Mount Holyoke Review 01

The

Mount Holyoke Review Issue 01 Fall 2020 i

“Hope is the thing with feathers That perches in the soul, And sings the tune without the words, And never stops at all.”

– Emil y Dickinson

Cover Art: “Boxing” by Jackie Hahn ’24 Jackie Hahn is a Korean-American artist based in South Korea, focused primarily on printmaking and oil painting. They explore issues of identity and place in their work. iii

Staff Editors-in-Chief Olivia Brandwein ’22 Flannery Langton ’22 Liz Lewis ’22 Fiction Editors Morgan Sammut ’22 Ella White ’22 Poetry Editors Lila Goldstein ’22 Elle Provolo ’22 Business Manager Gwyneth Spincken ’21 Promotions Director Ava Provolo ’22 Senator David Nejezchleba ’22

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Readers Anna Baynton ’21 Rose Cohen ’22 Emma Pope McCright ’23 Karla Esquivel ’22 Maeve Freese ’22 Ansley Keane ’23 Rebecca Kilroy ’23 Sarah Miller-Bartley ’22 Regis Reed ’22 Cressida Blake Roe ’22 Hope Rogers ’22 Hannah Thukral ’23 Olivia White ’21 Rachel Wood ’22 Advisor Andrea Lawlor, Assistant Professor of English

We want to extend a special thanks to Margaret Connor ’23 and Kelsey Thomas ’20 for copy editing the final publication. We also want to thank our advisor, Professor Andrea Lawlor, who coached us through the creation of the Review with endless advice and wisdom on the literary world.

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Table of Contents Letter from the Editors ..........................................................................................vi Self-titled, Regis Reed ..............................................................................................2 man! i feel like a woman!, Mira Rosenkotz ..............................................................3 Mother, are you afraid..., Tasha Elizarde ...............................................................4 Romeo and Her, Regis Reed ...................................................................................6 Sew So, Olivia Brandwein ........................................................................................7 Onwanting, Tori Gernert-Dott ...................................................................................8 Call me (for mom), Mira Rosenkotz ......................................................................10 What Came Over Me, Morgan Sammut ...............................................................11 A Moment Gently Mixed, Luce Brandt ...............................................................12 the heat went out again, Ava Provolo ...................................................................13 Two Boys, David Nejezchleba .................................................................................14 A Response to “IV. Glinda the Good” and “Summer”, Mahmuda Alam ..........15 The Theory of Bodies, Gwyneth Spincken ............................................................16 Middle C, Flannery Langton ..................................................................................18 GRAPHOLOGY, Cressida Blake Roe ...................................................................22 a small list of things i’m trying to forget, Elle Provolo .........................................25 ode to a public park, Lila Goldstein ......................................................................26 Summers, Beata Garrett ........................................................................................28 The Mousetrap, Rebecca Burns ............................................................................29 In recent years, Liz Lewis ....................................................................................32 The Mourning’s Dawn, Megan Horner ...............................................................34 Rain, Pearl Conley .................................................................................................35 From the Diary of Iona Douglas Hawke, 1842, Emma Pope McCright ..............36 I Plan to Die by Firing Squad, Hannah Thukral .................................................42 Like David, Deanna Kalian ....................................................................................43 FOOLS by nor’easters, Mira Rosenkotz ...............................................................44 vi

Didn’t Sappho Say:, Regis Reed ...........................................................................45 Home is not always a house, Mahmuda Alam ......................................................46 Thursday, Tori Gernert-Dott ....................................................................................48 “Your heart needs your attention...”, Tasha Elizarde ..........................................50 presence, Eugenia Montsaroff .................................................................................52 growing, Fiona Milton ...........................................................................................53 Shenyang, Beata Garrett ........................................................................................54 Notes to St. Augustine, Rosemarie Cass ................................................................55 the day i cried at onion creek, Elle Provolo ..........................................................56 Silence, Pearl Conley ..............................................................................................57 CRYPTID, Cressida Blake Roe ..............................................................................58 i don’t thank the wasps, Mira Rosenkotz ..............................................................60 Why it took me a month to write I, Beata Garrett ...............................................61 10pm, Regis Reed ..................................................................................................62 it’s here, Eugenia Montsaroff ..................................................................................63 Untitled, Tori Gernert-Dott ......................................................................................64 When the Earth Broke, Gwyneth Spincken ............................................................65 perfect day for the beach (for poppa don), Elle Provolo ......................................68 Wanting is all we do, Beata Garrett .......................................................................69 Author Biographies .............................................................................................72

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Letter from the Editors Dear Reader, Welcome to the first issue of the Mount Holyoke Review.

In some ways, this collection has taken three years to publish. In one way, it feels like it’s been that long since we were all on campus, first assembling the contents for the print publication in the Cassani Lounge and planning the publication party for April 2020. In another way, it really has been three years since the three of us went to our first Involvement Fair in 2018 and were separately disappointed to realize there was no literary magazine on campus.

Our desire for a literary magazine led to research on past publications at Mount Holyoke. We realized there was a legacy of literary arts at the College, with the Blackstick Literary Society and other past publications.

We wanted to create a space committed to writing so that students had a place to showcase their work and find community.

In 2019, the beginning of our sophomore years, these loose ideas grew into a plan, first scrawled on library study room whiteboards late at night.

Toward the end of the fall semester, we applied to be an organization but were devastated to be rejected. This led to more brainstorming in a Google Doc called “Oof, what now?” We reapplied a week later, and to our eternal gratitude were approved early Spring semester. That’s when the org grew beyond the three of us into a group of over twenty kind and talented writers and thinkers. We met weekly throughout the spring to discuss the submissions we were receiving. By the time we were nearly done narrowing down what would be published, the pandemic struck the United States and we were sent home. The last meeting between the editors was one of the first Zoom meetings any of us had been to.

What began in warm, chattering rooms, in conversations crowded around laptop screens, was completed over Zoom calls and shared Google Docs.

This book is a little like a time capsule, its contents surveying the life and experiences of Mount Holyoke students before there was a pandemic.

While it has no defined theme, the pieces explore love, adventure, and viii

what it was like to be together–something so mundane that now holds so much significance.

In this publication we see an exceptional body of work, a testament to the strength of Mount Holyoke’s writers and readers alike. There is joy nestled between these virtual pages–the joy of words, of collaboration, and of a community that has evolved even in the absence of a shared space.

We hope you enjoy reading this book as much as we enjoyed putting it together.

Warmly, Olivia Brandwein, Flannery Langton, and Liz Lewis Editors-in-Chief

Self-titled i want to be loved in the sun call me tree, apple-cheeked and orange slice smile my spine hums the tune of may my tongue dripping honey i am autumn sunset soft pink kissing my knuckles my collarbone my elbows all grass singing in the breeze dancing along that curve of air that holds me in her shine: i am something radiant i want to be loved under the moon born for her and by her all celestial power and holy my voice wrapped in dreams my lips hazy i am every twilight wishes are made in these hands spinning stars my laugh alone serenading october skies sweet with songs sensing that pull of everything beyond what i can see: i am something the universe craves. i want to be loved. and i am. – Re gis Reed

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man! i feel like a woman! i came back into the room— you were holding the sheet from my bed out in front of you, you said i’m sorry, i didn’t realize— but i smiled shook my head letting your words roll to the ground fall lazily out the window i kissed you whispered what kind of woman would I be if i didn’t know how to get blood out of a sheet? you sighed but sang man! i feel like a woman! by Shania Twain not loud but loud enough for us we threw the sheet in the Dirty Laundry Corner instead of the bed we laid on the floor, on the brightly colored carpet that i had found downstairs last summer we breathed wayyy cooool bayyy-beeee love and watched ourselves dance on the walls it rained all day so we ran from pay-to-park to Sylvester’s we laughed and does anyone actually know the answers on the trivial pursuit cards you looked beautiful but how many times can i say something like that until it gets old— i hope we do someday holding each other in clean sheets, songs about love, forgotten

answers to the 1981 deck of Trivial Pursuit cards.

– Mira Rosenkotz

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Mother, are you afraid of your own body? On my worst days, I am afraid of mine.

Mother, are you afraid of your own body? On my worst days, I am afraid of mine.

I am 14 standing on the roof 8 floors up, watching ravens dance with strewn lunch crumbs as I wait for you to end work. I feel the kiss of spring’s breath imprint its fresh glow on my cheeks, my new yellow dress swaying beneath me like dandelion seeds. For the moment, I pretend I am a resilient sun.

There is a man sitting on the bench of the roof near me. Lifting his head, he shouts at me: “Your dress is beautiful!” and I rise, the breath of his compliment inflating my ego. He continues, and requests: “Your brown skin looks beautiful in that dress. Can I take a picture of you?” and my ego shatters, smiles, and flies inside before he can ask again.

I wonder: Does he know that a stranger can do anything with a girl’s photo? Does he know that the cost of the photo of a girl in her new dress is her reminder that there is always a cost to being seen as too beautiful?

Does he know that the problem with a girl becoming the sun is that men will continue to stare but blame her when their eyes burn out?

Sister, are you afraid of your own body? On my worst days, I am afraid of mine.

