Leland Quarterly Vol. 17, Issue 2: Winter 2023

WINTER 2023

LELAND QUARTERLY

Copyright 2023 by Leland Quarterly | All Rights Reserved Stanford University | Giant Horse Printing, San Francisco

MASTHEAD

EDITOR IN CHIEF

PROSE EDITOR

POETRY EDITORS

VISUAL ART EDITOR

EDITORIAL STAFF

Malia Maxwell

Matias Benitez

Ben Marra

Katherine Wong

Kristie Park

Ellen Abraham

Lucy Chae

Jessica Ding

Khushmita Dhabhai

Damian Drue

Lyle Given

Daniela Gomez

Matt Hsu

Karin Kutlay

Lily Kerner

Caroline Wei

FINANCIAL OFFICER

LAYOUT

Isabelle Edgar

Malia Maxwell

Towards the end of Winter quarter, while I was walking to class through the wind and downpour (wearing three jackets, waterproof shoes, and scarf), I overheard a tourist comment on how “bleak” Stanford looks when it rains.

But, as I sit here, assembling the Leland Quarterly Winter 2023 issue, I am struck by how vibrant these works are–vibrant in direct contrast to that woman’s observation. Art grants us access to what lies below the surface of our surroundings: the thoughts, ideas, and feelings that make up the inner worlds of those around us.

From Kristie Park’s bold, neon accents in our cover art to the sunsoaked excitment in “Catching Guppies” and beyond, this issue is filled with the creative energy that exists at Stanford (though on always on its surface). This vibrancy shines regardless of the weather.

Before we lose ourselves in perfect, cloudless days of Spring quarter, let’s remember poems, stories, and works of art that have sung to us these past ten weeks–either in creating or consuming them. And appreciate them all the more for the respite it has provided us from the cold.

Malia Maxwell Editor-in-Chief

COVER ARTIST’S STATEMENT

Time by Kristie Park

Time is an interesting phenomenon. I always seem to have too much of it when I don’t need it, and allow my thoughts the leeway to wander aimlessly. Yet, at the same time, it seems to just slip out of my grasp like a distant memory when I need it so desperately. Time is always moving, a fact that offers relief, confusions, nostalgia–the range of emotions is endless. Sometimes I just want to sit down and let it sweep over me, to create an interlude from the chaotic pace of daily life.

Poetry

Prose

Visual Art

The Buoys

Damian Drue

We used to swim all the way out to the buoys, unafraid of what swam beneath us.

Arizona iced teas were one dollar up at the shop on the corner, and we raved over those candy cigarettes–the ones that tasted like chalk.

The caps of bug juices became shot glasses before we even knew what shots were or why our parents yelled in whispers to stop pouring juice into our caps whenever strangers started looking at us oddly.

One time, we found a ziploc bag on the corner where our bus picked us up every morning. We brought it to our parents and their faces turned as white as the powder in the bag clutched in our pudgy hands.

They told us to throw it away. We didn’t ask questions.

But we didn’t swim out to the buoys anymore after that.

Melanie Zhou

Baba, the basement is cold and water from our pipes has made this cardboard box an ocean where your past life is swimming. I’ll fish it for you and dry it on the porch by tomorrow morning. In this one, you smile with a cigarette hanging from your lip while the red flags behind you melt into my palms and the people in the square become black dots blending together like burnt tobacco leaves. I almost didn’t believe you

when you said you marched at Tiananmen. Is this my grandfather? He slings lumber in the labor camp you called home, his skin thick and dark brown like the leather covers of the album that holds him. You told me not to cry when those girls called me dark as dirt: I thought you were being cruel

but you saw your father living inside my skin. Here, you are a duke in front of your first Beemer. Here is a happy one with Mother before the papers ripped you away. Here, me and sister smile against your greasy monkey suit. Baba, why’d you leave me here among your memories? Your pockets are not warm enough for me to grow up in. When you unfold me from your tweed coat, I wait for you to send me a boat back to land.

All Stars Are Dead

Alina Wilson

This tingling feeling crawls up my spine as I read that all the stars we see in the night sky are dead. And even as I learn that this fact—like most—is not quite right, my body is yanked from bed and sucked into a brightly lit screen. The milky way crushes down upon my chest, holding my frail human organs in its vice grip. As I draw one shaky breath after the other I think about how I was once dead and one day will be dead again.

(Will they scatter me across the seas I once sailed or bury me in the graveyard of the gas giants?)

But my worry sweeps away from my body like a wave receding after kissing the shore because last night I was held tightly by a ghost for 60 whole seconds, but time lazed on so lackadaisically and so long that just for a single night, I lived longer and freer than the stars.

