CORNELL ‘S UNDERGRADUATE POETRY REVIEW
Marginalia
SPRING
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EDITORIAL BOARD VOLUME 1 NUMBER 3
Alejandra Alvarez Editor-in-Chief
M a r y Ja r v i s Chief of Staff
Sarah Lazarich Managing Editor
E m i l y Fo s t e r Secretary
A m y Wo o d Layout Editor
Siobhan Brandman Communications Director
Ishion Hutchinson Faculty Advisor
J. Gabriel Gonzalez Editor-in-Chief in absentia
Cover Art: Rebecca Jackson ‘18 Muted, screenprinting ink on canvas i
general staff Madeleine Galvin
Rachel Whalen
Ja g ravi Dave
Stephen Meisel
Mike Ascher
Madeline Day
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table of
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contents
vi
Letter from an Editor
2 Atardecer 3
Proceed with Caution
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The Flags in Northeastern Pennsylvania
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night flight
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In the Days of Fumigación
7 Oranges 8 Wading 9 Hair 11 Gorges 12
We’d Make Small Talk
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Just water
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Re: note on sincerity
15 Ayasofya 16
Love Poem #5
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Poor Odysseus
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Brighton 1st
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. . . being, sensible
21 Khichuri 23
– kintsukuroi
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Body Image
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Trench Warfare
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My Shell
27 Basic 28
Requiem Corinne
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the map of the land of feeling
32 Acknowledgements iv
Letter from an Editor To the Reader, Thank you for being here today! We are so happy to have you. It’s not very often that you stumble into something quite like this—that is, this small yet remarkably talented community of writers, some of whom are featured in the following pages of this review. The purpose of this journal—as editors before me have mentioned and will likely continue to mention long after my tenure—is to foster a community of Cornellians, poets and poetry admirers alike, in order to create a space that has not quite existed for writers and readers of this kind before. I hope that one day this goal will be achieved throughout the university, but until then I can rest easy knowing that for me and those I know it has more than succeeded. It’s been said that we read to know that we are not alone, a reason I also believe to be behind why so many of us write. Oftentimes writing can seem like reaching out into some sort of void or darkness and hoping to catch on to something or someone. Perhaps the metaphor is melodramatic, but such was the case for me before I found the magazine that you now have in your hands. Through mild harassment and sheer tenacity, I bullied my way into this group of some of the most gifted writers and editors I have ever had the privilege to know. Through them I have read hundreds of pieces of work from my peers, ranging in theme and form, and found the hollowness that comes with solitary writing to be filled by the voices of my classmates—voices that not only I have never heard before but never even knew to exist. If you were looking for us, we were here all along. If you just happened upon us, even better. You have found friends here—co-conspirators, writers of all kinds. It doesn’t matter how you got here or how long you will stay. Just thank you for being here today. We are so happy to have you. Yours always in quality poetry, Mary Jarvis Chief of Staff
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Atardecer Sarah E. Paez ‘17 Atardecer Somewhere between the skin of our bodies and the pale rose of evening peeking over the rugged peaks of your shoulders. Atardecer Somewhere between the rivulets cut deep in the pockmarked tissue of your mountain face, and I, the valley, that sits and catches your tears that bears the quakes and falling rock I am the ground your pain sows, the gale batters your summit and gently caresses my vale. Atardecer Somewhere between the naked sapphire water and your wind-soaked stone, our backs meet the sun share an evanescent calm and daylight slips under. ValparaĂso, Chile, April 2016
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Proceed with Caution Rachel Whalen ‘19 Please reserve this seat for the middle-aged the restless the yellow light blinking yellow light blinking yellow light blinking. She is a traffic light Proceed with caution she mumbles to the doors, to the driver, to the doors again still waiting for it all to heed her warning and idle before her she is a traffic light stuck on yellow. (Some people slow down when they see her and others ignore her completely.) Proceed with caution. Her children run away from her to catch more colorful things and her brothers are ants preserved in the amber of alcoholism her future wilts with every new gray hair and her sepia toned childhood floats beyond her reach nothing stops. And nothing ever really goes. At night she dreams of these grease-smudged handles (she will never touch them) longs for strange voices saying “Stop ahead” (she will never say it out loud) perhaps here she is stationary and the windows bend around her here she is suspended (in dilapidated barns and girls riding tricycles) here she is green and red. Please proceed reserve this seat for the yellow traffic light women with caution lest we crash.
