Marginalia
volume 4 | issue 1 | fall 2018
Marginalia
volume 4 | issue 1 | fall 2018
Rachel Whalen '19 Editor-in-Chief Peter Szilagyi '20 Managing Editor Yongyu Chen '20 Copy Editor Shaloni Pinto '20 Layout Editor Katha Sikka '20 Tomás Events Coordinator Lilian Hawkes ‘20 Communications Director Ishion Hutchinson Faculty Advisor Cover Art: Yongyu Chen ‘20 and Shaloni Pinto ‘20 “It’s a Different Piece”
Editorial Board
Tomás Reuning ‘21 Katie Zhang ‘21 Sarah Sachar ‘21 Zasu Scott ‘22
General Staff
1 2 3 4
Schrödinger’s Aunt Ode to Cafecitos Sample I: Dile que tú me quieres November Panacea or, Bonfire 5 a brief catalog of things that burn 6 All At Once A Poem for My Lemon Tree 7 Baggage 8 9 Afterthought Sundayschool in the Cemetery 10 Page One of the Handbook 11 חורב םילע ומכ 12 13 Convert PDF to Word Doc Antediluvian 14 The Amber Encasement 15 Figure of a Man 16 17 Anamnesis 18 to Jeremy, who has been to my house 19 Process Family Dinner at a Four Way Stop 20 The World Falls Asleep 21 22 Nocturne The Great Pacific Garbage Patch 23 ##Define grief## 24 26 Anne Carson Meets Hades Children’s Movies 27 Fault and the Inevitable Mollusk, Time and Time Again 28 Mapping 29 The Invisible Committee’s “Let’s Destitute the World” Appears Beneath the Melting Glaciers 30 Moving Towards Your House
Table of Contents
It is not enough to write poetry. This semester more than any other I have been stuck on the barbed wire that exists around language. Emily Dickinson famously stated that reading a good poem should take the tops of our heads off, and playwright Suzan-Lori Parks claims that creativity comes from the gut. Poetry is in the body, and it is a bodily experience that simultaneously alleviates and induces anguish. Gloria Anzladúa calls this experience that of living in the Borderland. Federico García Lorca and Tracy K. Smith call this agonizing duality the duende. What these writers suggest, and what perhaps every poet somehow knows, is that writing poetry is a purposeful self-fragmentation: it is creating a wound (perhaps in order to better understand a deeper wound), and then stuffing words in it, like gauze. Poetry does not heal. At best, poetry is a tourniquet, and I would argue that it is a feeble one at that. I do not mean to suggest that an artist should be in agony in order to produce good art. I am suggesting, however, that, at least when it comes to poetry, we must set aside our platitudes about pens and swords. We must stop pretending that our second-hand copies of Leaves of Grass can stop bullets, or that writing poetry in itself actually accomplishes any sort of cure for society’s perplexing infections. So what, if anything, is the point of the poet? Why do we write, read, and celebrate language? What is Marginalia’s function? We have put out our poetry, as we always do, in pages, on sidewalks and in our gatherings beyond the page. In this Fall 2018 issue, and in all of the work we have done in the past year, we have asked ourselves these questions. Our interrogation space is so meticulously designed and crafted by Shaloni, Katha, Peter, Yongyu, and Jake, who are wholly dedicated to constructing our written and physical presence. Of you five, and of our unwavering general body members, I am in awe. Thank you for daring to fiddle with that barbed wire, even if it stings, if only to further interrogate that acute ache of poetry. It is not enough to write poetry. But the space we move through within language, at the very least, demands us to feel; it provokes us to understand. To all of our poets and friends who safeguard that space, you have my deepest gratitude. Yours truly, Rachel Whalen
Letter from the Editor
1
There is a philosophy of props: cat, gun, room: gun room: of cats, or gun: of cats with rooms, or it’s cat: in room with gun: gun cats My aunt gun would say cat My aunt gun wounds a cat catastrophic: the cat room: or cat with gun without room; either way, you stand here or here and have to hear if the aunt is dead inside, the cat wound, if the dead room wounded if the gun goes :: :: If there is an egg not cracked If you don’t know if what is inside is dead or edible or alive until the cat goes off: it goes: the cat is neither a gun nor a room nor dead: it goes: the aunt is not dead inside until uncle gets the gun: when the gun goes off the cat is neither dead nor alive until you go inside.