I am 16 or 17 and we are walking the streets of a city far away from where we grew up. I am excited to try “street food” because I don’t really know what “street food” is, and the travel magazines tucked in the back of our airplane seats taught us that no family vacation is complete without a little culinary exploration. We inch forward, trailing clouds across cemented summer sweat until spat! and all I see is a man wearing a slur on his tongue before I feel his spit slosh down the crown of my head.

On other streets we walk, you remind me not to talk back at men who remind us that we are chewable. I can never stop myself. I demand every 4

man who calls us “beautiful ladies” or “cunts, sluts, whores” know that my womanhood means nothing, especially when he demands my womanhood means weak.

Don’t forget: Men are chewable too, and I will spit them out like the street food they try to claim that we are.

Brother, are you afraid of your own body? On my worst days, I am afraid of mine.

I am 19 and confused because you are 15 with a girlfriend that I just found out about. Okay, so not a “girlfriend”. You claim you are just “talking” to her, but that doesn’t change the fact that she is in your room to “Netflix & Chill” while I am in the living room thinking about you as a baby boy playing baseball in the summers.

I try not to think about how the girl is white. How two years ago, you told mom and I that there is no way you’d ever marry a FOB girl. I try not to think about every time a boy at a party clasps my waist when I try to run away, because while I know from experience that nobody wants to marry the FOB girl, I know from experience that everybody wants everything that the world labels us as “girl”. I try not to think that these things are the reason why you are “talking” to this girl in the first place.

Can I ask you: Even if you are not afraid of your own body, what will make you understand that you might be the reason other girls are?

I am afraid of my own body. Because most days, I am afraid of what someone will do to mine.

– Tasha Elizarde

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Romeo and Her SHE SAYS I LOVE YOU IS FOR RICH PEOPLE. she says we are for more than that kind of hallmark, that we kiss in the beats between breaths like fish do riverstones, like voracious, like quick, like i, like, like you, like, so much, AND LIKE SILVERSTREAMS SHE BREATHES ME FULL OF SOULMAGICK. stargirl i say how do you know the way dead things move, and she says she can see them floating in my hip dips ‘honey dont you know?’ and she takes it there, playing me all fiddle,, and in her eyeshadow it gets animated i get it, i see, i am, spectres dancing in twilight bruises AND SHE HUMS MAYTUNES, FORESTFIRES, MAYBE ASTEROIDS. baby, she says, baby oh i turn for you.

– Re gis Reed

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Sew So Darling darn and mend old wounds.

Sit spooling through wear and tear.

Find within my carved compartments, the tools to cling to past patchwork.

Fabricate fortune with thread, the poor-woman’s new dress.

Fill in the holes Sew them closed.

Make mittens of the memories.

Pass Mother the needle so she may pass you this common thread.

Now Tell me, Darling Have you seen my scissors? – Olivia Brand wein

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Onwanting It is more of a chore than it has ever been a pleasure.

The little red dots scream for attention.

So do the people, in equally subtle ways.

Fish, Four Loko, and Fraternity Men Fighting for attention, feigning indifference.

Nobody reads these.

Go Pats.

I don’t like it, but it gives me something to talk about over a plate of fries or a cup of tea.

I suppose it’s nice. A near-constant reminder that in someone’s world, I’m wanted.

Or parts of me are, anyways.

Is it the part that spent hours agonizing About that perfect combination of characters?

Poring over every photo I’ve taken, Curating a gallery of relatability with a dash of aspiration.

One picture of my whole body (demanded).

One of my smile (highlight).

One with a giant foot (silly).

One with ABBA’s Greatest Hits on vinyl (stylish).

One on a carousel (whimsical).

One with a tree (lying).

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How desperately I want to be known outside of the frame.

How desperately I never want anyone To feel like they truly know me.

Warm body seeks warm body.

Warm body seeks affirmation.

Warm body seeks intimacy.

Warm body seeks whatever it can get. – Tori Ger nert-Dott

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Call me (for mom) Do you

remember when we went to Iowa squirrels are in the walnut tree this morning

that was a funny thing Finally.

I wonder if it’s the first one I can look around today for places to stay

we need to figure out what we all want

so sweet he forgot that he’s already been

I’m good now your new name

I can’t see all of them All years

last night for the first time standing on the step stool

at the end of the kitchen counter bless you with

peace, joy and laughter try again when you’re free

(and awake) We have the weekend

either way helps I love you

so much.

– Mira Rosenkotz

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What Came Over Me i can’t tell you what came over me, but there i was, walking by house after house, sticking to the dark so the shadows couldn’t see the horns that protruded from my scalp or the tips of my talons that scratched my thighs in the moonlight, when i saw them. a man and his wife together in their bed. the man had his back to his wife while her arms were wrapped around him, face buried in his neck. and i can’t tell you what came over me, but i found myself in the room and i was staring at this man. his hair was smooth, uninterrupted by horns, maybe brushed down silky by his wife. his jaw was strong and square. his teeth were contained within his lips. His eyelashes stood delicate on his closed eyelids. when his eyelids were open, did his eyes shine in the sunlight? if i plucked them from his face, would they shine as brightly in mine? his wife was nestled into his back. were her lips pressed to his skin? and i can’t tell you what came over me, but i found myself wrapped around his wife. i dared not put my face against her neck, surely then she could feel i was different, but i dared to let one of my arms fall over her and the tips of my talon brushed his shoulder. i traced along his arm, down to where his hands were positioned apart, one in front of his chest the other up near his eyes as though he were examining a flower. i reached out to see how my talons would look holding a flower and saw how much larger his hands were than mine, surely meant better to hold her and to care for her and to provide for her. But then. She turned into me, eyes still shut, her face almost, unbearably almost, against my chest and I can’t tell you what came over me, but for a second, when she turned and tried to tuck her tender face into my breast, my horrible, ugly breast, her face looked just like yours and that’s when I screamed and that’s when she screamed and that’s when the man woke up.

– Morgan Sammut

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A Moment Gently Mixed There are no edges today,

Brambles with arcing limbs twine,

in close embrace with the Goldenrod.

Leaves strewn in speckled collage.

Their last memory

a void of rushing air.

Empty boots,

kicked off.

NO SWIMMING. The lake, dimpled with rain:

its mirrored face now opaque,

dense and rippling grey.

To paint without seams,

Cerulean blue with a touch of cadmium red.

Mixed gently.

Brush strokes that slide down rough canvas

In the trickle pattern of rain that

blindly shines empty boots. — Luce Brandt

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the heat went out again the top of my dresser is empty and my ears are dry and hollow and bitter and my mirror is dirty my reflection is smudged and the sunset is vivid but not vivid enough and the moon is slowing down dragging through the mud and I want to tell stories but my throat is too narrow and soft and accepting and I am making my bed but I wish it was gone and I want to be like them, and I want to feel found — Ava Provolo

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Two Boys One deer eyes of wet cherries, glossy and dark pelt of clover honey, cinnamon and candle flame, thin and light immersed in the flittering green that handsomely arrived in spring.

Trampled roses, dried like old blood, sharp air like your mothers metal jewelry edges and wires that pricked your fingers and drew blood that fell in drops onto the pink carpet.

Two boys beady eyes like wild blueberries, ivory skin stretched over giant hands, bones protruding from their shoulders.

They grasped the deer gently, ripped the Aurinia saxatilis skin away from the ribs, which they snapped like carrots.

The lungs they probed like warm pie, delicately poked holes into the pink organ and plucked it out like a tick fat with blood.

The heart they left alone to beat in its broken body. ­­­­— David Nejezchleba

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A Response to “IV. Glinda the Good” and “Summer” Our twin brown bodies with black eyes A raised hand hurts but we never stop raising our hand(s) It is the first thing we learn To ask permission from that hand, that feeds you What does it mean if you never stop being hungry That love never fills your belly Forgiveness is hard to come by these days Does that make me the animal here Brown and black, bound in the palm, existing in a dead skin An animal would know when to leave I looked up at the night, pretending not to feel the blow Ask me how it feels to see stars My tongue is too bruised to curse But if I could, I wouldn’t For sins are hard to swallow First you choke on air Then you choke yourself This is what devotion looks like I cannot apologize for what you cannot understand When you refuse, that too is a sign You are past the point of Her You can stop _____ now — Mahmuda Alam

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The Theory of Bodies In that corner you sip your tea, or coffee, or whatever it is that warms you.

Shift your ankles. Feel that? That’s dust flattening under the damp of your feet. Rain-slicked ballet flats pocked with holes. Your feet are calloused, whitened, but only in spots. Looks like herpes, the same kind Malie gave you, can’t remember if it’s type one or two or what the doctor said, all you know is that you’re covered in chalky bubbles. Bitch, isn’t she, that Malie?

The sun was small and red when you left, a bloodied knuckle dripping itself through the window. High window. She liked them nearly on the ceiling, just like the hospital, but you’re done with that shit. Straightened up even better than she did, even though she has money and you only have blurry bedroom memories, Bills and Mikes and Jerrys, but maybe you should just start calling them all Johns now. Is that all you have? Oh right, you also have the herpes.

You fell in love with the sounds and bodies of food and put on eighty pounds. The doctor asked why, his eyes blue and shallow. Shallow, flattened by his glasses, like you could reach for his face and touch a cool picture instead. Don’t you know? You say. He shakes his head no. You get quiet, breathy, hoping your crazy sounds good enough to pass for real words. You want to make it through his snowy wrinkles right past his ears, into his brain, but you know he’s smart and puts walls around that thing.

