Marg Vol4 Iss2

Volume 4 | Issue 2 | Spring 2019

Marginalia

Volume 4 | Issue 2 | Spring 2019

Marginalia

Rachel Whalen '19 Editor-in-Chief Peter Szilagyi '20 Managing Editor Yongyu Chen '20 Copy Editor Shaloni Pinto '20 Layout Editor Katha Sikka '20 Events Coordinator Lilian Hawkes ‘20 Communications Director Ishion Hutchinson Faculty Advisor Cover Art: Front: Shaloni Pinto ‘20

Editorial Board

Back: International Ladies Garment Workers Union Photographs (1885-1985) 5780PB37F13B, The Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation and Archives, Cornell University, Mexican dress makers on strike against Dorothy Frocks Co., visit Myrle Zappane who was detained in the city jail after being convicted of violating harsh injunctions granted to the company by the fourth court of civil appeals, https://www. flickr.com/photos/kheelcenter/5279694500, 04/16/2019, CC By 2.0, the image was mirrored and filtered

Tomás Reuning ‘21 Kelly Song ‘20 Sarah Sachar ‘21 Talia Isaacson ‘21 Teagan Todd ‘20 Zasu Scott ‘22 Ramya Yandava '21

General Staff

9 unremembered 10

Night Train

11

symmetrical asymmetry

12

Marlen's Poem

13

Long Poem for Kafka and Milena

14

Rising Moon

15

Storm Criteria

16

to my Non-ness which resides downstairs on the futon

17

an argument between Body Non and Me

18

I take my Non-ness out to brunch at the Denny’s near my house

19

How to Save a Fish from Drowning

20

Center State

21

My Mother’s Hands

22

Strong like Bull

23

ROAST NO. 14 (deliberately, uniformly, and electronically named roast number fourteen)

24

from Part I of Other Rooms

25

from Part II of Other Rooms

26

I Predict My Legacy

27

Carolee Schneemann

28 Adagio 29

Four Plot Garden Memory

30 Ascesis 33 Separating 34

Moon (or Process)

36

scheherazade

38 elena/isabella 39 rita 40

Family Is a Dog

41

Alternate (or The End of the World Will Come with Infomercials)

42

Paris, Texas

In 2002, June Jordan published an essay called “For the Sake of People’s Poetry,” where she analyzes the genealogy of American poetry beginning with Walt Whitman. Jordan argues that, unlike inaccessible and nationalistic forms of European poetry, New World poetry is of the “blood” and that it holds “aspirations to a believable, collective voice.”

I find this essay and all of June Jordan’s work to be so crucial because it is written precisely for this collective purpose. Her activism led her to start Poetry for the People, an organization at the African American Studies department at Berkeley that uses poetry to connect university with community. Jordan had a radical poetic vision, and she undoubtedly practiced what she preached.

Some of the most exciting conversations I have had about poetry bud from this vision of a collective voice. It is a poetics that does not speak for the masses, but to and of them. It is a poetics that not only invites every individual to the table, but goes out of its way to pull up a chair. For this poetics, we must dispel any image of the solitary artist: like June Jordan, these people’s poets are very much contextualized, very much engaged with the fabric of their surroundings.

Marginalia heeds June Jordan’s call for a people’s poetics. In a world where individual accomplishment is prized almost above all else, on a campus that often forces a divisive or competitive rhetoric, Marginalia is a beacon of belonging. In our publications and in our readings, in our meetings and in our outreach, we have split open poetry for the sake of sharing it.

Above all things, Marginalia has taught me that poetry is something collective. I have split and shared it with astounding poets, people who stem from the very lineage that June Jordan iterates. From Ale and Jesse, who showed me I belonged here, to Peter, Katha, Yongyu, Shaloni, and Jake, who work so tirelessly to nurture our people’s poetry and who constantly remind me that I belong, to all of the poets I have had the pleasure of knowing through Marginalia: We form a breathing constellation of Jordan’s poetic imaginary.

In “It’s Hard to Keep a Clean Shirt Clean,” June Jordan describes the laborious process of fighting oppression, asking “What’s anyone of us to do / about what’s done.” While a people’s poetry does not solve all of the world’s ills, it nurtures that solution. It is the work of Marginalia, the work of each of us — to undertake proudly — to render our world and ourselves, as June Jordan concludes: not perfect anymore just beautiful.