Insomnia

Anna Kiesewetter

Ma, I’m still afraid to sleep at night.

When I was small, I’d wedge myself into the crevice between bed and wall and watch the shadows converge into hulking figures. Swathed to my chin in blankets, I’d imagine the creatures that would nip at my toes should they escape my covers, imagine the porcelain doll on my bookshelf pinpointing me with her glass eyes. With my heart in my throat I’d come padding to your bedside and roll your earlobe between my fingers until you sat up and tucked me in beside you. In the crook of your arm I found safety. In the crook of your arm my breaths evened into slumber.

As I grew, the shadows waxed and waned. When I became too big to fall asleep in your arms, you taught me a trick for irrational fears. Being afraid of something like this, mei, that’s ridiculous. You have to learn to laugh at yourself, to say, ‘that could never happen.’ So when the silhouettes merged into a spindly-limbed demon, I needed only to remember that demons don’t exist. When they formed the watery grin of a knife-wielding clown, I needed only to remember the improbability of his presence.

I slept soundly for a few years, learned to quiet the nonsense that enveloped my brain. You laughed: Mei, remember when you would run to my bed? We laughed at the dolls, the clowns; we watched It and didn’t turn away. Then, I came of age, and our laughter faded to shadow.

When I turned sixteen, you gave me my first pepper spray. It came in a cheerful pink container, accompanied by your cautionary words: Mei, you must never walk anywhere alone. Cover yourself. Never let your guard down. If there’s a bad guy, use this. When I drifted to sleep that night, my monsters evolved with these words until they bore the faces of rapists and killers. I tried rational thinking: That’s ridiculous. That could never

happen. But this time, your words said otherwise. Daily, you told me the figures in the darkening news: five girls my age gone missing in a Seattle neighborhood. Bodies found bloated in the Green River, thirty minutes from my home. How improbable was it that the dark figure against the wall bore the face of a pedophilic stalker? Of Ted Bundy, who kidnapped girls from the Lake Sammamish parking lot where I picnicked? Sixteen-year-old girl disappears from Issaquah park. I was the demographic screaming across the headlines.

I began shying away from dark streets and short skirts, pepper spray forever embedded in my pocket. On nighttime walks to check the mail, or release an intruding spider, my pepper spray remained clenched tightly in my fist. Even a ten-meter radius around my home was not enough security against the “bad guys” I feared were lurking in the shadows.

Alone in my bedroom, I learned to drift to sleep with one eye open until I’d drained myself enough for it to finally fall shut. The second it did, the image of a man with a knife was imprinted on my eyelids. When Ba and you left me home alone for ten nights, this expanse of house, this expanse of bed, should have been the one place I felt safe. Instead, it felt completely cut off from the world.

On my first night alone, I tried rationality. I thought, Ted Bundy only lured girls from the lake in broad daylight. I’m safe here in my bed. Then my restless brain found me scrolling through grisly crime scene descriptions to find that he assaulted several girls in their homes as they slept.

I grew attuned to silence. When I sneezed at night, I’d freeze for a full minute knowing that anyone in the house had been alerted to my precise location. Repetitively, I mapped the escape routes out the windows, considered whether I’d rather roll to the bone crush of asphalt or stay inside the house to be killed. How I’d run into the master bedroom because it’s the only one that locks, and then the master bathroom deadbolts inside, the walk-in closet creating a final barricade: a three-fold barrier to slow down the killer as I

Insomnia | Anna Kiesewetter

opened the closet window and navigated the least bone-crushing path to the asphalt.

When I resorted to sleeping only when humanly dire, the monsters found me again at daylight. One morning a stranger came to my door, selling me pest control before unblinkingly asking for a favor: a glass of water on a hot day. My tongue scrambled for a polite excuse and came up empty. I turned, grabbed a bottle, and sent him on his way.

Only once the door was shut and bolted did I crumple to the floor and sob, mind flashing to Ted Bundy in the parking lot. My sailboat’s stuck. Can you do me a favor? When the man returned thrice in the next two days, I hid behind the door, eyes flush against the peephole until he disappeared down the street.

When the ten nights were up, you didn’t know why I couldn’t stop crying in your arms, why I began sleeping with my bedroom door open so I knew you were always there. At eighteen, I was one month away from moving out of this house and into my own place eight hundred miles away. Mei, in college I won’t be around to help you anymore. Be aware of your surroundings. Hyper-aware of darkness, I tucked my pepper spray into my suitcase.

Ma, I need a trick for rational fears. How do I quiet this terror that claws at my chest? How do I live alone when my own home feels like a morgue? When the shadows come I think the most frightening part is that there’s no one to run to.

Ma, I am a little girl again except I am untethered. How do I enter womanhood if I am still helpless without you cradling me in your arms?

