Marginalia Fall 2019 Volume 5 Issue 1

Marginalia

Volume 5

Issue 1

Fall 2019

Marginalia

Volume 5

Issue 1

Fall 2019

Editorial Board Peter Szilagyi ‘20 Editor-in-Chief Talia Isaacson ‘21

Managing Editor Yongyu Chen '20

Copy Editor Shaloni Pinto '20

Layout Editor Katha Sikka '20

Events Coordinator Lilian Hawkes '21

Communications Director Tomás Reuning ‘21

Communications Director Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon

Faculty Advisor Ishion Hutchinson

Faculty Advisor Megan Lee '20, "Swimming in Circles"

Cover and Theme Artist Natalie Yeh '21, Saki Wang '19 & Lilian Hawkes '21

Cover Artists

Madison Albano '22 Stasia Bartsch '22 Christopher Chandra '22 Angelina Franqueiro '22 Greta Gooding '22 Eve Hallock '20 Chi Kyu Lee '20 Sarah Lorgan-Khanyile '21 Anika Potluri '22 Sarah Sachar '21 Magnus Sæbø '22 Zasu Scott '22 Jesse Smith '21 Joelle Tancredi '22 Amy Wang '23 Saki Wang '19 Clément Xu '23 Natalie Yeh '21

Table of Contents 9 10 12

Per/mutate Two Poems from the Last Day in September "Mu vanaisa on suremas’’ or how I distract myself when confronted with death

13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 26 27 28

Blues Runs the Game Nightwood For the Worms I Step Over on the Sidewalk Nationalism High Stakes Legos The Lighthouse The Air No Longer Feels Like Home Duet Motion #56 Columbus and I Confront Each Other Direct Extension Poetic Pedagogy Self-Portrait as Wet Clay as the rain interjects the sunset, Sunflower Seeds

Lizard Skin Untitled October Diary (Long Poem) lightfield roast (but harder!, a lot harder!, you can't do this!!)

Ballad of the Hair-Eating Woman Nicaragua I Try to Save the Bees what is a gay man?

Genus, i.

Parable When I Say I'm Confused I Really Mean Untitled Clementine’s Fire Seance We Forgot About 1989 Performance Notes: John Cage, 4'33" literacy zomia

29 30 32 34 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 46 48 50 51 52

Letter from the Editors Dear Transfomers, We're not sure that we can write anymore. There's a giant orange balloon on screens across US and it has taken away many words. What is poetry beyond our reign in these high towers? Non-stop motion. Stop motion. Animation.

Loops. Hyperloops. Inflation. Hyper-inflation. Hi. We're trying to write to you. We're not sure that we can write!

We're not looking for the words that were taken away. We don't need them. It's horrible but we don't need them!

Hi to the first last semester of our lives. Hi!! to the worst year of our lives and the second worst year of lives staring at the worst year of our lives through the cherry trees!, through the iced-over shrubs, the dirt road. Don't read this.

Eat this to consume this. We don't want to write to you about poetry anymore — you know which side we're on.

You know which side we're on! Hey. (Hey!!) Bring hammers, ice-picks, moons. We could cut out the shapes of our faces from these pages. We could burn them. We could hurt each other. (Sorry.) We could hurt each other! (Let's not hurt each other.) Let's swim (only once) to new resolutions. Language will melt anyway. After language, we'll still see each other, as often as you want. Do you remember marks on stones? If you remember, let's relocate to the parts of Fl(ah)rida that are under the ocean. To Disneyland, but only when it sinks. Everything is sinking. After language melts, everything will sinking. I'm we're serious. We don't have to write poetry! We can tell stories of the new machine. We can write them into the machines as if they were caves, as if we lived underneath them and only saw our shadows, and only thought to tell tales of the people who saw shadows and then destroyed liberal education again and again and again for eons, for decades, until the stopwatch reminded us that there are four hours to this supernova. Ok!! OK! Yeah! Hey — everything from this point on, we're typing without fixing. We were thinking about Bernard Palissy — yeah? Yeah! The French enamler who sa w a white teacoup and gave up everything to figure out how it was made, he burned his garden trellises! And he burned his floorboards, his furniture, he. Ok. You know what we mean. We'll test you on this when the time comes so study. Study sharp. Sharp objects. Sharp hopes. Think only sharp and do not ever be surprised. At some point we need to decide if we're writing a poetry that only the enemy can understand or a poetry that only we can understand. At some point we'll meet you in fields, in ancient manuscripts, in a battleship sinking through the ceiling. Maybe not. If we could just be a little clearer about what we meant these words would sink. Let's go back to the very beginning. To the first great man. Let's not think about him. Let's erase our memories. Let's begin everytime we make his mistakes. Sharp mistakes. Let's only produce poetry but of nothingness but remember we can't write anymore. Instead of writing, we're drawing a map with all of the names of our friends on it Rachel Peter Andrew Sarah Lilian and and and and and we're drawing lines we're connecting name to name until the pen breaks, until the names break, until it's 8am, not the same day, not the same year, not the same life but we choose you. We could write less. We could write more. We could justify this!!

Here’s the truth: We have always relished the page as a source of liberation. In a molten world with too many faultlines & deadlines, it’s often easier to mask tape our emotions. To shove reflections down the rouge of our brain. But writing serves as both a refuge and a release. What we love most about Marginalia [Reading Day & Radiant Voices & Community Poetry Night] is that even in poems about capsicum-crazed bees & schizophrenic gods, the self sheds its cells. Traumas & joys & “Palestinian oranges” strip themselves down to a waxing mirror and real strength emanates from that vulnerability, empathy from that seeming self-centeredness.

We remain yours — in dissension, in poetic revolution, in love, Yongyu Chen, Shaloni Pinto, and Katha Sikka

Per/mutate Saki Wang ‘19

Every time before I turn / I blink / hard / to take photos. In one of them / you were smoking / against the moon / your back becomes thinner / as the moon / starts to boil. In one of them / a straw hat is dancing / in a field / for a harvest / that never comes. Two years ago I saw / a goldfish / in a thermometer / & before I could ask you / how the fish survives / you said look how beautiful. Collapse. Rebuild. Repeat. Happiness is / the longing / for repetition. In another one / when the war began / a woman dashed to hold / the dying flowers / on the balcony. Another one / a French party / everyone kissing / everyone else / I applied / permutation formula. The next was a tree / falling / but I remember in my tent / I wanted desperately / to make / love / right now / feeling the roots / the topsoil. & now in the last one / you face / the cascadilla fall / fog races / down / your face / your arms / open / backwards / you throw / out a wooden / stick / smirk / you say / you are illustrating the concept of hands / of hands / off.