Walls for people like you.

I’m preparing to be a chef, you answer, and he laughs, but you aren’t joking. You’re serious. Really? Damn. You tell him about that theory you have, that food projects spirits in the dark of your head, bodies of all kinds.

You see their curves through echolocation, taste echolocation, that’s what you’re going with, yeah. Because you have gifts.

Don’t you know? General Tso’s chicken is Mary. Lasagna is Rosie, soft and plush-armed. Caramel apples are Nidha, sporty but clutching candies in her fingers, just for you. Cheesecake tastes like Vanessa, smooth and doing the pirouette with you, all nice and white. Don’t you know that chocolate pudding is Monica, that french fries are Lusa, penne Dawn, baby back ribs Glory, raspberry vinaigrette like Malie? Don’t you know, you stupid fucking doctor?

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Go back to the ice cream shop, that pastel country from another time.

You see one of your Johns, you forget his name. He doesn’t even recognize you, he looks beyond you, into rocky road and cotton candy and berry bash. Get another coffee, or tea, because it warms you. Close your eyes. Forget that piss sour Malie and the mess of her fruit perfume. Forget the hospital and all the walls, and the windows, but you’re on your way to forgetting those things already, aren’t you?

Feel the drink, your mother drowning inside. Feel the imprints the raindrops left on you. Feel the dust they sweep up when the dark shuts around the store like a metal door, ink steel. Sit there and feel and wonder, as the store closes and the light turns off, where you’ll toss yourself next. Where will you forget and where will you be forgotten, you think, as the owner chases you out into the night.

— Gwyneth Spinck en

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Middle C These days, she was usually found sitting by the piano, rhythmically hitting the middle C over and over again. She had always figured her piece would start there, so simply, before taking the listener on some journey through sound and notes. Surely it would be an overture to a great movie, a reference to Hollywood’s Golden Age, yet stunningly modern. At times, she tried to write the movie script too. She had always been ambitious, so all of this was in her second grade journal. The only problem was that she never had a story to tell. That slowed all writing processes, and sometimes made her panic because the new scripts were laying out, mostly empty, and she never got more than a few notes into her piece. But still, she kept playing and studying, learning all of the famous sonatas and sonatinas, though never composing more than a few lines. Every artist she admired had been called on by someone or something, so she figured if she was patient enough, the same would happen to her.

In college she studied History, and no matter the class she wrote papers on wars because it was the one thing she would admit to not understanding. In her free time, she played middle C, and married a boy whose first words to her were about her chest size. On their first date, he agreed to always cook dinner as long as she stayed in the kitchen with him to keep conversation. By accident, they had three kids in rapid succession, each only eleven months apart. In those times between, she stumbled through a job as a researcher at a firm she didn’t know how to describe.

It was all very confusing in those first years. Tom, Callen, and Mary— who insisted on being called Butter— were all criers, and the boys had a mean side. When they were little, the kids sat and watched their mother at the piano, sitting back now hunched at the shoulders with age in front of the old, yellow-wooden piano, running through scales and songs she knew by heart. Butter, being the youngest and most outspoken, would ask questions. She was also the only one to stay to the end, when her mother would start up with her middle C routine of hitting the key and sighing like a deflated wind. Even after her brothers started school, she stayed by herself and watched her mother.

“I don’t like what you play at the end,” she would say when she learned 18

how, and each time, her mother would foolishly explain what she was trying to accomplish. It was all still too out-there for Butter, who at this age was a pragmatist, and liked things to be logical.

At this point in her life, the mother was thinking of writing her piece about Butter, a girl she found exceptional as many mothers find their daughters to be. ***

As Butter got older, she started playing piano. It interested neither Tom nor Callen, so the only person she argued with over practicing time was her mother. The older she got, the louder they yelled at each other to agree on the same predetermined times.

The boys found the instrument too delicate, but Butter’s only ever retaliation was to say “no! It’s cool!” It made her mother smile, but never the boys. They would leave books and chip wrappers on the lid that Butter and her mother had to rehome before practicing.

When she learned that hairstyle mattered, Butter insisted on keeping it short, covering whatever was left with outrageous bandanas. Until she filled out and began looking like a person rather than a tree, everyone would go up to her and her mother and ask if she was sick or if she was a boy. The answer to both was consistently “no” but the comments never bothered her. All she insisted on was her name, playing piano, and getting to climb trees even if her mother thought they were too high. But trees build pianos, making it all connected. In summer, when she or her mother played pieces in their den, the windows were left open and the music drifted onto the sidewalk and street and climbed up the trees and into the leaves where later it would fall into the ground. Sometimes they bent down to listen, and tapped their branches against the side of the house to the beat of the song. When Butter sat in the big oak in their front yard, she could hear her mother stumbling through songs or running across the keys. It sounded different out there, with the wind singing and the leaves clapping.

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From that oak, she could see everything outside the yard. It was near the edge, leaning over a fence that she used to boost herself up to the first branch. After school, Butter would sit up, unnoticed by the drivers below, and watch them through their windows. There was an industrial park up the road where the men who came by in loose slacks and ill-fitting button downs were headed. She imagined them going into those big buildings to point at different things: boxes and car parts and each other. The biggest ones always had beards and eventually she would learn to associate beards with ego. And for a secret while early in high school, she would try to grow one herself. A failed attempt but a sentiment that was far from over.

Thoughts like that only ever came up in the form of failed jokes. “You know when you tried to grow a beard in high school?” She would say later to new female college friends who never once would laugh or have any idea what she meant. That always left her feelings a little silly, and made her listen to movie soundtracks for films she hadn’t seen but wanted to pretend she had, to rebuild herself.

Even in high school she tamed her embarrassment with music pieces she didn’t understand. When she wasn’t listening to those, she was listening to her mother struggle, because things had taken a turn for the worse and were only getting worse. It started with a tumor but they heard it in her hands as notes were slowing and the beat of the middle C was different.

Scales were clumsy and soon impossible to play because she was so tired.

She lasted through Butter’s high school graduation and one month into what would have been her start of college. All that Butter’s father knew to tell her was how lucky she was to have a relationship so natural and full with her mother. Tom and Callen didn’t know what to say, instead they lurked around the house waiting for someone to play the piano. The trees waited too. That winter after she died, three fell in the yard, one blocking the road, the other two just denting the yard in a way that made it always look different.

In the last hours, Butter spent a lot of time with her mother’s hands. At that point she was unconscious, but her hands were still moving as they always used to do. The hands at that point were so small and bony and it was hard to believe they had ever held Butter’s body in full. Thoughts like that only happen in hospitals. The air in all other places is too busy, too 20

traveled, to make connections. Butter would find this out in the basement practice rooms of her school.

Sitting in those practice rooms, trying to make her mother’s original dream come to fruition she was shocked to find that the most irritating part of grief was that it did not allow her to think. She would find herself voice of ideas and at times basely sure how to lay out her hands. It was lonely then because when she was in the basement, barely anyone knew.

She would tell them later, in a few years when she had friends at school.

But those first months were spent along with the ghost of her mother floating somewhere above her.

Her hands by that time were startlingly big and dry, but usually could stretch all the way across the octave, from C to dull white C. She would hold down keys down and let the sound ring out and wonder if that was enough to be a song. But it was hard to tell because those rooms had no windows and no room for air or trees. Butter was on her own and the decision was only up to her. — Flanner y Langton

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GRAPHOLOGY She stared at the distant empty window. Drab-colored silhouettes she didn’t recognize drifted to and fro beyond it, in the airless cage of Recall.

The sight of them made her shiver, but she was shivering already. A nearby machine rattled and threaded out the faintest traces of heat, but that meant nothing to her. She had long since numbed to the depthless cold of anonymity.

A figure moved across her vision, closer than the others trapped in the glassbound horizon, and stopped in front of her. The small hole in the fleshy blur rather high up shaped a question. She didn’t understand it, but her head jerked back and forth in agreement, anyway. The hole might widen and swallow her otherwise. Though the rust bit deep into her bones, she knew she must still act the way she was supposed to. It used to be fun pretending she could rebel against her pattern of pre-scripted behavior, but not so much anymore, now that the joints were starting to creak.

The figure produced a square of pulpy material, and the block flashed across her dulled consciousness. Its cleanness fascinated her its regular lines in old-sky blue. Another article followed, short and slender like a directing shaft. The figure held it like a sixth finger and began to trace its point across the square. Viscous liquid moved like blood onto the whiteness; the disfigured purity hurt more than she thought she allowed herself to be hurt. She wanted to scream at the chemical smell and the spiking whirling dipping movements that tore across the virgin surface like raking claws, and the effort of holding in her revulsion made her tremble.

After a few moments of this torture, the figure turned the mutilated page around to face her. Her stiff eyeballs refused to make sense of the writing, but her body registered the lacerations as though they were etched into her flesh. Her pulse beat along those curves and sharps, figuring some comprehension after all: “What can I do for you? What do you need?”

Her jaw cracked when she opened it; how long had it been since she last spoke? Her tongue flopped against her teeth, a slug slung against pebbles, beaten insensate from disuse. “I applied for / Release / I / cannot go back / inside there.”

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More cruel movements along the blue bands. She watched because she couldn’t turn away: “I don’t understand. You can’t go back because you’d rather not, or because you’ve actually been forgotten?”