Catching Guppies Anonymous

We used to wait all day for guppies, feet in the cool slosh and slurp of the ocean, the sun a hot iron at our backs.

Plastic bucket in hand, we faced the shore and watched for the telltale v: they were sheer direction, vanishing before arrival. Then it was lunge and splash, millisecond

calculations, the heft and drag of water. We poured the bucket slowly, vigilant for a silver flick in the murk, suspecting one with every shift. Surprise stood at attention until the last dregs of expectation

slid from the plastic bottom. There were some catches but mostly long hours, lull, thrill, aching shoulders, salt tang, sunscreen streaked with grit, the inevitable burn

felt but ignored as it built up, wavelengths as the basic unit of time and hope, the way wet sand shimmied in our hands while we dug the pond faithfully, guppies or no guppies.

One year we caught thirteen. It was legendary, the pax romana of summers. We felt we had pinned transience itself: the point located, the intangible neatly bounded and circumscribed.

In late afternoon, thunderstorms came lumbering from over the roofs of the hotels. Then I gazed through sliding glass at lightning on the sea,

like the zip of electric guppies through heaven’s surf. Part of me is still there, crouched ankle-deep in horizon, bucket poised for a catch.

Lake Annecy | Nur Shelton

Lake Annecy

Nur Shelton

八寶鴨 (Eight Treasure Duck)

Anna Kiesewetter

Ma hated the duck. Hated its featherless skin, the way its bloodless limbs splayed in surrender. In the heating wok’s glow she felt a painful kinship with that derobed creature who existed to be stuffed with pearled rice and dressed in dark wine until one forgot the carcass plated before them. When, after an hour, Ba stalked in to bark, Where’s dinner? her only answer was the doll-like bird— skeletal wings clothed and sauced in gold until she could almost ignore how, once, she flew.

Journey Anonymous

If sprightly shimmer of her summer sun give way, without a trace, to bleak and brown;

If roses, carmine red, turn in time to petals dead, and lovers leave, their tokens not a place are found;

If shores with speedy current make with haste for marks erased, and not a parchment can be saved with flame enough;

The weary soldier of the war, the hopeless suitor of the dame, the jaded maid of children three, the lad the books shall never name, may think it strange to seek the beauty in the rough.

But what to make of such a passing through the woods— the forestry we journey through en masse, if not an instance, not a moment, while approaching end unknown, we praise the beauty that we daily journey past?

Little Red Cap

Bryan Defjan

Beginning Again

Jo Leuenberger

Gerard and I had broken up three Saturdays before, and the fact that I had been the one to end things was doing nothing to assuage my broken heart. At the coffee shop we frequented on Sunday mornings, I’d gestured for him to sit down in the chair across from me and laid out my reasons: we were too incompatible, I didn’t have enough time for a relationship now that senior year was ramping up, and besides, we were graduating—our lives as we knew it were destined to erupt and scatter across the country in a mere matter of months, so this was really just a preemptive measure. I did not tell him how desperately I yearned for my own freedom, and I did not let myself recognize that this was a form of self-sabotage, that I did want him, if not wholly then partially, but was whipped with terror of that wanting. When I finished talking, I folded my hands in my lap and waited for him to speak. But he only nodded forlornly before throwing his messenger bag over his shoulder and plowing through the entrance door without muttering a goodbye. I grabbed my mocha in one hand and wiped a tear on the back of the other. So began single life. In spite of this, the first week after I’d been mostly fine, though I was drinking more and had ceased attending class altogether. But still, I was getting up and sipping cups of readymade coffee in the mornings, so things felt like they were shaking out towards stability. But by the second week, I’d become uneasy again. Everything about myself that I disliked before I had someone at all times to confirm I was beautiful returned to the center stage and made itself readily apparent. In the mirror I would study the exact length of my forehead’s ascension, the uneven height of either cheekbone, or the shallow divots beneath each eye’s waterline which would one day become wrinkles. I couldn’t stop asking my friends if my hair looked okay, or if my jeans fit fine along the hips—perhaps a tapered fit might’ve been better? Everyone assured me I looked great. I’d sigh and pout, knowing that assurance was never quite

enough.

By the time the third week swung around, though, I’d entered a state of embellished despair. One day morning came knocking about through the window, and I just couldn’t get out of bed. I began Pomodoro-ing my weeping so I didn’t dehydrate, and slept so I wouldn’t have to think anymore. If I ever got worried about my hermiting, I’d bring my laptop to the library under the guise of finishing homework. When I arrived, I’d take my latte from the counter (ordered via app, so I wouldn’t have to talk to the barista), sit down at a table on the farthest corner of the second floor, and stare at a blank screen for approximately half an hour before returning to my room for the remainder of the day. Gerard didn’t text me once.