Schrödinger’s Aunt Rachel Whalen ‘19
1
Coffee is not for caffeine where I’m from, no — coffee is for memories, for after-dinner conversations about love and politics and telenovelas. I don’t remember my first café con leche, it feels as though my tongue has always been coated in its sweetness, warmth spreading from my stomach to my limbs, reminding me of home. My café is black and bold and uncompromising, That is, of course, until I make it sweeter, make it softer, make it lighter — It goes down easier this way. My family brought café from Cuba and I have brought it with me, desperately heating it in my dim dorm room, hoping its rich aroma will make this place home, will make me me again — but I wonder if any espresso is that strong.
Ode to Cafecitos Tomás Reuning ‘21
2
God is a woman or so I am told, though I’ve begun to believe she might be the Devil in the form of a whore, Perhaps they are one and the same — Lucifer is a god to some and Lilith was forged first for Adam, and we all need to worship someone. Quimbara quimbara quma quimbamba, she’s got rhythm yes – ella tiene tumbao, and she knows how to use it. Now she’s dancing, her steps cracking the pavement, making the earth beneath my feet unstable. Dile que tú me quieres, Tell me you want me, I want you to want me, I need you to want me, Love is the same in every language. No es amor, lo que tú sientes se llama obsesión.
Sample I: Dile que tú me quieres Tomás Reuning ‘21
3
There is something restorative in scalding foam cups of gunpowder green tea clenched so tightly they squeak, in sixteen wool-bundled arms twined together into a shivering octagon of heat and cloud-white breath mixed with curls of wood smoke — something powerful in us, in this steady geometry of wind-chapped flesh and amity among the pines in the bleakness that casts a gold light upon winter.
November Panacea or, Bonfire Alyssa Sandefer ‘21 4
matchstick / sunset / forest / breath / photographs / dynamite fuse / autumn / home / the self-immolating monk / all the old love songs / urgency / newspaper / illegal fireworks / cash from your back pocket, just once, to impress me / deadwood / flesh / unanswered questions / sheet music from 1968 / flashbulb afterimage / candles at the altar of a forgotten god / phosphorus sulfide / silence / your hands on my body / flashlight / embers / light through a magnifying glass / the memories, if i concentrate / fever / guilt / stomach acid when you entered the room / gasoline / your smile, false as it was / try harder, fireflies / bonfire / the stars in my eyes / phoenix / the kindness in yours / oxygen / love letters printed and saved / promises / poetry / memory memory memory it consumes / the butterflies in my stomach, one after another / this world we built / innocence / dead air after saying something ugly — only some of these are true —
a brief catalog of things that burn Alyssa Sandefer ‘21 5
I used to think in narrative, in beginningmiddleend, in evolution of character, my life an evolution of self and each anecdote a metaphor for something else, building tension, eventual climax, growth and resolution — Now midnight strikes me apart with its bells. My heart tastes like aluminum between my teeth. The shudders of my bedroom caught in a gale and I howl like a newborn. I am newly born, no skin yet to hold all my organs in. Now I am here and now I am elsewhere and now nothing happens and now the grenade goes off in my chest. Now I am blown to smithereens, all the mismatched pieces of me leaving blood trails as they slide down my walls. Now the song plays and I hum along. Now the shadows shift inside me and drive a gag up my throat. Now stories dissolve on my tongue like christly wafers, the integrity of their structures gone before I can say, this happened to me.
All At Once Emma Bernstein ‘21
6
Lemon tree in my childhood backyard, gnarled, fruits gone saccharine in summer: you were all I knew of love — The roughness of your bark, splinters caught in my palms and my blood in your roots. My arms were sticky with you as my skinny legs straddled your boughs. Still I asked, again and again I asked: Is this enough? Can you love me yet?
Poem for my Lemon Tree Emma Bernstein ‘21
7
A work-shirt clad elephant it is, other-wise I’ll put snails and crew length socks among the hoarded fortune cookie fortunes. The ziplocked succulents grow wild. I sigh, wondering if I roll my pants, shirts and ties will there be space for the wrapping paper wrapped tampons? My Poppins Samsonite 360. I pack light — a sunbeam shoved tight in a mason jar. Shredded wheat, barley and brain Mom, I can’t fit the printer! I elbow in my half-baked eggs a salad of bras, bralettes and the brazen Betty Friedan book. Gunning for the gold necklaces, I find them tangoing around each other, twisted into an unmarriageable knot, Shoot — I chuck them into my carry-on but a Miss it is, or is it Mrs. All that is left is the ironing board checkered, checked-red boxes, a to-do list, and I do.