“I am not / Forgotten / that is the / problem / I have been / from the / start imperfectly / Remembered / Memory is a very / cold / country in / all directions.”

The hand balanced the stylus on the block; its shadow across the dented whorls threw a spear through her bones. The soft dark hole moved again, unintelligibly, but she nodded as she had before. She lost count long ago of how many times she had to nod, agree, submit, consent, in this ceaseless place. The figure bent forward to place the black-scarred tablet on her lap. “I’m afraid I can’t help you there. Not my department,” pounded the meaning around her eyes. “But is there anything I can offer you in the meantime?”

She moved her own hand, creaking, and removed the terrible shaft. An enormous power erupted through her, to seize and control the instrument of her intolerable pain. Harnessed, she could arrange her own annihilation and shed this useless cadaver at last. She raised the point over the page / the envelope of her person.

The figure moved, too slow, to stop her.

Black blood poured across the plane, drowning all sense; and her scream sounded of joy as the words flew in arcs and spirals that gave voice to her reality, bled out, Recalled, and Released from someone else’s memory—

The only girl in the room / with a mouth big enough to hold me / I want to hold her / I WILL NOT BE HELD / her hips nestle into my hands / I feel her desire / heat / I SHUDDER WITH FEAR / love me, baby / I’ll make you love me / close that mouth / fold your lips in silence / I SCREAM NO BUT YOU CAN’T HEAR ME / what easy territory / AN OPEN WOUND / stop fighting / I can break you / I will break you / I have broken you / I AM THE WRECKAGE OF THINGS THAT 23

ONLY LAST / UNBEAUTIFULLY / BECAUSE YOU LEFT ME TO STITCH MYSELF TOGETHER AGAIN / WITH TOO LITTLE THREAD / EXCUSE THE HOLES / EXCUSE THE WHOLE / BECAUSE IN YOUR IMPERFECT CONSTRUCTION OF RECALL / I NODDED / I SAID / YES /

The operative carefully picked up the remains of the notepad; they had never seen a Release like this before. Usually, the memories faded away of their own accord, worn through by tiredness, but this one burned out with the intensity of exorcism. The operative checked their brief and went out toward the room past the window. Somewhere inside, there was a girl who needed her identity back, now transformed into something as fragile and strong as a steel cord, more bitter than winter, more enduring than the stars.

END — Cressida Blake Roe

24

a small list of things i’m trying to forget it’s the minute a spark of regret ignited my stomach it’s the 5:55 am alarm screaming it’s eerie cry before mine replied matching the urgency it’s the hushed whispers buoyant with deflated confidence staying afloat by its unknown transparency it’s the smell of fresh cut grass stained with spilled bar oil rushed fingers delaying the Trigger it’s the acceptance of defeat a tender softening of pain laced inconspicuously with regret — Elle Provolo

25

ode to a public park i love a green pasture where people graze on sunlight. on this hill i can see the whole city! there’s the man i passed earlier with his shirtless, sweaty, denim shorts’d jogging, now meandering, now remembering his sudden, out of breath “how’s it goin’” and my startled, silent smile in response. there are the shiny downtown buildings, hulking and humble beyond the trees, with the windows you can’t see from the winding paths below. on this hill all the songs i’ve sung in choir come back to me. i can hear children singing, and they spread out my arms, and they open my hands to the sunlight that covers the park, that sparkles and shines on the downtown windows for us. and i want to lie down on the green, shaded grass on this hill for a while, among dandelions here, and smell the weeds, my own scent, all the other things growing. watch white puffy clouds drifting. sleep as the world hums and sighs.

26

i love that there’s space between the trees, and i love that there’s space for the people, for once. with a wide view of everything. with plenty of benches to rest on. ­— Lila Goldstein

27

Summers 8pm is time for cough syrup fed through phone lines as thin as our veins, the hugs, and okays over dinner We watch movies, make fun of actors joke we can act better sometimes our voices crack and we rush to prevent spills, blame the static Four-hour bus rides to me because you need to breathe, need me to hold your hand and watch you blink proof of your existence We keep talking to conjure a future where we can send our words through skin, muffled so their edges are softer We’ll keep a jar for every time we travel back for the sharp, monstrous things we may say because our mouths weren’t allowed to say “I’m hurt” until phone calls this summer — Beata Gar rett

28

The Mousetrap * “Hello!” exclaimed my little mouse. A week prior, I had found him in a fat mousetrap.

“Hello!” I said by way of response, hugging him affectionately in my arms.

“What happened last night?” he asked, this rodent.

“Last night?” I replied. “Oh, nothing...”

“Who was that man who came with you right up to our door?” he asked me again, this time more clearly.

For a minute, I said nothing. Then I responded: “Fine. But I don’t know where to begin...well, that is...in another life...that is, a past life...I was a prisoner of war.”

My mouse regarded me with curiosity. He began to say something.

“Please be quiet! It is difficult as it is,” I exclaimed. Immediately, I felt uneasy.

I explained myself, saying, “I didn’t mean it, little one. But every second that I speak, I see it before my eyes. Like a series of photographs, I see it.

Ja, like a series of photographs.

But always, I can taste it. I can taste the smell of fear, the smell of urine and bleach.”

“You don’t have to tell me anything,” said this rodent, this sweet angel.

“But who was this man? I also feel that I have seen him in a past life...but it has been many years since I last saw him...many, many years.”

“Nicolas!” (At first, I did not remember his name at all, and then I remembered it with all the force of a train hitting me head-on.) “My beloved inmate and the overseer of my heart. I believe...” My voice faded 29

to a faint murmur. “...that we...may have grown up together. When it all happened. When They came.”

“They?” interrupted the mouse suddenly.

“Yes, They, ” I clarified with impatience. “The men and women in white.

They took us, one and then the other, to...educate...us. It was my own fault, I suppose. They saw in us a little of the spirit of the revolution. Back then, I actually had patriotism for my country...ja, maybe too much.

And him, Nicolas—of course, he was sometimes too aggressive, I suppose, but he never failed to make me laugh, even in the deep dungeons of my memory...”

I played with a piece of my hair as I described the prison of my horror: “The room was white, the floor dirty. There was no place for me to sit, not even a chair and definitely not a bed. My first inquisitor, who was himself sitting, of course, in a chair, pointed his finger at something on the board, where he had written in red the theme of our meeting: ‘Opening the Channels of Communication.’ The man had black, gelled hair and blue, shifty eyes. At his side, a woman with wide, brown eyes and hair in a long, orange braid told me, calmly, ‘We can place you in a room where there is nothing to see, nothing to hear, nothing even to feel. We can have you undergo complete sensory deprivation, unless you cooperate.’ But the man, he told me—My little one, he told me, ‘We can sit you in a plane.

The middle seat. You won’t know where you’re headed. A twelve or thirteen hour trip.’

“At that moment, I realized that I was rocking back and forth on the dirty floor. But his menacing words had the effect of teleporting me back to reality. I tried to breathe. Slowly. Great, deep breaths.

“They took me outside. Later, another interrogator demanded that I tell her who I consider to be my family. With whom was I closest? She was a young, thin woman, but her eyes were hard, and I felt afraid. I thought of Nicolas, but where was he? He had disappeared. But my family, my family, my family...

30

“Fear. Fear. Fear. I can still feel the moment when my soul left my body and looked down on me from the ceiling of my nightmare. “‘Nicolas, please. Please come and take me away,’ I prayed. I prayed to him and I prayed to God. I prayed and I prayed and I prayed.

“To my surprise, they didn’t want to know about my parents or grandparents but about Nicolas. I didn’t know why. We hadn’t had sex or even kissed. And where was Nicolas, my great warrior with his bow and arrows? I was told that he was a coward, that he was hiding, and that he had never loved me.”

It was a Tuesday when they released me from prison and now several months have passed.

But even so, life is a spiral, and it would seem that we are destined to repeat ourselves unceasingly. But where is the compassion, the human decency? Where is even the desire to know the story, the whole story? We humans are the true mice, always hungering for a slice of cheese.

I told all of this to my mouse, but he had fallen asleep. So I hugged him and bade him farewell, wishing for his next vacation to go well, while the face of Nicolas, his lips parted, was imprinted mockingly on my heart.

— Rebecca Bur ns * This story was originally submitted in French and in English as a self-translation exercise for the Mount Holyoke College course French 320: Romance Languages Translate.

31

In recent years In recent years these drooping ears have heard little aside from the bitter crackle of old bones And the creaks and the moans of floorboards and worn joints alike It’s difficult to watch these ragged limbs Grow thin, grow thin Til all that’s left is bone and skin Ah, the skin, that tired, fraying fabric Threadbare around the wrists The elbows The neck And I can tell my skin grows thin Because the veins beneath have never seemed so blue Bluer than the churning sea The skin, the skin, Has given up concealing them But that secret is safe with me In recent years these turning gears Have slowed, have slowed To the pace of a slug on pavement road With nowhere to be no one to see And nothing to do but trudge Oh, but it’s not all bad After all, the gears still turn This body moves quite nicely for its age And it’s not all bad The salt air still visits these lungs each morning What does it matter if I crack and snap and pop and click and moan and slip

and groan With every step To the off-kilter beat of a constant limp 32

But that’s a gift The earth’s been kind to me To send my body off with a symphony A crack a snap a pop a click a moan a slip a groan A beat, a tune A one man band—come see the show!