At the inception of the fourth week, on a Monday night, my friend Vince called me and demanded we hang out, saying that we hadn’t done so since I left Gerard. “I’m worried about you,” he said, over the phone, since I wouldn’t answer my texts. “I need to make sure that you’re alive.” Reluctantly, I agreed to walk to his dorm, where it was agreed we would “spill the tea.” Just talking. Nothing big.

But when I arrived, what transpired was immediately drug-addled. The first thing Vince did when I walked into his room was crouch down to a drawer in his desk and pull out his stash box and a grinder before grandly presenting it to me with a “ta-DAA!”, as if I hadn’t noticed the pot. “Wanna smoke?” he asked, his eyes gleaming with an exuberance best described as canine. But I was, am, a paranoid smoker, and thought that my mental state could only aspire to inevitable tweak-dom, not relaxation. I held up my hand in protest.

“Actually, I was going to ask to drink,” I said, pointing to a bottle of vodka standing tall and bright on top of his mini-fridge. The Absolut logo was the same color as Gerard’s eyes, but I tried to shove the thought away. “Do you have a mixer?”

“You can drink if you want.” He opened the fridge under his desk and handed me a half-empty carton of orange juice. “But I’m still going to take a hit.” I told him I didn’t mind either way. He nodded and grabbed his bong off his desk, tucking it gently between his armpit and his ribcage

Beginning Again | Jo Leuenberger

before swanking through the door. I laughed at his carefulness, and wished, a little woefully, that someone would handle me with the delicacy that Vince afforded his weed paraphernalia. We moved out to the porch of his frat, reclining in two white lawn chairs. There, I poured the orange juice and vodka into a red solo cup I’d found in the frat’s kitchen. I could only dream it’d gone unused. Vince unsheathed the bong from his underarm, took a hit from its green glass rim, and instantly began coughing, bringing his hand to chest so he could hold it while he hacked. But he didn’t look perturbed. Between guttural caws, he croaked out something along the lines of, “that was a great rip.” I wanted to laugh, but didn’t, because I didn’t want to embarrass him. Not that I thought I could. Vince was the type of person apparently immune to humiliation, and he had a cool, unbothered way of talking to strangers, asking after their names and how they were whenever they inquired if he could take a picture, or whether he had a spare pen. Tattoos saddled up and down the lengths of his arms, tiny, random illustrations that weren’t quite cohesive but which, from afar, still gave the effect of someone who was a patron of things considered cool. They were of all sorts of stuff: peaches, flowers, witches on broomsticks, matzo ball soup, a skeleton dancing under a disco ball, which had no sentimental meaning but had been acquired because “my friend designed it” and “I thought it was funny.” He wore a knit button-down vest with nothing underneath and a pair of army green pants, and looked a bit like a hipster, which he could’ve been, if only he hadn’t been so soulcrushingly sincere. Once I found a copy of Mary Oliver poems in his room. In the marginalia were microscopic love notes to and from his ex-boyfriend, from whom he’d split eighteen months prior. That break up had ruined him, the type of thing you recovered from by eating ice cream for breakfast each morning, and he hadn’t dated anyone since. I guess he understood where I was coming from.

Vince’s phone lit up and rattled against the chair arm on which it was resting. “What’s up, bro?” he said, his voice deepening. I’d always admired his ability to code switch between a queer man and a frat brother, the chance to simultaneously be two different people. But

even as I romanticized this separation, he let out a high-pitched gasp, throwing away the entire charade of heterosexuality. “Yeah, yeah, I’m with her.” He nodded decisively, as if the person on the other side of the phone could see him. “Okay, we’ll be there in a sec.” When he clicked off the call, he turned to me and pursed his lips. His face brightened, in the vein of a man who has just found an opportunity to act reckless. “Rider and Phil stole a bottle of fifty-dollar prosecco from Kurt’s.” Kurt’s was the local liquor store. “You wanna come?”

I nodded, though I felt a pit in my stomach. Rider was a close friend of ours who I was slowly growing to hate. He, too, was in the throws of lost love, having broken up with a long-term girlfriend about four months previous. In the intervening period, he transformed into something mildly intolerable, fucking a new girl once a week before proclaiming his love for her, though he still talked of his last relationship as something meant to last. On wistful nights, when he was drunk and nearing comatose, he would declare his imagined scenarios where he and his ex made a life together, creating art in the French countryside, or tossing grapes into each other’s mouths, plucked straight off the vine. “Guess what?” he’d say. “Jade got into Parsons.” Then he’d launch into a tirade about how they’d planned to go to grad school in New York together, but he’d taken an extra year in college and she was, expectedly, going on without him. I knew any time spent near him would vex me, which might’ve been unfair, but in my defense, his philosophical musings were teetering towards intolerable, and anyway, now that my love had also sanded away, he reminded me too much of myself.