Baggage Simran Malhotra ‘20
8
I catch whiff of the white lilies’ candy perfume. They’re discounted in an Aldi. I remember how you taught me to remove the anthers from stamen filaments so that they would stay fresh longer.
Afterthought Joshua Sandinsky ‘19
9
My father’s turn for Sundayschool unearthed In tender minds the same way as a newborn’s breath, how fear could molt a ripened fruit for squeezing like a heart to taint to taste to rule And juice, mingled with the old pages splayed My father’s gospel was beating drums. To scare the devil with hot fruit fire and His phobias, with stone bodies flexed And I did, I smelled citrus in the cemetery. Strung like beads of light amidst the graves We did not wake the rocks with laughter They’d think our feet were thunder
Sundayschool in the Cemetery Ana Celeste Carpenter ‘19
10
Number one. Get loose. Shake your shoulders out. Your shoulders fall out. Weightless. Number two. Breathe through yourself. Breathe to flay your lungs open. Number three. Poise. Number four. You can crack your ephemeral knuckles because you are now transcendent. Nothing touches you, not even constraints.
Page One of the Handbook Ana Celeste Carpenter ‘19
11
ע trading palms fire fish fleeting materiality you familiar stranger reincarnated: hey, life is both Emmaus and emptiness call me silent pilgrim, feather on your roof, promise in your throat, unmanifest nada. ל let’s speak different scales. fish rustle fire now it’s fall: fish fall lamed in my palms no better pilgrim of Determinism: its veins rethink my palmistry. my palms remap the forest, tree by tree — call me by your ringed age, time is orthography people are whispers: ה may we trade permanence? the wind stopped blowing. my leaves are finally reattaching themselves to the ocean. it is Friday, dinner is served.
חורב םילע ומכ Kristi Lim ‘21
Glossary: הלע: a verb meaning to cost or to ascend, when these root letters are placed in the format of a noun it means leaf ע: “ayin” phonetically corresponds with a pharyngeal fricative [ʕ] or glottal stop [ʔ] ל: “lamed” can be attached as a prefix to indicate directionality or possession ה: “hei” can be attached as a prefix to make a noun definite
12
Convert PDF to Word Doc Kristi Lim ‘21
13
I wish a rain would fall on me To bring the worms to the surface of my skin, A drizzle, turned deluge From a periwinkle sky Tilling the loose flesh like so much rocky soil Disinter my bones, keep them not in cloisters Let them float through ancient streets The prisoners of no sepulchure, no sarcophagus Devouring flesh, flesh prison, disintegrating in the downpour I wish a rain would fall on me To awaken seeds planted in my marrow And let them course upwards through the sediment of my sinew Until I look not so much like a tomb Anymore.
Antediluvian Jamie W Rivera ‘22
14
At the edge of the pool, I face the sick blue water Chlorine oozing from the depths to fill my lungs with chemical mist. Drops spray onto the concrete, staining deep brown like blood. With the stares of the sun and my mother hitting My back with equal intensity, I feel the weight Of layers, my hair and sweater and shorts and concealed Contour of bathing suit, Do its best to press me dry An autumn leaf between encyclopedia pages. I become a sour pit, my gut fevered, my organs Fermenting like overripe fruit, a slurry of flesh And a cacophony of skin. Would it not that I were a body trapped in peat, Acid browning my face and naked hands, swallowed Into the earth as a pill to dissolve slowly A testament to how easy rotting has become. They will dig my mummy up, out of the bog And lay my organs on the table until I am Clean, until I can leave the sweater on a plastic Beach chair, at last a figure emptied, a cavity Of cosmic ash, the void black of space revealing Stars that drift between gunmetal ribs. Someday, the water will have me bare.
