www.spectrum.neu.edu Northeastern University’s Literary Arts Magazine
Editor in Chief............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................Aislyn Fredsall Layout & Design Editor...........................................................................................................................................................................................................................Elke Thoms Financial Manager..............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................Joe Forti Secretary..............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................Julia Renner Advertising Manager................................................................................................................................................................................................................Kaley Bachelder
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Cover and title page art adapted from “Dog Walking on Boardwalk” by Erica Hinck. No part of this publication may be reproduced without the permission of Spectrum Literary Arts Magazine and/or respective authors. Spectrum Literary Arts Magazine reserves the right to edit submissions for layout, grammar, spelling, and punctuation unless otherwise indicated by the author. Any references to people living or dead are purely coincidental except in the case of a public figure. The views and opinions represented in this media do not necessarily reflect those of Northeastern University or the staff of Spectrum Literary Arts Magazine.
Copyright © Spectrum Literary Arts Magazine and respective authors. All rights reserved.
Poetry & Prose
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Something that Happened While I Was Away in the Bathroom -a poem about Danzel and Owen Abbie Doane-Simon when the tide comes in advancing like a line of ants threatening the boys’ toes after the long day under the untired sun when the tide comes in the boy runs on 5-year-old feet digging castles digging like a grade school engineer tossing sand quiet with sober determination racing the moon
focus focus focus taller walls deep moats smooth finish until the waves creep up the beach and send him scampering with 23-year-old legs back up the shore laughing leaving his 5-year-old castles to the waves and the water and the moon
Dog Walking on Boardwalk Erica Hinck
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Labor Day
First Day of Fall Classes
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prunes Amy Hood darling, my heart is a post-you prune, dark purple, wrinkled, small enough to fit in the palm of your hand: my heart’s only use is making people shit.
Attention Joanne Tang
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Columbus Day No Classes
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mistakes Alana Dore shake your fists at me sprinkling salt on wounds that I have carved myself deeper than the ditch I’m standing in I accept my place here standing but begging you to push me over that last half-dead leaf dangling one ligament left an exasperated sigh will do when I decide to write my story I will try and erase what I’ve done but they will bury themselves in the etchings leftovers documented by the pressure on the pages to follow
Chaokoh Break Ben Landsberg
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Veterans’ Day No Classes
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Spring Registration Begins
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Thanksgiving Break Begins
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You taught me not to blow out a candle if you want to see how long it can burn. You were always more than I could ask for, all blue eyes and sandy hair and tan skin, all wit and snark and genius, all perfectly constructed metaphors. You were created in the image of my childhood fantasies throwing teddy bears at my ceiling and catching them again, wondering what it felt like to free-fall. And then you were real, but still just a daydream. I remember the night I told you I was like a windshield, strong until a good enough chink sends it shattering, and you told me that I was more like an oak, strong and beautiful and unshakeable, no matter what tried to weather it. I remember the night I told you that my eyes were battleship grey, flat and monochromatic, and you told me that they were like a stormy sea.
Re- Letter to L Lindsey Ashe
I think you were the first mistake I ever made That I couldn’t take back with an apology or promising to clean my room for a week or a kiss on the broken spots.
I remember the night that I defiantly deleted the evidence that you’d ever said those words. I wish I still remembered the eloquent way you phrased it. I think you’re the first person that ever saw me. I don’t think I really saw you until too late. I danced around the bathroom in my office before anybody came in to work the morning you kissed me goodbye on a train platform, the morning you asked me—where do we go from here? I couldn’t imagine a future without you. You taught me not to blow out a candle if you want to see how long it can burn. Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if I’d held my breath-if the flame hadn’t flickered and let us go dark
Snow Day Maura Noa
Sunday
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Last Day of Fall Classes
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Reading Day
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Fall Final Exams Begin
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Winter Break Begins
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Saturday
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19 Fall Final Exam Makeup Day If Needed
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Good Night Hong Kong Jodie Ng
We Are Not So Small Alyssa Rubin I’m riding out the wave of things I’d forgotten you said and I think each matching letter in our names is a pair of soul mates, waiting to meet. Sometimes I have to sit on my hands to resist the urge to fling open the doors you nailed shut and find you drowning in the love I didn’t know how to give you. Because even though nothing in the creases of our hands
Sunday
suggests that somewhere in this galaxy we once met in stellar collision I can’t find the words, and I can’t fight the feeling that without the magnetic pull of your touch, gravity becomes irrelevant; and I’m crashing through atmospheres towards a bolted door covered in something that looks just like your fingerprints.
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First Day of Spring Classes
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Peacock Emily Wildermuth
Short. Elke Thoms I shouldn’t second-guess you, But I noticed that unlike the letters I received for Christmas and New Year’s, Your Valentine’s Day note was a little bit Short.