Yours most sincerely, Rachel Whalen

Excerpts from June Jordan. “For the Sake of People’s Poetry” and “It’s Hard to Keep a Clean Shirt Clean”. The Poetry Foundation. 2005, 2006. Web. 04/21/2019

unremembered Shuya Zhao ‘19

the blackberries lining the field next door sway in the summer hush caught, knocking against loneliness hiding springing cricket legs that click in the shell of my hands, leaping and smothered.

I pluck a soft dark berry from its unwilling stem ripe, beating hotly, enticingly kinetic, and crush it on my tongue.

I am startled to hold bitterness in the cage of my mouth, but my ribs rattle like cell bars and that, at least, is familiar.

9

Night Train Saki Wang ‘19 Motomachi Itchome 2-4-5 — They say my great grandfather used to live in a red pavilion by the sea.

On the train to his town, my town, I breathe on the window.

A condensation spreads out on the glass. A white aura. My head bumps up and down, and up and down, along with the rhythm of the train.

I hold my breath to calculate the speed of disappearance of a ring.

Exhale when the aura becomes so small that I could no longer see, I am relieved that my breath didn’t take away anything from the space.

The girl beside me is sleeping, a manga unfinished in her hand.

I hear her breathing: Is she dreaming of sailing on the Blue Sea fighting the villain captain Her respirations are so distinguishable among the wind the locomotive engine, the rubbing of the wheels and rails.

If my great grandfather were here, he would smile, ask a blanket for her, paint a portrait of her.

But I just listen: Sound of another person’s breath makes me feel alive.

I have never been to Motomachi.

Nor walked home along the sea after a day of work like he did. I heard the pavilion became a shopping mall. “2-4” inscribed on its stone pillar.

A nostalgia I am unrelated to.

A flash outside the window, then the thunder.

In the lightning I see a house with orange light.

I imagine someone who could not fall asleep tonight like me. Toss, then turn. Did he see too the light of the vehicles on my little train filled with traces of some other lives: it’s such a wonder. I remember physicists say beyond the universe exists a parallel space.

10

symmetrical asymmetry

Senna Phillips ‘20

“Will it help if we listen to Tom Petty?”

Oscillating gas pedal, last-minute stop sign, and speakers filled with mouthwash.

“Certainly” pushed through false teeth; Wildflowers can’t save us now.

Grocery store procrastination, unfilled birth control prescriptions, and obligation flowers.

“Let us take you to your Volvo”; we have a penchant for parking lots.

“Thanks” instead of “goodbye.”

“Can we go home now?”

“I’ll buy you one from Sears, my dear.”

Wrong turn into Scandinavia, locked steering wheel elbows, and a winterized car parade.

Automated “Arrived,” easy uneasiness.

Somewhere between 24 and 77 shoes, less than 12 kids in a Creative Cloud cloud, and at least one commercial airline pilot.

“We were promised tacos.” We got chili and three or four bottles of Chardonnay.

Soon, it was laundry detergent fabrications and a not-so-little little brother with broken-faced moms and heart-attack dads.

“It’s nice that you can be in the same room together.”

Too-tight hugs from far-away folks.

“I think we’ve been here long enough.”

Coffee dates with no concrete place or time, and forgettable brunch and lunch plans.

“Bye” brushed off by “I’m going to see you again.”

Scampering, skedaddling to nowhere in particular.

11

Marlen’s Poem Tomás Reuning ‘21

I want to write about you in Spanish, for it is the only tongue worthy of you, because English could never hold you, not the way I can, not the way I want to.

I stand in front of the mirror, watching my tongue move in the reflection, willing it to make the sounds I need it to, coated it in dulce and limón, sweet and tart like your lips.

Quiero escribir sobre ti en español, quiero que mis palabras te acaricien, me paro frente al espejo, mirando mi lengua en el reflejo, mirando mi lengua como si estuviera entre tus piernas.

You are volcanoes.

Quémame, enciéndeme, I am kindling in your hands, a forest fire in the making.

From ashes, quiero construir mundos enteros para ti, flores de tu cuerpo springing from my fingers, I want to build entire universes out of you, la raza cósmica — you are everything.