The Amber Encasement Jamie W Rivera ‘22
15
I am looking for myself in the museum halls And coming face to face with antiquity. There, in a mummy portrait, wrapped in linen I see myself behind the glass In the solemn gaze of twelve-armed gods, balancing Forever and a day, I meet my own eyes looking back Manhood not a question here, but dictum of a plaque Their pupiless eyes raised, unpainted skin marred Chaste scars, they matter not: Indignities, by time, the elements, or chisels wrought. Castration is not annihilation, And neither is decapitation Am I Romanticizing myself For nothing? I am made of marble too, only Beneath the surface it is my ribs that fracture, Hairline cracks too small to be restored. There is a statue here Figure Of A Man It is a piece of driftwood, With rough-hewn stubs for arms. There is a statue here Kouros, the youth It is only a standing stone. Am I not a free-standing stone? Am I not Antinous, am I not Socrates pointing to heaven, am I not The headless Bodhisattva, a legless king of Babylon, The eunuch Ganymede? I am every brick in the Byzantine tombs, And every stroke of paint that forms a young general’s portrait. I am Perseus petrified with the head of the Gorgon Brandishing my sword and holding myself higher Than the carnage behind me, Than the crowds passing below me. I am the statue of Adam too, Biting that fermenting apple. There is an oil painting here, Of two men, looking at the moon. I fall in love with them all, But only a little. 16
Figure of a Man Jamie W Rivera ‘22
The face you half-remember has a shape: one that is nothing like forgiveness. More like the faint handwriting on a penciled note you carry with you seven years from when you first crossed the border between what could no longer be and this: your steel appointment, drunken flask. The gnarled, uninhabitable city that still shudders in your chest. I can still trace you in the window, still your voice hangs like a scrap of flesh caught in its glass. Behind these shards only the dark unknowing, winter’s barren brood of recollection, gathers in its rest.
No heron’s slender neck without predator’s impulse: grab and twist.
Anamnesis Lilian Hawkes ‘20
17
open circle with an ex tra chair for a visitor Door open, precaution for a man we know, gun-toting tour guide milk that thickened and pickles we carve our names into lead like a bullet,, poi using your new son skills to deliver an important message: “ur gay.” smiling bigg er than Brian as he spat pool water onto my prepubescent breasts private chamber, mini van consul geniuses, “if you’re a girl, it just means happy It’s lesbian for a girl” now i want to know why he, or any Ph D. thought he knew me bet ter than thought he had to tell me. Sweet potato in the street, Dan cing with ch, kh, ha fax machine, bank I won sewing pin
tation with my
me. why he
der why you can dissect computers but so utterly fail to see your kind. i was one of twelve, alone without tion, enhancement eye protec
to Jeremy, who has been to my house Abigail Skalka ‘20
18
It is barely fall in Buffalo, and already we spread clear gel in the space between us and the sky. There are six new places to buy chicken wings, with sauces that slide around our wrists like a battery-broken watch. We dine in this hometown carcass, propping our feet on an abandoned bassinet. Here, my daughter will learn counting from an abacus and cursive from lines drawn in the sand. What did we expect? Cartography? Settle for a little something-something that actually keeps time. The Sunday garagesale crowd picks at porcelain, a pen holder, a strong desk — all screaming, “work in the morning.” They walk toward their parked cars, heads tilted. And this is the process of becoming vintage — reinventing our resale value. We talk about the coming cold through a tinny radio connection.
Process Sarah Lieberman ‘19
19
I never knew the luck in looking like your parents. My mother would pass us plates through a window, when the house felt too full to eat our meal indoors. Can we assuage ritual? A car accident, with a casualty of one, undid an entire family. None of them were available for comment. But one woman, passing by, said it was “One of the loudest things I ever heard.” Now, we sit at an unbalanced table — limping on its remaining legs. We say grace, spit it out. We had to relearn consumption. I’ll give you a penny for your patterning, for a fact about your father. Did he walk like you? Chew like you? In the evening, I hear quiet footsteps. My brother is the cleanup crew, picking up pieces of glass with piano hands. His face reads remembrance, each freckle: striking — a sparkle of our father. He says, “There is no time to mourn when you are the memorial.” He passes me my plate underneath the crack of a closed door.
Family Dinner at a Four Way Stop Sarah Lieberman ‘19
20
It sounds like a rat, and also that I am much too tired to be writing bad poetry, and that I should go to bed before the end of the world. And the creaks of the building are its sighs at the end of a long day (and maybe Ansu, my neighbor).
