The Literary Issue

statement THE MICHIGAN DAILY

FE B RUARY 25 , 2015

2B

Wednesday, February 25, 2015 // The Statement

Dear readers,

COURSE EVALUATION:

Ernest Hemingway once said, “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” Writing is hard. Putting your heart on the page for anyone to read is frighteningly vulnerable. Yet, every year the Statement calls out to the University, begging for your poems, short stories and other golden nuggets of creativity, and writers respond with gusto.

This year students submitted over 100 pieces, thirteen of which can be found in this magazine. In these pages you will discover an old woman knitting, a grizzled sea captain, and a little girl marveling in a blackout. While they may not have used typewriters, these writers bled a little bit, and it shows in their poignant, emotional, and thought-provoking work.

Welcome to the Literary Issue. Happy reading.

Magazine Editor, Ian Dillingham Deputy Editor, Natalie Gadbois

Photo Editor, Luna Anna Archey Design Editor, Jake Wellins

To view videos accompanying The Literary Issue, scan this QR code with your smartphone or visit www.michigandaily.com/ the-statement.

THE

statement

Magazine Editor: Ian Dillingham Deputy Editor: Natalie Gadbois

Photo Editor: Luna Anna Archey Illustrators:

Editor in Chief: Jen Calfas Copy Editors:

Megan Mulholland

Hannah Bates

Design Editor:

Maggie MIller

Laura Schinagle

Jake Wellins

Managing Editor:

0 0 0

T

“Comment on the Quality of Instruction in this Course”

he ratemyprofessors.com evaluation said that [name removed] could turn a phrase, and they were right. The thing about [name removed] that I found out on my own, was that his ego sometimes gets in the way of the point — the point of the discussion, the reading, the class, educating the youth, good taste, imparting wisdom, etc., etc. Sometimes, there was no point. Sometimes, you could see him peering down at the point as if from very far away, waiting for it to catch up with him. I mean to say, that he was good at his job, but in a way that made want to bite your own teeth off. (Imagine). Obscure, unhelpful, and smarter-than-you. And this was the most consistent vibe in the room, I found. For a semester, it teetered between “this is fun and interesting” and “this is sort of offensive, so now we are going to wait it out.” The class, I mean. As a whole. The History of Art. It should be so simple. Jesus.

I guess, put in a different way, my biggest frustration with this class (although it was usually interesting and well-presented) was that there was a certain need to answer the question in [name removed]’s own personal way, or maybe the way that [name removed] found personally meaningful. Oftentimes, it seemed like we were being tested for understanding [name removed]’s last impression of the readings. The real question is, how well do you know [name removed]?

For example, I was the guy who was curious about the social reception of Hume’s aesthetics (i.e. “can the ‘goodness’ of ‘good art’ be measured by how it would actually be received?”), but I was sort of written off or filtered out because it was construed that I wanted to take some kind of trans-historical “survey” or whatever, and that “surveys” weren’t going to help us understand art through the ages, and that is not what I was saying with a snide lilt, (which is also impossible since so many of its would-be participants are dead), but rather must have been

Phillip Whiteveen, LSA Senior

based entirely [name removed]’s terrible experience with “surveys,” since he seemed so premeditated-ly averse to this concept. At other times, I was filtered out because what I was saying didn’t match a given author, like X: “What X is saying,” [name removed] would say, “is that you are basically wrong, and I have no interest in the point you’re making divorced of the internal world I have constructed so that we can all like the same things because I like them and I have good taste, thanks for sharing.” Emphasis on the “X.” Maybe another example is that I’m writing this final paper on Ogilvy’s ideas about fiction and emotions (assigned by [name removed]), but I’m only quoting him where he’s relevant to a.) Poulet on the phenomenology of reading, b.) Henry James, and also, c.) it must be said, the blank, staring obvious. Although we’ve been led to believe that [name removed] knew Ogilvy and got tenure by disproving some of his ideas, it doesn’t seem like a very good last word on the subject. Rather, and again, it seems like something that was personally meaningful to the professor, whose name has been removed.