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Two Poems from the Last Day in September Peter Szilagyi ‘20

1. Sunrise on Three Bolts In the clear window of an immense morning, a clear sky wavers in the sky. Three small birds, or large birds far away, waver, holding something big in place, and liable to fall, like the new and drying portrait of morning hung from bolts in crumbling drywall.

And you and I are there, facing our own faces in the window. Funny, in a way to ask the glass something, to ask the sky something, to ask the birds anything at all.

And in the clear window of an immense morning, morning has no question on the tip of its tongue.

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2. Three Rats Steal the Organ from Al Green’s Cover of "How Can You Mend a Broken Heart" It’s true, three rats did that. They shivered a while in the first cold night of autumn, then said Only organ music will warm us. And they seeped like fog in the foggy night into the basement of “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart” and clawed and toothed the organ free. And they carried it home.

Listen to it now, if you’re brave enough.

It’s gone, isn’t it. It’s true. Don’t fix a broken song. Let the rats have this one.

They’re warm and by god tender and painful and slow.

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“Mu vanaisa on suremas” or how I distract myself when confronted with death Carley Kukk ‘23

my ema tells me not to dwell on surnud the harsh D subtly creeping behind my amber lips attempting to escape the sap, but stuck somewhere before my accent as I focus on i) “üks, kaks, kolm” ii) “üks, kaks, kolm” drowning out the battle with that foolishly golden substance. my vanaisa tells me he likes Muhu leib: to him, the bitterness feels like home — a deep brown velvet embrace textured with pumpkin seeds to me, the seeds get stuck between my molars and I don’t know how to get it out it’s like molasses It’s. like sap. “oma vanaisa on suremas” my ema says but the sap just piles up — cascading hills below my palate: i) “üks, kaks, kolm” ii) “üks, kaks, kolm” iii) — because the bitter Muhu leib does not sit well in my stomach, The seeds are too hard to digest.

12

Blues Runs the Game Leah Moore ‘20

Waking, I have another dream of your mouth and a bed of tulips. Outside, the icy front of never-ending December is starting to thaw, and the song creaks into sound. After the mirror shatters, what is left to say? Watch. Who can I be, but who I am? This wide-open ocean of wounds — relentless. Dark hands still trying to find the sound for sorry.

13

Nightwood Leah Moore ‘20

I am laughing at the turn of events here: I’ve kept your thunderclap in my hand and spun it into a necklace of tongues. I keep trying to bring the green forward — what is true of memory? I was once a mirrored child waiting — you tell me about the one you love and climbing trees. I will fit my boots in each dying trace of you as we journey up the cold trails of this mountain. Somehow, this is what I never knew I wanted. In a dark room, a film offers our deaths — eighty years and five hundred miles apart. In the film, there is a song about light and the ways stars make a trick of distance. Your blank face looks back beaming — the rest of the crowd leaves and I pretend I do not know the end of this story. I smile. I too have been loved by something strange and it has forgotten me.

14

For the Worms I Step Over on the Sidewalk Leah Moore ‘20

Sing me the dream of the fallen roof & the drowning. Like the warped promise of the glass window, did you see yourself here? Outside, this rain melts every flower & the slashed fish bleeds out in the middle of the landlocked city block. We swim among the sea of your departed dead, praising the air.

15

Nationalism Natalie Yeh ‘21

How many circles fit into a square?

Colored umbrellas drift. Make way for the parade!

My little brother’s birthdayparty trip to Disneyland is cancelled.

We cannot fly to see our loved ones.

We cannot see out of one eye.

Uniforms in lockstep cross Tiananmen Square.

Time to unwrap new missiles, fireworks shot into the crowd.

The Party is seventy years old today.

The square burns before it is blown out.

16

High Stakes Legos Natalie Yeh ‘21

Because we couldn’t afford ready-made furniture, or because we preferred the satisfaction of sweat and bickering, you handed me a hammer.

Between the sun-stained denim couch and a creaking floorboard you arranged each piece alphabetically.

But instead of counting the screws like I was told, I lost the instructions.

Yes, I was tired of playing roll call with inanimate objects.

So when your bad back was turned, I lost the manual blinking, between two small sticky hands.

So your bed frame isn’t the sturdiest.

So we sleep soundly, swaying.

17

The Lighthouse Regan Murray ‘20

When my mother came back from the shore she had around her neck a shriveled strand of seaweed and hanging from the seaweed a broken shell a black town car plowed aside her irises or maybe her poppies (she could not recall what she planted in spring) she used to save popsicle sticks in a drawer from April, when it warmed, to April again in thick block letters she penned perennial names over the stained ends she downsized twenty years past after her mother died brushing her hair and forgot her botany guide on the radiator by the door I spoke to her weekly on the telephone about heat and brief rain until it was disconnected of red lilies and white roses as she rambled the beach toward the lighthouse.

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The Air No Longer Feels like Home Rrita Osmani ‘20 May 1998, Prishtina Kosovo My father offers names to my mother, as she holds me in her arms.

Flaka — fire.

Zerzele — storm.

She prays no harm comes my way, as she looks outside, does not recognize her home.

The city she lives in is on fire.

The neighborhoods have so much rubble.

Everything is grey.

She says to God, I swear, I will raise this child with every ounce of me so long as we Survive.

She names me Rrita.

To grow.

May 1999, Bronx New York We Survived.

My mother wants to go back.

My father says there is nothing to go back to.

There is a stench of not belonging in our household, masked with the stench of burek being made in the oven.

But anything is better than the stench of your city burning.

My mother was a biology teacher.

My father, a journalist.

They both clean toilets now.

Their youth has been lost.