The World Falls Asleep Andrea White ‘20
21
I am looking at the whites in your eyes and you’re telling me that Texas and trash island are the same size. There’s a woman sitting on the highway. The museums have been closed for an hour and ten minutes. Her beach chair is blue-yellow-green and she’s sipping a margarita, her blonde hair holds the sun. She glances at me. A red mouth opens. It’s 6:10 pm. Can we move there? You laugh. A skull is superimposed onto the horizon. When we were seven, I filled in the world with yellow and orange. I can still remember how the color curved beneath my hand. How unsatisfied I was to find that it did not cover the white beneath. You tell me that the rain moves plastic into the ocean.
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch Shaloni Pinto ‘20
23
##Define grief## grief = c(“It looks like a finger painting”, “The kind I made in preschool with the same”, “Red-Yellow-Blue-spilling-into-Green where my finger - slipped”, “the kind she still keeps in a folder in the basement with my old report cards and”, “the phone number of the kid-who-ate-glue’s mom”, “I could’ve made it in preschool, but I didn’t and”, “the students who did hadn’t eaten glue for decades - I know”, “school may be harder than it was, but as far as I’m aware they still”, “don’t teach 4-year-olds to ‘visualize”, “gamma rays from positron-emitting radionucleotides’”, “(https://www.webmd.com/cancer/positron-emission-tomography#1).”, “They call it a PET scan because they locked her”, “in a shaft that was kennel-narrow, that was”, “made of finger-painting plastic and had the power to declare how long”, “before God would come and put her down.”, “They said it would click like a timer, but they didn’t say it might contradict”, “the doctors: two months longer two months less –”, “believe the who or the what, it doesn’t matter”, “as long as you don’t start believing there’s a why.”)
##Define grief## Katie Dillon ‘19
24
##Sort grief into tibble table## library(dplyr) library(tibble) grief_df = tibble(line = 1:19, text = grief) ##Unnest words, find frequency## library(tidytext) words = unnest_tokens(text_df, word, grief, token = “words”) frequency = count(words, word, sort = TRUE) ##Find Word Length## word_length = sort(nchar(frequency$word, type = “chars”), decreasing=FALSE) x = word_length[108:126]
##Find Line Length## line_length = data.frame(table(words$line)) y = line_length$Freq ##Graph as Kernel Density Estimation# library(MASS) library(RColorBrewer) rf = colorRampPalette(rev(brewer.pal(11, ’Spectral’))) r = rf(32) finger_painting = image(kde2d(x, y, n=200, lim=c(5, 18, 4, 20)), axes=FALSE, col=r)
25
imagine waking up dead tired skull an anvil and everything is dark like you hadn’t opened your eyes and some brutish dude with a bad haircut and red dog next to you imagine the river next door screaming the dog curled up at the foot of your bed blinks six red eyes and thumps his tail on the footboard imagine hoping for a bad dream and you can just hear your mother wake up in an ice sweat and shut down the crops and there’s this juicy red pomegranate imagine your feet on the granite floor behind you the dog whimpers his nails click and you toss him the fruit it shatters on the red floor imagine juice rivulets soaking up the king size sheets like ants up a leaf and this guy rolls over in his sleep and you birth a red flower imagine you pick up the pieces and suddenly you’re hungry your stomach or the dog growls you crush six red seeds down imagine the man wakes up and you’re elbow deep in red and he just laughs your bare feet are stained and he says “good morning, mine.”
Anne Carson Meets Hades Audrey Rytting ‘21
26
A form descends from the mountain or mountains (or many do.) A village or city or farmland below. A grinchy malice or a wild(ly misrepresented) Hunnic horde or the wild misrepresentation itself, which is never depicted but surely sleds the same malign slope. I, at my desk, weaving dark dandelions, their sap, rotten and fetid, dribbling out and yellowed, browned, blacked. Knowable, perhaps, what was being woven if this were real, but entirely false (implausible too, right?). I, elsewhere, in the city itself, or in its suburbs, on an undeveloped hill called so long by distinct but definitely related subpopulations (that is, parents and children) Sledding Hill Park that a sign of the county Parks and Recreation went up, where a lattice would form, sled tracks running down, snow boots printing horizontally to steeper parts as the young got braver or just older. Spring comes, and here, finally, a full sentence of weeds is blooming, dandelions, dandelions, and a biker rushing down would break them, and latex, never successfully industrial, would drip a Christmastime charity white. Do you remember the pathos of the little French baby’s face in The Battle of Algiers, the face of the filmic and very real enemy? It’s nearly impossible to reconcile (with anything) (no less the spinning summer blades of the white desk fan, on for hours, pointed at every dandelion weaver at the work of production).