12

Long Poem for Kafka and Milena

Yongyu Chen ‘20

Before the war begins, you turn on the lights in the hallways though it’s noon. We watch a film, together, separately, about war and forests, about forests, and then childhoods, and then war — with both of our blindfolds on. I am learning to live without the world this time. We are trying and then failing to learn of loss this time. I replay the scene in the rain twice, to forget the rain in it. The soldier kisses the non-soldier over a ditch over and over. My balcony changes places with your living room. We’re outside again. It starts to rain again. All around us, the fathers of our friends sway on motorcycles in the desert. Soldiers fill suitcases with what can’t be remembered at night, with their bodies alone, on the floorboards. The war in black and white looks like it’s green in the memory that you want to have of this and the blindfolds. Before the war begins you hold my head held in my hands with both sides of your neck. The lights turn themselves off in the rooms but not at once. The doors open and shut and open. It’s night again, it’s noon again, but this time more gentle. It’s not a heart. In one scene someone’s too scared to lift the glass of milk to his mouth because the glass might shatter, might fit perfectly into his mouth. Is this what an explosion meant. You cover my ear with your tongue. I learn to pull your hair all the way through my teeth, like speech. Before the war begins we write the longest poems that we’ve ever written. There are cherry trees at night. Faces made warmer by the end of the rain and then the beginning again. We write political poems, sad and strong. You read Blanqui. I read Weil. We visit the Museum of Natural History. (It’s destroyed in the war.) You nick a bone. I steal a diagram of anatomy, birds, teal and pink. Before the war begins there is so much writing, there is so much tenderness, there is so much memory, rooftops, time. None of this stops the war. Why does none of this stop the war. According to the principle of loss, language has nothing to do with loss. Suddenly Kafka writes to Milena: Already one evening in Vienna I had the feeling that we were searching for someone whom we knew very well and missed very much and whom we were therefore calling by the most lovely names. How could he answer.

13

Rising Moon

Alexander Schaef ‘20 I wake up with goosebumps on my feet.

I spill an entire bottle of wine (red) on the carpet (grey).

I vacuum the grease off your back. read a dictionary. spill a bottle of wine (white) on the carpet (orange). light affairs. lime soda. lots of lost affection. candles and finger-fishing eggs. it does the trick.

I wake up naked in you. this goddamn. tuesday sun. did I deserve any little thing at all? I wake up. mollycoddling. goosebloomers. french-fried zinc. freckled feet. some stains growing still.

I wake up dumb because of what I went out looking for last night. skin on skin. a bed that wasn’t my own. lost. wallet. pansy. sweat. nonsense. hope bubbles. squirt. drought.

I stand in front of the window. stand right in front. drought. the window of my parents’ old room is in the dark parts of your back. I think about these things. nights. thighs crossed over knees. sixty degrees. sex. the street all blistered with nothing. I wake up again but this time its special. this time it’s special. I say this to myself every time. growing still.

14

Storm Criteria

Alexander Schaef ‘20

The First Hurricane was obituary was a will was you up and out without doubt aggressive then gentle there are ways of blending ways to bleed

Hurricane bitter hurt-came-controversy & cringe

mischievous manhood muddy mayhem modern questions questions queer questions strength

& raunch and compilation…

The first convulsion was careless consequence

convictions of conscience, quests for cock carnivorous idols an asylum from oneself

…afraid of what comes next… afraid.

15

to my Non-ness which resides downstairs on the futon Rachel Whalen ‘19

Every day I feed you, Body Non. I wake up, I remember you. I go down coax you from comatose, untangle you from the stale longitudes and latitudes.

I build you a sandwich, I ask what you want to wear, what orientation we are feeling today, and how we’re going to squeeze into it together, that moldy sweater and bow / tie.

I can’t look you in the eye. I laugh when you shake your golden teeth. I am afraid, afraid of your mass, your ambiguous, your apocryphal shape, state, nation; your non-ness, nonsense nation and the ease of your oozing I am afraid of what we have decided, decided, decided, dealt and done together, of all of my negatives plastered to your thighs I am afraid of being not afraid of not being I am afraid of being I am afraid of being you I am afraid of you until you, Body Non, hungover, sticky, romping, slap my back, take a bite, and with full mouth remind me: heyyouwhatthehell you are the one who constructs these pipes, these teeth, this creed to keep us here.

I am

16

an argument between Body Non and Me Rachel Whalen ‘19

okaysso miss/mr neither - ur / that’s what you are /firstname /lastname mx. at that who am i? absolute refusal absolute, errything; refusal, nothing at all. house of dissention house of English house of diction my gaps and ab sences i am a prohibition non; nut; not; none; null numb aren’t you tired; aren’t you angry don’t you want to take me out to brunch sweet jesus we fall from harbor to harbor; if you want to talk then let’s pull out our molars; be for real; let’s slap on the makeup the coroners left behind let’s go out in this drenched morning; more beautiful than our mothers more beautiful more

I don’t know how to love you, Body Non… . .Body Nothing. Body Dissent, Body Obsolete.