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The Flags in Northeastern Pennsylvania Austin Ward ‘17 The flags in Northeastern Pennsylvania do they bother you or with you see the wind of the buses belting past and the cartoon animals on signs slick with hunters’ breathing overt death when they find a pair of fish to teach how to dream and read their scales of blind justice judge the bears in Berlin for hearing aliens and growing treetops to climb up the sky and into the fireplace once burned with rain fall feels cracked in the dusk light as a body treading water today I noticed you have a body when did you find one because tomorrow they will notice art trashed the walls of the hospital on Roosevelt Island knowing a man is one of many Arc de Tree Lumps the attractions outside the hotel where I found my family in my father’s snores disturbing the flags in Northeastern Pennsylvania do they bother you or with the arm of America flung those flags at the corners of gray mothwing barns Rothschilds’ litter sprinkled across the country’s sides signed with the epigraphs of history on our skins
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night flight Alexandra Burton ‘17 from here, the city is gold dust and glowing relics of old coals and headlights and I could free fall— make myself a particle of wind and float with aimless abandon but I won’t.
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In the Days of Fumigación J. Gabriel Gonzalez ‘17 In the days of fumigación, we lived in fear of the rubber-soled ghostbusters nonchalantly spitting blackish haze from Soviet chain-guns with tailpipes for barrels. In the days of fumigación, national holidays were announced in greasy pencil on sheets of butcher’s paper, Congress having been replaced (temporarily, for safety’s sake) by four deceptively innocuous syllables and the smell of burning tar– So we held hands and ran clumsily between wheezing tenements, fleeing the bullish tankers snorting heavy chemical clouds from their rusted nostrils, the arrogant sun always behind us, waving his blistering cape. In the nights before the days of fumigación we would re-seal our suitcases and pray to the porcelain saints and cardboard strongmen resting above our medicine cabinets, only for someone to wake up coughing or screaming with fried chicken grease still drying on their lips– in the end the saints were silent and the neighbors just shrugged and said don’t dream about mosquitos. La Habana, March 2016
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Oranges Sarah Lazarich ‘16 On a morning in mid-January I stood in the kitchen, burying my fingers in the flesh of a clementine. My mother likes fruit in the house but has no time to eat it, lets bags of oranges go soft and fragrant next to the sink. My grandmother, too, has an insatiable appetite for citrus. She used to leave the rinds in between cushions for her husband to find later— dried out, dusty but still smelling sweet. I had been picking at my nail beds. The juice stung, and the pain was distracting.
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Wading Sarah Lazarich ‘16 I have the whole heady weight of this prodigal April rolling against me. I am waist deep in clear water and you are skipping stones from dry land, feet planted firmly on the ground. To think—it was not long ago that I watched you learn to walk.
