THE OLIVETREE REVIEW HYBRID ISSUE 2021-22 by The Olivetree Review

THE OLIVETREE REVIEW HYBRID ISSUE 2021-22

The Literary and Arts Magazine of Hunter College Since 1983

OTR

2021-22

Administrative & Editorial Staff

2021-22

Editor-In-Chief:

Associate Editors:

Jordan Ortiz

Vice President: Mia Carranza

Treasurer:

Meghan Elberti

Secretary: Andi Sauer

Art Editors:

Olivia Baldacci, Jordan Ortiz

Poetry Editors:

Sheena Rocke,Sylvia Welch

Prose Editors:

Anling Chen, Jenna Song

Candice Brown Claudia Carado Victoria Cotaj Ayesha Fareed Jake Geller Danny Jiang Samantha Key Tyler Martinez Nadia Noemi Onyekachi Okeke Bella Ramirez Maya Ryan Shayna Shah Phoebe Streeter Maya Wong

Drama Editors:

Mia Carranza, Elizabeth Ratkiewicz, Andi Sauer

Publicity Team:

Arifa Ba, Sowjan Sritharasarma

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2021-22

Table Of Contents Prose

Chewable, Fast Dissolve Mona Lisas (1) Inwood Hill Park, 2005 (32) Language of a Thimble (37) Reflective Winds (50) Untitled In Paris (59)

Drama

My Guardian Angel (16)

Poetry

Regarding God (39) "You Are..." (52) For Rent: APT. 4B (61) Detangling/Weaving (68) Weird Bread that I've Seen (72) Crumbs (74) Tired (76) Recuperation (78) Seven Mugs (81)

Art

#End Sars (15) Alta Marea (37) Christchild (38) Discovering (50) In Cemento Veritas (51) Judgment Day Dreams (56) Love Not Pain (60) Mai Mamma (66) Midnight Blues (67) Peninsula (71) Self Esteem (71) Urbanscape (Series, 1.) (73) Urbanscape (Series, 4.) (75) Shave (77) Twin Lens Walkout (80) I Will Work Harder (80) Dumpster Fire (84) SuperHuman Identity... (85) Snake Oil (86) Mama Said Knock You Out (87) Bring Your Whole Team (88) Sophie's Lounge (89) These Boots (90)

Contributions Meet the Staff

(91) (95)

History of The Olivetree Review OTR

(97)

2021-22

Letter From The Editor Hey y’all, thank you for sticking with The Olivetree Review through thick and thin. I know things have been quite strange, but OTR prevails through it all! So thank you so much for being loyal to the publication. I have many people to thank for being engaged and keeping the OTR presence alive. I’m most grateful for all who dedicated time and energy into contributing to our publication, whether that be through attending workshops, submitting your art/writing, or just being a kind soul in the OTR space. You mean a lot to us, truly. And to my wonderful Editorial Team, you have been the most understanding and helpful bunch ever. I truly could not ask for a better set of friends, nor a better team. I really do love you all. However, like I said, times have been weird. Like very weird. It seems as though we’re always living through historical events, and I don’t know about y’all, but I’m tired. I’ve been tired. Everyday it seems like we wake up to a new narrative, one we don’t have control over. And though it seems that way, I know that’s far from the truth. And The Olivetree Review continues to instill that in me to this day. I remember walking aimlessly through the halls of Hunter my freshman year, somewhat like a lost puppy. Then I met Melissa Rueda, one of our former Presidents, and the rest of the Editorial Staff present at the time. In short, I found a home, and a way to transmute a lot of the circumstances presented to me in life through my artwork. They helped to uplift me and my work, while also just being great friends. I really wouldn’t be here, writing this letter, without any of them (I love you guys).

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2021-22

Letter From The Editor And It’s truly been an honor carrying on their work and their legacy. And I’m so happy to have helped OTR transform and evolve into the magnificent publication we see today. There’s hope in our work, and progress in what we ascribe to be. That much is evident by how much energy goes into our art. I’d like to think that the art we showcase here is reflective of what our society is missing, hence why the artists have created such intricately designed worlds to escape to. My hope is that you all take the opportunity to read this magazine and escape from reality just for a little while. We’re all due for a much needed break, so sit back, relax, and enjoy the showcase. Til Next Time, Jordan

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2021-22

Chewable, Fast Dissolved Mona Lisas Forest Oliver

These trust-fund kids would love for you to think they invented the business model. How American after all, to monetize smashing things. Rage rooms already existed in Hong Kong and Moscow long before Albert and his friends introduced it to the States. What had been a business built on destruction for destruction’s sake, Albert rebranded as an artform. Think Oreos, not Hydrox cookies. Think Lego, and not Lincoln Logs. Think Vent. I wasn’t surprised to learn Vent was a Madison Avenue dollar store in another lifetime. New York City likes to stick budget-bins in between buh-zillion-dollar high-rise condos. They’re always packed with penthouse wasps in ten-thousand-dollar coats haggling over the cost of single rolls of two-ply. What remained in the underground labrynth was a lingering scent of karens staining the walls, and the braille feeling of pink pumps on uprooted linoleum. “Hello?” I said, cupping my hands into a bullhorn. The points of my shoes teetered over the edge of the last concrete step. Anything beyond that point was pitch black. “I think I have an interview here,” I said into the darkness. Their Craigslist ad wasn’t trying to be a lighthouse for chads tired of repairing drywall in their honeymoon suites. It just happened that way. The short blurb didn’t describe a place where disillusioned frat-jocks could take out their bad day on inanimate objects in a safe, controlled setting either. All it said was, “You break it, WE buy it.” “We give customers the waiver,” Albert said. “We give them some minimal PPE, and then let them go all lizard-brain on salvaged Pier One home decor.” Add a little bit of body text

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2021-22

Vent was going for the “fashionably dilapidated” look, but they had liability waivers thick enough to kill any shiba inu whizzing around Gramercy Park. Albert talked about the employee discount. There, at my lowest point in New York City, Albert said, “If you don’t know what sound it makes when you frisbee ceramic plates into drywall at twenty-five miles-per-hour, you haven’t lived.” What I forgot to tell you about was me. Out of school, armed with an eight-by-eleven cardstock diploma, and pocket-size pepper spray, and everything else was monochrome. Brutalist. Matte. Two years’ worth of optimism crammed down our throats were immediately sucked out through the black rubber lips of the number six train. Mars-rover doors opened to adulthood. They opened to part-time consignment shops in Flat Iron. Opened with a ding to a one-window, fourhundred square feet medicine cabinet above a Turkish hookah lounge in the Lower East Side. Nothing paid, nothing resonated. I could’ve made an army of origami pigeons out of wasted resumes. Hiring managers wouldn’t have recognized her. The younger version of me. The SCAD kid with pink hair and pierced septum. Me, that naïve kid that wanted to bring joy to people’s lives through the magic of interior design. The subway would jerk to a halt and the doors opened to more dead ends. Entry-level retail store fronts, time-share investment sales calls. Pyramid schemes chasing suits down Park Avenue. If there was a difference to be made in the world it wasn’t going to happen behind a particle board counter.

During interviews, when hiring managers would inevitably ask what my goals were, I’d tell them about Jimmy Carter.

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2021-22

. How, when the Rockefeller Center tree comes down every year, it doesn’t just rot in a landfill. When the NBC ice-rink dethaws and the tourists have already flown south, by then the tree is in a thousand two-by-fours on their way to Carter’s Homes for Humanity. “What you should get out of this is,” I would say at all these interviews, “Thanks to Jimmy Carter, there are people living inside of Christmas Trees.” That was the icebreaker. Then I’d tell them that after I made a name for myself redesigning homes of the rich and beautiful, then I would do pro-bono work. With my established brand, I’d give back. Not just sheltering the homeless. I’d reinvigorate their lives with bay windows. With ivory coffered ceilings and cast-iron clawfoot tubs in Astoria townhouses. I wanted to put Christmas through the chipper and pull homes out the other side. You already know the basement entrance of Vent wasn’t exactly at the end of a rainbow shining out of a leprechaun’s butt. Not for me. Not at first. At the bottom of a stairwell between residential brownstones, I followed overhead pipes that flushed in twentyone-gun salute. Inside the windowless offices were piles of spent rage pushed-broomed under fluorescent lights, like trophy cases dedicated to testosterone. And there was Albert waiting for me, a diamond in the rough tapping his Rolex. For once I didn’t put on the fake smile. I didn’t talk about Jimmy Carter and Christmas trees. I told Albert about my real hero. Before she invented Spanx, before she was anybody else in Atlanta, Sara Blakely said you need to envision sitting on Oprah’s rose-pink couch. Visualize sweat beading on the cliff of your scalp under stage lights, Camera three zooming in on all your flaws. It’s then you tell Oprah how you made your first million. I could close my eyes and see Oprah. Oprah’s follicles. Oprah Winfrey’s perfect pores. I could almost scratch my name into her microfiber couch.

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2021-22

There was just that one last missing part. Albert showed me around. He said when Vent’s orange flyers— plastered from Flatbush to the Meatpacking District—didn’t do the trick, they resorted to using six-feet tall models in extra-small bikinis.

Albert admitted it was a cheap attempt to lure men in by their Fabergé eggs. They couldn’t attract the NYU kids loitering around the fountain in Washington Square, or their rich fathers, so instead, they settled for small fish. A demographic of young, white, angry incels. Dudes with lululemon bosses breathing down their Calvin Klein collars from nine-to-five. Jocks with girlfriends that won’t put out, or keyboard warriors with axes to grind. New York is teeming with them. America is teeming with them. “The problem is, those people are fetishists,” Albert said. “Closet-cases, bottling up inferiority complexes into a hundred PSI compression tank until they inevitably burst during some innocuous public event.” Albert called these people Goldfish. “Goldfish,” he said, “will fit into whatever environment they’re flushed into.” This is why we have a surplus of school shootings. This is why we have Vegas hotel snipers and black churches in South Carolina pumped full of lead. All that American toxic rage and nowhere environmentally sound to dump it. “Guns aren’t going away. They’re going to get bigger and deadlier.