It won’t be long before I go In recent years these growing fears Have settled in me Comfortably But it’s not all bad For I am comfortable too And when it is my time And it won’t be long now No, it won’t be long now When it is my time I’ll go out with not only a bang But with a crack and a snap and a pop and a click and a moan and a slip

and a groan With music — Liz Le wis

33

The Mourning’s Dawn Would the light glinting through my window warm my frigid bones?

I lay myself down on wooden floors, let the grain grip my fingertips.

There.

In the blistering dawn, I can breathe better than in our bleak, barren sheets.

I miss you. – Me gan Hor ner

34

Rain Back home, the rain is soft.

It falls in slow sleepy drops And finds a home in the old cherry tree on Cumberland, the one I used to climb on my way home from school.

The blossoms reach out to accept the sky’s offering, cradle late-June showers in their trembling petals.

The rain slices sweetly through the searing Carolina summer, quiets the heat of the pavement, just a little.

Here, the rain comes in barely-there mist, or in sharp urgent sheets.

It does not slip gently from the sky in a pink-tinged southern shower.

Here, I stand on the bridge and watch the sky scatter itself across the lake, and I miss the cherry tree.

But the loose bricks on Cumberland do not hold the sky’s reflection in their surface.

I know more now than I used to-about the bridge, and the trees, and the rain.

Here, the New England mist turns my skin a little silver, and here, I have learned to love the sky from a new angle, and here, I am almost home.

– Pearl Conle y

35

From the Diary of Iona Douglas Hawke, 1842

Thursday, 14th April

Clear skies today. I must have hauled ten buckets of water to scrub the floors and the front stoop. The walls need whitewashing too, but I can’t afford to pay for paint. Nevertheless, I am determined that this house will not fall to ruin. The house, my garden, the sea–this is all I Have.

This afternoon I went to see the lawyers again. I must have sat in the waiting room for over an hour, planning out exactly what to say–but it was no use. Mr. Whipple was adamant: one has to wait seven years to declare someone dead.

“But my husband is dead,” I told him, “I can feel it in my bones.”

“He is not legally dead, only lost at sea,” Mr. Whipple said to me over his wire-framed glasses, as if I were a child, and I knew he would not budge.

“Fine,” I said, “If the law will not give me what I’m owed, I’ll just have to earn it myself.”

It has been thirteen months since I heard news of the shipwreck. If I can survive five years and eleven months more, I will have the annuity my husband promised me–even from the grave, he denies me my freedom. My God, there is nothing in this world so disappointing as a man!

Friday, 15th April

Fog off the water in the morning, rolling over the land like a great woollen blanket. In the afternoon, I visited my sister Hannah. In her house something is always going wrong: the servant is lazy, the cutlets burned, the children misbehaving, a dish broken. Today her oldest boy is in bed with a fever, and Hannah has headaches and fainting spells. Sometimes I wonder how it’s possible we share the same blood, we are such opposites.

“The children are impossible today,” she told me from her sofa. “Thomas needs constant tending, and the others are so noisy! They have been 36

stomping about all morning jumping on our bed and trying to put their toys in the fire.”

“I could help with them if you need rest,” I said.

“No no, I have everything under control,” she insisted, “I just hope I’m well enough by tomorrow evening. The Hills are giving a party and I simply couldn’t miss it for anything. I want to wear my new green taffeta, but Mr. King says the calico will do.”

I have always thought it is very silly for women to call their husbands by their last names, as if they are only acquaintances and not two people who are meant to spend their whole lives together. Hannah thinks it is very grand though to call her husband “Mr. King” instead of his Christian name. It reminds her of how far she has come up in the world, to a home with a pianoforte and fine beeswax candles for the evenings and a servant to help with the cooking and cleaning.

Sunday, 17th April

The winter’s biting cold has returned, and I almost froze to death on my way to church this morning. The ospreys have returned to the nesting platform I built last spring–I like talking to the birds much more than to people. My sisters used to tease that I was as stubborn and solitary as a cat, but surely even cats are sometimes lonely in their solitude.

Wednesday, 20th April

Big cumulonimbus clouds on the horizon. Last night little Thomas’s condition worsened, and Hannah had me sit up with her until the fever broke.

By that time it was well after three in the morning, and Hannah offered me her spare room to sleep in but I refused–I had no patience with her.

I am so exhausted, I can scarcely keep my eyes open. Still, there are nets to mend and bread to bake and washing to do and I must not show any weakness.

37

I got another letter from my father today, begging for money I don’t have.

He’s in debtor’s prison in Boston now, repenting I hope for ruining our lives with his foolish investments, for marrying me off in exchange for empty promises.

Thursday, 21st April

This morning when I went outside, the sky was as red as blood. The sight of it stopped me dead in my tracks. A storm is coming–I can feel it. The clouds have been gathering since yesterday, and a southerly wind is blowing.

But luckily, the tempest has not arrived just yet.

This morning while the earth was still soft and damp, I began to prepare my garden for planting. I broke up the soil with my spade and put down all the fish bones I’ve been saving for fertilizer. As soon as it is warm enough, I’ll plant potatoes, carrots, turnips, beans, and cucumbers. If I can save enough, I’ll have rosemary and thyme too. I saved room in front of the cottage for violets, marigolds, and roses. In the autumn I’ll press and frame them and hang them on the walls, to add a little cheer to the bare white boards.

After I had scrubbed the earth from my hands, I made butter. Tomorrow I’ll make cheese. I cleaned the soot from the panes of the lanterns and beat the dust from the old rag rug. When the tide went out, I dug for clams. Soon I’ll have to scrub the floors again–all I do since I married is cook and clean and fetch and mend. Sometimes it makes me want to scream.

Later

The storm has arrived. The rain beats against the windows like a hundred angry fists, and the wind whistles down the chimney and threatens to put out the fire. Usually I can see the beam of the lighthouse from the northern window, but tonight even that is obscured in the downpour. I’m praying for “those in peril on the sea”–except my husband. That may be sinful, but I don’t much care.

38

Friday, 22nd April

The storm has passed, thank God, but I don’t think my prayers for safe passage were answered.

I was awakened late last night by the ringing of the church bells–three bells over and over, the signal for a shipwreck. I threw on my coat and boots, wrapped a shawl around my head, and rushed to the cove. The rain was falling so hard and thick, even with the light of my lantern I could barely see. At the cove, the men from the life-saving crew were gathering in their cork vests and Mackintoshes.

“What’s happened?” I asked Mr. Davenport. He pointed out towards the rocks, and I saw the wreck: a wide three-masted clipper, listing hard to port while its sails flapped helplessly in the gale. I shielded my eyes with one hand and could just see the spray of the waves against the hole in the hull.

“We’ve got to row out to her, boys,” Mr. Hamilton shouted over the wind.

“Rescue the survivors before they’re dashed on the rocks.”

“It’s too risky!” the constable shouted back, “The winds are too bad!”

“You should go home, Mrs. Hawke,” Mr. Davenport said to me. “There’s no need for you to be out in such a storm.” I told him I wanted to help, but he ignored me and kept arguing with the others.

There was a deafening crash, and a bolt of lightning leapt from the sky and struck the foremost mast of the ship–I screamed in spite of myself.

“That settles it,” said Mr. Hamilton, and we all rushed down to the pier.

The men climbed into their boats, but they left no place for me.

“Go home, girl!” Someone shouted at me, “This is men’s work!”

They pushed off from the pier, leaving me behind. I did almost consider turning around, but then I saw it: a white shape in the water, the outline of an arm and hand.

39

The men were rowing towards the prow of the wrecked clipper, the body floated near the Stern.

“Lord, save me from men’s stupidity,” I whispered to myself, and I climbed into my own little dory and set out.

I have never been so frightened in my life–not even on my wedding day.

The waves higher and angrier than I’ve ever seen, hardly able to manage my oars, thunder and lightning crackling above. Several times I truly thought I was about to die–but I looked out at that floating shape in the water, gathered all the courage I had, and rowed onwards. With every stroke of the oars I wrestled Poseidon to move forwards. The rain plastered my hair to my cheeks and filled the bottom of the boat with choppy water. But somehow, I don’t know how, I rowed on.

At last I reached the clipper and the floating shape. The ruins of the ship were a dreadful scene to see–like the wreck of the Hesperus, drenched in salt and frost crystals. Shards of the broken hull floated like dead fish in the water. As I watched, the ship creaked and groaned and tilted even further to port, the masts jutting out almost at right angles to the waves. I saw a flash of fire lick the sails.

The white shape was the body of a little girl, her dress billowing around her. Her eyes were closed, but her unconscious hands still clung to a scrap of broken board.

“Hello there!” I called out for the men to help me, but my voice was lost in the storm. I edged my dory closer to the girl, so close the boat bumped against the board she clung to and I could see the blue of her lips.

I shook her shoulder. She didn’t move. I shook her again–nothing. I leaned so far out I thought I was sure to capsize, wrapped my arms around her waist and hauled her body over into the boat.

The girl coughed and sputtered as her body hit the floor of the boat, but she soon fell silent again.

“Wake up, wake up,” I said to her, but she did not move. I cradled her 40

head in my hands and turned it to the side so the water could drain from her nose and mouth.