Of course, I’m not trying to be a dick, but hey, maybe it will help with “the quality of instruction in this course,” which despite the tenure thing, appears to be something that [name removed] – who I feel so privileged to address in the third person, as if he were a person you and I had just met (it is you actually reading this [name removed], isn’t it? Hi!) – “takes seriously,” and “values,” and what a great start we’re off to already! We are, actually, (I think). We are probably even past the start, and into somewhere in the middle, where the end is the ultimate, unreachable Form of this class as taught by a manifest god, or something even less interesting.

In sum: 8/10. I basically liked this class.

Emma Sutherland

Lev Facher COVER ILLUSTRATION BY MEGAN MULHOLLAND

ILLUSTRATION BY JAKE WELLINS

Wednesday, February 25, 2015 // The Statement

3B

THE BILINGUISMO Lauren Quinlan, LSA sophomore

Gillian Golden, LSA senior

The ship went down with its captain as all sturdy sea ships do.

It sank in a flash of briny salt splash as the captain gazed over his crew.

EL LENGUAJE ES LA CAPACIDAD DE COMUNICAR. (The language is the capacity of to communicate) LA LENGUA ES UN IDIOMA ESPECIFICA. (The language is a language specific) LA LENGUA TIENE DOS LENGUAS.

The ship she sank to the bottom as the captain turned sweetly mad.

And the crew they all shrieked as the cruel waves peaked and the sea took back what it had.

(The language has two tongues) LA LENGUA ES FLUID. (The language is fluido) EL LENGUAJE HAS CREATIVE CARACTERISTICAS. (The language tiene creativas characteristics) EL LENGUAJE IS SOMETHING ABSTRACT.

Then all was lulled to some peace as the crew walked tiredly ashore.

They all looked around but no captain they found whose ship lay on the sea floor.

(The language es algo abstracto) LA LENGUA HAS SOCIAL IMPLICATIONS. (The language tiene sociales implicaciones) THE LENGUAJE IS INHERENTLY ARBITRARY. (El language es intrinsicamente arbitrario) THE LENGUAJE IS THE CAPACITY TO COMMUNICATE.

Now all who remember dear captain honor with venerable grace.

(El language es la capacidad para comunicar) A LANGUAGE HAS THE CAPACITY TO DISAPPEAR.

There was sea in his eyes with strong waves as the prize of his salty, sweet resting place.

ILLUSTRATION BY RUBY WALLAU AND IAN DILLINGHAM

4B

Wednesday, February 25, 2015 // The Statement

Wednesday, February 25, 2015 // The Statement

5B

DISRESPECT

ARCHITECTURE LESSON

by Jean-Pierre Seguin, LSA senior

by Maria Robins-Somerville, LSA sophomore

AN OPEN FIST

by Carolyn Darr, LSA senior

A bitter bunch of pennies sit on the back of my tongue, Each time your fist makes love to my eye.

We always begin with a dance of words.

The battered goat in the basement of our love Limps into light, All matted fur and tattered ears.

You create the creatures in the corner That crawl up my spine.

I force you to feel like you are falling from the 35th floor.

Nightmares and fears: Weapons best wielded by the ones we trust most.

Our words have weight behind them, Then we put our weight behind them.

Strange flowers, the prints of knuckle on flesh.

FOR LUCY

by Alexis Springer, LSA senior When the men hoot and holler

It’s not because you’ve done something.

Flowers do nothing to be picked Except be there and beautiful.

Grow where you will And bury your roots deep Like a spiked weed.

Don’t wish you looked like one.

It’s not because you’ve done something.

Living shouldn’t be this hard.

Strange paint.

A math teacher once told me that Architects are considered geniuses for close following of a form to it’s function That when the form of an object is suited perfectly to its function, We are left with inherent beauty.

And it’s got me wondering If the number of hearts I break Exceeds the number of times I trip over my own feet Does that deem my form My architecture, Inherently beautiful?

If I conduct my body like a well oiled machine With grace and maximized efficiency, Am I the product of some architectural genius?