Who are you? What is my house?

Impar impair absent.

This cathedral of mouths aren’t big enough. This death, this architecture, these bodies built into our mouth walls, these bodies left behind, left, these, they, us, non? Us, Non? Really, Body? Really, Non? We are left a world left half-worlding, half-wordling, you are a half, halted wordling you. What a worldling you are, what in the world are you, you body, you non-body, you non-nothing, you empty house of empty non-words, non-worldings, non-world and worldly things, a horrid, twice-born thing, you wore me through worn worded things, phantom wordings, you left me through you left me you What kind of world What in the world are you

? ? Where in a word

are you? How do I touch you? How do I embody you? How do I body you, Body Non, you bulbous, bumbling, you humming numb thing, you thing full of you, what do I have to do to be, become you, you who are always an I don’t know hue, I don’t know how to touch you, Body! Non I don’t know how to harbor you or birth you or labor you or be enwombed, enwomaned by you. What are you? What are you?

Where? Sweet? Sweet? Sweet? Body Non, fill the body Body Non, you worldling, you almost-word, almost wanting almost be almost be almost

beautiful

17

I take my Non-ness out to brunch at the Denny’s near my house

Rachel Whalen ‘19

what the fuck, Body Non, nonsense my lord, read the

menu

right side

left /

thank

right side

— it says strawberry

left to right

who pays the bill

who bills

who

?

stra wb e r ry

/ no thank you Non no,

you what is left

decides

have a breather, rather

left up to

left

who

who decides

consumes

you, a body null ? yeah,

right

what is left

after all

this consumption

toxic straw

issue

all this

angst

all this

removal

burying is

not long

no longer

after all not

an offer – it’s a

nonoption

I get it, no more

it’s mute non-now removal

a moot or

null not

now we need

sense

what is

bodynull okay

bodynon we

are

full

point / all this has left a a re-fill ?

we need

what is duende

our remainder what is

are we

linear

basement

what is in the body, of the body

what is

are we

NON

left to

removal

stop

burial we

okay

we are

18

How to Save a Fish from Drowning Hannah Morris ‘19

I am searching for a place where people construct households of blankets and bath water. Watch me wear a room like a cloak.

Sometimes comfort soaks, or phagocytoses. I too wonder which one consumes the other. Pray fiber weaves us softly refusing invasion. To claim me a stick and see me a bubbling bath bomb.

See how wood splinters as it bends? I too bowed and split under strain.

Once broken, rebuilding like the two-legged asteroidean.

More face a fisherman’s nets again and strain against the pull of all that makes them. Most tear into chunky patches of quilt squares. May they stitch fragments and pigment into a palace. Stand against the weight of air. Choose to float, flow, billow, school, shoal — a minnow in the whole.

19

Center State Kelly Song ‘20

Catalina under my fingertips is a stroke tonight — burgundy, fleshed red, a mirage for after midnight. Who knew we could travel so far down and still see coastline?

Papa will place a seedling in my hand tonight, ask me to bring it to the light. I take it and try to taste the grains bitter on my forehead. Who knew the walnut could split in half like this — shell-cracked, beaded, sifting the home back into our hands?

Let me trace down the spine of California this evening, along the dropline where moths drown in water, whistling as they dive, limelighted. I’ll drive, eating licorice from my hand, remembering where the soil was soft again. South of the Fresno sign, the boysenberry mash in tire tracks signals the countyline — still, the studded air whistles into the farside.

Middle state, you said, Papa — we both knew it was a long ride. But could you let me go as far as Catalina tonight?

Back home, the eucalyptus unfurls in the backyard, emanating heat — heady, musked, crushing dry rot and jasmine with its branches. How many flowers will it bloom this spring? The number tells me how soon Papa and I will plant orange trees together again.

20

My Mother’s Hands Kelly Song ‘20

Shucked corn is a bracelet along my mother’s wrists, the yellow pearls scattered across the cutting board grain. And peering into air of flour and mist, I have never seen her hands this way, kneading and wrinkled in the floursack.

