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fall 2016 volume 2 number 1
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M a r g i n a l i a
Marginalia undergraduate poetry review
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Editorial Board volume 2 number 1
Alejandra Alvarez ‘17 Editor-in-Chief
Rachel Whalen ‘19 Chief of Staff
J. Gabriel Gonzalez ‘17 Editor-in-Chief
Stephen Meisel ‘18 Managing Editor
Sana Gupta ‘17
Copy Editor
Amy Wood ‘18 Layout Editor
Tina He ‘19
Communications Director
Ishion Hutchinson Faculty Advisor
Zelmira Rizo-Patron ‘18
Amrit K. ‘19
Cover Art Interior Illustrations Blue Woman, charcoal Ink
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general staff
Amira Samiy ‘18 Jessica Brofsky ‘18 Madeleine Galvin ‘18 Madeline Day ‘18 Carina Chien ‘19 Chloe Amsterdam ‘20 Yongyu Chen ‘20 Peter Szilagyi ‘20 Kristina Nemeth ‘19
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Table of Contents
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Letter from the Editor
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Darkness on the Tyrrhenian Sea
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To a Stranger in Memphis
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Arranged
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Old Lovers’ Ode to Cranial Nerves
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Once a Blackbird
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Before dawn
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Near an Empty Cupboard in Upstate New York
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In Absentia
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Choices
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13 Ways of Looking at the Sky
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Corner Pocket
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Control
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Fingernails
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Three Haiku
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Trophy
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Milagritos / Little Miracles
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These Sick Beats
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Thus Spoke the Teeming Lady
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The Persistence of Memory
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After the Fortune Cookie
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Acknowledgements
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Letter from the Editor Dear reader, In recent weeks, I have had to come to terms with the inevitability of change. I’ve spent a lifetime seeking ways to cope with transitions, some smooth and others a bit rougher around the edges. With my December graduation looming on the horizon, I’ve set some parting rituals in motion —grabbing my last cups of coffee on my way to early morning work shifts, celebrating holidays for the last time as an undergrad. And now, as I write this, I’m wrapping up my last Marginalia issue as a Cornell student. How did it all go by so quickly? Of all the things Cornell has given me, the most surprising has been this magazine you hold. It has surprised in me a deep appreciation for and reliance upon the written word, in all of its forms, with wonderful and supportive friendships, and—sometimes—with frustrations and inconveniences. But most of all, it has surprised in me a passion for its publication like nothing I’ve ever experienced before. And I attribute this to you. You—the poets who write to us, write around us, and write unabashedly. I’ve learned from you how to stare down adversity, march through heartache, appreciate the simple and delicate, invent new worlds. I’ve learned to trust in the passage of time, to acknowledge the struggles both as temporary and as inspirational. As graduation comes barreling towards me, I cannot emphasize enough how important these lessons have been to me in tempering my fears and igniting in me hope for the future, for life beyond Cornell. It is proving very hard for me to wrap my head around the reality that my time with Marginalia has come to an end, but this much I know: I will take your lessons with me far beyond Cornell’s campus. The time I’ve had reading and creating on behalf of Marginalia will be something that shapes me for the rest of my life. Thank you for letting me into your beautiful minds. Best,
Alejandra Alvarez Editor-in-Chief
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Darkness on the Tyrrhenian Sea Chris Lombardo ‘18 I search for you in vain like a calamari fisherman— my lanterns burning crimson on the midnight horizon, scouring the lost abyssal sea as, from shore, tourists sip wine from cheap plastic glasses and mistake my lights for stars.
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To a Stranger in Memphis Yongyu Chen ‘20 let’s start with dusk— like a swollen bruise, a sagging apple. yes. it’s a sort of lingering. tonight, the sunset overflows tonight, the sunset as a wasted red, no more than these burnt-out ends of cigarettes, these makeshift ashtrays in the cobblestones. here it’s the jilted hum of a sophone, and loitered shadows leaned against brick walls, and a single coal stove that seems to pour itself away, slower every second, limb after limb, just smoke into air. here. I wait for a seat in the barbeque. behind me, my shadow cinders into the night. and, in turn, the night speaks of miracles, of a dam in a river, the pure impossibility of this moment into the next, of the swollen smoke in this alleyway and its welcome fingers through my hair, my shimmered blood, how it cups me, fills the meters between me and me, me, a well in the rain, that hope of fullness, and— god moves slow down here. Hold me.