We can’t remove the problem at its source,” he said. “But we can change the target. If we could channel those feelings into a safe place—if we could dam up that river—we could save lives.”

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2021-22

Vent had multiple yuppie investors, but it was really Albert’s crusade. His version of putting Christmas through the woodchipper. In the offices were a few rooms encased in concrete, with big nuclear blast doors. These rooms were arranged like a museum dedicated to the Great Depression. A random assortment of broken chairs, baby cribs, microwaves from another century— anything saved from the curb or salvaged from the landfill. No real theme, just a collage of what they could dig up from the dumpster. “I’m ecstatic,” Albert told me. “What just came in this morning is a crate of Russian nesting dolls. These kids are going to love smashing these things up.” Any sane business owner would’ve looked at the third quarter returns and sold Vent. Albert said the partners behind the company had other, more lucrative ventures to apply their attention spans. Like the loyal parents of serial-killers on deathrow, Albert fought for his toxic little baby. Those other businesses might have been safer bets, sure. But they didn’t have rage. “Once in a blue moon,” Albert said, “we get a car in here. Nothing fancy. Just a lemon from the scrapyard or police auction. But we give these guys a sledgehammer and let them go nuts.” Albert talked and talked. He talked about making a real change in the world, but I knew that wasn’t going to happen by dumpster diving. Meanwhile, I saw something that wasn’t in their office. Color. Cohesion. I saw beveled glass doors and baroque filigree lining cavalier boardroom ceilings. I saw the potential for a numinous experience in the empty canvas. In the piles of ceramic dust, I saw the green sprouts of catharsis. “Albert,” I said, “Wouldn’t you rather take a sledgehammer to your own car than a stranger’s?”

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2021-22

This yuppie with the keys to a Tesla Model S in midnight silver metallic double-parked in the street was speechless. “Wouldn’t you rather be the one driving the bulldozer that demolishes your own home? What’s missing from your business model is stewardship. Your customers need to feel a sense of ownership for the things they’re destroying.” I told Albert, “No one wants to beat a dead horse, unless they’re a jockey.” I was hired on the spot. What Albert had wanted was a new grunt to rummage through the police auctions and estate sales for discounted combustibles. What they got was a new project director. As long as I complied with the legal stuff, kept the code inspectors happy, Albert said I had free reign. Total artistic license. The days of chasing customers down in Washington Square were over. No more early-onset arthritis from stapling flyers to construction sites. No more corralling drunks in the middle of the night. Now they came to us. Under my lead, Vent embraced quality over quantity. We were doing custom-made dream rooms. Frat boys and neckbeards were out, celebrities were in. No more goldfish. We had fat stinking tuna throwing themselves into our boat every day. Meanwhile, psychiatrists were losing their regulars in droves. An exodus of agoraphobics, germophobes, career patients after they had heard about what we were doing. They wanted to try something new. Peaceful acquiescence wasn’t doing the trick anymore. They wanted to try violence. This one Jane, a former model, turned designer, turned activist, bleached blonde to her core. She called it thalassophobia. That was the closest name for it. Early in life she saw a man fall overboard on a cruise ship. A body was never recovered. She had this recurring nightmare ever since, years of men falling over the railing to their death.

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2021-22

Psychiatrists called it exposure therapy when they led my Jane by her shaking hand up the boat ramp. They toured the deck and the bow and the cramped corridors of the Oasis of the Seas. They practiced breathing exercises in the sun and the salt air. When they reached the railing, she froze. She couldn’t look down. The whole thing made this woman want to be the iceberg that sunk the Titanic. This Jane provided the basics. Pictures ripped from magazines, screen captured laptop pics, tiger striped in CMYK, glued onto a vision board.

I tracked down the cruise ship she had been on and matched the colors of the walls and accent wood pieces. I had custom parts shipped in from the Rolls Royce factory in Mississippi. Interior design one-oh-one stuff. In the span of a week, Vent’s plain concrete box became the working cockpit of a cruise ship. With the door hatched shut, with the ocean sounds playing on a loop from inside the walls, you’d swear there was an ocean outside of that room. My Jane walked in, took a deep breath, and carefully closed the door behind her. Bare handed, she tore down every inch of it in minutes. To really bring it to life, there was a scent to capture. That might have been linseed oil in your grandma’s bedside trunk, or cedar paneling that made the room. Sometimes it was cherry licorice and stale movie-theater popcorn. Carefully curated dirt in the seams of wood paneled floors, the black mold stuck to the air vents, and the scratches in the paint. Flaws made the rooms real. “I bet you have demolished some pretty spectacular ones yourself,” Jane said, picking drywall out of her scarecrow hair. I told her “Of course.” It was middle school again, and I was trying to convince the eighth-grade girls that I was so not a virgin.

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2021-22

“From one blonde to another,” she said, gleaming from adrenaline, “you’ll never be the same after your rage room.” That Jane never returned to Vent, but she never went back to therapy. Six months later I was pinning her postcard to the office fridge. Jane on her Disney cruise ship in the Bahamas. Her bathing suit with a white lace veil, her hip casually resting on the railing and her new tanned groom, half her age. That card is somewhere in the rubble now. After a year designing rage rooms overdoses decreased. At the same time, domestic violence calls drop to zilch. We built more elaborate rooms as gun violence and suicide rates declined, and the bell curve of divorces leveled. My one-time use works of art rippled out into the world. New York’s most elite and most damaged would have one quick, violent outburst in a private soundproof stage and walk away changed. Silicon Valley tech dweebs who you wouldn’t think had it in them. The one-man wrecking crews of rejects, virgins, victims—all of them hungry for chewable, fast dissolve Mona Lisas. Life didn’t just have color again, it had night-vision thermalscope, with extended magazine and hollow-tip bullets. “No, thank YOU, Oprah,” I’d rehearse in the back of uptown taxis. “It all started with giving people an outlet to their trauma. But no, Oprah, I’m no hero.” Hard pan-in camera three. Big Botox smile. Neon applause sign lights up. Applause, applause, applause. This version of community service I was providing, Vent was destroying homes at twice the rate that Jimmy Carter could put them up. For one year there wasn’t a shooting, letter-bomb, or poisoned Tylenol bottle in the state of New York. The city landfill was obese with the snakeskins of real-estate moguls and Dow Jones execs. Our small office annexed the first floor of the building, then we swallowed up the second. Champagne flowed through the faucets of my demolition studios.

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2021-22

Like Banksy on steroids, I was making art with an expiration date. The way people romanticize the Library of Alexandria, or Marilyn Monroe. The dead things people can’t let go of, they’re only masterpieces because they’re not around anymore. They’re the reason why a lock of platinum blonde hair stolen from a morgue goes for millions on eBay. Because they’re mementos of something short lived. Because they went out with a bang. I had money. I had my dream homes. Eat your heart out, Jimmy Carter. Take a number, Sara Blakely. And that’s when a Lodi hick stumbled in, an orange flyer in one hand and a wad of cash in the other. This kid with thumb holes cut out of his long sleeve black Metallica tee, gauged ears and instant-ramen hair buried under a baseball cap. He said, “I understand, ya’ll provide a different kind of therapy here.” “Toof” was living proof that the kind of people that have money, don’t look like they’ve ever seen money. It used to be, before they came to Vent, johns were stuck in an endless cycle of therapy. The role reversals, trust falls, the primal screaming thing. After thirty minutes with us, they were cured. Their unique trauma measured in neat little piles of debris for the clean-up crew to deal with. We watched our clients cross the threshold of their nuclear blast doors like calves taking their first steps. Coated in their catharsis, they removed their goggles to see with new eyes. Without their protective masks they took their first breaths with virgin lungs. Every customer I had disappeared into the sunset, the phoenixes they were, leaving behind their broken selves. All except for one. When he talked, Toof emphasized his bright, white veneers. He didn’t have any broken teeth, not anymore. The insurance policy took care of that. He smiled a flat, Mercedes-grill smile when he described how his dad drank himself to death and left him as sole beneficiary.

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2021-22

“It was one airplane sized dose of banana schnapps at a time that did it,” Toof said. “But it was a blessing after the accident. Daddy was T-boned by a Madison Avenue city bus and we never had to work again,” Toof said, habitually pulling at his shirt sleeves. “I was too little to see over the dashboard. The thing hit us and all the dust and dirt we didn’t know was hiding in the seats shook loose and hung there. At first, I didn’t notice my two front teeth broke off in the panel of the airbag compartment. Dang airbag never released.” Toof walked in and placed a shoebox on my desk, held together in duct tape. Inside he had pictures, paint samples, drawings, tape measurements, and faded thermal receipts. Years of what amounted to the blueprints of his own personal torture device: a perfect replica of his childhood double-wide trailer. The same room where his father had keeled over one August night with the smell of banana on his breath. Toof said, “The one thing that would bring the room to life is that ninety-nine proof banana schnapps in airplane-serving-sized bottles.” It took me a week to recreate that trailer, and Toof had reduced it to rubble and wires within minutes. Then Toof didn’t disappear into the sunset. He wasn’t reborn from his trauma like all the other johns. Instead, he re-upped. Toof came back the following month, his baseball cap pulled down to his eyebrows.

I ignored the brick-colored blood stains on his sleeves and took his cash payments. He came back the next month, and the month after that.