Another bolt of lightning split the sky. It was not safe to stay on the open water. I rowed back to shore as quickly as I could and dragged the girl’s body up onto the beach.

“Mrs. Hawke!” Mr. Davenport and Mr. Hamilton were struggling towards me with a half-conscious rescue of their own. “We must get these people to safety in town immediately.”

“My house is closer,” I said, “I will take them.”

“Can you walk, lad?” Mr. Hamilton said to the young man they were carrying. The man nodded weakly.

“You head back out, Hamilton,” Mr. Davenport shouted over the wind, “I can take him from here.”

We carried the two survivors up the hill to my cottage and laid them out in front of the fire, and soon I was left to tend them on my own. I might have sent for Hannah to help me, but it seemed more convenient to do everything myself. I stoked up the fire to a blaze and changed their salt-stiff clothes for flannel nightshirts. I held the little girl’s hair while she vomited salt water over the slop bucket. The young man has fallen into a sleep I cannot wake him from. When I had done all I could I half carried, half dragged the bodies into bed with an extra blanket and the warming pan.

I meant to keep watch over them from my chair by the window, but some time in the small hours I finally succumbed to sleep.

In the morning Mr. Davenport called, his hat in his hands. The men searched all night and into the morning too, until their hands were raw from rowing–but there were no survivors.

– Emma Pope McCright

41

I Plan to Die by Firing Squad I plan to die by firing squad.

Not tied to a tree though, that’s played out I want to be tied to the replica of the Eiffel Tower in Paris, Texas.

I will be wearing a Versace ball gown and Jimmy Choos.

With one quarter of PB & J made to my exact specifications in my right hand,

and the collected works of Shakespeare minus Titus Andronicus

(obviously) in my left.

Shooting at me will be: The remaining members of the cast of SNL’s second season The two living Beatles The third best Elvis Impersonator in Reno on any given Tuesday And of course, Mets slugging first baseman “Polar Bear Pete” Alonso.

My last words will be “Here we go round the prickly pear” A line from a poem I will never live to understand It might puzzle my executioners Perhaps they will look dumbfounded as they pull the triggers on their

revolutionary war-era Muskets.

I devised this plan in the passenger seat of my mother’s car.

A place where I am much more likely to meet my end.

With a John Denver song I have heard thousands of times playing in the background, Talking about character development in Broadway musicals, Or the poetry in Taylor Swift songs, Or just listening to the story of how they forgot my Aunt Colleen at home

when her family went on their annual trip to Lake George.

My last words will probably be “Mom, if I had a nickel for every time I

heard that you got all the way to Saratoga before someone realized

she wasn’t in the car– – Hannah T hukral

42

Like David Psalm 38:7: “For my loins are filled with burning; And there is no soundness in my flesh.”

1 Kings 19: 11-12: “...but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a still small voice.”

David: king, lover, psalmist strumming the lyre’s strings; Can that one have known my sequestered suffering?

Could such a mighty man have echoed my feeble cries Centuries before my ancestors’ ancestors were alive?

My loins also blaze, my bowels baked and branded by pain.

The fire licks and bites, makes its brutal, bitter way Upward, burning its path through my stomach to my throat.

The acrid bile, splashing, singes, as briny waves batter a boat.

Like David, I am weak, withering, cowering in a cavern, Silently scrawling the scream I have not the strength to whisper.

Like David, drowned in darkness, I put my pain in poetry, For there is a fire in my bowels, but there is also a fire in me.

I wrestle with my wounds just as David wrangled the bear; My Goliath is my illness, and health my perpetual prayer.

To God I cast my hopes, as in the darkness David did.

Only Saul is not the huntsman; my own crumpled carcass is.

Feverishly feeling like this cannot be my fate, I stagger into the future knowing I never can escape.

Yet still I scratch my story into this apathetic paper Just like David, all alone, still cried out to his savior.

And although I know my story will never be enclosed In a gospel so renowned the story always will be told, Every day, my song in a “still small voice” I’ll sing, For there is a fire in my bowels, but there is also a fire in me.

– Deanna Kalian 43

FOOLS by nor’easters

to find the fools like us showing teeth in winter to defrost the hands shoelaces and numb fingers the earth holding us hard against her when frozen, when night, when waiting

to hold them closest/longest honey evenings burn each other ( to prolong this heat ) and everything else we have found one night in late ______

to let them go be sing hold you slip into the world – Mira Rosenkotz

44

Didn’t Sappho Say: it began with these things, this dirt and this coffin, with Holy and Tempered. body traced, body trapped, in it souldust and sunstar, in it root and tree and rock, we. it began bush and twig, that hand and that skin, with Ending and Forever. souls like eyes, meeting, in that an inferno, in that graywater and seakiss, you. it began as all things do, with infinities and finities, with You and I? – Re gis Reed

45

Home is not always a house She looks at me Forces her hand down my throat Rips out a string of words A tangled ball Stripping it down into a thread of lies She does not recognize The veneer overtop the delicate stories in her palm It is the only way You know (Amake bishash koro) (Believe me) I step out of my body Againagainagainagainagainagainaga...

She calls me her little bird But I was placed in her nest Existing on filtered terms I don’t remember ending up on the ground She calls me her kolija, her liver She can’t live without me You can though She does When she calls, I don’t pick up When I call, she doesn’t pick up Homeostasis In stasis, no home Mama, can I come back?

1. I have those wings. They are larger and longer. Better.

They are proud, can you believe they had a price The red on your neck tells me you didn’t read the fine print You won’t find heaven in the small of your back That split sky hides the light, you can’t follow it Stop trying

46

2. Battles do not always have a winner and You have forfeited His grace Before He takes your life back Remember You can bring someone with you Blue is not just a color, gold will be the last thing you see That blade, don’t forget to watch its path 3. Defiant. Defying what exactly?

How will you speak with the red choking you You put it in your mouth The other colors can’t won’t save you Which is worse? goldgoldgoldgold Gold comes from the sun, but yours will not keep your warm I understand your eyes, do you remember the name Your brown skin is black is your braided, beaded hair The white across your body has risen Have the lack of fear hold it back —Mahmuda Alam

47

Thursday The stench burped out by the school bus, white-hot and acrid, was only a minute gone before we took off to the woods. Even on windless days, the leaves on the trees rustled their invitation. Haylie’s heels screamed on the blacktop, so loud that, if I closed my eyes, I could have followed her anywhere. Not that she wanted me to. But little sisters are harder to shake than those old glass ketchup bottles at the diner; you think the liquid on top is gone, but it comes out first anyways, pooling thick below the red.

Kip tagged along that day too, my twin in every way excepting those who made us. His Sketchers brushed along the pine-needled ground, red and blue flashes showing the sun dapples who’s boss. I knew he had a lychee jelly and a Kit Kat in his backpack, but I didn’t want to ask for them yet.

We were barely over the crest of the hill.

Beneath our feet, blacktop turned to stone turned to gravel turned to dirt.

Haylie screeched with joy as she slid down the little ravine to the path, and Kip barreled down after her, caking mud over the lights of his shoes. My descent was far more cautious, gingerly picking my toeholds as a I looked for snakes and stray animal bones.

“If you don’t hurry up, we’ll leave you here.” My sister was a speck in the distance, not even stopping to yell at me as she tore through the underbrush.

Kip didn’t stop either. They had left me behind, as always, even before I was out of sight.

My legs weren’t yet so long, and by the time I could see the clearing at the end of the path, I could hear the hefty, hollow crunch of cinderblocks colliding. The golden-tinged afternoon sun was blinding as I stepped out from the shaded path. Kip called me over to help him build stairs out of the scattered blocks so we could clamber into the hollow cement cylinder in the middle of the clearing. In five steps, the grey swallowed us whole.

We stole the name for this magic place from a bestseller-turned-blockbuster, but nobody died here. Instead, we pressed our backs against the 48

sunbaked walls and opened our schoolbags, putting our times tables and other treasures on the leafy carpet below.

He placed the lychee jelly in front of me like an offering.

We didn’t know how long those cement pieces had been there. Kip said since the time of Lord of the Rings, and I said since ancient Rome, and Haylie called us both stupid before running off to look for sticks to hold up her hoodie like a roof. I heard her ask Mom later that night, but she didn’t say anything, turning back to the Crock Pot with a laugh, trying to keep a dumping ground in the woods as sacred for her children for as long as she could.

– Tori Ger nert-Dott

49

Your heart needs your attention, right here right now “Your heart needs your attention, right here right now Your heart needs your attention, right here right now Do you feel?

Yes, I feel.

And, do you heal?

Yes, I heal.

We’ve got all of our medicine, right here right now We’ve got all of our medicine, right here right now Do you feel?

Yes, I feel.

And, do you heal?

Yes, I heal.” an ode to the ancestors: I am at the party with the other people like us, mouths juggling karaoke and pancit.

This household of happy is not built on Philippine land, it is built between the constellations of America. Our whitewashed breath is your ancestral legacy, each question I ask you another colonizer’s victory. I do not know who we are, who you have asked me to become, and I am sorry for not wanting this sooner.

In my dreams, I have become an island woman.

Warm weather kisses my cheeks and my mother stretches her hands open because there is more than just one way to pray, and my favorite is to welcome. At this party

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we call ourselves by no other name then “our people�. When I catch myself sailing the sea away from my heritage, it is our people who plant searchlights in the palm trees.