My mother’s blue song floats on the record, the autumn by the kitchen window liquefied, a mulch, a pulp in the swaying notes, and Mama’s brought the season back again, spinning the sky sweet with potatoes.

I am in my red cloth robe, still barefoot from sleep, and from the doorway of the old oak home, I see her as the young picture on the mantle again, red apron a dress, hair powdered in salt, dancing.

21

Strong like Bull Raina Kamrat ‘19 I wish my great-grandfather had died somewhere warm, somewhere with deserts and white clay, words pressed like kisses in the cracks of walls.

His paintings were always more beautiful than real life, his jokes were always practiced. Stolen rings kept in boxes emblematic of a poor man’s generosity.

The shoulders of his suit jackets don’t fit me.

I can’t look in the casket (I won’t).

There are sparks burning down my throat.

A Jewish immigrant paints a green stripe up the side of a house in Brooklyn.

Zichrono l’vracha — rests on the tongue and melts away like so much ash; my great grandfather said they made soap from the bones of Jews cremated in concentration camps. How long does that residue stay with you?

(How strong to survive that?)

Youth wrapped around barbwire edges of a war: there are words beyond language in the sharp whistle between his teeth.

He was never anything but soft with me.

22

ROAST NO. 14 (deliberately, uniformly, and electronically named roast number fourteen) Jesse Smith ‘21 I. If I wear this black thermal you might mistake me for yourself and if I carry this memo to your house you might think of me as superglacial. (I counted on that, because it’s in your file that I checked out from the national library of onomastics. ANNIKA: TWO LIVES AND TWO DREAMS AND TWO PREVIOUS LIVES: BLOOD TYPE O POSITIVE AND ONLY AN ORGAN DONOR ON WHITE SUNDAYS.) Your coat is eighty percent polyester so I couldn’t stay the night, but everything remained the same somehow.

II. I will now proceed to tear my tongue through my brain: I will now proceed to psychoanalyze myself: I will now proceed to proceed with tearing my tongue through the roof of my mouth into my prefrontal cortex (hopefully spearing every memory of you on the way) and through my hair (you just got a haircut I believe in you, just believe in me back, I’ll get another haircut I’m not as afraid of change as you think I am) and into the sky where we can blindfold each other and return our love to the sun: III. [ fire ] fire[ fire annika, ]fire[ fire please help me forget all of the terrible things I made myself think you did]fire[ fire ]fire, do not forget all of the trains we criss-crossed on the [ fire ]fire [ fire ] fire way towards each other[ fire ] fire[ fire ]fire[ fire ]fire[ fire ]fire[ fire ]fire[ fire ] fire annika sorry you’ve got yourself caught up in all this [fire] fire[ fire ] fire [ fire ] fire [ fire ] fire[ fire ]fire[ fire ] fire both hemispheres of my snowy body are turning themselves on you [ fire ] fire[ fire ]fire[ fire ]fire[ fire ]fire[ fire ]fire[ fire ] luckily I slipped a map underneath the smell of your hair in the cloth of your starry night pillow fire annika I can return to you when I exorcise (nape) all of the caffeine from my blood in the nape of your neck.

IV. Inside PUBLIC PARK, CURVING SURFACE OF A GLASS BUILDING, CHRISTMAS TREE, HAND, LEANING OVER, ROSE are the memories of PUBLIC PARK, CURVING SURFACE OF A GLASS BUILDING, CHRISTMAS TREE, HAND, LEANING OVER, ROSE which are just as fragile inside your bones as they are in mine because in mine they’ll always be falling along the geodesics of my marrow, and in yours they represent how close love is to dying.

23

from Part I of Other Rooms Peter Szilagyi ‘20 A dream of ants, a stirring, an alarm.

The night before, I fell asleep in the ice hammock of panic. A boat’s bottom or some discarded tun floated above and cut across the sun, crawling on refracted fins.

I was a shark. Illness was in the room.

Next to me I felt my partner twitch.

This was usual. But if this time she flinched as rusted steel above grated down her shark’s back, then illness was in the room. How useless, the panic that galloping sleep can overtake. Then the ant dream. Morning.

The ants, threaded through the needle of habit, were being pulled. Habit was walking to Munich. I was ant sized. The road before them and they were the same road.

I counted ants. Each, once counted, shone with scriptural light, which finds no correlative in the light of the morning, reacting only with fear (which it engenders) and none else.

In Munich, a swan’s carcass was waiting in the English Garden.