I think they left it back when they boarded the train to Stankovec, Macedonia.

To the refugee camp.

Or maybe it disappeared when they had to ask for help from cousins and uncles.

They are careful not to be bloated with the worry that they are too much.

So long as we can get on our own feet, my father keeps saying.

There’s a tiredness.

But not from the long hours on the New York City subway.

Not from coming home at 4am in a city, unfamiliar.

It’s one, sleep cannot cure.

19

Duet Milan Mistry ‘20

your blue cap in the rain, my cigarette clenched between two teeth, the deer in tall grass crosses eyebeams with his killer, and the stub of ash fractures in the rain.

I run to my little bag of highgreen hills, and softly pack fireworks in a blue pipe, it is cracked along the side.

The weatherman says things will cheer up, the shrink lies down and says all clouds go away.

And in December when they say the storm will end, I’ll chant delicate mantras, pluck plastic flowers, and swear to hold your umbrella, repeat your prayers, and paint your fingernails.

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Motion #56 Shaloni Pinto ‘20 He invents stories. There are no flowers. Only sharp rocks in the outset of the city and the ash from the fire is coated into teeth. A pressed face adopts tongue. Snow falls back into the sky. The full rushing Ganges. Rewind.

A full rushing Ganges. A body in tissues. Light. Is it haunted? A specter.

Illness. Your request disappearing. Voice in the floorboards. Stacked newspapers sit in wake. The water is full of people. The ice, river, needles, and earth are full of people, laid against your chest. Staying.

Stay. Melt. Our river is the Ganges and the Sun meets your teeth. A fast black car. Transparent eye. Deer in the moonlight.

Smoke. Screech. Your hair tied into cloth is falling. The road in ash. Oysters in fire.

A body in the Ganges.

A dream. River. Car. Gold morning. Your chest in the wake is falling. Teeth or river? Light is like ash in nailbeds and in the morning is fire. Fast. The haunted are fast. Ganges keeps and invents. Between the rush, only tongues forget ash. A mountain in floorboards. Haunted?

Your ash. A sky. Rushing. He against you and his face meets ice. Open.

Go. Freezes laid in carpet. Specter.

Tissues. Now, disappearing. Teeth and distance and your coated living eyes invent The Screech. Needles.

Smoke. People in stories. Rewind.

Room. The West is ending. Sit. In the lake. Ash. People. Car. Now, a morning with snow beds and earth meets the voice in the living papers. Screech. Your tongue is fire. Ganges. Light.

Stories. River. Distance invents Rocks. The freezes, your face.

Smoke. He was fast. In the Ganges, sharp oysters of ash. Relics make road to the chest. The requests are eyes to needles. This Illness. West. Staying. Your teeth. Ash. Eye. Fire. White. Full Newspapers 21

Columbus and I Confront Each Other Shaloni Pinto ‘20

Columbus in gunmetal blue.

Columbus in puffed maroon.

My arms wrap around my waist.

The men are seagulls, they circle the world.

My grandmother makes us a garland of chains.

We tie each other down.

Columbus learns to wear a plaid skirt.

His knees are arrows.

I tell him: Isabella’s a show-off.

Her cross is too gold to bear.

She’s proud even if she prays.

22

Direct Extension Shaloni Pinto ‘20

Someone called for me, an unknown tone.

A cord is your hair stretched across miles.

You take shape with the items of futile love. I have one thousand pieces of The Kiss. Gold foil on my fingertips.

Today, you are the man from downstairs who knocks to borrow a cup of sugar in exchange for his sighs. Are you sick of me?

When the war finished, what was left of us wandered washing the fields. The world was a dream, soap water in between the flood plains, with the taste of metal, the last of me, the last of you fled, animals to the country.

Are these your words behind the dial tone? My voice stays composed.

Again over the hold tone sits a garbled swan song.

A thousand legs creep across the bathroom floor.

We switch languages, a thousand legs in their multitude.

In the distance, the river moves so slowly, and the swans drift so slowly, and I trade our names for bread. In the distance, you see a city burning. I’m writing these words to watch them fade from the walls. A thousand legs in the crack. Again, you sit in the desert to watch the sand drop slowly and press into my mouth. Still we keep talking, about what is on the television tucked into the back corner of your room.

You’ve seen a person mistaken for missing persons.

You ask me if miles extend and in my silence I ask for an extension to apologize for these possibilities.

If these limbs stretch, if electricity could call them, if we washed our masks in the 1990s, if we lived digital, if our wings lift without the weight of tar and oil, if thousand legs can stretch softly to the staircase, if the dial tone repeats: We can exist everywhere, in the city, in the country, in the hollow islands of trash floating aimlessly across the Pacific, in the pages of a directory, in landlines, in infrastructure, in factories, in the hole between the floor and the wall, in the future. Call me.

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Poetic Pedagogy Lilian Hawkes '21

Approach the keyboard. “Press

the major press the minor.” Ask only unanswerable questions. Starting 1.

How is the never-to-be different

from the never-was?

(My uncle, standing knee-deep in his own painting, thick impasto congealing over four white walls

as if the night were again thick with stars, as if there would (for him) ever again be world beyond this cell’s dark

concrete ceil -ing.) (question) 2.

Where is the line between our politics

and that sepia-toned fishing-lure desire that we could somehow run time backwards? As if

we could count down the decades 2010 2000 (There’s still time to save the climate!) 1990 80 70 6raise our parents up

from infants with some new ideas, computers, (a whole new “woke” awareness!) — & watch

as “evolution” unfolds at the breakneck pace of mass-extinction — this Modern yearling giddy on its legs — 200 species a day springing spontaneously from the soil, re-composing from the earth & filling in the spaces their death’s left behind… & even if we could, (turn back the clock, slowly unthread the weave — Space-operas, Disney, Fred Astaire&Ginger whiteface tap-dance musicals concealing rape genocide lynch-law & bullets blooming in the flesh of strikers, “foreigners’ ” children—that has long been this country’s legacy...

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would we be kinder to them than they were

to us? could we afford to be?

3.