Ancestors, I apologize for what I have stolen from you.

I have stolen your skin without paying the cost of culture, of recognition, of understanding where I come from.

I know there is no difference between stolen land, and stolen skin.

I know I cannot ask forgiveness for rejecting, and for not knowing.

But I promise now to do more than tell colonizers who I am when they ask to know. I promise now to earn the skin I have stolen and cannot return.

And together, pamilya, we will emerge, unearthed from the wreckage. – Tasha Elizarde

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presence “something old lives out there,” they tell you

(for the sake of the story

it does not matter

who is “they” or where is “out there”). you had a dream last night that you were inside of a great and gentle beast.

there were wolves gnawing at it and they freed you from the flesh but the ribcage remained as a bony embrace. when you first moved into your house there was an iron horseshoe nailed to the door. it fell off recently and now you’re wondering if you should put it back after all something old lives out there – Eugenia Montsarof f

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growing we become too attached to pain we are bound to it watering and feeding it drinking less so it can drink more, give it a little miracle grow if it’s hungry we let it weave into our walls and build fences around our homes it latches onto us like ivy a noose of daisies around our necks rose thorns scratching up the windows lilies shoved down our throats we can’t decipher where it ends and where we begin vines twist around my veins killing one means killing the other I can’t put down my watering can or take out my shears because if I try to pull out the roots my bricks will crack and crumble I have no plaster for my walls and no paint for my doors I may be a skeleton but look at this beautiful garden peeking through my ribs I am no longer empty this garden is my home look at my garden isn’t it lovely, overgrown?

– Fiona Milton

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Shenyang I think of rivers salting skin, unfolding fields and cities stacked upon each other like lovers, a sky short-stopping on my people. Balls rolling on streets towards scraped knees and robots singing from skyscrapers, asserting themselves as present. Outlasting and archiving us. A city I’ve never touched but which I’ve seen so much it feels like distillation of an old love.

Creation myths are birthed every hour and eyes roll to the heavens, to hell, back to earth & grime fruit splitting mouths like oceans — Beata Gar rett

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Notes to St. Augustine O Lord, make me chaste But not quite yet...

Let me linger in bars, or on the smoking patio with strange men, let me proceed with misguided seduction in misguided parts of town, with no one sensible awake, around.

Rolling on lawns, living in leaves of grass, wearing swimsuits with no fabric, no imagination, lots of ass.

On the shore, washed up or in line, let me carry on believing salvation may be lifted in gyrations and hippy grinds. —Rosemarie Cass

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the day I cried at onion creek it was the day i became hollow and transparent the void was illuminating a vulnerable glow and the bones in my body rearranged themselves to fit the vast emptiness the tears stung for the fire in my lungs burned and burned and it needed to escape the sepulchral walls of my skeleton it was the day i drowned washed away by the cursed moon’s powerful gaze and i saw my reflection in the clear water the unrecognizable face of a person lost and gone — Elle Provolo

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Silence

After Heather Christie Last week I broke my jaw clenched it so hard the bone snapped and the back of my mouth turned jagged and red every time I spoke—so I didn’t speak and I went to the hospital so I could let them wire my bones back into working order and it wasn’t until after the x-ray when I was back in the waiting room that I remembered it was never broken at all this is just how I live now perhaps I have grown weary of holding this weight so the loneliness has filled my bones instead and I bit down on my own silence so hard that it made its way into my jaw and maybe—maybe this will not change and I will simply grow used to swallowing sound — Pearl Conle y

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CRYPTID Define time: all the times you said we would make it out together, like some prep school Bonnie and Clyde (or Thelma and Louise, or Rogers and Hammerstein. It was all of them, and none.) But my time is not your time, and it isn’t the same time, either, as when we first drove into the desert.

(It doesn’t matter, especially, what desert, but a smattering of cactus is encouraged. The sky always beats like open wings. Is the view clear enough?

It’ll be important.)

(I hope someone’s paying attention. I’m not just talking for my own amusement, here.)

Set the scene: the time was 2:32 in the afternoon when we stopped at the gas station in the last town with a name and you bought us scorpion lollypops. Provisions, you said with your false humor. Meaning: (1), supplies for a journey. (2), insurance against a known liability. The liability was the nonexistence of definitions. I wasn’t definitive enough for you. I hover between identities like the suspended Y of the brittle insect, catatonic in sugar syrup. I stared at the one you gave me in fascination, wishing I knew how the candy makers first came up with the idea, or if it had been only an accidental encounter of matter. I felt some fellow sympathy for this confectionary freak.

When the car ran out of gas halfway to nowhere, you invoked both conditions: last one to reach the stinger pushes the car the first five miles.

Somehow, I didn’t lose, despite the strange rapture of self-consumption.

You would rather burn out your muscles than your tongue. This was the time I traded for the privilege of sitting in the cab of your beat-up Subaru and cradling your soft vintage jacket, which deposited the dust of other deserts and other adventures over my lap. I slipped it on, hoping it might finally contain me. But it was only a reel of corduroy, after all. I looked like a kid playing dress-up (as Clyde, as Louise, et al. My face is sexless and obscure.) I teased you out of the rolled-down window and wondered when I’d ever remember that I’m not a precocious twelve-year-old show58

ing off to the grown-ups. But that’s just another version of myself I’ve never been able to shelve.

The second time we drive into the desert, I take my truck. You sit invisibly beside me, constructed out of Blink-182 lyrics and disheveled paper. Your toned muscles rest in someone else’s bed. Your jacket accumulates the odors of new closets. Missing you, missing you, I fold away your tired synonyms. Twilight collects on the window, and the only poem worth writing is the one I know I cannot write. The verses hang between truth and falsehood and look a little too much like real life. Instead, taking the road for my lover, I pour out fantasies along the miles I leave behind me. Some of them come back later, as casualties of the journey. Still, I mount the heads on the walls of my skull and admire the bared teeth, glad they died trying to defy something—even if it was only the restrictions of genre.

The last time I drive into the desert, you won’t recognize the person who comes out the other side. Coyote-Heart, Sandstorm-Eyes. My fingertips tap out the tarantula’s mating dance. Rattlesnakes twine through my veins, shedding yesterdays. The living bones already lie bleached beneath the sun, and the distant mountains desire me more than your empty arms will. The wind roars down to seize me in its claws and carry me aloft.

I have found it very pleasant to ride on the back of the sky. There is no time to define when living up there, and no self to identify, either, never knowing whether coming or going, but still somehow disappearing between now and the horizon.

(There now. Isn’t that nice and self-reflective? Thank you, thank you. I’ll be here all week. Sixpence at the door and a little extra is always appreci— Cressida Blake Roe

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i don’t thank the wasps mountains in eyes and a pack of gum carry home to ‫אמא‬ soft rain child in a hurry slip slide down so, so far down into the west so far it becomes east again where there is no sand anymore, only rocks where the rocks at night turn into ‫מים‬

‫המים שלי‬ to sing to our hearts on the living room floor red carpet itchy, old stereo skips/scratchy around and around and around disc skip to disc 5

‫בוקר טוב‬ with

...‫מודה אני‬ fir and pine drier before november hits temporary housing for late season wasps

‫אבל אני לא מודה לצרעות‬

i don’t thank the wasps — Mira Rosenkotz

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Why it took me a month to write I As a kid I skipped over English, shuffled all the in between words deemed unnecessary like I, tucking them into all the corners of a house where ghosts ask a child for absolution so they dip their hands into white paint and layer their faces, dreaming of mirrors and perfect tongues if I write with too much I’s and me’s understand it took a month to find them pressed and wilted throughout thin days — Beata Gar rett

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10pm it’s candles in wine glasses and golden shapes lining the walls; the slip of her dress and the shadow of another: backlit sits the spine. it’s a boat and a sea and it drifts like minds don’t; simple, rocking soft; bird’s wing gentle, safe. unfamiliar. thunderstorms and hurricane winds, ares’ breath sharp like whip cracks and knives, they all fall silent this night. . . . i wonder if it’s you.

— Re gis Reed

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it’s here the dark is closing in now

faster. faster. ink spreading through a glass of water. no more morning birdsong

breaths puff out

in ghostly predawn,

a reminder of something visceral and true. some day in a while the dark will begin to peel back

(skin of a tangerine) but for now we are wrapped and quiet. — Eugenia Montsarof f

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Untitled Your body is still your body Even when it rebels Even when it drags behind you tethering you to this earth Lashing your feet to the firmament Rooting you in sandy soil Even when it makes them smile Whispered words of wonder whirling Cloaking you in rich fur and daffodils and morning-dewed skin Even when it went before you were ready Changing faster than fire spreads Chewed up and spat out Faster than last night’s dinner Even when you wish it wasn’t Even when you know it is Your body is still your body

— Tori Ger nert-Dott

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Repels

Just water, please

Up before the sun

A moment on the lips

Even in the still

When the Earth Broke When I woke up in the backseat my parents thought I couldn’t hear them.

But I could. My eyes were closed but I could see. They spoke in crooked notes. The sodium light settled in their lips as they talked.

“They said there wouldn’t be a scar. Look at the size of it. Is it bleeding again? Get the gauze.”

“Don’t wake her up. I don’t want her to look in the mirror. God, she was so beautiful.”