I downed the rest of the screwdriver, of which there was probably about half left. Then I handed the red solo cup off to Vince to throw away. “Where are they?”

Vince tossed the cup into a trash can three feet to his left. “By the basketball courts on Arguello.”

I shrugged. “Yeah, let’s do it. Are they with anyone?”

“Hannah and Maria.” Hannah and Maria were two girls I knew distantly from set designing a campus production of A Chorus Line. Maria was Phil’s girlfriend.

Windchill Gabriella Garcia

Windchill | Gabriela Garcia

I said, “They’re cool.”

“Yeah,” Vince agreed, although he was busily collecting his gadgets to return to his room.

After he’d stashed his bong, Vince and I walked three blocks to a basketball court on the far side of campus. When we set our feet on the court, Rider and co. were sititng in a misshapen circle, debating how much they’d individually make per month on OnlyFans. Every time a man gave his number, a girl would tell him he was overshooting, no one would buy that from them. Inevitably, this caused said man to find a creative add-on to their nudes: say a BOGO sale on videos, or a sponsorship deal with a sportswear company, as though they were Olympic athletes.

“I’d make videos on how to crochet or fix drywall,” Phil said. He was talking loud enough that I could hear his voice from the other side of the court. “But I’d be naked while I did it.”

“Are people there for the educational content or the porn?” asked Maria. She tossed her curly hair over her shoulder very femininely, as though in a rom-com.

“Their decision.” Phil smiled and wiped his hands on his jeans. Then he put his left palm on Maria’s shoulder. “But I know what you’d be there for.”

“I wouldn’t pay for it,” Maria whined, but she was grinning all the same. They’d met in a summer program in high school and, by chance, ended up at the same college a year or two later. Since then: inseparable, conjoined at the hips, et cetera. They would almost certainly get engaged by graduation–they were already planning internships to stay in the same city over the summer, and, if you talked to either of them individually, they’d confine themselves to a first person plural: “We did this, we went there.” They were like the romantic equivalent of two conjoined twins attached at the brain, giving one complete access to everything the other saw or felt. I never saw them not together. I thought it was an insane way of life, two-headed and two-bodied, but it was hard to say that I wasn’t completely jealous of them, to have everything in life mostly figured out by age twenty, or, at least, to be so confused about everything that you

could delude yourself into thinking it might be. Either sounded nice. Seeing us, everyone waved us over, Rider and Phil cheering my and Vince’s names as though this was a baseball team and I was up to bat. They were all sitting in a circle in the same criss-cross applesauce, save for Hannah, who was hugging her knees to her chest rather protectively. In the center of that circle, the bottle of prosecco in its unmarred pink wrapping glinted like a dilated eye. Rider threw his left arm over Hannah’s shoulder, and when she didn’t shake it off, knew instantly where the trajectory of his night was going. I sat down next to her.

“Does anyone want to pop it?” Rider asked, grabbing the bottle by its handle and waving it towards his target. “Hannah, wanna do the honors?”

“No!” she said, covering her face with her hands. “I get so scared opening those! I always think it’s going to explode in my face.” She giggled and tapped her canvas sneakers on the pavement, pushing away the bottle with a flattened hand.

I looked Hannah up and down. She was a short, blonde girl from West Virginia, beautiful, nice, kind, exceptional in ways that I could not muster from myself. Her voice was cut with a slight Southern twang that made all her sentences lilt upwards, and this made her immediately gentle and teddy bear-like, as if she descended from an aristocratic line of Cabbage Patch dolls. I hated her for this. I didn’t believe that someone could be this feminine naturally. I thought it must be an act, or that she must be very, very stupid.

“I can do it,” I said. I swiped the bottle out of Rider’s hand and opened the bottle in the most passive aggressive way possible, by standing up, quickly tugging the cork off, and setting it on the ground without letting it fizz over, as if the prosecco itself was afraid to confront me. The white condensation that arose from the bottle seemed to indicate this, venturing shyly out of its home like a gopher from its burrow, and everyone was left silent and twiddling their fingers nervously. It went like this for a few moments. Crickets, shifting eyes. At last, Vince took the bottle, said, “Well, if no one else is going to take it,” and floated a sip into his mouth. He passed the bottle off to Phil, who took a sip and planted

it in front of Maria, and so on, and things returned to normal for a little while.