Children’s Movies Peter Szilagyi ‘20
27
We have not been honest. Who could fault us, when all the world’s withholding; when every drawer is not a drawer but draws a filamentous cartography of cabinetry, which, with its gaping mouth, could only be compelled to speak on the dark woods of a past decade and the finely managed finances that let them be? And what won’t finance talk about? This is not withholding? This is, if anything, chatty, constant gossip? Exactly — you’ve been duped. You’d have to shake drawers down for silence, for accountability, for the hushed and truculent cockle of soft selfhood (what could be a cockle? What does one contain? Nothing; nothing. So, a lie.) And should silence come easily to a word, (or words), to poured concrete, to systems, aren’t some trained to beat them up for secrets, which the act of keeping turns (by speaking) to a lie? This has gone on and on, as if I did not know, to start, the thing I had to say, the cockle, that I have lied to loved ones, said I told soft, clammy eyes the truth, believed it, and did not.
Fault and the Inevitable Mollusk, Time and Time Again Peter Szilagyi ‘20 28
I It could end up in experiential density: somewhere where the tall, important cottonwoods fan out around the stream on ranchland and, thirty feet at least between the trunks, an openness, deceptive, since all around, the shrinking, brown, and grassy overlapping flowing (drowning) of the plains, which is enough. II Enough and yet, always also somewhere new, the curve, for instance, of a river, carving out the back of cities new to you. Unbelievable, the arc, the swing, the bristling scoliosis of the until-then unfelt. Every map lies the whole way, any honesty about scale a mere evasion of all fact. III What belies the facts? What could give them up like the earth surrenders worms? Notions abound: it was said that Chopin, in Rubinstein’s hands, could achieve a real anger, with the discretion of mint leaves and the squareness of mint stems. Others contest this anger. Others yet have never listened. IV Enough. I want to finish speaking, but the chatter of the chipmunks outside compels a forward motion. One pictures their squirrelish indirection gathered at the speakers hearing iridescent Chopin or strolling along the Salzach, useless maps in hand. The wind, a curve of wind, picks up and, bristling, lifts a patch of fur between the ears.
Mapping Peter Szilagyi ‘20 29
The Invisible Committee’s “Let’s Destitute the World” Appears Beneath the Melting Glaciers Moving Towards Your House Yongyu Chen ‘20
Rachel Whalen ‘19 Tomás Reuning ‘21 Alyssa Sandefer ‘21 Emma Bernstein ‘21 Simran Malhotra ‘20 Joshua Sadinsky ‘19 Ana Celeste Carpenter ‘19 Kristi Lim ‘21 Jamie W Rivera ‘22 Lilian Hawkes ‘20 Abigail Skalka ‘20 Sarah Lieberman ‘19 Andrea White ‘20 Amber Pasha ‘19 Shaloni Pinto ‘20 Katie Dillon ‘19 Audrey Rytting ‘21 Peter Szilagyi ‘20 Yongyu Chen ‘20
Contributors
Marginalia would like to extend special thanks to the following people: Ishion Hutchinson, for his continued support as our faculty advisor; Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, for her generous guidance and insight; Corrine Bruno, for her unending patience and support; Karen Kudej, for putting up with our constant and urgent requests for room reservations; Cornell Printing Services, for their patience and timely publishing of all our issues; The Durland Alternatives Library, for hosting our public reading nights; The Tompkins County Public Library, for hosting our public reading nights; The MFA Cohort, for sharing their poetry and wisdom with us; Jesse Gonzalez and the clones of Jesse Gonzalez; and every poet who submitted, for allowing us the honor of reading your work.
Acknowledgements
Marginalia is an independent publication and is not affiliated with any other publication, on or off Cornell’s campus. It is funded by the SAFC. Any and all views expressed in these poems are of the poets themselves, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Editorial board, the magazine itself, or Cornell University.
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