I want to believe in happy endings. In “forgiveness.” I want the clock turned back, the bullet leaving skin the rent flesh closing over as the blood flows back, and my father’s mother’s heart, my mother’s mother’s brain, the wrecked circulation of this continent, begins to beat again. As the flipping silver coin that is life on this planet since the 70’s — its tail side vanished, and its other face a waning crescent — 60% of life gone missing. Breathe this, with me, slowly…

(I want whatever women alone have called out to as “God” to be

real, to be necessary.)

But there’s no turning back. You know their stories. Take their lives

and sing a new song. Sing as if the ones you sing for could somehow hear it; like the time of art bends backwards, towards the land they came from, towards all the wild and unreckoned life quartered and broken, all our dead that stand behind us so that we can have our day in sun...

Sing like by singing, you could make this massive wound, this crater in the weft of being that is human history — as if the wreckage all around you could somehow, just

by living, be made worth it.

As if, when you died yesterday, it had not already been determined

that your grave would bear a stranger’s name forever.

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Self-Portrait as Wet Clay

(as what you made me, what these hands / have wrought) Lilian Hawkes ‘20

Hungry for words, I slipped the moorings

of my child’s bed, and crept out to the balcony where drifting

adult voices vaunted carelessly the stairway’s traitorous moan.

Young body planar with the cool smooth

of the hardwood floor I listened, every muscle tense with hush, and still

— invisible, draped in shadow hues — I trembled at sound’s touch.

I would have never known god, but for this — the rippling shade

of velvet hammers against strings, and soaring clear above that stream, your voice — at first a distant glimmer, then a falcon’s plunge of falling, fastening inside my throat.

I wanted no more than to be that song. To hold its ragged grief, sustain in breath its crystal

note. Cradle in voice the terror that gripped my sister in the nights — Mother, I would have made a better daughter.

Facing the congregation, my voice a first soprano

to your second, eyes alight…

But instead, a son — set to become you, shedding tears over his body’s metamorphosis, seeming betrayal of pure song. (Our first duet, already requiem.)

Unable to hear god in anything but voice — forever falling for each passing Word.

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as the rain interjects the sunset, Vivian Jiang ‘21

the grass sinks underneath steady steps, damp and simple. smoothing a dusty sheet over a pale dogwood sky with gray corners. each inhale is a secret gulp from pitchers of cool spring winds. the sun slips into the next room. a glass jar of hot water, cradled in an elbow’s corner, slightly swollen and feverish. juggle it between sleeved palm & clothed underarm. and in heat, i am afraid. the possibility of burning. a burnt tongue: current inconvenience & continual reminder of past impatience. so, the deserved punishment for doubt. fingertips against a marble counter — to shiver is to twitch. cold is the absence of heat. the tea: placid & an ear: chilled from pressing against watch faces.

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Sunflower Seeds Vivian Jiang ‘21

The same chin: sloped to a point sharp like the edges of the sunflower seed shells scattered across our basement carpet.

(Our lineal language: cracks and chips) You were fluent and I winced at the scratches inside my mouth.

Habit carved micro-grooves in your incisors, and mine: too smooth like a factorydefective lobster cracker.

When will I inherit your precision? Little serrated birthrights should rise from pink gums to replace pearly fangs. In between scales, my fingers rest on the smooth ivories, as you ticked, hovering and shuffling over Sunday’s dinner steam.

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Lizard Skin Vivian Jiang ‘21

no need for any more skeletons in her closet; it is dusty enough. horny on the subway, ashamed of sudden libido amidst that laic commute. she misses lacking an answer. the blank & her were familiar: friends of platonic proximity. silences she reckoned with. no one missing, just not manifested. her horned & horny understudy crawls down cranial corridors. the way a striped shirt is a torture device. the iguana molts under an unreliable light bulb. but she is too stubborn to unscrew it herself, fearing that familiar dark.

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Untitled 吕心远 Cypress Lyu ‘23

对于你﹐失败和病痛中的世界 我 一无所知 我从未从战争中存活或 被肢解 我从未经历国家﹑语言 和身体的背叛 我还从未﹐ 在目睹你的自杀后 建造一座有文饰的墓碑 对于你﹐失败和病痛中的世界﹐ 我 一无所知 我畏惧停顿﹐脚步的﹑抑扬格的﹑历史的 我畏惧你对永在怀有希望 我畏惧以呕吐作为隐喻的假面舞会 对于你﹐失败和病痛中的世界︒ 我…… 我 我﹐ 我﹗ 没有辩词﹐ 便 请出示在场证明︒

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About you, failure, the world suffering from illness I Know nothing I have never survived a war or Been dismembered I have never gone through betrayal of my country, my language, And my body I have never, After witnessing your suicide, Built a tomb well decorated About you, failure, and the world suffering from illness I Know nothing I dread pause, pause of footstep, of iamb, and of history I dread your remaining hopeful that there exists eternal being I dread the masquerade that uses vomit as metaphor About you, failure, and the world suffering from illness I‌ ‌ I I, I! If you lack argument or plea, Then Please provide proof of PRESENCE.

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October Diary (Long Poem) Yongyu Chen ‘20

More than anything else. Disquiet. Fugitivity. Risk. The time it takes to remember a past. And then leave it behind. Wet, pluraled, with histories. The novels I loved, in bed, in a rainjacket. Every single one of them, dipped in milk. Every single one, and why you shouldn’t read it. Duras’s L’Amant. French Indochina. How a single too-early overtakes seventy future years of too-lates. Letters, which A sent me. Am I allowed to read them twice. More than anything else. Cracked ice on the heater. Dámaso Alonso. Los hijos de la ira. Nanni Balestrini. We Want Everything. Rachel Kushner’s obituaries for him. More than anything else. More than anything else. Orange, on nightstand. And pain, stuck to the ceiling. Either it’s redemptive or it isn’t. We have to find out, tonight, in your friend’s apartment, while the five wine glasses shake apart like hammers beneath the table. The last October of the decade. Looking through old texts with you, wondering if we could find in every unmade promise a trace of how capitalism is ending. M, on the floor, like black-silver, like talking about honey. Eve Sedgwick, writing about shame. The averted head. The always still gone, always still taking up the shape of the building we used to fall through. Can we swim together, for the first time. With 28 other people. In a well. In a windtunnel, with steel fuzz glued to our ankles. Can we drive to small towns together, in Alabama, the Gobi Desert, to die outside, to peel blueberries off the mirror and speak, together, more lonely than ever before. I’m serious. It’s horrible. It’s J, writing to me on the blackboard about “the shell game we play with ourselves.” An ars poetica, every morning. Regardless of. Fugitivity of. Disquiet of. And risk. And more than anything else, early nights. Early early nights. More than anything else, I want to write you hard writing. Lispector, in Água Viva. E antes de mais nada, te escrevo dura escritura. Lispector, leaving the burning building in her house by turning back. More than anything else, perpetual motion in a zigzag. Ars poetica. Denis Lavant, as a French Legionnaire in the last scene of Beau Travail, desperate, and horrible, and very warm, in a nightclub, in East Africa. He’s been discharged. It’s hard to explain. He’s trying to kill himself 32