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Presidents’ Day No Classes
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I would rather hear the singeing of spirit the cool, crisp silence that flutters into the window after knocking you down a peg and leveling the playing field It’s not a game, as it may appear to be but rather a long list of pros and cons which I place on a scale shortly after taking off my heels Today you broke my pen burned my list-keeping and journal entries stacked the scales, as they say and left me giddy, giggling, breathless If I knew any better, If I were any wiser I might have called for back-up but my startled spirit couldn’t have voiced a word even if it wanted to
Man and Dog Abbie Doane-Simon
winners, losers and in-between Alana Dore
It’s not like me to play the fool. I prefer watching the men dismount their high horses after losing a jousting match against the sharpness of my tongue
My hands shake as I admit defeat and relinquish my practical, analytical tradition There’s too much blood on the battlefield and I only just realized I’m the one whose bleeding
Sunday
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Words Ivy Pepin
One day it’s there resting white and smooth as an egg in the small silver mailbox, no longer an uncertain image wavering in my mental vision and lost each morning at the sight of a blank expanse of metal. The envelope births one college-ruled page thin enough for transparency ripe like fruit, but suddenly emptied and shook out in a strange brief moment.
And now that it’s here you aren’t what you used to be
and in the leftover cologne of your shirt that you gave me before you left.
bare feet crossed on the coffee table next to mine a hesitant creaking of my front door fingertips tracing my hairline a blur of road past open windows and a low voice earnest in conversation underneath it all.
Now thrust into tangibility all I know of you is inked in fading black pen:
a name, and an address, and words.
There had still been the essence of you lingering behind my eyelids
Babies Kelly Burgess
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Fall Registration Begins
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Last Day of Spring Classes
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Reading Day
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Sister Sonnet Ivy Pepin You used to think of worries late at night. I’d want to sleep, but you’d be asking me just when and if the world would end, despite the warmness of our beds and I would be annoyed, but I would always mumble “no.” And then your breathing would grow soft and slow and I would lie awake, in gentle glow of moonlight dimly drifting through the window. We always whispered as we fell asleep and dreamed of things that we will never know, that we have now forgotten. Did you keep these memories at heart, or just outgrow them as you did your yellow flowered dress? Just ask if I remember; I’ll say “yes.”
Yellow Kelly Burgess
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Commencement
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Memorial Day No Classes
Tower of Babble Anika Krause The meek shall inherit the earth but on their commute there they’ll find pebbles in their Keds and realize they left their mittens on the nightstand and abandon their wallet on the inbound as they’re worming through winter gear and spilt coffee. And when they see the subway cars switch directions for the very first time, they’ll realize that the train doesn’t flip in an elegant, ‘round-the-Christmas-tree arc, but writhes until the ass becomes the entrance. When they board, they’ll ride ass backwards to paradise with ginger-bruised toes and frozen fingers and not a penny in sight.
Bridge to City II Ben Landsberg
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Last Day of Summer I Classes
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(503) Julia Renner
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Life Paused Elizabeth Magnuson
if we were lying under that swing set again shoulders pressed together in an act of faith against the fading summer sky, I’d ask if you remember the things we did just to prove we were still young, invincible. like those fireworks we lay under with our eyes open, ash falling, ash caught in my lashes like a catalog of months forgotten. how the smoke settling over us was thinner than all the ghosts we’d collected before I knew you, the ones we passed back and forth like a shared cigarette, like an ash burn on your collarbone, like a catalog of scars. the smoke like ghosts we’d met together, just solid enough to blur out the shatter of stars against the swollen night sky. if we were back on that sand dune, fingers tangled in one last fit of defiance against months lost, this time I wouldn’t tell you about how the days getting longer means they’ll get shorter again, about that dream I had where I was me and you were the sunrise bleeding through my curtains, and how every time the light hit my skin the veins shone through spelling out all the ways I’ll miss you when we’re gone. I won’t make you say to me I’m here with you now, there’s more to us than the rain under our skin, we are not a metaphor for loss so stop thinking about autumn. stop thinking about what you’re going to lose. this time I wouldn’t whisper to you about tomorrow, about boundaries, about whether this is a choice I should think through: this sleepless night, that impulse, your heartbeat under my ear in battered synchrony, a litany of promises made only because I knew they were never the ones we could keep.
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Quotidian Olivia Van Benschoten Screaming would obviate the illusion that the water ever stopped choking me, that the waves ever let me wander back to shore that I know the magic trick that saved my life. Whatever gave me my feet back was statistical. I filled a survivor quota, a mandatory left-behind to testify against reason. Yes, you can quietly die for years, without noticing. Yes, you can grow older and older with a face the ocean never saw and a body sterilized of those waters, and still feel the thousand-fingered clutch of your throat. Yes, you can wake up afraid every day.
You don’t know that on the day I almost drowned, the ocean was knots. Green, and not angry, just excited. Just pouring over itself, trying on a new dress, delighting in its own arcane deception of beauty; how did I forget it would kill me. I was just the victim of enthusiasm, just culled too deep. And I can only blame myself if my lungs still sear ten years later, if I wake up in the night unable to breathe for all the salt in my blood, if all the air just chokes me, because the only thing worse than drowning would be never drowning again. The pressure on my chest; the runaway of my pulse: I have made them my home. I am home in this fear. I don’t know how to live when I am not dying.
These days the ocean tries to pour itself down my throat. I swallow. I am a statue in a living garden. I am a facsimile of truth and all I ever want to tell people these days is that you don’t know me.
Chesapeake’s August Elke Thoms
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Last Day of Full Summer Classes
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18 Last Day of Summer II Classes / Full Summer Final Exams End
Full Summer Final Exams Begin
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www.spectrum.neu.edu Northeastern University’s Literary Arts Magazine