. Afterward, when we are on the bus to Chinatown for pork buns, I will look through the

photos and hate how I look in the vast majority of them. But there will be one where you’re making a silly face, and I am laughing. I will hate how I look in this one too—the bunched double chin under the curve of my lips—but it will be coupled by a knowledge that I will never delete it. That someday I will look back at this picture and the first thing I will notice will not be the bloat in my face but the way you made me feel.

Let’s take a trip on the northbound train. And when the trip is over— when we have to return home—neither of us will address how fast time is passing. Instead, you’ll rest your head against my shoulder, and I will adjust my body automatically to fit better against yours. Eventually, your hand will find mine. I won’t tell you what this means to me. The endings are all so close, anyway.

And when you look at me, as we’re pulling into our station, and say, “How did we get here already?” for once, I will know exactly what you mean.

Domenica

Diego Rafael Pérez

holly in late spring

Aden McKracken

I’ve watched old friends from distances. I hold a rotten tooth in hand. I swirl it in lemoned water. Early June’s loss sweats through the plastic goblet where we share our last drink.

I wish the sting of an overworked bee at the closing of Spring a gentle death and a soft winter.

In Newness of Life

Naomi Mo

I think of the aftermaths: rebirthed holy under blue, shedding skin made antiquated by sanctification, in supplication rising from the font with feathers draping my backside, testimony shifting on my tongue. The congregation applauds and I smile, feel God smile from that newfound space he has woven between the pilasters of my soul.

Two and a half years later I witness baptism of a different kind.

I think of the aftermaths: feet nailed to the shore of a silence shattered by emergency sirens and shaking shoulders, tightroping the precipice of a grief that laps my spirit in imitation of the waves gnawing at my toes. The body is drawn from the lake and I scream, feel him smile: that which has taken residence in the wake of God’s eviction.

I now ponder the precursors: the divergence that occurs for one to emerge breathing newness of life, the other without breath at all. I sink even as I turn heavenward— watch the sun fade to stained glass, feel a kiss of unknown current, let the threads creep across my lungs until the last prayer on my lips loses itself in the bubbles.

Locals

Brennecke Gale

After Jenn Alandy Trahan.

All the white boys in our high school could really ski. They could play hockey, too, and lacrosse, and go to back-to-back practices every day and still outrun us during passing period pick-up basketball. They learned to skate before they could walk and did backflips in their sleep and dreamt of dropping out of high school to ski professionally. We smoothed our oversized Colorado Avalanche hockey sweaters and tried to be sporty and funny and cool and hot, and we prayed every night that one of them would choose us to wear their away jersey during home lacrosse games.

Phillip and I finna huck it at Vail this weekend, Alex Grady told us at lunch. Alex Grady lived in Eagle. All the white boys did, in houses on golf courses with big, sprawling basements. On Fridays, they hosted parties in those basements while their parents sipped Coors Light and watched Broncos football upstairs. Our high school was in Gypsum, ten miles down the road, where single story houses squeezed together on narrow streets. Gypsum boys spoke Spanish at home and played soccer and basketball because you only needed a ball and maybe some shoes. Eagle boys played lacrosse and hockey. They had garages full of expensive equipment, and their parents could drive them upvalley to the ice rinks in Vail for hockey practice because they got off work earlier, or they didn’t work at all. Eagle is closer than Gypsum to the ski mountains by fifteen minutes, but it made a world of difference when it came to varsity rosters and street cred and homecoming kisses and the attention they got from us.

Us girls were from Gypsum and Eagle, but we vied for the attention of the Eagle boys equally even though we, too, could rip tricks and skate fast and pull our own weight at the keg on rodeo weekend. In tenth grade, Zach Mason asked Riley Glutova to homecoming after the volleyball game where she broke the school record for most kills in a single season. For the rest of the week, no one talked about Riley’s game. They only talked about how Zach had eased up to her, pants low, and asked her to the dance in as few words as possible. Who cared if he could barely spell and kissed three different girls every weekend night? He skated circles around every hockey team this side of the Continental Divide and was the first boy to throw a cork-7 on the ski mountain, baked out of his mind. At the homecoming dance, we gathered in shadowy corners and watched Zach put his hands on Riley’s waist during the first slow song and felt something small in our hearts like pride.