Soon the night descended into its familiar patterns, dominated by juvenile needs to be ridiculous and shocking. We listed out various drugs and raised our hands if we’d ingested them. Vince had done all of them but ketamine, though he said he had a plug and hoped to try it soon. And we talked sex. Our worst hook-ups, at what age we’d lost our virginities. The girls debated on whether or not size mattered while the men awkwardly stared at their hands. I announced to everyone that Gerard had only an average package, but declared he knew how to use it well—this announcement elicited only a stunned and semi-embarrassed silence from the crowd, so I hunched my shoulders and pretended I’d said nothing at all.

Moving on, each of us went around the circle and said the word “cunt,” but the boys wouldn’t say it, except for Vince, who yelled it rather enthusiastically. Maria said she’d kiss Phil if he did, so he muttered the word under his breath, and she pecked him on the lips in turn, which I found weirdly sweet. But Rider refused to say it. “I just think it’s demeaning,” he said. “I have sisters, you know.” Then he turned to look at Hannah, smiling.

“But you said it before,” I said. “Last week. About how you were ‘serving.’”

I’d heard him say it the day before, which was true, he said it in the middle of the story about his friend Corey, a lesbian, and had told him one day that he was “serving cunt.” And he’d said it like that, cunt, not the c-word, not a cheeky bleep! where the word was meant to go, but the full consonant-vowel formation without any euphemistic substitutions. Vince nudged me with his elbow and when I looked back, his eyes said cool it. But I didn’t care. “Say it if you’re going to say it,” I argued. “Just don’t flip flop on your morals.” “Fine,” Rider said. “I’ll tell the story.” So he did. His voice grew very quiet, whispering it, then, when the moment arrived, squealed, “cunt!”, covering his mouth and flitting his Adidas Gazelles over the court.

At this, we all laughed, and for everyone else, it seemed genuine.

But it ignited a great and fiery pessimism in me, a complete disillusion with men as a species. You could tell, with him, that the hiding of the word was just a show, that he was perfectly fine with the utterance itself. While I didn’t mind that he’d said the word, the faux show of chivalry irked me. I took a swig of the prosecco and set it down. I began plotting how I could ruin his chance with Hannah, to protect her, in a sense, although in that second I disliked her as much as I reviled him. How could I do it? Ask how Miranda was doing in her MFA program? List the last girl he’d hooked up with, the one he’d met in his Earth Systems class before inquiring, very casually, if she might be able to help him with this week’s homework? I hoped, unjustly, that he would die alone, as I feared I one day might.

“You okay?” Vince had put his hand on my shoulder.“You look, I don’t know, grumpy.” He was whispering.

“Tired,” I said. I felt a pang of embarrassment and added, “I’m sorry,” but I can’t say how genuine it was. Vince smiled gently and told me it was okay.

Rider reminded me of Gerard in a way, perhaps in his heterosexuality, but also in his insistence, subliminally or not, that everything was fine when things were most certainly not. Early in our relationship, I had been intimidated by the masculine jocking of Gerard and his friends, the subtle shoulder pushes, the strange moments of teasing that revealed deeper, more acidic tensions. But then, one night, as I curled into his arm, Gerard admitted to me that the only people he thought he could confide his secrets to were romantic partners, that he did not feel close to his friends at all. He could not even conceive of loving them, though I was certain he did, in his own way. But he’d insisted that it wasn’t real love, not like what was between me and him. I’d actually thought of that as sweet at the time.

Vince patted me on the shoulder. “You’re good,” he said. “Just checking in,” and I thanked him for it. I heard Hannah’s laugh, and when I turned my head, I saw that Rider had put his hand on her knee. I thought, of course he screws the pretty blonde. Only a week ago, I had been swayed by her, in an awed and slightly powerless way, when she

Shirley Temple

Gabriella Garcia

complimented my shoes during tech week. Now I wished that if she was going to be alluring, she would do so privately and away from me. Phil leaned over to Vince and me. “We’re trying to get Rider and Hannah together,” he whispered, swinging an index finger over his lips. “Because they have chemistry, and Rider’s been, y’know.” He made a mock frowny face and mimed a tear by running his index finger down the side of his cheek.

Before I could say anything, Vince nodded and said, “Us, too,” then hit me between the shoulders. I nodded, probably too decisively—I was so drunk that no physical gesture ever seemed large enough. “They’d be cute together,” I whispered back, again too loudly.