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2021-22

. Each time with the same shoebox, the same specifications down to the shag carpeting and the seashell glued lamps. The Marlboro smell stuck in the paint and the tweed. Anyone would have loved to smash his trailer to smithereens. Always when Toof left, the cleaning crew would find the same little yellow bottles. Plastic fossils in the car crash of his personalized rage room. Always opened, always sucked dry. One day Toof didn’t show up for his regular appointment. I worried, the way I worried about rent or about Balenciaga shoes in stock. The interns called it “Toof’s Curse,” when business dried up. When patients returned to their psychiatrist’s fainting couches Albert blamed me. In hindsight, the problem was Vent had become too effective. Thousands of Johns and Janes had demolished their nightmares, crushed their demons into a fine powder and took a wrecking ball to the monkeys on their backs. But there was no room for repeat business. Toof’s double-wide still stood in all its white-trash glory, taking up a quarter of the offices, just begging to be put out of its misery. Inside the popcorn ceilings from Toof’s childhood hung like a storm cloud over shag carpeting. Brown and gray and deep like the back of mangey dog. The new tweed Barcalounger in red and gold tartan pattern sitting in the cocked-and-loaded position, carefully distressed like high-end, raw-denim blue jeans. Simultaneously new and haunted. Wood paneling emphasized the high prison windows. All of it just begging to be smashed to pieces. Our high art, in need of Toof’s low art. It was a Thursday when a few more Lodi hicks wandered in, gawking around the office like Times Square tourists. “So, this is where Toof had spent all of his money?” one of the ladies said. Toof’s mom and her sisters were following his receipts wondering how all the inheritance dried up.

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2021-22

Toof was dead and they were penniless again. Inside Toof’s replica it was easy to forget it was the middle of a summer day in the city. From inside the temperature-controlled room, everything screamed industrial New Jersey. The sisters stomped around the dog fur carpet in orange Crocs and swung Gucci bags through the wood paneled hallway. “Yep, this was home for us, for a long time,” she said. “Why anyone would want to relive this, I can’t for the life of me...” “I hope it’s not…well, can I ask how he…?” “Died?” one of the sisters said. The sisters hen-pecked the popcorn ceiling and turned on and off the seashell lamps. “Just like his daddy,” Toof’s mother said. “He drank himself over.” “He didn’t kill himself, ma’am,” one of the hens said while pawing through the Chenille drapes and tapping on the windows. “If that’s what you were thinking.” “He had diabetes real bad,” his mom said while hand-weighing the chachkies of baby-faced cherubs, Elvis memorabilia and jade ashtrays. “You’ve seen his sores, right? They were the size of Texas over his arms, sometimes even his face. By the end of it, he was more sores than skin. He said he’d quit drinking, but those sores said otherwise.” “This room is almost identical to my old house,” she said, pointing a long fingernail down toward the TV. “Almost?” I said. “There’s only one thing missing here,” his mom said. “The TV stand is like new. It’s too new.” The nerve. This woman didn’t know the lengths I went to; The details I personally combed through to bring these places to life. After a few builds I didn’t even need Toof’s shoebox. I had memorized that sad little shit home. Toof had given his personal stamp of approval to a hundred of these double-wide nightmares.

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“Of course,” I said. I gave the sisters privacy to say their farewells, in the room Toof had destroyed a hundred times over. They could have demolished it for all I cared. It wasn’t a manifestation of their trauma. It was the room that ate away their life savings and killed a woman’s son. When they emerged unchanged, one of the sisters said in her helium drawl, “Honestly, I can’t imagine the appeal. People just come through and break things? That’s it?” Toof’s mom stopped to thumb away stray hairs from my cheek. “I don’t blame you, honey,” she said, pursing her Lamborghini lips into Flamingo pink Playdo, “It’s your bosses taking advantage of these poor souls. You’re just doing your job.” The time came to take apart the room to make space for other paying customers. It was an eyesore in our building for long enough. For the first and last time, I put on the PPE. The full body hazmat suit in canary yellow, the goggles, gloves, and gas mask. The Barcalounger was gutted. The couch filleted and the furniture razed to the ground. I used a red axe, and when the head broke from the handle, I used it to spear the TV set and clawed through the drapes. I finished with my bare hands, prying off the seashells from the lamps before smashing the watts out of them, and I scratched my name into the tweed couch. Panting in the dark, sitting in the rubble, an astronaut painted in moon dust, I felt nothing. Not better or worse. Not high from adrenaline. Nothing. People just come through and break things. That’s it. The cleaning crew showed me a pack’s worth of Camels left in the lung-pink ceramic ashtray, and a handful of empties. Little bottles of banana schnapps littered in the couch cushions and left in the drawers like Gideon’s bibles. The Lodi sisters had raided the minibar during their farewell. Without the double-wide taking up space,

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Vent was even more claustrophobic. The building was a little dimmer than it used to be. The old money had abandoned us for the next trend in mental health. Vent quickly devolved into its goldfish days. Once again, we were stuck with yuppies wanting to relive glory days of drunken club nights and fistfights in Motel 6 prom suites. More than ever there were hateful people looking to destroy for the sake of destruction. Clocks ran slower, and I could no longer tell the difference in shades of green or styles of baseboards. We were back to stapling orange flyers around campuses. When one john bickered over the type of chairs in his mockethics classroom set up, I didn’t bite my tongue. “What does it matter? it’s going to get destroyed anyway and you’ll get your rocks off all the same.” This is when Albert pulled me aside and accused me of drinking on the clock. He said he could smell banana on my breath. I was fired before I could quit. They don’t know how the fire started. There was an electrical issue and all the tax records and customer files made for great kindling. Once it reached the exposed ceiling filigree the rest of the four-story building was a Sterno can. No one dared say the word arson. With the amount of powerful people Vent served, there were thousands with motive. Albert and the other owners cut their losses, took the insurance settlement, and never looked back. The bulldozers came. Then they wrapped the lot in green plywood and caution tape. Eventually they converted the vacant lot into a community garden tucked between buildings, secured by a rod iron gate and razor wire. Years after and they were still finding yellow plastic liquor bottles in the soil beds between tomatoes and sunflowers.

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2021-22

#End Sars

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Kenechi Tabansi

2021-22

My Guardian Angel

Edonis Bacaj

(TW //: May have some themes triggering to some people) (TW: CAR CRASH) EXT. CAR- DAY A sports car is speeding down the rural path with its engines roaring and wheels skidding and leaving a trail behind them. Ahead of them lays a train track surrounded by signs and lights with the train brawling down the tracks. The car begin braking before turning and hitting the train in a heads-on collision. CUT TO BLACK. PAUL RUNNINGS (V.O) Everything changes so fast. Faster than you can anticipate. INT. BEDROOM-DAY On a night stand, a phone begins RINGING with the name BANKS on screen (the photo is an iPhone bitmoji of a dark skinned male with short brown spiky hair). CHELSEA RUNNINGS, long black hair with an eye mask and scarred eye forearm tattoo, turns over and quiets the phone. She sits up and removes the eye mask and puts on the sunglasses on her night stand on. PAUL RUNNINGS, mid 30s tall with short brown hair, stands in the bedroom watching Chelsea leave. PAUL RUNNINGS

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(V.O) It’s been 3 months since everything happened. INT. BATHROOM-CONTINUOUS Chelsea stares at her reflection before opening the cabinet (the cabinet is mixed with pill bottles and toiletry accessories). She takes a bottle and puts it in her pocket. Her phone on the toilet begins RINGING while she brushes her teeth. She goes and silences the phone again. PAUL RUNNINGS (V.O) I don’t know why I’m here. Maybe it’s to protect her. INT. KITCHEN Paul tries to block Chelsea’s way to the fridge but she goes right through him. PAUL RUNNINGS (V.O) But, I’m failing at that so far. Chelsea opens the fridge (it is filled with alcoholic beverages). She takes out a bottle and shakes it before opening it. A RINGING from her back pocket fills the room. She removes her phone and accepts the call. Paul goes to sit at the dining room table and puts his head in his hands. BANKS (over the phone)

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Hey, where are you right now? Chelsea takes a swig from the bottle. CHELSEA I’m home right now. It’s where I like to sleep. BANKS Cute. Did you forget about our breakfast plans today. The phones clock shows: 1:57 PM. Chelsea’s shoulders drop and lets out a heavy sigh. BANKS (CONT'D) They serve lunch here too. CHELSEA Yea, yea. I’ll be there in 10. Bye. Chelsea places the bottle back in the fridge and heads out the room. PAUL RUNNINGS (V.O) I appreciate Banks. Him and I were pretty close. I’m happy he still checks on her every now and then. INT. HALLWAY She heads to the closet and takes out a jacket and hat and takes a few pills and heads out the door. CUT TO: EXT. CAR- DAY A sports car is shown speeding down rural ground with its engine roaring and wheels leaving skid marks being it.

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2021-22

INT. CAR- DAY Chelsea is in the passenger seat of the car slumped down playing music on her phone. She smiles and looks to the side of her and begins taking pictures. She starts smiling and laughing. CUT TO: EXT. DINER Chelsea, Paul and Banks are sitting outside the diner. Chelsea is staring straight with her hand on her face. BANKS (snapping his fingers) Hello. Chelsea? You there PAUL RUNNINGS Remembering the past. Thinking of the good times. No one ever tell us how haunting it can be. Chelsea snaps back to focus. She looks at Bank sitting across from her. CHELSEA (stuttering) Yea, sorry. I was a bit lost. What were you saying? BANKS (removing his sunglasses) I was asking how you’ve been. It’s been a bit. CHELSEA Yea it has. I’ve been struggling at work.

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2021-22

BANKS I didn’t mean that. (takes a quick breath) It’s been 3 months since everything happened. (stuttering) You don’t pick up your phone often. You miss out on plans with me. I just want to make sure everything's okay. If you ever need anything, you knowCHELSEA (annoyed) I’m gonna stop you right there. Did you invite me out to eat or to analyze me? I’m not one of your patients, so don’t treat me like one Chelsea looks away from Banks and crosses her arms as she looks into the window of the diner. BANKS (sighs) You’re right. You’re right. Just promise me one thing. Chelsea turns her head back to him. BANKS (CONT'D) (reaching for her hand) Promise me you’re ok. PAUL RUNNINGS (V.O) That’s what I hope for too.