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Hair Saarang Deshpande aka Saarangutan ‘17 Part 1: “What do you like about me?” “I like your hair.” “That’s it? I mean, it’s just hair.” “Well, yeah…” But I like the way it looks, How it frames your face, The thin border that captures all I care about, The way it gently slips over your shoulders, A newly formed stream winding through crevices in the land, Flowing without sight of where it could be heading. I like how your hair becomes one with the rain— Drops stream down through it, Connecting clouds to ground, And heavens to hearts, How your hair spars with the wind, Strands twisting and tying like armies unifying, Tussling against even the lightest breezes, Either revealing your face or hiding it completely Only to do the opposite seconds later. Not unlike you. I know autumn loves your hair almost as much as I do, The leaf piles we jump into told me so— Remnants of leaf patterns lost between tangles. Even the winter clings onto your hair with its snowflakes, And if every snowflake is unique, Imagine how many permutations of perfection it could make With a palette like your hair. Every spring, I find the first flower, Slide it in between the tough hairs near your left ear, Looking between it and you, it and you And saying that I have two blossoming flowers in my life. The best thing is how your hair tracks memories, Borrowed hoodies and slept-on pillows With leftover hairs curled up like you do, On those hoodies and pillows. Your hair is a trail for where you’ve been, And if I lose you, I’ll follow it to find you, Knowing that pushing it aside Reveals the frame that makes the perfect picture. But, yeah, I guess it’s just hair. 9
Part 2: I like to play with your hair— You’re sensitive about it Saying not now, I’m tired, But it feels like I’m wasting time when I’m not, “Close your eyes.” And I weave the strands in and out, In and out, twisting and turning Like tangles are a toy to build out of the fibers that remain. I raked the leaves into a pile. I brought some inside, Glued them to a hair band, And gifted it to you after the first week. Snowflakes might just reach your scalp now, Your eyebrows are getting thinner, But your eyes still shine as your skin fades dimmer. It’s still the perfect frame, Accentuating new features, Revealing more of your beautiful body, Each hair lost is a page turned, A detail the author hid until now Making us more invested in the plot. Sometimes I just want to know how the next scene will turn out But I’m learning to appreciate each chapter, Or should I say, stage. I hold what’s left of your split ends, And grip your hand so tight during therapy. On a good day, we shop for new hair, But every wig you try on reminds you of what used to be there. I like how your hair still tracks your memories, The bunches of strands I find are speed limits on the road to recovery, The doses multiply without pumping the brakes. All of a sudden, we’re 40 miles per hour over but using cruise control. I like how your hair still tracks your memories— Even though you aren’t making any new ones. You left all of you behind here, for us to find and hold onto And twist and turn and tangle into a frame for our memories of you— But, yeah, I guess it’s just hair.
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Gorges Ilan Kaplan ‘17 There’s a way, if you walk carefully and slowly on the jagged wall of the gorge, to get to the waterfall. I would go there again in the late spring to see the reflection of the sun on the water. But it would never glitter so peacefully as that first time with her.
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We’d Make Small Talk Alejandra Alvarez ‘17 I sit with my back to the door, let the breeze stand in for you. But you’ll float in on feet cut by seafloor sand, cradling the moon clothed in gauze. Here! will fall on my ears, is what the sun tries to erase. Today, it endured. Plucked it from the clouds myself.
I had a right to.
The glass sweats a river into the table. I quake with the effort of being wall, of feeling heat peel plaster off me, praying for the moon to bloom ugly in your hands. Candles burn into the night, they weep mountains onto the tabletop. I am canyon, stoic in my seat, each bruise down my spine, a soil bed for weeds and red-ant piles. Venomous, I seethe winter runoff. Never once do I turn around. Your voice, drowned out by birds between my fingers, their wing flap and song recolor the moon, debilitate the rock. Your vinegar shade, contained in the darkening doorway— departures have slurred you.
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Just water Mary Jarvis ‘16 I cried in the ruins of the Acropolis and beneath the dome of the Hagia Sophia, on a Russian airline above the Atlantic, back against yours in the middle of the night in the middle of Athens near the coast, and in four separate showers in Ithaca, NY. Then in a bathroom on the sixth floor of a library, a mountaintop breakdown over a turtle in dust, and a panda at the National Zoo, the worst being in a pillow in your friend’s Arlington apartment cracking my knuckles on one hand with the thumb from that hand, a mess of blue tracery below translucency that you used your palm to quiet before turning over silently making my back against yours, back against yours, back against yours.
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Re: note on sincerity Mary Jarvis ‘16 Walter led every cold war and Hank was the sloth bear who came running when called, who, in spite, turned back to glass as onlookers fought elbow to elbow trying to catch his face on the screens of their mobile phones, which, by virtue of their communication, Walter knew all about—more than the NSA or even Steve Jobs before he died of a cancer treated with only prayer words and herbs. On the telephones of the people Walter watched, alone, in his studio, with a daisy fish and a vibrating mattress, he would add postscripts to their messages. Why? asked Hank the sloth bear, who looked up from his magazine, glasses tilted downward in condescending inquiry. Walter said because— it was sincerely, Walter. PS. My work is done but I have not yet finished.
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Ayasofya Mary Jarvis ‘16 Beneath the dome of two religions against columns of dark marble there was no bargaining, prayer, hope or other unwise practice that would save them from the certain extinction of condemnation, the hell which she brought on them. She and she alone.