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Arranged Katha Sikka ‘20 I. Priya cleans all night. Every night. Fingers bound in bandages of foaming soap, her long dupatta knotted around the slim of her waist. Middle-aged, she still looks like a child. Skin soft with coconut oil. Eyes melting and bright, the color of soot-soaked Mumbai, feathered with lashes longer than lives. She grips the mop. Smears bleach over the tiles. II. When she turned 18, her father force-fed her pictures of suitors. Each photo glossed like the wine glasses her mother washed. Fingers tight in the maze of her hair, she’d name the flaws: His nose is too big. His left eye is bigger than his right. A pointless pastime: her dowry was a disappointment. Costume jewelry—flimsy, bleeding like picked scabs, slouched in the back of a ratty wooden dresser. Shackles of thin chains and fake stones. Cheap. III. 7:30 AM. Her husband comes home from another woman’s house. Priya wonders if time has ever tried to stop itself. Hands cracked with calluses, she slaps the shrieking kettle silent. Drops in a teabag. He goes to sleep. She pretends she just woke up.
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Old Lovers’ Ode to Cranial Nerves Madeline Day ‘18 You chap my lips with citrus and cigarette soot and laugh how you love the finish of dust settled in your bronchi like unswept kitchen crooks that are beyond me. So we redecorate. We sniff paint fumes and feel cells burst and not sprout back. My eyes fill up and dry out again. I blink up, unearth the roots of those tubers in my heart you dug out and left the dog to re-bury under the house. As the stoop sags and the garden weeds win us over, brick edges crumble like your teeth after a smoke.
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Once a Blackbird Eve Glasergreen ‘19 The blackbird sunk thigh-deep in frosting; interpreter of flitting and perching, yes, you, sleeping in you, on the Avian Plane with one eye open to conceive your memory. Birds, air themselves, traverse the layers of tiramisu; cake without sprinkles waits for your birthday, for the edge of the horizon to dip into your sky. You fell? into the John James Audubon print, you fell. It would’ve pinned your eyes to the table for the sake of details you never Noticed. On the Avian Plane, where our bodies come to nest, to rest, where our mothers come to play, channels as narrow as feather shafts birthed us from yolk. Eat the lithograph! Wanting the waif edges of paper as much as wanting purpose you can’t attain isn’t shameful. Taste; the track to remember the body of a blackbird once your own, whose wings and black eyes like a sundial cast a shadow for your anthropomorphic
Birthday.
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Before dawn Alexandra Burton ‘17 We woke up that day to look for sharks in the dull ocean. We paddled until there was nothing beneath our feet but the breaking of shapeless things into shapelessness— unstable, the waves decomposed wove into our wakes and re-composed our faces, our reflections into ghosts. Later, we sat by the window and looked out at the storm. Expecting rain, we watched the wind without feeling it. We imagined the rest of our lives, looking empty.
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Near an Empty Cupboard in Upstate New York Rachel Whalen ‘19 My mother cuts the avocado, keen to keep calamity on the cutting board. But when she pulls out the pit she cannot fill it: a gaping O slightly left of center. She eats it for her supper just so: a v (O) c a d o
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In Absentia Kevin Goh ‘18 It was not your seat at the dining table or the door to your bedroom forever closed now, not the bills in the mail that keep coming for a phone line Dad refuses to terminate— but when I spoke of you in the present tense and by Mum was softly, but strongly, corrected.
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Choices Chloe Amsterdam ‘20 I am not finished, my story will go on. But sometimes, I’d rather not.
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13 Ways of Looking at the Sky
inspired by Wallace Stevens’ “13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” Chloe Amsterdam ‘20 I. “Mommy!” I wanna eat the cotton candy from the sky. II. Something is watching me, its face nestled in the clouds. III. We kiss, we kiss some more, forgetting to watch the stars. IV. It’s hard sometimes to keep planes and birds from falling. V. As he watched the sun sink into its nightly grave he noticed the sky bleeding. VI. I wonder if people see the same shapes as me, or if they’re all in my head? VII. I was there when you were born, I shared in your silent sob.
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VIII. He once told me that he wanted to float up into the sky. It looks so safe in that space. IX. It was too late— you had already fallen off that yellow tricycle by the time my gaze found you. Use that scar to remember me. X. When I grow up, I want superpowers. I wanna see as much as the sky. XI. The wind pulls me along, drags me through the blue sea that is air. Sometimes I leave a wispy trail so that you might find me. XII. Changing like a chameleon— blue to bluer to black— the moon comes out to play. It gets lonely sometimes. XIII. I’m cursed with eternal life. I watch my children grow to die, white cotton always crying, dying.