OTR

2021-22

CUT TO: INT. BEDROOM Chelsea is sleeping in her bed and Paul roams around the room. He notices a letter by her desk. The letter reads: “Dear Chelsea Runnings, As we have previously discussed, we had received many complaints of you not answering emails from students and faculty. We do understand unexpected issues may arise but we still expect our faculty to be professional and act in the universities best interest. This is your final warning notice Sincerely, Edonis” He frowns at the letter before phasing through the wall into the next room. He looks at photos on their table and hears voices of past trips. He remembers her smile and laughter. The bedroom door opens and Chelsea walks in. INT. LIVING ROOM Chelsea sits down with her laptop and begins working. She opens up an email and begins writing. As she writes, a notification pops up on her computer: “You Have A New Memory” She clicks it and it shows a selfie of her and Paul. FADE TO. INT. CAR Chelsea snaps the photo of her and Paul on her phone

OTR

2021-22

PAUL RUNNINGS How do we look? CHELSEA Gorgeous. PAUL RUNNINGS I’m not surprised. (MORE) EXT. CAR The car continues down the rural pathway with smoke exiting the engine. INT. CAR Paul continues driving the steering wheel and Chelsea stares at him. Paul looks at her. PAUL RUNNINGS (chuckles) What? CHELSEA This driving trip has been such a fun time. PAUL RUNNINGS Yea, totally. It was a good idea. EXT. RURAL GROUND Further down the path is an intersection with train rails. The area is surrounded with signs. A train starts pulling up. .

OTR

2021-22

The sound of the trains engine roars. CUT TO: INT. LIVING ROOM Chelsea’s laptop begins overheating and on her screen is the original email she began working on. She closes the laptop and leaves the room. CUT TO BLACK. INT. KITCHEN Chelsea sits at the dining room table in a robe. She holds her head in her hands and reaches for the pill bottles in her pocket. PAUL RUNNINGS (V.O) You never know who suffers the most. (MORE) PAUL RUNNINGS (CONT'D) The one who goes through everything on their own, or the one who watches everything unfold, with nothing to do about it. Suddenly, Chelsea’s phone on the table begins to RING. CHELSEA Can’t anyone just leave me alone? Chelsea puts the call on speaker. SCHOOL CALLER Hello, Chelsea. How are you?

OTR

2021-22

CHELSEA I’m good. Who is this? Paul sits down next to her SCHOOL CALLER Oh, this is Edonis. From Ace University. We’ve sent a few letters to your home and left some messages. We wanted to talk today regarding issues with work. CHELSEA Yea, I know. Answer the emails. I’ll get on that. SCHOOL CALLER Yea, thats just the thing. We have continuously warned you about the fact you have been ignoring your duties. We have had students reach out to other advisors and staff to get help with issues. CHELSEA Now just hold onSCHOOL CALLER And how you have neglected any assistance we wanted to provide to help you with these tasks. Now, we unfortunately have to dismiss you from your duties. Payment for your vacation and sick days will be included in your final paycheck.

OTR

2021-22

CHELSEA Is there nothing I can do to resolve this issue? SCHOOL CALLER If you had cared more about the position, we would not be having this conversation. Have a great rest of your day. The phone is hung up. Chelsea just stares at her phone. PAUL RUNNINGS (V.O) It’s times like these I wish I could give her a hug or let her know everything would be ok. Chelsea places her phone down and takes a deep breath and looks down at the table. She takes off her sunglasses then proceeds to cry into her hands. The echoing of the callers worlds “If you had cared” start filling in her head. She looks at her forearm eye tattoo. FADE TO:

INT. CAR The sports car continues down its rural path. The train tracks further down the road and the train starts gunning down the tracks. CHELSEA Hey, I’m gonna play some music ok? PAUL RUNNINGS Yea, go ahead. Chelsea takes Pauls phone. “I’ll Be There For You by The Rembrandts” begins to play filling the sound of the background.

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2021-22

CUT TO: INT. LIVING ROOM Chelsea is still in tears. CUT TO: INT. CAR PAUL RUNNINGS I’ll be there for you! Chelsea is laughing and pulls out her phone to record. The train tracks begin to get closer. CHELSEA Babe, look here. Give your fans some love. The car begins to get closer to the train. Paul begins singing towards the camera. The sports car then collides with the train. CUT TO: INT. LIVING ROOM Chelsea is in a pool of tears at her table. Paul is sitting with his head in his hands. PAUL RUNNINGS (V.O) I should have been paying attention. I should have been watching the road. Chelsea jumps out of her seat, grabs her jacket and heads towards the door. INT. APARTMENT HALLWAY-GARBAGE DOOR Chelsea stands near the door with a cigarette in her hand. She sniffles before looking out and towards the roof.

OTR

2021-22

Chelsea drops her cigarette and calls the elevator and Paul Runnings follows. CUT TO INT. STAIRWAY TO ROOF Chelsea exits the elevator and heads up the stairs to roof door. PAUL RUNNINGS (V.O) It’s not your fault. Chelsea stares at the door with the warning: “EMERGENCY ALARM WILL ACTIVATE” CHELSEA (sniffling) Everything’s my fault. If I cared enough. If I didn’t(pauses) Chelsea puts her hand to cover her mouth as she continue sobbing. She pushes the door open and the alarm WHALES. Chelsea walks near the edge and is about to jump off. PAUL RUNNINGS (hastily) Wait! Paul runs and grabs her from behind. She falls back and her wallet falls out of her jacket pocket. The wallet is opened on a photo of Paul. She stares at the photo before standing up and looking around. She’s all by herself.

OTR

2021-22

The super enters the building and asks what is going on. However, the scene is silent. Soon, they exit the roof. FADE TO: EXT. DINER-DAY Chelsea is seen sitting outside looking at her phone. Her sunglasses are next to her She looks to the side and starts waving. Banks comes and sits across from her. BANKS You know, I half expected you not to even be here. CHELSEA (chuckling) Yea, I get that. BANKS (takes off his sunglasses) How’s the job hunt going? CHELSEA Better. I also heard that you guys need someone good with emails; like a receptionist? Chelsea raises her phone showing the job ad around. She’s all by herself. BANKS (smiles) This why you called me? For a business proposal.

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2021-22

They both laugh and bit and silence fills the room for a moment. CHELSEA I appreciate you coming. And I appreciate you treating me. It means a lot. Banks reaches for and holds Chelsea’s hand. BANKS How does an interview sound? Tomorrow afternoon? CHELSEA Sounds like a plan. Banks lets go of Chelsea’s hand. BANKS I’m glad you’re doing better. Ever gonna tell me what changed your mind? CHELSEA Let’s just say, (pauses) It’s nice to know you have someone watching over you. BANKS Like a friend? CHELSEA More like an angel. (smiles)

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2021-22

CUT TO BLACK. THE END

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2021-22

Mae Passes Me A Picture Steven Abell

Mae passes me a picture I hold it in my hands it’s the one she took of me last week “no” Mae says “that’s the one of you waiting to be photographed” apparently the instant before Mae pressed the shutter button she pressed the shutter button to capture me in a moment of weakness smiling Mae hands me the photograph of me it looks exactly like the other one

OTR

2021-22

Inwood Hill Park Joel Little I’m a junior park ranger, in case you couldn’t tell from the bee-magnet yellow of my patched shirt, or the telltale sunburned neck and mosquito-bit ankles of our creed. Entry is free this year for students of the Amistad Dual Language School, so you could say I had the inside track. Of course, we find any opportunity we can to lord this over our hereditary rivals at the Muscota New School — namesake of the salt marsh which surrounds our little peninsula, and co-occupant of the W. Haywood Burns building, jealous as we are of their supposedly lax pedagogy, particularly laissez faire where recess duration is concerned if one’s to believe the schoolyard mythos. Let’s say you’ve come to the squat aluminum-lined nature center on a summer’s day, wandering away from the ballparks in the shade of the cliff which skirts the border of Marble Hill, covered by massive painted “C,” an omen of Columbia’s continuing encroachment into the park and Inwood at large, radiating out from its locus at Baker Field. Maybe you’ve fiddled with the pin impression topography map at the entrance long enough to turn your attention towards the bald eagle that seems to fly off the wall from its perch in the corner of your eye with taxidermic ferocity. Below, you mark the arrowheads and wampum in delicate display and the grainy photographs of Wecquaesgeek men and women in caves beside them, their faces blurred by motion. Suddenly, you remember the Drums Along the Hudson festivals of Junes past that once filled the whole park with Cherokee kitsch and friendship bracelets; Captain Planet knockoffs you half-ignore, tearing up blades of grass and wondering when you’ll finally get to eat. Down the hall a ways, you’re struck by a grand view: the sprawling hilltop estates of a bygone gilded age, frozen in sepia tone. .

OTR

2021-22

You wonder what became of them amidst the untamed, tree shrouded mass that looms over the marsh outside the window. Of course, I’m happy to tell you all about it. I know everything there is to know around here and more, and I like to show off for whoever will listen. Let’s begin at the heart of Inwood’s cosmos: Shorakkopoch Rock. Site of Peter Minuit’s legendary swindle: the island of Manhattan for 60 Dutch guilders ($24) in beads and trinkets. Don’t be fooled by the crafty accounting or the dubious history. This story is truer than true. The land you take up is steeped in blood; tears fill the riverbeds behind you. Once a people, then a village, then a mighty tulip tree, now a weatherbeaten old rock, its bronze plaque barely legible from decades in decay. But read it very closely. Who will remember the story when it's gone? Nobody knows, but listen well: there’s terrible meaning hidden all around. Ghost beckon out from every name and every place. Listen closely. Can you hear the water lapping at the thicketed banks across the field? The tides are coming in from both directions, the Hudson and the Harlem; a curious estuarial phenomenon, quite beautiful to behold as it floods out the muddy tracks left by so many Canada geese. You wonder about the name of this narrow strait: Spuyten Duyvil Creek. More Dutch prehistory, courtesy of Washington Irving and his knickerbocker tales. Either the spout or the spite of the devil, depending on whom you ask. Legend has it this is where the poor old trumpeter Antony van Corlear — right-hand man to colonial governor Peter Stuyvesent — met his watery doom, swallowed whole by the treacherous whirlpool which popped up from right under his nose.