A lot of us went to college. Some of them did, but they usually made it only a year or two at Colorado State or CU Boulder before dropping out. Sometimes they stayed in those cities, squatting in their frat houses or shitty apartments with mattresses on the floor. Usually they went home to Eagle, to their parents’ basements, and they skied big, dangerous lines and drank heavily at the Brush Creek Saloon and drove past the lacrosse fields where they used to be somebody. We got good grades. We made friends. Most of us stayed in-state, but some of us went further, to liberal arts schools the Eagle boys had sneered at when we graduated. We played sports better and tougher than anyone else at our coastal colleges. We called our parents often, and sometimes, we thought about little Eagle and little Gypsum and those little boys we’d worshipped. We laughed at them, and we shook our heads at the altar of hockey pads and lacrosse jerseys and crumpled beer cans we built for them out of curse words and playing dumb and looking the other way when they’d smoke weed off the side of the main ski run in a circle of lodgepole pines. We laughed at them, but we also worried about them when we saw that one by one by one, they were leaving college and partying more. Online, we saw videos of them

egging each other over bigger ski jumps, doing riskier tricks. Quietly, feeling far from Gypsum and Eagle, we worried about what they were doing offline. And then we got the calls—three in nine months—that they were gone. Alex. Phillip. Zach. Suicide. Overdose. Suicide. We felt strangely blank, unsure of how to feel, like our childhood house had burned down even though we hadn’t lived there in years. We hung up the phone and stared outside at the sunlight straining through the green leaves of the California oaks.

When did we first lose them? Was it in the science wing bathroom, freshman year, when they passed chewing tobacco to each other under the stall doors? Was it earlier, in middle school, when they pushed each other to try bigger jumps in the halfpipe, choruses of expletives and name-calling bouncing off the aspens? Was it much later, at graduation parties, in dark corners, when they came up to us and gripped our shoulders and told us that we could be something, something big and real and important out there in the world? The boy who holds us now, so far from home, tells us that we cannot blame ourselves, but we’ve been worried about those Eagle boys for as long as we’ve known them, and we never said anything. Who might be next? How can you even ask that? How do you reach through four years and two thousand miles to try and grab hold of someone?

And how do you explain to the people at your coastal liberal arts college that these boys mean so much to you when you’re not sure why they do? What does it mean that the dead is always someone’s teammate, someone’s older brother, someone’s date to the junior prom? How do we collect grief together, picking it up through the truck windows driving along the slow highway between Eagle and Gypsum?

There’s a wide, flat field halfway between the two towns. In the winter, the dads of the neighborhood lay down tarps and wooden siding and flood the field with hose water until, after a few cold nights below freezing, we have a homemade ice rink. They set up goals and smooth the ice with a homemade Zamboni and stock a big box with spare skates and firewood. I spent almost every weekend night there in high school, skating around with friends. Sometimes I’d go with my dad and watch

him reach for the memory of the hockey player he used to be.

I remember one night in February, two years before we even knew to think about college, five years before my high school friend Camilla called me, tearfully asking, Is this what growing up is? More people you know die? It was snowing such thick, fast flakes that the night was warm and glowing. On this night, I showed up to the rink alone. As I laced my skates, I searched the skaters on the ice, blurred by the firelight and falling snow. It was the Eagle boys—Phillip, Alex, Zach, and more—catapulting their bodies across the ice, dancing and weaving, passing the puck to each other like they were born to do it, like they would do it forever. And they were laughing, a high, clear laugh that hung in the air with the snow for a long second before floating up towards the moon and whatever is beyond.