Unnumbered ants picked it clean, then left.

24

from Part II of Other Rooms Peter Szilagyi ‘20 You are sitting to my left. Your left foot dangles, cross-legged as you sit, over your right knee. Someone speaks with the urgency of water birds abandoning dry grass when an eager dog descends the hill, and as they circle under the ceiling, dry grass fills my mouth. I watch your boot; see the sole thinning beneath the ball of the foot where you prod the ground with investigative vigor; see, too, where the sole’s relinquished the welt near the wearing heel, some cheap adhesive no contender against the tension of heel and ball.

In the grass of my mouth, gooseshit, coating a willing tongue. In the taste on my tongue, rats’ sight, mundane prophecy. Yes, my tongue was struck with prophecy: you will have these boots repaired. The first cobbler will sew a new sole where this was glued. This, too, will smear away. The second cobbler will sew a third sole, but the welts will crack, the uppers wear translucent with the moths of use. The third cobbler will stand before you, winter grass passing under his palate as his tongue moves little.

You will throw them out. You will wear them five years. I will notice them three more times.

The day the leather starts to rot, I will trip on them in a dream. I will hold the left boot and, running my finger nail along the welt, I will dream of twenty streets in twenty cities where these boots were worn. I will dream of these at once, as one street. Their aggregate names, all uttered and heard, will walk away on silent, drying grass.

25

I Predict My Legacy Shaloni Pinto ‘20

A lonely rock sees not one fork but fifty You have claimed that I only have two modes: anger or the lack thereof.

Think of my anxious children, who will surely be extensions, ferocious puzzles disconnected and stranded, their mother-tongue stolen for my happiness, and whose birth will be among sterilized practice, a government will claim that theirs is an exile that exists in their mother, who like her father and father’s father requested burial between peninsulas.

26

Carolee Schneemann 1939-2019 Shaloni Pinto ‘20

She is recording a film: two dimmed spotlights, waning gibbous moons, undressed and insatiable as a section through a fish spine or holes bored in clamshells by mollusks in search of subsistence, devouring is remembering what is to happen, dharmachakra, birth in thirst, set to motion within a sermon, today is as today is, two cops eat howl bookstore, hit him with a rope, the large hadron collider looms, sad baby, an idol, seized in the fields by an eternal cycle, the storm, christ in limbo, a virus attached to the decoy in the bloodstream, everything in everything, se muriĂł.

27

Adagio

Shaloni Pinto ‘20 Are prodigies only born to musical families? Sharpening teeth on genetic ivories and power lines.

Quiet women, staring columns, quiet women, all staring.

When we went away, I caught eleven whole fish. To shine a light on black water.

To find that it undulates rolls its hips shake and if we were made of what we would have done, I would be filled with blue, violet, jasmines, aluminum.

Refusals thrown into a gold sea.

I can see your hands moving, quiet women, all staring, quiet women all staring and I can talk like you.

Columns. Quiet women.

Are prodigies only born to musical families? Sharpened.

Music teaches that women are all teeth and power lines. Quiet on staring ivories.

Columns, all staring. Women quiet.

We went away, I caught light, a whole fish.

Water on black. To shine, it undulates, rolls, and shakes its hips. To find what if we would have when we made We. I, blue, would be with filled violet. Done with moving, jasmines, aluminum.

See your thrown women.

Hands, quiet, gold. Refusals, I can see.

Staring. All talk. Quiet. All quiet.

Women staring, like I can.

Columns, women. I. Quiet.

28

Four Plot Garden Memory Shaloni Pinto ‘20

is a sin u soid al reality for my grandmother whose hands have become syn on y mous with perfumed talc & pruned roses or is it? oxidized fruit for my grandmother whose hands shake to decline the silver spoons mining green eyes Seed ing D D T tears or she is moving? ready for a crow to whip the air & plunge. no match for razor tongue is poised seed, spit tle, and thorns.

29

Ascesis

Lilian Hawkes ‘21 A cold god stands above the marshlands, bearing the spooled wire of your every future impulse in its chafing hands.

All you must do to own what you love is renounce the world.

I swear — it’s easy.

Your bone-thin fingers clutch the wheel to which they’re bound; the rush of blood inside you merges with the engine’s shudder and the systole-diastole of music only partially unscrambled as car’s speakers snatch at signal from the quiet outside air.