If only he had known the tides better… But alas, fools abound, as our history shows.

OTR

2021-22

If only he had known the tides better… But alas, fools abound, as our history shows. To think, that very same water would have met your toes right where you stand, flush against the mound beneath Shorakkopoch Rock, before the Gaelic field was filled in. Maybe it will again, someday. Follow me into the park, there’s more I’d like to show you. There to the right are what remains of those caves you saw before, stripped and pillaged long ago, since given over to the summertime escapades of those still small enough to squeeze through the narrow vertical chutes in the rock left by glacial formations. You can spot them by the cobwebs and guano in their hair, faces beaming in conquest of nature’s little secrets, struck by that ineffable joy of discovery. Try not to interrupt them as we make our way up the steep slope. Notice the mossy husks of fallen trees, buttressed by DayGlo orange fire hydrant and black turn-of-the-century lamppost with its lantern shattered out. Don’t they seem out of place here among the overgrowth and vegetation? See the small standing spring off the trail, cradle of generations of mosquitos — let this scratch-ravaged skin to which all manner of salves and calamine provide but a minuscule pittance of succor serve as your warning, you’ll want to maintain a proper berth. Let’s stop and catch our breath for a minute at the crossroads of the humpback boulder. Our journey only gets more vertical from here, I’m afraid, so have some water. Look over that ridge towards Payson Avenue, you might be able to see the Houdini house. Surely, you’ve heard the names of old Inwood wealth, seen their legacy in various stages of decomposition. Isham Park, Dyckman Farmhouse, Seaman-Drake Arch (if you can spot it behind the auto repair shop), the bricked-up facade of Hurst House just across the street from where I live, inspiration for many a fireside tale of wailing midnight specters, the burnt nuns and schoolchildren who once roomed there in the 30s during its time as a convent.

OTR

2021-22

I made a model of it once out of cardboard and toilet paper rolls, painted a dull russet to match the worn brick. Isn’t it strange, the things you do for fun? Maybe you’ve never seen these particular spots, but the past haunts you all the same. Names, dates, streets, places, landmarks, architecture, fences, statues, plaques, families, curses, love, war, industry, land disputes, contracts, wills, estates; it’s all there waiting for you. As we’ve seen, Inwood Hill Park is no exception. Now, at long last, we reach the uppermost point: the overlook meadow. Across the river, the Palisades stretch all the way from the George Washington Bridge and up as far as the eye can see to the Tappan Zee: cliffsides acquired and donated by Rockefeller in the 30s, his project being to keep the view intact and undeveloped. Glorious in the full light of day, to be sure, but there’s more to this spot than what lies beyond it. Turn your eye back to the bluff and into the tall grasses. To see it in daylight obscures the truth, so let it be night. These stories are evening primroses that blossom by the glow of the moon and shut up in the harsh midday sun. Wait for the sound of the screech-owls, let the mist settle around and the cones and rods adjust, then you’ll begin to see what’s there to see. No longer simulacra, just you and the land. What is this place? Once there were mansions in these hills. Department store barons and their summer homes, lost to fires in the late 19th century. Here and there you’ll see the scattered vestiges of those days and the decades that followed: lampposts, park benches, crumbling pavement, all out of time and left to molder, like many a Robert Moses effort. In this spot, there was an orphanage, left vacant for many years before its razing sometime in the 30s. Before that, it was the House of Mercy. An eagle flying overhead from its home just over the ridge to the east might discern vague traces of the E-shaped structure that composed this “home for women,” but surely you won’t have any trouble feeling the pall of cruelty that lingers here in the darkness.

OTR

2021-22

The cries of hunger, women in need starved of all but bread and molasses; “inmates” committed, shaved, gagged, and beaten; handcuffed and straight-jacketed, isolated in small rooms for days and weeks at a time; deprived of outside contact so as to maintain “order,” iron bars grating every door and window. You must understand that this was not at all unusual for the time. Alcoholics, addicts, sex workers, wives cast out by husbands, children cast out by parents, all locked away and made to suffer these conditions in the name of God. In the same city, in the very same woods where the wealthy delighted in their grand pageantry, so many suffered just around the corner. Neglect, abuse, deprivation, cruelty; it's all there if you look close enough. Here and now. These things happen everywhere. They are omnipresent. Don’t look away. Don’t forget. Another woman died here recently. She was out past dark, raped and stabbed and left in the bushes just down the hill from us. It took them days to find her. It didn’t take long before the shock wore off, and the stories faded from our conversations soon thereafter. No one was prosecuted. Another woman, shot twice in the head just a little while later, in the same park. Again, there’s terror, then there’s curiosity, then there’s stories, and finally there’s nothing. We accept these things as normal, the sediment of daily life. But I remember them: names, faces, dates, places. If you don’t, who will? It could’ve been anyone, but it was them and it happened before our very eyes and in our own backyard. It’s all part and parcel of where we are, who we are, why we’re here, even when it’s silenced and destroyed and buried under unfathomable depths of land and history.

It’s all in Inwood Hill Park: death and life in the wild green woods at the edge of your subway map. There it was and there it remains

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2021-22

Alta Marea Tatianna Spotorno

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2021-22

Christchild Tatianna Sportono

OTR

2021-22

Regarding God Avidor Auden It fascinates me, that stage of life when children think that grownups are in absolute control I once saw a little boy Reaching out to the hand of another little boy And when he was shirked by that face of disinterest over and over He didn’t look to him, but to me As if to say, “Mother, make him love me” I have been that boy, longing for the cold-hearted Breaking my spine for a brush of the hand On my knees by the bathroom sink eking out my ugly little prayer Croaking in vain, “Mother, make them love me”

OTR

2021-22

Language Of A Thimble Tyler Martinez “Can you believe I made this dress from an old bedsheet?” Marie emerged from the bathroom with a pirouette, wearing a dress with the imprints of a mattress pad still diagonally wrapped around it. “Of course I can believe it,'' he said. He unwrapped a new pack of cigarettes, and without taking any out, laid them beside the telephone on the end-table that separated the two beds, still neatly made, with an extra top-sheet draped at the foot. “Should I phone for breakfast?” she asked, both hands arguing between themselves to fit an earring and already starting towards the phone. He sat on the edge of the bed and stared meditatively into the carpet, half-fixed on distinguishing a dark spot as a continuation of its pattern, or a stain, or a shadow. His right hand wandered to his face, and before registering her question, he aimlessly measured his features with his forefinger and thumb, and became suddenly aware of his age — not being at all old, but much older than he had been. Marie took a seat on the adjacent bed facing him — her dress obstructing his view of the carpet — and in his vacancy, heard only segments of her phone conversation: “...breakfast — yes, thank you.” He remembered waking up yesterday morning at home, and through an elaborate plan of calling, packing, and driving — of which he had very little participatory effort — they arrived at the hotel after it was dark, scoured the downstairs dining-hall for leftover sandwiches reserved for that morning, and retired to the thirty-second floor, the meager suite, of a hotel-resort in Clearwater, Florida. “Room C61. Should be under Cohen — or James?” His name made him suddenly aware of his posture, and slowly he straightened his back. “... and a croissant, do you have any?”

OTR

2021-22

“You shouldn’t live on those all morning, you should eat.” “I know.” He lit the cigarette slowly, and ashed it directly on the table. She looked at him with a familiarly bothered look, one he had learned to evade with some proficiency, but not from directly in front of him. “You really ought to eat, I’ve got them on the phone,” she said, handing him the phone, then brushing the ashes over the edge of the table and into her hand. “They don’t do breakfast in a couple more minutes.” He watched her stand up toward the bathroom and walk measurably so as not to send the ashes into the air. He raised the receiver to his ear, and without saying anything, quietly listened to the bustling on the other end, which he assumed — from his work previously on a line — was the kitchen. The indistinct chatter and voices piled over each other, and in metre, a sharp crash from the utensils rang, and complementary to that, a bell, which sounded before, during, and after an order was shouted. The loudest of the sounds came every couple of seconds, exactly, as a brush of air wafting into the receiver, extinguished, he presumed, from the nose of the man on the other end whose patience was, approximately, running out. James sat listening to the ensemble of sounds, shielding the phone from his breath and dragging on his cigarette. “Hello?” he finally heard on the other end. The man’s voice betrayed the preconception of himself in James’ head, which originally was of a gruff man, who was the wider, less intellectually literate of the duo to which he belonged with another man, the thinner, taller and more sensible and constructive. Instead, it was a sweet voice, but still firm, in a sharp but inquisitive way. He imagined him, this time, to be delicate, whose proclivity toward food was much greater than to be dispensed in a hotel kitchen, but he nevertheless accepted the position, having understood that, well, sometimes it's more important to work than not. He was lucky, too, that he was of a genetically thin build, as the kitchen was a narrow and claustrophobic place,