with the ground. With the repetition of the sound of his body. His best black shirt. His in-love shirt. More than anything. Yesterday the mirror so small I couldn’t hear my mouth moving me back in the dark. Lying, between the sink and the ceiling at night. The shower full-on during the storm. The lightning. And in the morning waiting to be blessed through the holes in my shirt. No one will sleep tonight. I swear. Ars poetica. To live, harder. Self-harder. Than smoke, bent over a dress of collars. Harder than cinders, arriving. Harder-clouds. HarderGod. Ars poetica. I’m completely worn out. Ars poetica. I wanted to write a poem long enough that it could remind us of joy. Its restlessness. Long enough that I could not not think at least once of joy. Its exhaustion. More than anything else, 2am. More than anything else, Nijinsky. More than anything else, I wanted the person spinning-upfrom-the-floorboards to be you, every broken arm holding a wicker basket filled by you. You, in a fur coat. You, already furious. Already brokenhearted, eating sandalwood with me, warm, and light, and bitter. Very bitter. And very happy. Joy, and its weather. The intractable. The un-contradiction. The last nuance of a color that can be named. The best day of my life, beating up the second-best day of my life with a shield and a shield. Every single ars poetica. And how it turns into a love poem. Every single love poem, waiting for someone to not end it. The first poem that really doesn’t end. The impossible, which implodes. But still doesn’t become possible. It never disappears. But it sinks. Sonnet, in nitrocellulose. Lockbox, in tears, in funnel, in leather.

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a of way Ca to ro go lin t ei os ns lee id p e a lik lig e t ht he fu to lm w an n de this is the sand-d la une the one that look s like icy water where we sunk th at Toyota and I can just barely m ake out our old apartment be ing feasted on by light now a canal to take that dictionary from my house to yours. a film to place hunger in a spaceship & unreel time. dog-slugs! the lightning the field, Higgs's dog, of the roses at your feet, growing. a year of reconfiguration.

now, all we have around us are rusted gears — old pipes and shadows of sp arks and these things hardly ever flower: THINGS TEND TO BURN AFT ER VIEWING

pletely I was here, but com fugitive, a candle the woodpile. drinking water from

lightfield roast (but harder!, a lot harder!, you can’t do this!!)

Yongyu Chen ‘20 and Jesse Smith ‘21

A

the dark B the memory

the tablecloth

still Y's heart

god, scattered all over the light! my middle school French teacher, totally in control of the crashing plane. my old dog, the coach, berries in a sea of the dead

(A n B)' = a falling sword, again A' u B' = a sandy cross, not again

the light the wind of landfall

image

the ship of Tiresias teaching the audience lies

the impossibility of union or unintersection

the pureperfect sunken one-to-one correspondence

the ship of theseus in dissection room

still Y's heart.

Ballad of the Hair-Eating Woman Madison Albano ‘22

Somewhere, a molten girl has curled her nebula-ball hair into helixes. The whole night, each strand is spent sycophant-lusting after air, after dust, after boys’ backs who each, dare after dare, pluck her, faithful that she could be pruned a dry prude by some simple man’s hands. They laugh, she laughs, there are no mirrors, here; none to exhibit a balding girl’s denouement. She, a sweat-congealed scalp, mocks fads which come and go, as frescos fade, as autumns frisk to frost. But her hair grows, swells couch corners, wraps spaghetti-straps as tetherball coils, and dares, like wound-ooze roils, to soak surfaces in her chromosomes, turn fads to fixed facades. Last night, her flight-like foot fled front door, lusting for sidewalks, which condemned her, as a catechism would, to none, to nothing, a tripped-ankle, a fall, not much more than a scraped, bruised bum. Some friends saw her, dirt-in-mouth, contest the ground, but really, there were none to witness both her true, bald-headed, guilted fall and know that the hair was still breathing, there, away. That the party was over, she home, but the hair daring itself immortal edifice, lingering long. But here is me: green-skinned, lusting to hate this girl, hate her hair, hate how her undulating body, toes, skinned some carpets to wood panels. Hating, knowing she moved and that moving’s a fad and fads fade, that limbs never lumber the air inoculate. Instead air plunders, it dares to foil a foot, to fondle hips awry, to curve, to concave boyish knaves and crumple some silly girls inward. That air forgets whims, repels reprobates, forgiving, lusting, cascading one body to the next, never retaining in its chest a coven of shed hair which remain for my own lips, my witchery, to suck strands like spaghetti — my solitary fad: I eat hair. Looming titanoboa tongue, vacuuming strays, neglecting none, not a single strand saved by my greedy, grubbing mouth. I eat some, return to my home and regurgitate my feast into a kettle — set to high boil. Water lusts spirits from spume who, with the hair, curdle to soufflé-like patty — once, spurned a fad, by long-ago hair eaters; tonight, my solitary ingestion — reheating and re-eating the girl’s hair — feels lonely. Morning comes in oily rays, dragooning sweat, the hair in my stomach dares its new appearance. I must, again, consume my hair-puke up, eat until none remains. Hairballs pulse my trachea again, again — cyclically some sucking occurs — I concur: I know the girl. Luring chromosomes, expatriating her hair, I exhume. I am no tomb — sure, I consume, I strip — but never butcher. Merely, I dare the girl, her hair, bare, for me, to keep. What’s left of her on the hair — none.