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Corner Pocket J. Gabriel Gonzalez ‘17 I love it when you put on a cocktail dress to sit in the corner and drink coffee alone— the muted gold of your equivocating eyes reflected in the chilled metal of a necklace from your seventeenth Christmas.
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Control Stephen Meisel ‘18 Teach me that desire is the flame we came to stand beside, not inside or outside ourselves but parallel to each other. Neither space nor closeness could connect these bodies; neither wind nor heat could clean their skin from touch. But our tongues betray our feeling. They speak without knowing what words we’ll say, except phrases used to bomb the past that lies in our heads already a ruin like a bad photo we could never toss because memory doesn’t move forward but bruises, instead, our care for movement permanently, as if appearance was art fleshed into its truest form, as if love meant jump without knowing when to fall and when to float in the air, eyes closed, praying for the ground.
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Fingernails Nina Lüders ‘20 It was the end of summer in upstate New York And the leaves began to fall In love. I bathed myself in indecision And watched my skin recede, Bit my fingernails and Gilded my teeth with blood and filth. So the body corroded itself and I watched As royal water ached inside my mouth. It was the end of summer So God routinely killed the Earth and left it Unbloomed, while I routinely killed God And silently fell upon my knees, And threw my words into an un-holy pyre, As hearth-colored leaves kissed the ground While the sun became acidic. So it ended as it began: With the disillusionment of succulent youth. I fell into a boy with a morphine smile And dreamed, and dreamed, And dreamed, and dreamed. Nothing came of it. But we shared A glass of warm water and my blood Turned into heavy rain. I killed God so instead I Prayed to myself, and with punch-drunkenness I imagined burning sunspot holes into his skin With an invisible cigarette. So the body corroded itself with infinities And I dreamt of drawing blood again, Only this time, ichor. I did not ask him Why his universe was black, or why He didn’t think of me gently. I did not ask him Why he was so beautiful with his smooth chin, Or if he loved me, or if he would weep Telling me that. Instead I retreated into my den And left my canines by the door.
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It was the night sky in upstate New York That was a picture palace, filled with stars. Insomnia grabbed me firmly by the neck And tangled its sleek fingers in my hair. The leaves fell In love and they were newly blond and blushing, And I wanted so badly to rest But felt myself changing too. My fingernails, along with the daylight, Became shorter. I lined my eyes with Kohl and sang aubades to myself at sunrise, Put sugar cubes in my tea And pretended they were pearls, Gathered wool, thought of my mother, And removed a rib so I could breathe. So the body corroded itself and gnawed Its fingers until they became swollen. I chose to love mirages and did not speak Anymore. I drew my own sanguine fluid like Holy water from a well and slept by counting Soft sheep on their way to slaughter, Engulfing myself in iridescence. Dumping God’s body into a river, I popped a sunflower seed in my mouth, Laughed about nothing and flushed thinking About loneliness. Wanted to swallow someone else’s pulse And stretch their veins over mine. Wondered if I could Look back upon my mistakes and turn into A pillar of salt, And dreamed and dreamed And dreamed and dreamed. And what a terrible thing it was To do, I thought.
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Three Haiku Max Witynski ‘17 Monterey bay fog the magenta glint of a hummingbird’s gorget wooden tabletop a white crab spider sips from a drop of spilt milk lavender spruces and an owl’s wing-print in snow Quebecois rest stop
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Trophy Sylvia Onorato ‘19 There is a woman behind the white-armed birches who lives by the windowsill waiting for a pleasant thought or that woodpecker to just stay still a moment. He’s had time, history, enough success to make him think he can drill into her house and be proud of himself. When the last one got in he never left. She keeps him in the office.
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Milagritos Sylvia Onorato ‘19 Si quiere oír la mejor poesía del mundo, respire. Si quiere ver el mejor arte, mire las manos. Si quiere aprender la mejor canción, sienta el pulso. Si desea un milagro, no busque lejos.
Little Miracles Sylvia Onorato ‘19 If you want to hear the best poetry in the world, breathe. If you want to see the best artwork, look to your hands. If you want to learn the best song, feel your pulse. If you want a miracle, don’t search too far.