Because if my form followed function I’d have hips just wide enough for you to paint on And above that, A sliced piece of cedar bark Cascading curls would serve their purpose Of driving lovers to dizzying insanity.

I’m no mathematician nor a masterpiece But they say that when your form follows its function With empty spaces to be filled And smooth surfaces to run fingertips across All things reflective and light You’ll have beauty like bridges unbroken And towers tall and thin.

BEAUTIFUL

For Sale

by San Pham, LSA junior

2.7 Acres

or blonde haired blue eyes i am yellow in the wrong places they call it gold on hair but for skin it’s a sickness.

Vacant but there are trees

in english to be beautiful is not black hair trying to soak up sun while avoiding its rays on your skin. being dark is only cool when it doesn’t remind people of how they used your culture to build their houses and towns. your boyfriend’s mom sees you and tells him that she looks full of herself because you’re not allowed to be proud of yourself when you’re not beautiful only full of too many years avoiding mirrors gulping up shame and pretending. one phrase eavesdropped becomes a mantra boys will never like asians when they can have some blonde chick. layers of make up and forced confidence will only get you as far as cute or exotic people don’t remark on my beauty but on my height my skinniness or how i (kind of ) look like my mother huge nose small slanted eyes skin with holes looking at my reflection is a girl who learned from day one she was the opposite of blonde haired and blue eyed, ugly.

THE RUNNER

by Hailey Middlebrook, LSA junior, Daily Arts Writer

Johnny knew of the angry nights in pool rooms, when his father whirled like an eight ball spinning above the socket. A shiver of movement, and the game was over. He saw the muscles rippling as the man rustled his morning paper, the flash of gritted teeth as he pushed the lawn mower through the sticky pit of summer. His strength was his skin, worn into like the habit of flinching at a firing gun.

The same thick blood raced through his son. While the house quivered under his father’s footsteps, Johnny would run. Dashing in the dewy mornings, guided by starlight and his own breath, around wispy fields and sunken sidewalks and unmarked rivers, their names scrubbed off of maps. He would sit at a school desk, sneakers tied, legs wiggling too much to concentrate on combustion reactions.

Boom. At the bell, he was a hamster in a wheel, treading on rubber until the coach told him, Go home, Johnny Boy. Desire bubbled from his tremendous lungs at supper, burning a hole through the tablecloth, deep in the wood. He would walk dutifully to bed, only to slip out of his sheets — a blurred bandit. The day of the race came. Johnny broke the news like eggs over breakfast with his father. I’m busy today, Son the man said. And that day, outside, the defeated man pushed the lawn mower over the dying grass. It was his third week without work. He was listening. The chorus of voices rose up, over the bushes, through the thick, wet air.

A roar.

ILLUSTRATIONS BY LUNA ANNA ARCHEY

6B

Wednesday, February 25, 2015 // The Statement

DISTANCE Wesley Holkeboer, LSA junior

ILLUSTRATION BY MAGGIE MILLER

W

e’ve been together for years.

You are, in a way, just a sofa, and I am mostly a raven, a doorknob, a lunatic. I don’t seek vindication for this, I know I just am, and you, for this long moment, are. In terms of accessibility, you’ve always been the best, and courted many and offered your services freely to a whimsical republic, those people who enter and exit and spend much shorter moments around us, and sometimes they grope me, but seemingly more often you, them; you offer me no protection apart from some small aspect of distraction, and you do not look disgustedly on me when man-handled but remain illustrious in your position, watching; for your attention is everywhere, and though I swing and revolve and am maneuvered, any movement by you would catch all the attention of those fragment-moment-minded maneuverers in this room—they do not realize the piece is in your handle of your long-sitting, your lack of deformity over time, your patience; what I mean to say is I think you’re not well-enough-appreciated.