She thinks herself safe, in bed, yet here I am — eating her spirit raw, lusting her secrets, herself, to my pretty awe, my love — snaking hair in my throat so a fad her hair becomes. None are safe; some may think their hair hidden but I am seismograph bomb-sniffing dog — I’ve smelt out every hair-fad and I dare myself to devour delicious mobs of manes. None are safe: I am always lusting.

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Nicaragua Luz Dybner ‘22

And The Black Dog that I received (Although he was mangy and covered in fleas) Yelled for a moment And bit at my knees And The Black Dog that I received Still mangy in the air thick with breeze Ribs protruding and quietly heaved “The knowledge lies between the leaves” And The Black Dog that I received Led me through echoes of disease

“What now.” said The Dog

to The Cane and I saw The Cane

“What now!”

I said “We must make change!”

“Foolish girl,” said The Dog

"The cows are still in the river"

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I Try to Save the Bees Janet Malzahn ‘21

I am not sure how to tell the bees inside of me that I am out of nectar.

These snapdragon bones were bled bone-dry last spring by a visiting hive trying to fill its broken jar.

“Is this enough” my bees asked me and I rooted two fingers around the pot and stuck them in my mouth.

“No. Keep going.”

Jim says the bees are dying.

The pesticides coating our crops nestle in their fur and hitch a ride back to into the hive.

I have spent a while teaching them not to trust anyone but me.

The problem is I think my bees want to see other people.

Coke and rum make sweeter honey, so they tell me, than whatever sludge I have left over.

A bunch of punch-drunk romantics making a bee-line for whatever they smell first. How do you think their flowers remain so crisp? When ours are dry and kinda wilty-looking.

It’s a security dilemma, this modern hive. We need pesticides and stingers because it is no fun to lose a zero-and-falling-fast-sum game.

I didn’t want this, you know, but honey is sticky and now I’m not sure how to stop the needing.

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what is a gay man?

Magnus Sæbø ‘22

to the old christians, a bundle of sticks to make the winter months livable — a faggot. to the new christians? the new christians hang up big men with abs in torn and revealing garb and also rainbow flags. that’s the ticket for me.

I still burn myself when I start the stove to make some soup for the geezers that corner my table this January.

I make it warm for that small instant where my blistered hand hands a little bowl of meat stew — no vegetables, it’s Winter, and we didn’t prepare well — to the wrinkled sacks. they will die much before me, but they do not give that impression for my soup. some when they grab the bowl dip their thumb in it on accident and they keep it in there. the hot I’m sure would burn if not for their wood-like texture. their flesh not exactly my flesh. some mornings when I turn on the lights of the chapel I still see them there standing. and I can never tell which are the old men and which are the hung ones on the wall, one wooden and the other one with a thumb in my soup. and then even later, when I push one up against a wall and his body alights in newness, I am the fire for the evening.

39

Genus, i.

Talia Isaacson ‘21

In California, God was sparse and dry buckwheat rimmed August in rust. The city sweated newness — our schoolfield shell of blacktop could be mottled with our thumbs.

In winter, Eucalyptus littered concrete with strange pods: beetle-like, they’d skitter under chain-link, beneath nameless ever-leafing shrubs that coughed up yellow. Such brittleness, contingency on riskless tics that reduced life to glare. In the Torah, my mother said, God’s spirit moves on water — our synagogue was stucco, lawns were rocks instead of grass. The most water I saw was after rain, in the paddock’s swollen creek. We’d let the horses loose, then sit railside to watch: the old ones nose it gently, some geldings lip the edge, the chestnut yearlings charge downhill then splay over, sides rattling with air.

40

Parable Talia Isaacson ‘21

An instinct to pursue precluded any room for doubt, and faith laid flowering in wood — even hardness sweated hope.

Now leafless oaks ache with absence, the crow hawks at the monstered moon. Left behind means someone leaves.

Abandonment admits belief.

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When I Say I'm Confused I Really Mean Eashan Garg ‘20

Cedar tree takes root inside my head, its mossy offshoots carve up and down, left but never right. Blotted pitcher plant waits under moon and perished leaf-stem, lips stained red. A deep, vein-popping red, puckered up, sans fang and bone. Mint scent, incense. Until I fall into its pith, pit of my emptied stomach. Is translucent, spasmodic, dissolves the softest parts of me into kaleidoscopic slush. Look carefully, pick out cases of unused lipstick from grayed goop and blighted plant-matter. Reach out with fronds of aloe, emollients, placebo palsy-wort, gold-tipped calendula for ripped skin and dried chamomile for the anxieties in my chest. Mistake even the most tempered leaf-edges for poison ivy, thorned brush. Creeping nightshade, splintered nightshade.

Unfurl beige, petaled wings of snapdragon, satin snowdrops, like the fingers curled into my palm. Squeeze and don’t let go, and maybe more sanguine flowers will blossom from the fragile bud. Budding chrysanthemum, chrysalis mixed dark and ochre. Pluck the petals one by one, “She loves me, she loves me not. Forget me, forget-me-not.”

The last petal, a doubtful shade. Rotting hue, love hue. Send these musings along flocks of pollen, buoyant dandelion seeds, thinned grapevine tendrils, hope they flower in the right places.

No need to cry, I’ll bring those bottles of sweet wine aged months, years. Tannic with shabush berry, tanned. Mind the weak alcohol, macerated grape skins and sloppy tears. Mind the distilled water and mercury, I wanted to make sure even our most dense organs could float.

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Untitled Eashan Garg ‘20

Sunlight Zone

Under moon, a porcelain wound fills with seawater. The brine, impregnated with salt, stings. My hands, a bone-crushing embrace, so I bite my lip instead, my tooth, my tongue. Barnacles crawl into my ear and whisper my brother’s words: How long can you hold your breath how long much longer. Moonlight shutters through the blinds and I pull them shut, gathering the oceans tears to hide in my own, bubbles escaping between my lips like lost love. And the waves, the waves come crashing once more.