Kindergarten

Anonymous

St. Perpetua Catholic School, K-8

& this was when the hinges to my brain swung open like fists & memories start to keel. A genesis, this: day one we learned hell was something you could eat. I was five when my lips dressed in plaid & I swam in memory before it bore memory, I mean memorare: how each noon I flew unto Mary, flaying prayers like sweet apple skin. Her son loitered in the wafers at church: soon he’ll temple my throat he’ll pound my tongue like a table & he’ll drug my words to Word then kiss my sin to skin. I honeyed my voice. I honest a smile, but nights I’d flatten a wafer under my body till it was blade, greedy for something untaken. Fall days crisped with sun. Recess resurrected & recessed again. I was five when the dismissal line tempted & I waded into my best friend’s lips. I thought love was something you could taste. (How a wafer tumbles back & forth. Or a memory marbling through wind.) Mouth open, voice an entryway— she flinched. Dyke, a classmate

breathed, I heard bike, I’d never ridden one, & my love for her was so easy, without condition. Now I am so lonely. I think if I live in my words any longer I will die. Sin down, T., my teacher dismissed, dammed twelve bodies between us. I mean sit down. No one ever told my mother— she still cut me apples every lunch. In kindergarten I learned about hell & thought it said he’ll. I learned hunger meant greed. Greed meant lust. I learned subtraction.

Allegory

Charles Li

IShe lives next to the police station and to the high school. She meditates in the mornings until the sound of sirens and students engulf her apartment. Then, with one good eye, she walks to the fish market, the meat market, the bakery.

She watches out the windows as she eats. On one side, skies over brick. On the other, sunlight atop cars. The talk of the town is 高考, 高考, 高考.

She brings food to the policemen. Her husband used to be one. The playground in between is always empty.

The day we visit her grave is the hottest of the year. We stop to pick up incense, jewelry, and joss paper.

We mix them with leaves and branches next to her gravestone. The ashes fly high. We each burn incense, bow three times, tell her how much we have grown, and wish her well with the money we have sent her.

I sleep in her room at my aunt’s apartment. In the middle of the night, I see her reflection at the foot of the bed. A few weeks later, the glass doors to her room shatter.

Sometimes, you see shapes in the clouds, my best friend tells me.

I ask what he sees. He does not respond. I see the outline of a swan. I do not tell him.

He stands on the edge of the wall. He launches the ball towards the hoop. He skins his arm on the way down. He rips out grass from our lawn and shoves it in his mouth. He cries and then laughs.

That was ten years ago, and have not talked in six.

It is late, and the baby is crying. She stares at her paper. She turns toward the cradle. Her heart sinks. It had been on her mind, but she noticed most clearly then.

Her dissertation defense the next day is successful. Perhaps it would have been better if it were not.

Upon an ancient scroll, she teaches him piano. The markings war. The metronome ticks. The pedals creak. But there is still space to learn.

Machine guns in earshot earshot dead bodies down the row. Fire on the third story, bridge suspended in the air. He is only five.

The sound of the piano fades. A grenade too close, she cradles him in the corner as the piano convulses.

The roof combusts, her body shatters, the boy crawls out. The metronome ticks. He braves machine guns in equal temperament. He is now six.

I places a line of sunflower seeds leading to a dead end on a trail. I wonder how many have followed it to the Tree.

The seeds: eaten by birds, stomped into the ground, lifted through wind, weathered by rain. Where there are no seeds, there are no people. But I trust that the seeds still form the line; they will follow; they will come to the Tree.

The Tree: robust perennial, wise, unbothered. The Tree speaks; they listen; they do not know what the Tree says; they lean in; they want to hear; they want to know where the seeds have brought them; they want meaning; they want to discover; they want something larger than themselves.

On Wednesday I Still Have Time Before the Dining Hall Bagels Go Stale

Casi Cobb

If I think about it just right, I can still love the memory of the boy, stubborn ‘til he sang reggaeton as he danced with me. The insides of our knees touched, the party growing tired.

My hair was barely more than a buzz then. Soon, again, I’d be shocked by the obvious: how each new hairstyle multiplied unmaintainable. My blonde hairs rebelled with stubborn growth.

Twice a week, I used to climb tall walls, obediently reaching up and after bright colors. Shaky armed, I’d clutch the last hold firm, two-handed.