OTR

2021-22

less accommodating to those whose inclination towards the culinary was apparent. He was a fair man, James judged, exhaling his cigarette into the opposite bed. “Is there anyone there?” the man said. “What time will they be here, have they said?” Marie asked, emerging from the bathroom, drying her hands on her dress. “I’m not sure,” he answered them, then placing the telephone back in it’s cradle. “Well, it shouldn’t take more than a few minutes.” James stood up and waited for his vision to sharpen before stamping out the hilt of cigarette and igniting a new one. Still in an undershirt and briefs, he opened the sliding door and sauntered toward the balcony, and saw the beach extend into the far distance. Where the sand met the concrete was a perfect line of patterned umbrellas, under which multitudes of people had jammed and clamored back and forth from the water. As he scanned each one consecutively toward the horizon, he picked out a swimming cap to watch for a moment, and hung on to it as dearly as he could before it vanished, inevitably, in the tide of people. One of them he took particular interest in: a man, whose features the distance had erased, wearing a fishing vest and a striped cap with bright yellow goggles. He walked slowly among the crowd — distinguished in his speed, if nothing else — transferring the entirety of his weight with every step. The children had run in front and behind him, galloping sand into the air and affording him very little consideration outside of the obstruction of his pace. James — from what his sight allowed — considered him a strong and burly man to labor his weight in the heat, and while the man’s family hadn’t considered him the sharpest, they appreciated him for his dedication to their well-being — sending some to college, and always providing for the holidays. James certainly took notice of his slow, distinctive walk, which he earned from being a hard and working man. In one hand, he carried a cooler, and in the other, a long carrying-case from which, at one end, several rods and fishing poles

OTR

2021-22

had extended outward to further complicate the economy of his gait. James appreciated him for his forward, bold nature, and almost had the idea to shout for him, but decided against it on figuring the sound wouldn’t travel far enough to really get his message across. “Beautiful, isn’t it?” Marie said, crossing the threshold onto the balcony behind him. She stood next to him and placed her hand deliberately on his shoulder. “Sure,” he said, losing vision of the man after hearing her flip-flops coming toward him. “There’s something about the water here that really gets your attention, I know, it said so in all the magazines.” She took the ashtray from inside and placed it on the railing beside him. “We have so much time, I should be finishing all the work I still have to do. It’s practically all I brought with me,” she said, and began unearthing her sewing bag onto the wood balcony floor. An ensemble of metallic jingles erupted into the air, forcing James’ survey of the beach into a squint. He continued to ash his cigarette over the side, refusing to concede his knowing the ashtray was there, a mission easily compromised if, James thought, a single atom in the tray’s bunch had crossed the inertia picket-line. He felt, through the very precise vibrations of the railing, Marie amicably line her thimbles on the edge. Before placing each one, there was a clattering of metal from, he visualized, her hand plunging into the repurposed canvas makeup case, which yesterday night, had been the basis for a largescale federal investigation through their luggage during the drive. He counted how many there were to place and several times lost count, feeling each one inch closer towards him. He tried desperately to recapture his focus on a fixture of the beach: he measured the length of the street-poles, and their wide, graffitiladen bases; he saw the parking lot across the street, and their muted orange Volkswagen whose weekend rental fee was significantly reduced on account of Marie’s dad having worked there as a high-schooler; he tried for the adjacent buildings and their array of balcony-furniture,

OTR

2021-22

some rearranged, others still underneath dark, reflective rainsheets; he found a plane, and painted on its rudder was “AA” in red and blue, and before completing a full turn, it disappeared behind a building and out of sight. Eventually he tried for the sun as best he could, staring adjacent to it, inching his gaze closer and closer and further into a squint until his eyes were completely shut. Marie concluded her thimble row, and placed the final one inside the ashtray, directly in the center, beside his left arm. The sound wasn’t as much of a stab to his ears, and looking down to finally acknowledge it, the thimble sat upright inside the tray whose dark-green mineral pattern appeared cut straight from the center of the Earth. In his recovering vision, he saw the row of thimbles neatly on the railing, not budging from the exact measure of distance between one another. “What’s wrong?” Marie said, standing beside him. “Nothing. I’m just terribly hungry. I wish they’d hurry up down there.” “No, well, besides that … you’ve been awfully quiet this morning and last night. I mean, if it was something I did, I’d rather you tell me before I think about it all day, you know.” “It’s nothing you did.” “Are you sure? James — really? I mean, I really thought coming here would do us some good, because, you’ve just seemed so on edge, and you never talk to me about anything — the least I could do is give us some time together. I mean, I remember the time we went to that one national park, after Josie’s birthday, and you seemed fine then, after everything. But I’m just looking for a way in, and it feels like you aren’t letting me in. Is there anything I can do? Really, anything, I mean —” She leaned against the railing and the length of her arm in thimbles slid and went with the wind. James watched — at first, expecting their descent to be steered entirely by their weight — as they became separate, flickering pieces of metal strewn in the breeze and silently disappearing into the foreground. “Well, that's really great.” Marie said, “And — ” she surveyed the thimbles closely, and counted them over again. “And fuck, one of those was Claire’s,

OTR

2021-22

and after I lost her keys, she’s gonna let me go. That’s really amazing.” James stared vacantly into the direction of the thimbles, and tried to make out exactly where they’d fallen, still listening closely for their impact. She sat on the balcony’s reclining beach chair, with her elbows on her knees and her eyes in her palms. “You know, it hasn’t exactly been the easiest for me either,” Marie admitted to no one. “Everyday is the same, and it doesn't feel like it’s getting any easier. I’m not sure why I thought it would. She’s having me fill an impossible quota by the end of the month for Fashion Week, and as it is, I haven’t heard from anyone about any of my applications, or from Dr. Rhett, who I’m convinced at this point is avoiding me for making that comment about his secretary earlier this month, the one who thought I stole one of their Vogues from the lounge. And now, I’ve lost one of Claire’s thimbles, and I’m sure she’s already got a line of people looking to take my stupid little position, and now, my fiancé refuses to communicate with me. And — ” Just before she went on, another thimble from the procession slipped from the balcony into the wind. “You know, what I would give to be one of those sometimes.” “One of what?” “Something to accidentally slip from a railing.” “Don’t say that.” “No, really, I mean it, I do, and not have anyone hear that I ever hit the ground.” Marie began to cry, at first silently to herself, then loudly. James put his finished cigarette out beside the thimble in the ashtray. “I’m sorry to hear it’s been so hard,” he said. “Yeah, well, it has been. It’s just that, sometimes I get this feeling that you really dislike me. I don’t know why you get like this — all stoic, and, there’s not much I feel I can do about it, and it can just be overwhelming.” James lowered his gaze and measured the distance from his eyes to the ground. He forgot the floor they were on, and if a building’s height were measured in something other than it’s storeys, he guessed the building was several thousand Webster anthologies tall — he couldn’t put an exact number to it —

OTR

2021-22

or, maybe several hundred UPS trucks high, disemboweled, with each of their packages plummeting down toward the cement, ornamented in the air with paper and envelopes. He imagined the chaos of the crowds at the beach, at first being terrorized by the sound of alarm clocks, books, several bundles of kitchen utensils, Cardinals tickets, replacement vacuum attachments, spare living room telephones, home lava kits, and cat food striking the pavement, most of them with a great eruption. Then, after the commotion, the crowd would be drawn by an instinctive curiosity — the escalation of which no one could help — towards the debris, and they’d scavenge among the litter to find what they’d been looking for. Marie was standing next to him now, still crying and staring directly at him. “I mean, tell me, is it something I did? You really should tell me.” “No, you haven’t done anything.” “You’re lying — I know you’re lying. Why can’t you tell me the truth? I mean, am I who you thought I was this entire time? Are you having doubts?” She gripped the railing. “Because Claire said you might have doubts, and I mean, I’ve had doubts too, that’s nothing to be torn up about, right? We’re young, and there’s so many other things to be doing, I know you know that, but it isn’t a lose-lose, plenty of people get married now, it’ll be good for the both of us, and we’ll get that percolator we saw over here, and there won’t be anymore crying and fussing. I promise. None of it will matter, not anymore, after that. Why won’t you look at me?” James, still leaning over the railing, took the cue and refocused on her. He saw her swollen face beneath the tears, still running and stopping perfectly at each corner of her mouth in long strips of eyeliner. She had her mother’s eyes, which were always noticeably heartfelt and matched her dark brown hair parted down the center, with a bright red headband connecting both of her ears hidden underneath. Her jaw was whetted from years of keeping her fists underneath it at the table, she’d sometimes say, before saying something disparaging about her straight, Greek nose to divert the attention.

OTR

2021-22

Her chin converged at a single precise point, and continued to tremble through the extended eye contact. “Say something, please.” “I mean, you know I love you.” “Do you mean it?” “Of course I do.” Marie glanced at the remainder of thimbles, then over the railing to address the building’s height in her mind. Her crying became quiet, impartial gasps, then eventually into full, concentrated breaths. “God, where is breakfast, how long ago did we call?” she asked. “I’m not sure, I’ll head down and see,” he said, already making for the door. He dressed himself in the same clothes from last night hung over the crest of a chair beside his deflated duffle bag. Marie watched him from behind the glass door of the balcony, remembering the shirt he slipped on as the reason they’d ever gotten together in the first place. They’d met through a mutual friend who knew someone perfectly capable of fixing James’ shirt — and perfect she was, James told him after meeting her. Her handiwork, then, had been amateurish, and from the opposite side of the glass, she could see the loose threads still hanging from the yoke which James kept in tribute to their first date. James stepped out, their eyes meeting before her image shrunk between the door and the wall, and he clicked the door closed. The hallway was silent, and bolted onto the ceiling was a digital clock whose numbers were indecipherable against the glare of the sun pouring through each window at either end of the hall. He took a careful pace down the hallway, patiently waited, and stepped into the elevator, where an operator stood beside a young girl and her mother clad in beach attire. “First floor, please.” “Wonderful out, if that’s where you’re headed,” the mother said, apportioning her arm strength between a towel and an umbrella. James looked over to smile at her. There was some of his mother in her. The girl’s eyes scanned him, and after noticeably deciding between friend or foe, she reached for the thread waving from his back and plucked it with her entire body, acquiring it as a perfectly detached strand. “Excuse me, Janie, was that appropriate? — I’m very sorry.”