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Love Poem #5 Stephen Meisel ‘18 in fear of every eye and mouth left open by the sight and sound of you I let both swing closed cut off the input connected to the stream still flowing through every beat every ounce of you
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Poor Odysseus Stephen Meisel ‘18 Poor Odysseus, raised on television, no attention span, no ideas about God. He stretches his feet out on his parents’ couch, inhales, exhales, then plays more video games. Pretend, in this moment’s deft slip, that Penelope fidgets ten stories above him, in the penthouse, in the heroin parlor where she slides her tongue across an envelope adhesive to seal a rescue message which reeks of despondence and pleads for delivery. Poor Odysseus, raised on belief and mystery. Somewhere in the corner of the Swiss Alps he prays, like a shaman to a society he has only recently discovered in the recesses of books. Penelope, at intersection of main street and alleyway, clutches her purse to her chest. Her fear compounds when she hears a step behind her, around her, throughout her gut. Poor Odysseus, a policeman and his handgun nicknamed heroes on the nightly news because the Ithacan’s pathetic body hangs headless to warn away the troublemakers. Penelope, she sits by the stove, dinner wolfed down by the public officials. Their ruddy faces and tumescent bellies unravel her labor to sleep with teary-eyed hope. Poor Odysseus, his magic tricks fail. They starve him, remind him of home where federal banks disguised as hospitals dupe residents into organ donation. Penelope, her sensitive flesh exposed beneath the lights and operating table, dials his last known number. No answer. The state’s surgeon makes the first incision.
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Brighton 1st Siobhan Brandman ‘17 Two women lay their baggy bodies out in beach chairs mid-boardwalk mid-April Their bones are swimming in sacks of skin that have been toasted into a nice-ish golden brown They look like life-size raisins Their bodies are like freshly melted ice cream on the sidewalk Two women Too much vitamin D Two chairs No cares
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. . . being, sensible Naima Kazmi ‘17 I Such hatred of winter. This town, finicky child bemoaning vegetables. Winter is yours. Reclaim like the landscape does, gratefully blanched. II By now our bastard would be articulate— by now I should have stopped wondering if and how it happens that crawling, the skin never forgets. I’m yours. VI Undertones of oranges being peeled rasp in his voice, tempt me break me into halves, segments I burst excoriate inundate
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am gulped, a single mouthful for him. VII Flux of multiplying cells disdaining rhetoric of prayer, my grandmother’s death— grip on her string of carnelians IX Remember effortless flight raindrops on spectacle lenses, vision, dissolution pigments streaked on cheek. Mapping brushstrokes: infinite texture and you begin to see the wings in the dust on the wings.
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Khichuri Pritha Bhattacharyya ‘16 In the swelter of barsha kal, the rains which patter steady streams, taps and clicks, against tin roofs signal a respite to window people, who, with their muddy soles and Cheshire grins fill their pots to a brim. Like the sun’s twin of the night, handfuls of rice trickle along palms, veins sinewy and protruding, snaking blood to gated hearts (much like their gated enclosures). Dripping into the dekchi and following, a barrage of daal flakes: orange, uncooked, sinking gracefully unlike greedy lotuses on murky ponds. The deluge persists and clouds drain themselves of window tears, for, there are enough to flood a city. For, there is a city of cardamom. A bay of leaves. Cumin dust and seeds of chilies, a ladle full of ghee, pooling in crevices along concrete walls and potholes on shit-streaked highways. Buttering up moneylenders whilst swiping oil from the candles of cardboard Hooverville houses. Their occupants meander between honking taxicabs with boxes filled with sooty lollipops, fruity plastic juices, waiting for a stream (or a trickle, or a whisper) of rice to run through their babies’ veins, who stand against flat paper walls
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gawking at flat-screen TVs holding protruding bellies with railing arms. Simmering for hours, people at their windows—soaking in the sight of the monsoon—remove the pot. Steaming wildly, dancing hot Staples mingle together, the vestiges of their separate parts coalescing amalgamating into a savory, crunchy, over-burned, overcooked mass. Sticking to the edges like moans at night in shadowed alleyways with tomcats and the like. Steaming and viscous, poured out onto steel thalas, a trickle of fat and a burst of acidity—this is to cure you and calm you. To heal you. Here is to stopping the rain. Here is to burning your tongue, swallowing in tears, and to people in hollow windows scraping away the edges of their plates, breaking free the atrophic pieces perhaps of your desh, but really, of life collated.