We pulled back and saw that Hannah and Rider were now laying prostrate against the court. They were counting stars, or Hannah was, and Rider would ask if she’d counted that one, or that one, or…was that a new one? It reminded me of one of Gerard and I’s first dates, when we snuck onto a hiking trail behind campus at night. It’d been a horrible affair–we’d broken in by scaling a fence, and then had to walk through a plain of tall grass. By the time we reached the actual trail, there were burs in my shoes, and we had to stop so I could pick them out of the canvas by hand. Later in the evening, I would find out that my new sneakers were completely ruined, but before then, when we reached the trail, Gerard sat down on the dirt and patted a bare spot, where I joined him. I draped my head over his shoulder as he pointed out constellations to me, and I felt the steady bubbling of my chest. We hadn’t even kissed yet, and it felt wonderful to be caught in that, the anticipation, the wonder, the possibility of where our affections might lead us. A sort of emotional frizzante had fizzled in me then. It was a completely devastating thing to remember, knowing now just where that possibility had taken me. Then my sadness took a turn, and I wondered if Gerard was fucking anyone yet. He’d always had a thing for a friend of his, a girl with curly brown hair and a particular affection for one-shouldered crop tops, though he liked to deny it. Maybe it was just easier for men to move on. Or maybe it just manifested differently, involving rosters and hook-ups with any girl that triggered a modicum of desire. Perhaps men had to

fuck the love out of themselves, to sweat it out and endure their pain by shoving it aside with new sensations; maybe this was the entire basis of patriarchy. A friend of mine kept a list of every girl he’d ever fucked, claiming it was for “STD purposes,” but he had encounters that went years back, including his high school girlfriend, that surely were recorded for reasons not pertaining to one’s health. I’d found it unnerving at the time, but now could only regard it as quaint and a little pitiful. He’d only been trying to keep a record of his desirability, which nearly everyone was always doing, in one way or another. I was devastated if I ended a night out with no one hitting on me.

Suddenly Rider and Hannah emerged from their quasi-isolation chamber, and both sat up very tall and proper. “Me and Hannah are gonna head out, I think,” Rider said, sidling his arm around Hannah’s waist. Maria and Phil gave a decisive nod, as if to say, us too. Vince grabbed my arm and pulled me to my feet. “We’ll see y’all, then.” He linked arms with me, but when he pulled me to move, my feet wouldn’t budge. Suddenly the world felt very dizzy, and I could sense everyone’s gaze pointed towards me, the way someone might feel a sunburn creeping up their neck on a summer day. I didn’t know what to do. I had made myself the odd one out. I didn’t belong there. My knees were shaking.

“We’re gonna fuck,” I announced at last, and everyone paused, taking in the suddenness of it all, then burst out laughing. I stood in the middle of their laughter, fanning it in. This felt good. I was reminded that even if I’d never be loved, I could always be a spectacle. That made up for at least some of my loneliness, which was growing so vast and impenetrable that even half of it seemed impossible to cross. Then the laughter stopped, any good feeling fled, and I was forced to move on to something new.

As we walked away, Vince patted his stomach. “I’m hungry,” he said. “Let’s go somewhere.” He took my hand and whisked me off back towards the frat, where his Honda Odyssey was parked. The Honda was fifteen years old and had a missing bumper and maybe barely qualified as a car, but there was something comforting about its decrepitness, like

when I was back home and passed by the now-abandoned swing set I’d once played on as a child. Nevertheless, he apologized for the state of it, as he often did, as soon as he turned on the ignition. In the car, I plugged in the directions to the nearest Wendy’s, where we ordered chocolate Frosties and a ten-piece chicken nugget, intended to be shared between us. We parked the car in the lot of a superWalmart, and Vince put on a hyperpop song, the type I’d once heard him play for his fraternity brothers to a lukewarm reception. The song was about giving head, and being good at it. It felt like a ridiculous song to be sad to, especially as Vince clapped his hands to its rhythm, shouting its lyrics, which cycled the phrases “deep throat” and “slob on your knob” so often one hypothesized about the limits of the singer’s vocabulary. I leaned my seat back and slipped out of my shoes, throwing my feet on the dashboard. As Vince spat out “yasses,” I began bobbing my head, an earnest gesture that might’ve passed for genuine if I wasn’t so off-beat. I could feel my eyes wettening, but I thought everything might be alright if I made it to the end of the song. I pursed my lips and repeated the words very quietly, attempting to compose myself. I thought, things can be overcome. I thought, don’t embarrass yourself. The thoughts were pouring at such high intensity that, at one point, my brain overloaded and forced itself to quiet, and I sensed for a moment, almost viscerally, that my period of emotional hyperactivity was over, and all was calm. That didn’t last, of course. Whatever peace I felt was just a momentary grace period until my sadness broke through the barrier like a Trojan horse, and soon each hot tear was splashing down the side of my cheeks, so fast it was almost athletic. It was so clear to me then, what I’d lost. I missed watching him get pull his trousers over the curve of his hips in the morning; I missed the margaritas he made on Thursday nights before we went dancing; I missed having someone to kiss the spot between my shoulder blades, so sensitive and ticklish that my body scrunched whenever someone dared to brush their lips there; I missed the pop music he played past quiet hours, even though at the time I’d found the songs adolescent and annoying, and I missed cramming two people into the space of a single, university-provided twin bed so that the sleep was inevitably uncomfortable and unsteady, but always preferable