She was so beautiful. He said it like a curse and it worked, running down my neck and my spine. Warmth leaked down my thigh, into my shoes, and it smelled. She gasped and he groaned when they realized and we were in a gas station bathroom. They coated me in soap so antiseptic it smelled rotten.

I couldn’t speak but I could see through the walls, I could see the cars rolling on the highway and the billboards with their graying paper and a deer with broken legs dying in the grass. I could see that the man-made wind never leaves the grass alone. I could see the car that smashed a girl last week, slick and quick, smashed her face in and left down the highway.

Breathe.

I’m washing my face in the cracked sink and a little girl tugs on my pant leg. I think she’s my daughter.

When I leave the bathroom, I notice little comets of color striped in the night. The sky’s the color of burnt almond and the trees are dyed gray.

Dull, boring shadows. There are no cars tonight. In the gas station store, I take a few things, some concealer for my scar, food that doesn’t expire.

“Excuse me. Excuse me, ma’am, you need to pay for that.”

She doesn’t work here, no one does, but she once kept the register going.

When there are no more cars and the billboards peel away she will still be 65

here. My daughter asks what I see behind the counter.

Breathe.

It doesn’t matter. Nothing mattered here because the hospital smelled like paling people, pruned, bleached and canned. I could still see the car beneath the bandages, finding me in the dark, again and again. Like being flogged.

My parents were near me but I couldn’t tell their voices from the TV. They all cracked under dread. Listening was like solving a riddle. Some voices warned of the earth breaking, as I saw it would, but couldn’t say.

Other voices warned of me, falling down a derelict valley of the brain, silent as I go.

Breathe.

I was being sponged when the earth broke. My mother was humming a quivering song as she let the water slip over my arms. My skin pressed into the tub and I could feel the ground beneath open slightly and let out a sigh. I couldn’t say anything, I couldn’t even scream as my mother was swallowed. She fell somewhere, and I was rising, standing in the water. I could walk again. Then I could scream.

Breathe.

I gave birth in the gas station, sensation finally rushing through my body and a voice returning to my throat. Of course no one could hear. When she was born she was so beautiful, a doll of iridescence and gentle petal lips.

Breathe.

I cover my scar with the last of the concealer before I notice that my daughter has been sleeping for a very long time.

There’s a chip of glass on the floor. I see a woman in it. Face rippled by a scar. Broken legs, blood. Final knocking on the door.

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Breathe.

It was my parents. They still knocked back then, before the car. I had been crying, but I was surprised by the mirror, by my youth. Why was I crying?

What was worth crying over, before the car, before the earth opened its mouth to laugh? For once I couldn’t remember.

My mother stroked my shoulder.

“It’s okay. It’s okay. Don’t listen to them. You’re going to be so beautiful.”

– Gwyneth Spinck en

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perfect day for the beach (for poppa don)

it’s 55 degrees the sky is lousy with clouds that echo memories of the winter storm mere weeks ago the sweet golden rhythms of Sinatra are flowing through an embrace as tight as the music; jazz was the soundtrack of my childhood saffron steeps olive oil is delicately laced over the greens you reminded us to eat a single sliver of cake is cut and you in your optimistic tone point out the bay window and declare it’s a perfect day for the beach – Elle Provolo

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Wanting is all we do wanting is what we do, is all we have when we wrap ourselves in at night to calcify crimes & hopes and press them through skin into blood every body a nation starving, armed with teeth & pregnant with the sun of a new day everybody a parent, a lover pacing time onto their groaning floorboards waiting with chant & fraying faith some come back and want for another night so they can have children who can want more – Beata Gar rett

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Author Biographies Alphabetical by last name Mahmuda Alam ’20 (p. 15, 46) – Alam is a 2020 graduate with a B.A. in biology and is currently pursuing a career in optometry. She draws upon her experience as a first-generation Bangladeshi-American to create poems and collages that reflect that identity.

Luce Brandt ’22 (p. 12) – Brandt is an environmental studies major and English minor. Brandt loves to write about small and beautiful moments that are often overlooked.

Olivia Brandwein ’22 (p. 7) – Brandwein is a junior majoring in art studio and minoring in French. She loves playing frisbee, listening to WMHC, and idolizing Eric Carle.

Rebecca Burns ’22 (p. 29) – With a passion for learning languages and science, Burns is a prospective physics major and Russian language minor. In Burns’ free time, Burns enjoy creative writing, art, classical piano, Broadway musicals, and mountain trail hiking. Burns has also enjoyed working as a museum docent, combining Burns’ love of art and science.

Rosemarie Cass ’21 (p. 55) – Cass is an environmental studies major in the Mount Holyoke class of 2021. Her work is inspired by her experiences living in New York, including the “hustle-and-bustle,” outspoken attitudes, nightlife, and the poetic influences of Brooklyn-born Walt Whitman.

Pearl Conley ’21 (p. 35, 57) – Conley is a theatre and English major who loves writing and language! They have been writing poetry since they were a child, and are excited to have this opportunity to have their work published.

Tasha Elizarde ’22 (p. 4, 50) – Elizarde is a junior at Mount Holyoke studying history, business, and Asian Pacific American studies.

Beata Garrett ’20 (p. 28, 54, 61, 69) – Garrett is a Chinese-American student who just graduated (!) Mount Holyoke College. She enjoys horror movies, science fiction, and fantasy.

Tori Gernert-Dott ’20 (p. 8, 48, 64) – Gernert-Dott graduated from Mount Holyoke in May of 2020 with a B.A. in art history and German Studies. She 72

is grateful that she decided to take a creative writing course before graduating; without the encouragement and support from her peers and professor, she never would have had the guts to write her thoughts out like this at all.

Lila Goldstein ’22 (p. 26) – Goldstein is an English major and writes mainly poetry, but she also dabbles in playwriting and devising evil schemes. She loves working on the board of the Mount Holyoke Review and with Open Call Magazine, which has also published her work.

Megan Horner ’23 (p. 34) – Horner is in the class of 2023, uses she/her pronouns, and is an IR major.

Deanna Kalian ’20 (p. 43) – Kalian was an English and Latin double major.

She enjoys reading, especially medieval and Victorian literature, and the books she reads inform her writing.

Flannery Langton ’22 (p. 18) – Langton is a junior English and French double major at Mount Holyoke College. Langton’s writing is often inspired by the sights, sounds, and landscapes of New England. When not writing short stories or fiction, Langton also spends time writing and editing for the Mount Holyoke News.

Liz Lewis ’22 (p. 32) – Lewis is a junior History major at Mount Holyoke. She is thrilled to be part of the Review’s first issue. She is also a section editor for the Mount Holyoke News and a WMHC radio host. In her free time, she loves to create visual art.

Emma Pope McCright ’23 (p. 36) – McCright is a history major from Middlebury, Vermont. She enjoys writing female-centered historical fiction and loves to read Jane Austen and Terry Pratchett.

Fiona Milton ’22 (p. 53) – Milton is an architecture studies major who studied creative writing at Chapman University for one year. She enjoys dabbling in multiple areas of writing and finished a book as part of NaNoWriMo. Eugenia Montsaroff ’23 (p. 52, 63) – Montsaroff is a chemistry major with a journalism nexus. In her spare time she works as a firefighter-EMT off campus.

She enjoys writing and reading anything, but especially poetry and mysteries.

David Nejezchleba ’22 (p. 14) – Nejezchleba is currently an English and philosophy double major, but they will likely be dropping the former major and 73

will soon have a psych minor.

Ava Provolo ’22 (p. 13) – Provolo is junior majoring in English and Spanish and is a poet and a comedy screenwriter. On any given moment, she is most likely thinking about DiGiorno frozen pizza and where she’ll take her next adventure.

Elle Provolo ’22 (p. 25, 56, 68) – Provolo is a junior at Mount Holyoke majoring in environmental studies and minoring in Italian. She often writes her poems between the hours of midnight and one in the morning about whatever she is feeling in those moments. She dreams of one day owning multiple Italian greyhounds.

Regis Reed ’22 (p. 2, 6, 45, 62) – Reed is an English major and poetry enthusiast. In his writing, he enjoys exploring religious images and stories, ideas of the body and embodiment, Trans* experience, and the connections humans have with one another. This is his first publication, and he couldn’t be more excited to work alongside such talented writers and devoted staff.

Cressida Blake Roe ’22 (p. 22, 58) – Roe is a religion major and medieval history enthusiast currently attempting to survive the Apocalypse. Her short fiction and poetry, which deal with the themes of identity, memory, and magic, have appeared in various publications throughout the Five Colleges.

Mira Rosenkotz ’20 (p. 3, 10, 44, 60) – Rosenkotz was an English major, enjoys driving back and forth across the country, and making homemade hot sauce in their spare time.

Morgan Sammut ’22 (p. 11) – Sammut is a junior majoring in English and pursuing a minor in computer science. Her favorite genre is sci-fi/fantasy, her favorite author is Carmen Maria Machado, and in her free time, she does fencing and crafts!

Gwyneth Spincken ’22 (p. 16, 65) – Spincken is majoring in English and history at Mount Holyoke College. She hopes to one day publish her own novels.

Until then, she enjoys learning as much as she can.

Hannah Thukral ’23 (p. 42) – Thukral is a data science major. She has mostly written short fiction and person narratives in the past, but she has recently taken a liking to poetry. She is thrilled to be included in this publication.

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