And the space between us rattles and grows, and I’ve squeaked and been lubricated and you’ve only just begun. And the space between us reduces and could shimmer, or maybe I only imagine so. Your light yellowstained satin body glows like soft lightning; your parallel body is a forced symmetry that affords itself with the realization that a mask is a blink—a realization I remember happening, that knocked me off my seat, postalighting at the window-sill, and took away all my anger from you. Who has the right to show such perfection? There is no balance of

this sort in nature. Perhaps during the basic explosion there was some. Why should there be here, was my question? I admit I felt some sort of godly perfection when I came from the inner-gilded, though outwardly brown furnace. Or was this the whimsy of inexperience? For though I’ve flown from there to there daily a-time, I’ve only done so. But I’ve never forgotten. I’ve never even fallen asleep in surgery.

The realization that the mask is temporary, and truth will never be found, but may happen in experience at moments of divine insight, like crashing, orgasm, or at the edge of sleep. When we don’t know what is happening but might. That the divinity within you truly may be found greatly within your constituents at the end when all is so unpressured that the split re-happens again in totality. Everything is allowed to break apart; and if anything were ever anything or even imagined, it can and must be real there in the recombination of all parts and motives that become the great thing—including us, including us two together, for the briefest of any moment, when light and void become irrelative, and inseparable. No longer two sides of a page, they are the flame that burns it, dynamic, an end of god and balance, a choral glissando at the end of time. Until then, we masquerade, and it could be that nobody notices.

Though I’ve seen you every second since I came to be in this room. Can I say it? That I’m jealous of the asses of those humans who bleat around rubbing appendages on things, who rub things and each other down, (sometimes on you!) and move and

run their mouths off with their bleating, who sometimes spill. I hate them. I’m jealous of their asses. Had they the respect for you they should they would lick (lick!) you, though I’m glad that they never did. I want to be set atop you. I want to roll underneath.

I am promised physical exasperation, I have always been potential, pent up, with a spring down my back and wings that won’t stop to flutter and won’t pretend to until unstopped universal flight. Were it a fool who wished he were an ass? I am both; also a raven and a doorknob.

Also I am here on this side-table, for they took me down when they left, placed my body here so close to yours, inches, even, from touching for the first time. And we have been this way for years, though you’ve been unkindly tarpaulin’d and I collect dust with my skirts in the air open; and I lay as if crestfallen, prostrate, crucified, wings and beak agape. And I am crestfallen; the room has not been lit for some time. The last—when I was moved—I was taken down with screws and carried in a man’s back pocket. The door hasn’t closed since. He travelled in the room, adjusting and removing the final things, blanketing the chairs, the table, and then he came to you, and sighed. He turned to sit and lowered himself, me first, so close to you I could feel something that just buzzed between us, a sign of electricity that I’m sure would have killed the man upon collision, something that pushed away all dust and left just the you and the me in the glob of creation of the first dawn, the planar spread of pulsing final, we two segments on a line and me alone and you alone in me and just this

man who nobody could recognize, bringing we two finally to we! And he whispering “Lenore” and watching me. He removed me from his pocket, placing me open chested on the small table near you, mouth gasping in horror, distance from you horrible. And then he sat on you. And then he covered you up.

It is believed that nothing can ever be touched. Just, it’s your electrons bouncing against other electrons, or magnetized against each other or something, and the atoms in your fingers never touch the atoms in another’s fingers, like a doorknob can never touch a couch, even were they to ever be finally against one another. Your fingers can never touch a pencil, or a keyboard. Similar to how a voice can never speak a thought except for using a language, how there could be no perfect communication but touch, were touch true, except in memory, the expanding original, or the end that breaks. How the words are broken thought, learned or given, accepted because what are you ever without them, and it’s beautiful, and it’s like some sort of technological beast designed and who walks you, and loses pieces in walking, and how every moment you are creating in your choice to even move or not, operating in the realm of imitation and novelty, everything as possible as any other thing, where imagination is revealed to be just belief in everything as it’s all true, like the love between a door handle and a couch. All necessarily plausible, because what can you ever sense that never existed, and what whatnot extant.

It’s bad, and like I’m laying similar to open near but never to touch you and horrible, or normal.