You know only — if you slow down then the sky will break to birdflesh, sister’s accusations, mother’s ire, an eruption of beaks boiling about you, pecking, rending, blocking lungs’ access to air.

Eyes closed, you breathe. Your veins unbroken circuit and your pulse your world. There is no other home, but this one. Outside this metal vessel, nothing but the suffocating spores of expectation and misrecognition. Stifling silence and disappointment.

You know this road and open your eyes just in time to swerve. * You perch silent on the eyeless edges of dark pools, where there is no human habitation, but the promise of some precious inner resource somehow still draws you on.

The water is light bathed with ink, chill as the interstices between worlds, or the catch in a lover’s voice after your question “do you still feel the same for me?” is met with silence for response.

Outside, you hear the roll of thunder surge from its initial crack out to the edges of the valley on and back, wave after wave washed through the hills and over you, filtering down as surface surge and swell must to the bottom of the sea.

You think — if I left myself here, to fossilize, I could someday be useful, maybe.

But outright disappearance would bring shame — instead, you shrink yourself to skeleton, all the better to be swept up into air, a lightning kite, rooted through veins to the suburban power-grid you hate.

You open up your rib-cage and unfold yourself into a house, miniature replica of your parents’, perfect, sheltering roof — before divorce.

Your public body splits into these structures, while your private soul burns through your every visual love in backyard bonfire, makes of itself one of those sightless, sharp-toothed fishes that inhabit such deep subterranean recesses as you once, with longing, watched.

Above, the power-lines still redirect your every excess into the dull glow of your family’s hearths. Feeding their hunger for a status-based security, on the damp, halogen-loving mold of fear.

31

Lilian Hawkes ‘21

Separating

Janet Malzahn ‘21 We snuck beneath the fence to see the beach after the lifeguards went home, after the gulls gave up begging, after that one last minivan dripped out from the seaside.

The tide arrived softly, afraid to wake us, but by the way your toes curled up I knew you felt it: how the ocean took the sand from you like the moths ate mom’s tablecloth.

I thought you would understand. The ghost crabs and their clear, frail bodies. How they burrowed, hiding from the sour sweep of the world resurfacing beneath our feet.

“I wanted them to be together.” Yeah.

A wave broke. We let the surf take us too.

33

Moon (or Process)

Janet Malzahn ‘21

Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass. — Anton Chekhov i. Light Arrives i heard it divided like those first prokaryote cells, multiplying from a single glow until the earth teemed with bright. someone else said it just arrived fully-grown from somewhere foreign and set its suitcases down, got a coffee, and began to live. people used to think it was good and for once that was enough. maybe it was always here and we one day woke up and decided to see. but as for this light i saw its mother heave in labor: a projector spitting photons like cherry pits soaring until they hit ii. Light Lingers the image and received it hands trembling nodding yes yes, as they tottered with their mouths open towards their destination. take the remote and pause at the fragment of a second when they tangled: michaelangelo and david sharing one body refulgent. can’t you see

iii. Light Leaves to be seen is to give all the light you thought you were away or have it taken from you. can you feel the body refract between subject and object? look at yourself scattered across the room and galaxy. the sun simmered and oozed all this light that the moon just bottled up and passed along to us. in the shower i check my back for craters and boot prints and a little american flag on the days i feel more space rock than sparkplug. god i want to be phosphorescent just for a moment. let my atoms crackle and your pupils swell as something comes into focus. yes, an image born from myself. yes.

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scheherazade Teagan Todd ‘20

i. i swallow a fable at lunch, a legend at dinner, a fairy tale at tea-time, & stuff myself round full of knowledge to excite him. ii. if you are going to silence me, do it with blood. take my neck or take my words, & if you must take the neck, wait until i’ve spoken volumes of the one thousand & two women whose voices you stole in prelude. iii. prologue, revisited: perhaps it is better to die than to spend eternity with a man so unpredictable you stop the story halfway through. iv. no virgin, however educated, can teach love to chaos or chaos how to love. v. i slip out the window on the seven-hundredth night.