OTR

2021-22

James kept forward, staring into the elevator gate, trying his hardest not to move, or give any indication of his being there anymore. He mirrored the operator’s manner in being precisely quiet until their floor arrived when he exerted himself in forgetting anyone was in the car with him. “Well, you have a lovely day,” the mother said as the door opened, apparently to the operator. James arrived at the foyer and walked briskly towards the entrance. He shouldered open the glass door, meeting the ocean’s wind with force on the other side. He walked out into the street and crossed into the parking lot, stepped into the rental, and for a while, sat with his knuckles pressed into his forehead against the steering wheel. He thought indiscernibly about everything, all at once, and the sound of it roared in his ears and came into his mind as flashes of things, and places, and ideas: the first of which were the cigarettes he’d forgotten on the end-table, and beside them, his watch, which wasn’t of any serious importance to him, then wondering if Marie heard the rattle of the rental keys as he slipped his pants on — he was convinced she did, seconds closing the door — then he remembered when she had called him her role model when he’d won his postgraduate award, then the trip to the national park and persuading Marie away from the overhang of rock, and watching her tremble at the height, but remembering her persistence until someone shouted, which frightened her, enough to be wrestled away and to the hospital. The thought prompted his eyes at the rear-view mirror and he measured it at their balcony above, where he discerned Marie continuing on a piece of fabric between her hands.He felt the warmth of the sun on his fingers and his pulse as a hammer in his head, and he sat up straight and turned the key in the ignition. Underneath him, he felt the churning of the car’s devices and heard the vibration ring against the unoccupied seats. He pulled out of the parking lot, presented his I.D. to security, and almost began on Myrtle before watching the mirror a second time to find

OTR

2021-22

Marie looking directly at him from thousands of anthologies high before disappearing behind several buildings.

OTR

2021-22

Discovering Katherine Williams

OTR

2021-22

In Cemento Veritas Mario Loprete

OTR

2021-22

"You Are..." Victoria Francisco "You are mixed." "You are not." "You are Latin." "you mean I·ta·li·an?" "Being mixed is black and white, you can maybe pass for that." "You are Spanish!" "You speak Spanish?" "You're Hispanic, that is that." "You're denying—" "What's your culture?" "Oh! I wouldn't've guessed that." "You look like my friend in Delhi!" "You look Philippines and Irish!" "You are neither!" "You are mixed!" "You speak Spanish?!" "well, now, that changes things."

OTR

2021-22

Reflective Winds Rei Wolfsohn The winds rushed in every direction. The flickers of light through the grave curtain of grey were few and far between, glaring out from the lighthouse a mile down the beach. Edgar’s arms were crossed at his chest like a mummy, and he stood in the sand, tied to a tree, expecting the worst. His thin black pinstripe suit barely retained any heat, so he shivered in the cold of this stormy morning. His white shirt was crumpled and dirty from sleeping in the sand the night before. He looked ragged—a splayed version of his usual self. His black tie hung halfway out of his pants pocket—he had the intelligence to at least remove it from his neck so it wouldn’t flap him in the face. Edgar thought to himself, if I live through this, I swear I’ll take my dog for more walks, I swear I’ll have children. He didn’t know what kind of higher power wanted him to have children, but he thought it must be the case. He knew the right thing to do was to at least spend more time with the only living thing that loved him, his dog. Then he brushed it off as a moment of desperation. He thought of how he ended up tying himself to this tree, now that the taxis sheltered themselves from the chaos and the people who lived nearby locked up their houses. He had woken up too late to make a run for it, so he took a rope from an abandoned boat and tied himself to this tree, so he wouldn’t blow away in the furious weather. He spent the night before taking a few clients out for drinks at a strip club on the docks. Then he wandered alone down the coast to this point miles away. He didn’t feel like going home, and he was too drunk to even use his phone to call a cab. “What about family?” His client asked him the night before. They sat in the front row next to the stage. Bright lights in blue, purple and pink ignited their eyes. Perfectly oiled and shaven legs moved gracefully in front of them.

OTR

2021-22

The smell of smoke soothed Edgar. Thinking of this question now, in the fray of the wind and the rain sent him into the same flurry of confusion that triggered his binge drinking the night before. Was he living life wrong? Was it too late to change? He was sick of his lifestyle. He had to do something different. But how? Thoughts he was trying to avoid in the rage of both the night before and the present storm, but kept coming back. “I don’t have any. My parents died when I was little, my grandma’s been gone for years, and the only one waiting for me at home is my dog.” He replied the night before. He thought of his cold house, his modern leather, cold metal furniture, his nearly empty cabinets, his single set of silverware, his harsh fluorescent light, so unlike the house he grew up in with his grandma. “I can’t imagine never having kids. They make everything I do and earn worth it.” His client commented, as the very same client stuffed a woman’s panties with twenty singles. “I just never met the right person. I’d rather be doing this.” Edgar lied, as he did the same with ten singles. For awhile now, he was getting bored with his habits. As the storm bellowed, Edgar thought about how he had no one to make his life worth it. Every experience was worth the minimal joy he got from it. Looking at it this way, his life was bleak. Why should he settle for meaningless minimal joy? Why had it taken him so long to realize that without family and legacy, no one remembers you. No one wonders if you’re safe. No one gives you a reason to get up in the morning. He was finding it harder and harder to get up in the morning. “I don’t get to see them much, but when I do those are the best moments of my life.” His client said the night before.“What makes it so special?” Edgar replied. “It’s hard to explain. It’s the look on their faces when they see me, like I’m the greatest person in the world. It’s all the recognition I’ve ever gotten from work, rolled up in three cute balls of love, every time I walk through the door. They’re so grateful for every bit of attention I can give them. And my wife is so supportive, I don’t know

OTR

2021-22

if I would’ve made it through my parents passing without her. It’s just comforting, to know I have someone who I can lean on, and kids who will always love me.” “I just don’t have time to meet anyone because I work so much.” Edgar replied, as he loosened the tie around his neck. “You make time.” At that, Edgar had nothing to say. He ignored the growing feeling inside, the pang of regret, by flooding it with drinks. He forgot the rest of what happened last night. Today, sober in the storm, he couldn’t ignore it. Edgar often drank as a remedy to any bummer feelings. When he was younger, he had major successes at work, he was very young for each promotion, he was frequently recognized for achievement. He kept it all top notch despite, perhaps because of, his drinking habits. It was a way to let loose—work hard, play hard. He had always been an overachiever in school. Since college, he usually had buddies to go out and rage with at night. He had laughter with them, making fun of people and each other. By the time his grandma died, when he was in his thirties, most of his buddies had started families and barely went out with him anymore. He would take the younger executives out as often as he could, keeping up with their drinking and coke habits. When they couldn’t go out, he would take his clients to dinner on the company expense accounts. Between those two types of people, he always had something to do. But now, he was finally noticing how depressing that is, for a man his age. He didn’t like either group of people all that much. He was too old to be in on all the jokes with the younger crowd, and he could never get close to his clients. Even the strippers weren’t doing it for him anymore. And he was having trouble picking up chicks like he used to. For a decade now, as his body slowed down and his mind started skipping, he gradually felt less and less motivated to get out of bed. At this point, it took three alarms and smacking himself in the face just to put his feet on the floor. He was constantly reminding himself of what was at stake. He had begun to slip at work.

OTR

2021-22

Having another heartbeat in the same space gave him comfort. He wondered if she was enough. In the whipping of the storm, his head started to pound. Then he thought back to what it was like with his parents as a kid. How cozy and welcoming his house had been, when his mother filled it with knickknacks and floral patterns. He thought about how excited he had been when his father came home tired from work every day, how he suddenly got a second wind in the flurry of wanting to talk to them. He thought about the delicious family dinners on weekends, their laughter, their smiles, the way his parents kissed each other softly and slowly right in front of him. Back then, he was too young to go out galavanting with his buddies. And one day, when he was twelve, they disappeared one night. Car accident. It felt as if he was in a perfectly safe room with four walls and the walls suddenly all disappeared and he was in the middle of a dark and spooky forest. That’s what it felt like to lose them. He had been too young to want adult excitement, but now he was too old not to.

Drinking gave him that warm and cozy feeling that nothing else seemed to provide as an adult. As the winds grew stronger, Edgar’s legs rattled against the tree. His head banged against the trunk and his clothes swished sideways and up and down in erratic motions. He though, why didn’t I wake up sooner? Why didn’t I feel the wind and the rain in time to find shelter? His entire body had been numb by the time he passed out the night before. In the false glory of forgetfulness he failed to remember that the news had told him the storm was coming. Other memories started coming back to him. Marissa, in high school. She told him she loved him and all he could say was, “thanks”. He stopped calling her after that, and stopped taking her calls. If he saw her in the hallway, he’d quickly turn his head like he was talking to someone in the other direction. He just didn’t feel the same way she did. He didn’t feel like they were close enough to say that to each other.

OTR

2021-22

They didn’t have what his parents had had. Last week he missed a meeting with a client, which was the ultimate offense. Far worse than forgetting to do background research or forgetting to read his assistant’s work—in both those situations he could wing it. Thinking now, under the pressure of nature, his client was right—if he really wanted to meet someone, he would make the time and effort. It might renew his youthful spirit. Since his parents died, he never introduced himself or tried to make friends, like he did when he was little. In college it just kind of happened, he fell in with a frat that recruited him off the street. The few he had now, he had met at work, and even they initiated the association. And if anything went wrong, if anyone got offended, he just stopped talking to the person. He was old enough to start realizing he hadn’t learned the habits of relationships people usually learn in their twenties and thirties. The winds howled and the rain came from every direction. He wondered if he could learn. He wondered what it would be like if someone were worried about him right now. He always thought that he could never do what a woman would require of a partner, that a woman would ask more than he wanted to give, that he could barely pay enough attention to his dog, so how could he keep a relationship afloat, and why would he want to? Now, in the cold heat of the storm, he thought that if he lived, he should at least try. So far from his physical comfort zone, he realized it wouldn’t be that uncomfortable to take the risk, put himself out there, and attempt a relationship. He had to recognize that his subconscious was screaming for companionship. Edgar started thinking about his dog. He thought back to every sad puppy face she had made at him, every time he had ignored her whimpering for attention and kept watching tv instead, every time he had ignored the dog walker’s suggestions that he start playing fetch with her when he had a minute. He wondered why he got the dog in the first place. He realized, just then, that he didn’t want to be alone.