to going to bed alone. It felt as though the present was chipping away to reveal a futile future that I was reluctant to enter, and then I would have to wait forever before I ever really recovered. Just beyond the car window, I spotted every passerby with their grocery carts full of gardening tools and bulk boxes of fudge sundae PopTarts, though they were slowly blurring as the tears gauzed over my pupils. I dogged my head into my shoulder and would’ve weeped into my chicken nuggets if the car didn’t feel so public. “No one wants me,” I tried to say to Vince, but he only insisted that I was beautiful and special. “You just got out of a relationship,” he kept saying. “It’s only been three weeks.”

I sat for a while, letting Vince repeat himself. I wiped my nose with my sleeve. “Yes,” I said at last, and dipped one of the nuggets into a bin of ranch. He threw his arms over me and continued his mantras, but the more he talked the more I failed to listen. “You doing better now?” he asked, and I nodded, though my lip was quivering.

“I’m glad,” Vince said, turning the ignition. “C’mon, let’s get you to bed.” Through the car window, it began drizzling on the California roads that had been rainless for so long. Underneath the yellow light of lampposts, the streets glitterered gold with their own wetness. It was beautiful, even extraordinary, in this seven-year drought. I closed my eyes and leaned into the car seat, listening to the rain’s subtle putter as the land struggled to regain itself. As Vince drove on, all I did was listen to that melancholy weather, thinking about how the only way to survive your present absence is to convince yourself that things will one day begin again, elsewhere, when you are someone else.

Beginning Again | Jo Leuenberger

Tuesday at the Louvre

Melanie Zhou

After we finished fucking, we suckled ice cream from plastic spoons in the fluorescent glow of my open freezer: his body warm between my thighs, my thighs pushed against the cold countertop, our nakedness hanging like swollen grapefruit. I am beautiful to him in this moment. No, I cannot wash him away from under my fingernails, between my teeth, or beneath my hair, even now in this grand hall where we stand as strangers and eyes recoil like box springs, even now as he hides behind his bushy eyebrows, a painting behind glass.

The Road to Kazbegi | Nur Shelton

The Road to Kazbegi Nur Shelton

Contributing Artists & Writers

Bryan Defjan (visual art) is a Design and Art Practice junior who uses natural imagery to explore Asian masculinity and human connection within our digital culture.

Damian Drue (poetry) is a Midwest-born, world-wandering writer & artist. Much of her creative work focuses on expressing the raw human experience through hybrid poetry-prose experimental literature; she particularly enjoys experimenting with the relationship between literary content and form (form being both that of the writing itself and the way in which it is physically presented to the reader). Currently, she is completing her B.A.H. in English & Creative Writing at Stanford University. You can find more of her work at damiandrue. com.

Gabriella Garcia (visual art) is a junior at Stanford studying Political Science.

Helen He (visual art) is a Stanford student studying HumanComputer Interaction and Architectural Design. In line with her scholarly passions, she is curious about the physical and digital experiences that people have with the daily world around them, and she likes to capture these experiences by creating art and photography of mundane, everyday moments.

Anna Kiesewetter (poetry, prose) is a sophomore studying Human Biology and Creative Writing. A firm believer in the psychological nature of literature, she writes to explore human experience and perception. Her work has appeared in Polyphony Lit, Prometheus Dreaming, Blue Marble Review, Eunoia Review, and elsewhere.

Jo Leuenberger (she/they) (prose) is a senior studying English and Film. She enjoys going out for a bit and then coming back.

Dayeeta Pal (visual art) is a first year PhD student in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering and extremely passionate about Fine Art.

Nur Shelton (visual art) is a senior from Ashland, Oregon studying English with a focus in creative writing. In his free time, he loves film photography and spending time outdoors.

Katie Terrell (visual art) is an Art History major who doodles in her free time.

Alina Wilson (poetry) is a junior majoring in Human Biology. She believes in the power of narratives and their potential as tools for meaning-making, connection, and healing. Her interests intersect community health, narrative medicine, and relational organizing. In her free time, she can be found learning to play the drums, practicing Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and Muay Thai Kickboxing, trying new things on her reverse bucket list, and creating playlists for friends.

Melanie Zhou (poetry) is a junior at Stanford studying Computer Science and Poetry. Her work revolves around love and sexuality, coming of age, and identity. When she’s not writing poetry, Melanie edits for Leland Quarterly and enjoys traveling, reading, and going to as many concerts as possible.