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– kintsukuroi Kevin Goh ‘19 I traced your scars on paper in a war zone of shredded photographs tear-stained pillows and bitten sheets. this is armistice. I read you the terms at dawn and watch your body turn into gold.
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Body Image Kevin Goh ‘19 to a couch potato there is nothing quite as satisfying as watching clumsy pears waddling through knee-deep snow our fillings might be different, but in the winter we are all dumplings anyway
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Trench Warfare Kevin Goh ‘19 It was not the glorious adventure of dodging bullets, noble sacrifices and rising heroes of our boyhood dreams. Instead we huddled collapsed, facedown in dirt children praying that they had chosen the right gods before the lights went out.
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My Shell Mike Ascher ‘16 I live in a conch closed off— the elements claim no threat to me. The days and nights feel quite the same, clearing out the sand, grain by grain, until the grains are new again. I make paintings, broad strokes along the wall, practicing poetry as my break,
though boredom is to blame.
A hole in the wall—my shell is fractured and bright. I must investigate, inch close to the source. Eye to the socket, I stare as sand expands into an ocean at my bay. I could close up the wall— the push of my thumb is all it would take. But why close off everything so novel and rapid? Technology incarnate, overflowing with motion, promising so much change. Bloodshot, I barely notice faded paintings on the wall, sun scarred and bleached, poetry almost forgotten. My hollow mind stands at bay, waiting for something new.
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Basic Mike Ascher ‘16 Basic, she says, buttered toast so plain in her eyes, then prove me wrong. Bitch deserves nothing of me—shut off. Condescension begets a cool empty stare, I become skin deep for her, nothing more than a smize. Rising above I remind myself claiming she knows me artfully exposes her as basically blind, poor girl.
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Requiem Corrine Evan McDowell ‘19 You are beautiful, like a Ferrari is beautiful after someone drives it at full speed into a brick wall and gathers the wreckage in a splintered pile and puts it in a gallery at the MOMA where I can walk by and glance with detached appreciation.
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the map of the land of feeling Evan McDowell ‘19 come with me
i’m over here
but no
to the land of feeling
turn follow go back
now
this isn’t it this isn’t
not yet
home
ireland or reykjavik
istanbul sri lanka
or hamburg
or america
(space)
bangkok the land
with urinal damn fountain
on pedestal no substance
boats coming
but not
leaving
get
me out
take
stones land in four jumbos upon
filled
my head with thoughts
buckets i’ll give you
everywhere
my passport
and you give me mazes voyage take off
your grids i need journey and liftoff
get out go (home)
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Contributors Alejandra Alvarez Mike Ascher Pritha Bhattachar yya Siobhan Brandman Alexandra Burton Saarang Deshpande Kevin Goh J. Gabriel Gonzalez Mar y Jar vis Ilan Kaplan Naima Kazmi Sarah Lazarich Evan McDowell Stephen Meisel Sarah E. Paez A u s t i n Wa r d Rachel Whalen 31
acknowledgements Mar ginalia would like to extend special thanks to the following people: Our general staff, for being indispensable in the poem selection process and all-around lovely people. A my Wo o d , f o r e ve r a n d a l wa y s. Corrine Bruno and Cornell Literary Society, for helping us spread the word about submissions and being so supportive of the creative writing c o m m u n i t y. Cornell Printing Services, for their patience and timely publishing of all our issues. Rebecca Jackson, for her beautiful cover ar t submission. To t h e C o r n e l l c a m p u s , f o r e n d u r i n g o u r c o n s t a n t harrassment. And to ever y poet who submitted, for allowing us the honor of reading your work. 32
Marginalia is an independent publication and is not affiliated with any o t h e r p u b l i c a t i o n , o n o r o f f C o r n e l l ’s c a m p u s . I t i s f u n d e d b y t h e S A F C . 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 magaz ine itself, or Cor nell University. 33
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