At one point, I was reading that great book. At one point, that plastic bag still dripped wet with clay. Now, Its 11:11 and I’m wishing that I get what I want. (I’m hoping so does everybody else.)

On Wednesday I Still Have Time... | Casi Cobb

Thursday comes, and I want someone to kiss me slow enough I stop counting time in weeks. In the car, I dream of firelogs.

The way the embers kept burning under the sand we kicked on top.

The call home always ends the same way:

David Toomer

I form an O with my mouth, press my tongue to the back of my front teeth, and feel my jaw slowly deaden as if molded in amber:

Love. You want to say love. I love. You. You two. I love you, too. You two, I love. Love you too.

Three words, and an end to this dreaded stillness: my staggering heartbeats aligning with their curious blinks, the time—

Oh, God, the time. Get it over with already:

Drop your tongue. Luh. Bring your bottom lip to the blade of your front teeth and blow. Hard. Veuh. The rest is easy.

Drop your tongue. Bottom lip; front teeth. Blow. Hard. The rest is easy. Drop tongue. Lip; teeth. Blow. Rest easy.

All I ever manage to spit out is you too A broken triad left to mourn its lost love.

Two parents become black screen, and I wonder why they still smiled as they saw it: the bile of an undigested love forming in my throat and failing to be regurgitated. I want this word to fit like speculum to mouth, for it to explode from my voice like all things good and nuclear, to reciprocate, goddamn it, if only in name, if only in this language that continues to choke me.

Contributing Artists & Writers

Kaitlyn Choe (she/they) (prose) is a senior majoring in Human Biology and minoring in Creative Writing. She is interested in exploring stories that capture the lived body, especially in the contexts of pain and deisre during adolescece and young adulthood.

Casi Cobb (poetry), is from Miami, FL and has recently desired to indentify with the entire state. Casi just returned from abroad in Australia, which changed and challenged her (though she thought she was done with all that). She loves to knit bonnets for fun, self-identifies as a gossip, and prefers dancing with friends, but would, reluctantly, seduce an entire dance party alone, if she must.

Brennecke Gale (prose) loves drinking coffee and listening to the wonderful stories her friends tell her.

Tai Kao-Sowa (poetry) is masters student at Stanford. He enjoys making acorn pancakes and hoshigaki.

Charles Li (prose) is a sophomore who enjoys creative writing and playing classical piano. In his free time, he likes to take naps and eat snacks.

Aden McCracken (poetry) is a current sophomore studying Anthropology, Creative Writing, and Interdisciplinary Arts. His work has previously been published in Stanford’s Leland Quarterly and Euonia Review.

Hailing from Dallas, Texas, Naomi Mo (poetry) is a five-footseven hodge podge of engineering mishaps, adventurous inclinations, and poetic tendencies. She enjoys creating circuited magic wands to activate the lamps in her dorm, getting lost on hikes, playing marimba with two mallets in each hand, and overanalyzing J.R.R. Tolkien’s

Middle Earth lore. She is a sophomore currently deciding between studying mechanical or electrical engineering, but when she’s not building (or breaking) things, she finds her greatest solace in words she hopes the honesty and introspection in her own will resonate with whoever reads them.

Diego Rafael Pérez (he/him) (visual art) is a senior from Santa Barbara studying Biology with a concentration in Ecology. He likes to make art when he can.

David Toomer (poetry) is a poet from the metro DC area and a senior at Stanford University. Their poetry frequently explores memory, nature, and the various strains on familial relationships. David currently serves as a co-director for Stanford’s Spoken Word Collective. You can find him on Instagram @davidjtoomer.

Sarah Yao (visual art) is a sophomore majoring in Computer Science and Product Design. In her free time, she enjoys hiking, skiing, and exploring art museums around the Bay Area.

WE WANT TO HEAR YOUR THOUGHTS!

Where do you want to see LQ head in the future? How can we continue to grow, increase our accessibility, and support the artistic community at Stanford? Drop us a line at lelandquarterly@gmail.com or DM us on Instagram @stanfordlelandquarterly.