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These Sick Beats Sana Gupta ‘17 You should have understood by now. Everything’s a motherfucking circle. Imagine a drumset as beating, beating in a black and blue vortex that doesn’t stop, it’s still beating, why won’t it stop beating, you want the beating to stop, this is too much beating, beating, beating back the blahs in the epicenter of your heart. Your parents tried to get you guitar lessons first. You left the guitar in the playground. They tried piano. Your fingers end up making weirdly different music, hitting the same note again and again till the sharp ting stopped making sense. They landed you smack dab on a drumset then and you drowned your hearing down the beats of summer parrots crying near the rose bush by your father’s study. Summer reminds you of nights that were too sweaty to sleep when you would make your way out to the verandah next to your parents’ room. You could hear voices, sometimes crying, sometimes laughing, mostly begging: “No, not tonight. Please, not tonight.” A thud, couple of grunts, maybe a sigh and then silence—and you would stay standing, watching the roses glow with dew as the sun broke out the bruises of dawn. You carry around drumsticks in your backpack now. You hold the chiseled wood, caressing the chips and fingerprints while you wait for the circle of dead roses under your patchwork quilt of skin to stop blooming. You look at men and all you can see are their hands, a largeness that you don’t think could ever quite translate into fragility. The thing with circles, though, is that it’s just a cut away from a chain or something that has an end.
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Thus Spoke the Teeming Lady Nora Rabah ‘18 Altoid mints, silk scarves, a wallet phone. I want so badly to be a minimalist, it’s my muted obsession. The irony dances in these words, humming the tempo with each step. Minimalism is all about the lack of digression and attachment to material things but my bones are obsessed with the excess that sedates them. Diet pills, matte nails, a movie theater. The black stripe on the back of my credit card, a never ending river silky and opaque. Just a moment please, I’m listening to the gospel red SALE sign singing to me. I string my first chord and note my importance—this music is orchestrated with my MasterCard, I am a part of something. Protein powders, velour sweats, a video game. The flutter of my flying heartbeat when I conduct the sonata with a silver baton because I bought something for less than it was marked up to be, the applause rings in my ears. Thank you, thank you. Soy lattes, gold rings, a social outlet. Streets suddenly seem pregnant with greed, shops are filled fat with consumerism. I walk wide-eyed and terrified of missing out on something I want to need to want. Wheat Thins, sports jerseys, a virtual reality. I notice a loose thread on my sequined dress, and I unravel in anger because I was promised quality when I choose quantity. I’m not sure which song to tune into anymore, this white noise is deafening. I can’t turn it off.
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TV logs, digital cameras, a laptop. Ipods, bluetooth sets, a holographic husband. I’m searching for myself through the racks of clearance but none of the deals are enticing enough so I run outside, but I trip on my debt and help I suddenly feel stuck window shopping my life, but my vision is blurring with each flip of the catalogue page. The only window I run towards is that of opportunity but my legs are frozen in place they’re becoming plastic! These objects are in my way, I’m straining to see so I swallow them whole. I look at my plump belly in the mirror and I see a mannequin. I’ve dissolved into my pleasures I’m so sick. I throw everything up and search my remains for any sign of life but my intestines are gold chains, my face is melting silver, my cardboard skin is flaking, the ink in my IV is slowly running out. I try to scream to wake my skeleton but my voice is automated, “Nora cannot take your call right now”, for an object cannot speak how silly of you to think she, a mere human amongst the world of silver, could ever be free.
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The Persistence of Memory Ally Findley ‘17 Melting clock face sagging, old and heavy lidded hours slipping on oil gilded artfully twirling mustachio’d question mark how gravity is limp impressions unsuspended, curling time a kiss you had to try twice: two cranes, angling fishhook trajectory on line up your gaze, heavy lidded hour, clock face tipped down, in a soft press thumbs on temple, palm frond Sunday warmth dark, deep-spun wax: moon near full lips, hands
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After the Fortune Cookie Anna Ravenelle ‘17 I used to wear disappointment like a jacket in springtime— necessary in the morning, a burden by noon— but you, my dear, are an infinite daybreak and I am so cold
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contributors Chloe Amsterdam Alexandra Burton Yongyu Chen Madeline Day Ally Findley Eve Glasergreen Kevin Goh J. Gabriel Gonzalez Sana Gupta Chris Lombardo Nina LĂźders Stephen Meisel Sylvia Onorato Nora Rabah Anna Ravenelle Katha Sikka Rachel Whalen Max Witynski
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acknowledgements Marginalia would like to extend special thanks to the following people: Our new members, for bringing a much-needed and fresh perspective to the poem selection process. Our returning members, for remaining passionate about the publication. The English Department and Cornell Literary Society, for spreading the word about submissions and supporting all creative writing organizations. Cornell Printing Services, for their patience and timely publishing of all our issues. Zelmi and Amrit, for their beautiful artwork submissions. The Cornell campus, for being faithful readers.
And every poet who submitted, for allowing us the honor of reading your work.
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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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