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Shaloni Pinto ‘20

elena/isabella Teagan Todd ‘20

last month i set fire to my see double-you narrative. i erased violence via remote, cracked the static of an early 000’s set left standing in my kitchen, a toaster-sized tee vee tripping eternally between vampiric romance and the news, all thanks to bad weather. one fist-sized piece of plastic, one sedentary rectangle, one tiny slice of life outside the confines of my screen, that’s all it took — one beast hurled across my blood-soaked tiles, one incision from the corner of my conscience, one spider’s web stitched by the top-row teeth of a best buy clicker. once upon a time, i longed to be miss america: miss tragic teen usa, miss brunette virgin barbie with a thumping human pulse. i longed for inhuman lovers, for subhuman stares, for the cold touch of an infinitely colder man, the fastpaced protection of quiet jealousy and an expensive car accelerated beyond its legal limits. closing my eyes, i wished on teenage candles for a poison-laced piano lullaby, a perpetual apology sung to the tune of how-could-i-ever-trust myself-to-love-you-after-what-happened-last-time? on average, most paranormal scenes cost the american taxpayer not only an arm, but a jugular and a leg lamp’s worth of rent. for the american cheerleader, the selfcontained size 2 loner with half a dozen close friends, for our favorite old soul hailing from a broken home, miss tragic teen usa, it will cost her her life. love is like a red, red Rorschach, butterfly-bat inkblots surrounding my feet, psychopathy diagnosed via soft trickle still emanating from the twin hole scars throughout my body. “are you sure?” the vampire asks the cheerleader, tee vee signal moving in and out, first static then newscaster then static then him, fangs poised above her neck, “it’s me or your friends, me or your family,” i throw the remote before she can say yes.

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rita Teagan Todd ‘20 sometimes new news comes like a fist to the belly. sometimes in your patterned tights you melt and you bend and you snap right in half under the weight of new news. sometimes i swear you don’t go to your knees but you squat, six cards against humanity stolen, borrowed, bereft inside your back right pocket, accidentally unreturned to their owner, the first says sunshine and rainbows, the second third base. i set my teeth in the silver of the moon. sometimes new news comes like old news, like news you knew was happening, but would’ve rather not acknowledged, “the u.n. says the polar ice caps are melting” i mean we all knew that it just feels fucking bad to hear it. everything is dying around me and i smile, i take a couple hits, i promise “yes everything will be alllllllllllllright!” like some aggravated makeup saleswoman on HSN, like i promise if i peddle this product to you you will still hate your face underneath but at least you won’t be showing it to the world. i set my teeth in the silver of the moon. no one stays down long after receiving old news. no one goes home to their clean empty room to bask in old, bad news. old news needs a warm body, old news needs a 2-minute 2am call to a best friend, “can i stay with you tonight?”, old news needs indignation learned through the cataclysmic reaction of someone who loves you, i mean someone who really loves you, i mean sometimes old news and bad news and new news are all good news in disguise, and the sixth card says finger painting. i set my teeth in the silver of the moon.

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Family Is a Dog Ruth Xing ‘19

It reeks of love in here.

Don’t you see the neighbors jealous of our furry underbelly?

If I’m Roman, you’re Fido; against us, Caesar’s empire wouldn’t stand a chance .

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Alternate

(or The End of the World Will Come with Infomercials) Leah Moore ‘20

In this ending, the announcement comes too late. Somewhere: A dark — lit, blue smoke room. Somewhere: A tape offers its looped goodbye—there are a million ways to live: P90X… ShamWow… Moon Shoes… the great George Foreman Grill. Somewhere: A body waits for its mother’s touch 100 years and 200 miles apart. In this ending — Fire — miraculous re-beginning. Somewhere: only birds searching for home.

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Paris, Texas Leah Moore ‘20

Sitting on the years-stained suede couch, I watch the red of the spilling sunset move across your wrist while the man with no face wanders through the desert’s open fist. He and I both know of highways — the quiet rattle of the rootless heart. We, faceless brothers, know there are some things that cannot be known no matter how desperate the howl of the beast that runs loose through this barren, blue-drenched landscape of desire. We know there are too many, too long sentences with no endings — no Punctuation — no sense of resolution — that die unheard in the air

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Shuya Zhao ‘19 Jesse Smith ‘21 Alexander Schaef ‘20 Saki Wang ‘19 Rachel Whalen ‘19 Janet Malzahn ‘21 Hannah Morris ‘19 Shaloni Pinto ‘20 Leah Moore ‘20 Tomás Reuning ‘21 Yongyu Chen ‘20 Peter Szilagyi ‘20 Teagan Todd ‘20 Lilian Hawkes ‘21 Raina Kamrat ‘19 Kelly Song ‘20 Senna Phillips ‘20 Ruth Xing ‘19

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 Radical Poetry 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.