Twilight Zone

The kelp garden shivered with warped noise, of howling gale or a lost siren’s wail, and either way, I didn’t mind. I buried my head, laden with crabs and urchins, oysters robbed of their shells, shattered scallops — but it kept calling, what choice did I have? And so, pruney and rash-red, I crawled towards the echo, the rows of fluorescent lights bouncing back and forth like jellyfish.

A sea of weeds grabbed at my feet, some gently, others with a vice and a passion. Closer, the sounds became clearer. The snapping and snarling, and my body, heavy with other creatures.

Midnight Zone

No stars — the light falls in swatches of grey instead. Pools of ink from some forgotten pen fill my horizon, pulling my gaze further towards their center, pulling my heart, still — beating and moist with silvered blood, towards their center. Mother scolded me once, said the Loch Ness monster would swallow me whole, and I wish it would. The serpent’s head: I wish it would, I wish…

I take a step, down rather than forward. Bitter mist, cold.

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Clementine’s Fire Fabio S. Cabrera ‘23

Sylvia, mon amour, el fuego de mis ojos no se puede contener…

From a closet in Oslo a mollusk set ablaze,

asunder, ignited.

Sheer serendipity in a crystal cup.

It pulsates and snares, like me

like me — Sylvia, sylvia, Sylvia, sylvia…

Quiet, Hush!

May your anger be forever a Greek fire!

May the ever-glorious mollusk be free!

May the everlasting hypnagogic temple, Fall prey to its vicissitudes: Eyes, bones, spleen, fire.

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sylvia...

monochrome (pink) Melody Zhou '23

Seance Jesse Smith ‘21

May-time rides through fields of sideways trees, stirring crickets he sold sugar to accidentally, and Alice lost herself again in the morning trying to catch with her wet bare hands a bowl of crabs for me.

In the laurel-crown rain, doves drag their fig branches out of hiding and for the right to make a hundred silver prints of it, her eight biographers start fighting.

I cast stones in the shade of the bridge, which arcs over the marsh where Alice digs, for something more real than this but I fall off my white horse into an industrial-almond pit while she says ‘this is it.’

Flowering charcoal turns back to cedar, and the smoke itself refuses to tell its shape to us.

Three layers of gold on our portraits corrode as they ask where I keep the incorruptible bust.

Chimes filled with chicory ringing as the empty train-yard goes up in flames, and we saunter to the gallery where the Viennese walls don’t say but they know our names.

Alice balances her chair on a book, an old besieged manuscript that she reluctantly took, and the raven perched on the second floor is in love with a rook but I just, I just can’t bring myself to look.

The twelfth street tea shop reopens, selling vivid youth out of a heat seeking candelabra, on Thanksgiving Alice bought a backwards-Latin-speaking camera and poison ivy chokes the jasmine silently while I rename the rose boy the hyacinth girl.

Unexpectedly the tea turns to blood, but all she sees is the lonesome way it curls.

Isaiah over there writes his forty-fourth, when he’s finished, hands it to me to torch, because, he says, “there’s still Kraków to endorse,” and we all sit wide eyed and nod “of course.”

46

Opaque opal mist, with vigor wrestles the folds of Persian dresses.

Still on that lawless mare, May’s faster than life! while his cape wraps the sky in tension.

Deliberately he races, judging wooded footholds for their valiance and sturdy shadow.

Commanding I Ching too, he calls my bluff and explodes sixteen sticks of yarrow.

Now Alice calls to her treasured black heron, which flies to her hand like a sermon and shades her as she bathes in the current that flows Westward towards courage.

Salvation flows like knowledge, milking the knotted prairie like pomegranate.

Kneeled over the brutal sunlight, I sip the world from jugs of selfless solid granite, and imitating a broken pose for the judges, I now remember Alice.

Her tricks and her tightropes. The tambourine she’d ring around our palace.

Her delicately-hanging psychomotor, which the twin sister of Judas once showed her.

She took to it when she was just a loner, now it’s rusting into grace itself, grace itself, with no owner.

Somewhere down the river, in the limestone-honest hills that flicker through the dawn, there’s a mural of a peacock, with a hat, drawn in willow charcoal, or was it just chalk?

I wore heavy bells this time, so I could let the sheep wander where they may, but thunder cracked, cathedrals rang, and before the door I just lay.

More rain mixing gently with The Gloria, the prophet playing recklessly the harmonica, and me in the attic listening to Everything, on a red woolen blanket it was all euphoria.

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We Forgot About 1989 Kelly Song ‘20 On a whaling day last June, two seals slick with blood floated

belly-up to the leering moon, and I thought of you breaking your stick on Tiananmen. Mother, don’t let the suburban make you forget that you once carried a flag, damp with air, and dragged it

across the dirt path to the hands of hierarchy and village. Mama, don’t let the women with the shiny nails

cutting your hair praise you for the way your black strands are like that of a bird’s which they’ve seen only in movies with subtitles.

You tore it out once, don’t you remember, between

the morning and the brick floor, caffeinated on something boiling?

Mama, don’t let the tiny ramekins of mooncakes at noon make you forget that you sieved

water into that turnip-red flask and rushed out the door before your own mother could call for you. Mama, don’t let the way your gingham, ironed blazer fits this morning make you forget the direction

your pendant clipped on your neck; felted, crimson, one of the class president. It split

in two on the concrete in your busy, in your blazing, in your absence. Mama, the bean buns you made this morning still taste of the salt of the ration — don’t spend your time wondering if the others

at school will snarl and ask why I haven’t brought Wonderbread instead.

Your hands, once slick

with cornmeal and lard, made this substance And I will eat it in the middle of the cafeteria square, looming

under a mascot flag, the white teeth of a dragon grinning down on the plastic benches.

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Love at Tiananmen Yuqing (Eva) Cao '20

Performance Notes: John Cage, 4’33” [

]

33’ (first movement) Paper is folded shut. A stopwatch begins. Text for this section spoken as if observationally, unrehearsed.

Silence. Or the illusion of it. Soon after, we shatter the fourth wall: plastic chair, as performed by audience member.

Itch, as performed by glottis. Wind, as performed by weather. Direction, as performed by intention, accompanied by nervous rubber (material of shoes of performer who stamps twice on the ground). Expectation, as performed by the norm. Social norms, as performed by — silence.