Wednesday, February 25, 2015 // The Statement

THE GREAT SUMMER BLACKOUT OF 2003

ILLUSTRATIONS BY MEGAN MULHOLLAND

7B

8B

Wednesday, February 25, 2015 // The Statement

I

saw her first through the fog that engulfed the courthouse in one swift embrace. I wondered if she would recognize me, even though I knew she wouldn’t. My car’s headlights were my shield, just as her teardrop eyes were safetly locked, protecting her from the truth. I guess I wouldn’t want to know me either, all things considered.

Her hands were small and strong. She was hunched over, as though she was carrying an enormous load upon her back. I suppose, in a way, she was. My eye focused on the wrinkle carved over her left eyebrow. I couldn’t help but think that I had put that age-mark there by accident, like a sculptor whose hand slips and leaves a line that was never meant to exist.

Her brow trembled. Don’t cry now, I encouraged silently from the warmth of my sedan. I can’t handle crying. Not now. She pushed an empty stroller, the ghost of her child playing peekaboo under its hood. The stroller was red, pierced with yellow stars and tagged with rainbows here and there. The woman didn’t seem to know the where of her destination.

She didn’t seem to have a choice in the matter. She was pulled by necessity, by the tug of guilt that she was the one still alive. If she stopped, she’d think and remember the hole I had ripped in her family tree. Her footprints dug deeper in the tread of yesterday’s walkto-forget. Smudges of dirt flicked up on to the backs of her legs.

I circled around the block, so she wouldn’t think I was following her. “There’s a parking spot,” you pointed out. But I ignored you and drove past the meter. I needed to see her one last time before it was my time to serve. In a moment of guilt-ridden masochism, I needed to see the mother’s tar-streaked tears, staining her lily-blossom cheeks. The little girl’s rattling laughter pounded in my head, stronger than it had the night that I silenced her.

We had parked outside of a quaint little house on a dark and quiet street. “Lovelock Court. That sounds like a nice one,” you said.

While you and I had been dancing swirly tangoes on each other’s skin, car leather sticking to our necks, she was stocking up on taffeta make-believe and glass-slippered innocence.

Coming out of our dizzy haze, I blindly flexed

ILLUSTRATIONS BY JAKE WELLINS

the pedal, and made contact with the runaway princess, whose frog prince waited in front of the car. She was a fly on my windshield, not making a dent as she collapsed on the road.

And yet, I’ve never felt more weighed down.

When had the world around me become so polarized? I had grown accustomed to the inbetweens of this half-caff, capri length world.

Suddenly, decisions needed to be made. Either we do or we don’t. We are or we aren’t. We live or we die. Yet, what was a life in prison but the slowest death known to man. The mother understood this much, I knew. She died a bit every day without her babe, while her treadmarked memory lived on in her head.

Would you visit me? I wondered. We had always said, that when the time was right, our child was going to be beautiful. Nights staring up at the ceiling imagining the chestnut hair, the brown eyes with my long slender nose and a bit of your freckles across the cheeks. She would have been a flautist. He would have been a doctor (a radiologist because he would get squeamish at the sight of blood). But our dreams were cracked like the pavement the mother walks on, day after day. It’s hard to fuck between metal bars, I wanted to say even though I hate swearing in front of you. I knew you would only understand if I was explicit.

But, she, the mother, and I, we were more alike than she would ever know. Both shackled in an endless reverie of the path not taken.

You squeezed my hand and returned me to the present. “It wasn’t your fault. You know that.” I looked once at the court’s four Grecian columns, looming ahead. My vision blurred and combined them into one fat cement wall, blocking my view. I turned to see my victim’s victimized mother, taking the lonely path she never saw coming. “But I blindsided her,” I said. “I didn’t give her the chance to choose a different way.” It’s not your fault, I thought, hoping that in some magical way, my thoughts could transmit through glass windows and highly polluted urban smog. She was looking for her prince. You can’t stop a love like that. I took the key out of the ignition, wiped a black fleck of mascara from the corner of my eye, and prepared my retreat into destiny’s cold, metal womb.

DESTINY’S CHILD Cammie Finch, RC junior