2”40’ (second movement) Embedded in any silence is all we have been taught to ignore or mislabel. Overtones are a kind of whinnying head/ache , but/wait — If you paperclip my strings I sing Tibetan If you clip my paper wings Icarus patterns The sun can stain me: C# Eb F# G# Bb — all colored intervals.

My mother taught me if you use only these black keys everything you play sounds Chinese, let’s see: wo qing ke ren xian zuo xia, zai dao yi bei cha [客人来 is hummed]. And this is how whiteness became the norm. Then my teacher taught me the black keys are "accidentals," chromatic scales are full of tension, so classical instruction writes its laws to social cues. “No accidentals except as a leading tone to the tonic.” This is how normalization became the norm.

It’s stitched into the classical canon, we perform its scores daily: thoughtless prevention, careless pollution, restless production. (Hums Canon in D) We live in thoughtless canon, we wrestle with our patterns, we plunge ourselves in silence, and we drown.

I tried to achieve satori. At a zazen sitting meditation I am told to label my thoughts as they pass, as if they pass, I’m so worried about my — “future”. I wish I didn’t — “past”. I’m thinking. “ Thought. ” I’m thinking. “ Thought. ” Bell. Wooden block. I can’t stop the traffic of my thoughts. I concentrate on the cars out — “Thought.” Breathe — “Thought.” 1, 2, thought. Thought. Thought. Thought. Bound by my structures, even within silence I am taught how to choose what I perceive, everything is socialized, everything will , be , was stitched into me in my mother’s womb — Chaconne: there are 100 variations of the moon.

Lets meet our second violins: This light (pointing above) is the illusion; our systems are diurnal. I mean, sure, there’s caffeine, and forgetting the IPCC's 12-year overtime-underpaid-work — but we are still bound by time. (reads timing off stopwatch) How loudly can death sing? Sun, as performed by moon. You are sitting here until the whole movement is over. Within this space you are championing what is inscribed. But if every movement is but a variation then stop wrestling with silence. Think.

1”20’ (third movement) Dear worshipper of silence — Who believes in silence, the silence almighty, creator of silence and earth, of all things visible and silence — how did you grow so deaf?

You, who believe you can rewire your socialization but the monkeys at your typewriter, too, are evolved. You carpeted Central Park with manuscript paper and convinced yourself, finally, randomness could be your composer, – but have you seen how fat those pigeons are? There is nothing you haven’t fed, there is nada you’ll never eat.

In the anechoic chamber you still hear your heartbeat. Perhaps one day you’ll keep time with your pulse. For now, about 70 beats per minute. For now, let all the horrors you hear, be. Social norms, as performed by silence.

Embedded in any silence is all we have been taught to ignore or mislabel. Copernicus and Icarus are dead. The sun spins around us nowadays. Our highest aspiration is ourselves. Maybe someday we can pick up our instruments of silence. And maybe someday we’ll recompose our social movement.

50

literacy Kristi Lim ‘21

i am here to repattern my self already-variegated re-variegated now from mute-hid hues to vandalism pixels anonymous screech white as leukoma broad-bleaching faces chilling bytes dispersing strangers embodying ][ and the dog on the leash, too, turns suspiciously away. good morning, passer-by. i came here to remember that this country maybe no country would will itself to doubt itself yet surely it tries, and surely it can puncture policing with a self-aware whisper: [] (but why couldn’t you speak, whisper) yet whatever self means my foreignness must be kneejerked into a binary — yet for whatever self’s worth i will myself to Read

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zomia Kristi Lim ‘21

(一) finally the rivers fold blue: suspiciously Spring, the backs of hands moistening, thin hair of grass peeking, as mountains cast ocean-tinted shadows on mountains: distinct as we are, our saplings’ roots were tangled deep beneath the earth our starlings flit across the gulf our backs in darkness frame eyes spangled lucid: we return the city’s gaze. (二) in shadow tar roads glow blue: overbearingly calico, bloated firmaments so palpably plump let’s patchwork the possibility of progress is but shadow blue: elsewhere, in geometric glimpses, some promise of sun. (伞) underbelly blue clump the morning dew soft on heavy clouds: i, too, awoke from rain as fog brewing deep-valley silence the yielding crack in your eye nearly suns my crevices, they hold me the way i struggle to hold us: loosely without letting go.

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Contributors Saki Wang ‘19 Peter Szilagyi ‘20 Carley Kukk ‘23 Leah Moore ‘20 Natalie Yeh ‘21 Regan Murray ‘20 Rrita Osmani ‘20 Milan Mistry ‘20 Shaloni Pinto ‘20 L. Hawkes ‘21 Vivian Jiang ‘21 吕心远 Cypress (Xinyuan) Lyu ‘23 Yongyu Chen ‘20 Jesse Smith ‘21 Madison Albano ‘22 Luz Dybner ‘22 Janet Malzahn ‘21 Magnus Sæbø ‘22 Talia Isaacson ‘21 Eashan Garg ‘20 Fabio S. Cabrera ‘23 Melody Zhou '23 Jesse Smith, ‘21 Kelly Song ‘20 Yuqing (Eva) Cao '20 Kristi Lim ‘21 Anon. [ ]

Acknowledgments Marginalia would like to extend special thanks to the following people: Ishion Hutchinson,

for his continued support as our faculty advisor, Corrine Bruno,

for her unending patience and support; Karen Kudej,

for putting up with our requests for room reservations; Megan Lee, Melody Zhou, and Yuqing (Eva) Cao

for sharing your beautiful artwork; Cornell Printing Services,

for their patience and time publishing of all our issues; The Durland Alternatives Library,

for radically hosting our public reading nights; The Tompkins County Public Library,

for creating a space for our community poetry nights; Rachel Whalen,

whose poetic wisdom will never leave us; and every poet who submitted, for allowing us the honor of reading your work.

Marginalia is an publication, on or views expressed in reflect the view of

independent publication and is not affiliated with any other off Cornell's campus. It is funded by the SAFC. Any and all these poems are of the poets themselves, and do not necessarily the editorial board, the magazine iteself, or Cornell University.