OTR

2021-22

His home was empty enough with her. Then, as the winds raged on, he thought of the other women he’d kept at a distance in his adult life. He never went past the third date—if they didn’t put out by then, the relationship would get to serious anyway. There was this one woman, Rita, who he almost took a fourth date with. She was gorgeous, and funny. But it wasn’t worth it. He figured there was a high probability it would cause him more pain than pleasure. Now, though, he thought about what he had been missing out on. What if he’d given Rita a chance? Would she be loving him and worrying about him right now? In this moment, his thoughts were catching up with his reality. Half an hour ago, he woke up soaked in salty rainwater, with wind so loud he couldn’t hear himself call out. As he struggled to walk straight, as the storm tugged at his body, he saw the rope in an abandoned boat and had an instant thought. Tied to a tree, he would be safe from the gale forces. He leaned back against the tree and tried throwing the rope around to the other side, but it didn’t make it. He leaned forward against the tree, and got the rope around a few times, but couldn’t reach around to tie it shut. So he got off the tree, wrapped the rope around it a few times, loose enough to slide into it from the bottom.

Once he was in, with his back to the tree, he tugged at each end to tighten it, and tied the best knot he could remember from his boy-scout days. Then he slid his arms into the loops, mummy style, which made it tight enough to hold him there. Thinking about it now, he made the same mistake he always makes—trying to solve it on his own instead of seeking help. He might’ve been wrong—someone might’ve let him into their house. Why didn’t he even try? In the next few hours, that might mean the end of him. He swore to himself, he wouldn’t repeat the pattern any longer, if he made it through.

OTR

2021-22

Judgment Day Dreams

Tatianna Spotorno

OTR

2021-22

Love not Pain

OTR

Tatianna Spotorno

2021-22

For Rent: APT 4B

Skyla Blue Lombardi

You said that you wanted s p a c e and not in a missing button on your keyboard studio apartment in New York City aspirations of being an astronaut sort of way.

OTR

2021-22

Untitled In Paris:

Joshua Pulsifer

at 1:38 pm i woke to the wailing of police sirens dozens of floors below and the mewling of a kitten at the bedroom door. half a can of a beer i could half pronounce was spilled on the sheets; three pretzels, one crushed, on my bare chest. the sun beat through exposed window mercilessly with rays like the combined fists of 1948 marcel cerdan and helios. in that battering of naked flesh, the day’s first thought, “oh. so hell is real?” at 1:51 pm, after assuring that every other member of the house i was temporarily subletting in was gone, i stumbled into the communal bathroom accompanied by the small orange tabby and proceeded to shit my brains out, simultaneously confessing my sins into the world with varying degrees of gusto and sincerity. at 1:59 pm i urged myself off the clammy seat and began assessing the spiritual and physical damage done to my body the night before. in the toothpaste speckled mirror, there was momentary panic at the sight of a near bald head and just as quickly, great psychological relief recalling the buzzcut as a conscious, sober decision made in the 13th arrondissement 48 or so hours prior. i recognized it likely that the image would continue to alarm and thrill me for some days to come and tried to reassure future-self that he need not fear. my eyes and hands then worked in disjointed unity to track a dull pain emitting from the left-side of my forehead. at the touch, a memory played on the brainscreen something of a scene from avatar: the last airbender or jackass but starring myself, at an ungodly hour gracelessly tumbling down a staircase near the canal saint martin. collapsing to the floor, i resolved it would feel much better to reflect on that episode later with a man who would laugh and maybe find me impetuous in

OTR

2021-22

a handsome sort of way instead of to myself, alone, hunching over a putrid smelling toilet, vaguely aware of a possible concussion. at 2:18 pm i locked the door with the clunky brass key given to me by the nudist, “house mother” and made my way down the hall. i lamented that most everyone who resides in this building unsettles me in profound ways and while tromping down the mustard-lit corridor began manifesting an elevator scenario in which i did not have to mouth, “bonjour” to one of its cretinous inhabitants. at 2:19 pm the doors rattled open and i muttered, “bonjour” to a wiry child with a preposterously bloodshot eye. at 2:26 pm under the green cross of the corner pharmacy, under moderate distress, i googled the translation for “ibuprofen” as a necessity and for “brain hemorrhage” just in case. at 3:07 pm the coffee was dry in my cup and i was smoking a gauloises blue. i do not know who told me gauloises blue is what i should be smoking but i’m sure whoever they are, they are an insufferable bastard. i wrote this in my notebook along with, “jesus christ, my head hurts,” the word, “paris” 17 or 18 times, and various things i knew about who i was with last night when i fell. “his name was definitely camille. he studies… he studies. something. and he works. and he went to china because that is what we talked about. and we laughed about “ravioli chinois” being the word for dumpling in french. and he has hips that were nice to grab while dancing. hips that kept me upright and moving forward, like handlebars on a bike or the helm of a ship.” at 3:29 pm the pen did not tell the paper how kind he was to stick with me when i desperately needed someone to stick with me and how that kindness was now sending me reeling with deep embarrassment and exhilaration. at 4:11 pm i left a pocket’s worth of change on the enamel table and started my way from belleville to somewhere.

OTR

2021-22

Add a little bit of body text in sticking to shadows, crosslights that were blinking, skateboarder crews, multi-national tourists, balloon clusters, cafes with beautiful, young people on their terraces, and those with ancient boors, i was eventually led to the seine as i was eventually very dehydrated. at 5:18 pm and 40 days, i wandered around desperately for a water fountain. at 5:34 pm, taking queue from the first seven people ahead of me, i held up the line devoid of care, washing both hands and face, drinking until my stomach ached. at 5:41 pm i decided to start reading at 6:00 pm but would first respond to days old texts from my mother, check emails, log onto social media. at 5:52 pm i saw that camille had requested to follow me. he had already sent me two messages. at 4:41 am, “did you get home okay?” at 1:42 pm, “jesus christ, my head hurts.” at 5:58 pm i asked what he was doing tonight. at 5:58 pm, “seeing you, of course.” at 5:59 pm time stood still. at 6:00 pm i set a timer on my phone for two hours and read for most of those two hours, taking small breaks to stretch my legs, eat the stale stroopwafels in my backpack, check my phone to see how long i had been reading, check my phone to coordinate with camille, stare longingly at the river, and smile for very little reason other than the fact that 8:00 pm was coming and at 8:00 pm, 8:00 pm came and while getting up i realized i was getting up very quickly, very, very quickly, bolting even. i realized my head no longer hurt and that i was awake. i was very awake, and i was alive again. yes, i was alive again. resurrected and knowing where to turn and how to get there, knowing what i would say and what i would listen to, what drink i would buy him and all the different ways our lips might touch those drinks, each other’s lips, lips that would speak what we wanted

OTR

2021-22

and where it was and everything that was today was now the past because now it is 8:26 pm and in the middle of a crowded sidewalk stood the start of another night which i will not talk about, i will not write of, and i will not care to remember because i will be living it instead.

OTR

2021-22

Mai Mamma

OTR

Tatianna Spotorno

2021-22

Midnight Blues

OTR

Aroosha Noor

2021-22

Detangling/Weaving

Abhijit Sarmah

In the evening [of November 19, 1962], Chinese people living in different places [of Assam] were rounded up by the armed forces and compelled to leave their houses. The administration told them they would be shifted to a safer place for two or three days…The majority of them were deported to China.‟ —RITA CHOWDHURY, “The Assamese Chinese Story” Against the grey frame of a November morning the rushing bogies were a fine stroke of endings, seven darkened beads rolling across the skyline. For many nights, I imagined my mother looking through one of its windows, waving goodbye & unleashing blessings through a sea of kohua bon. Part of me took the train that morning and never returned, part of me is with my parents cooking steamy báizhōu & lip-synching Talat Mehmood on a cold spring afternoon in Hong Kong or any land that feels home & not an intrusive memory. When they ask do you remember their faces, M.? I can hear the rattle of kitchen drawers, relaxed to-and-fro of jack plane & trowels on old wood, clinking of bowls filled with pork broth at dusk. Often, I trace my thumb along the barbed edges of the photograph in which we are still a family: mother weaving monsoons, father stitching a cot while siblings & I, by clotheslines, stand sulking .

OTR

2021-22

a palinode of utterance into existence. Only if un-leaving was a thing, this could‟ve been spring & against the sharp air of April, we would‟ve sat on a hilltop with pockets full of sunflower seeds & hooted at racing bogies, balimahis, the moon (for Leong Linchi aka Pramila Das)

Kohua bon: Saccharum spontaneum; Balimahis: common wagtails

OTR

2021-22

Peninsula Tatianna Spotorno

OTR

2021-22

Self Esteem Katherine Williams

OTR

2021-22

Weird Bread That I've Seen Boaz Kaufman

Things are being baked today. My love is baking shortbread. I clocked in at my new job, so I’m also making bread.

We are in the process of becoming and becoming, a shifting undulation, personhood, alchemizing like lead towards a state brand new.

When my dough rises ready Celestial bakers will take me out, frost me, slice me, and eat me up, crust and crumb

OTR

2021-22

Urbanscape (Series, 1.) Gigi Lin

OTR

2021-22

Crumbs

Mollie Grinberg

The pastry lounges atop my palm Embraced in a hard shell Laced with decadent, gooey brown in between. My talons close, On begrudging instinct, Crushing the baked perfection. Crumbs plunge from between my claws, Slowly disintegrating the delicacy, Until heaven’s dough is debris. Leaving a sticky wreck between my joints, I know That once again I have utterly demolished The smallest blessing Given unto me.

OTR

2021-22

Urbanscape (Series, 4.) Gigi Lin

OTR

2021-22

Tired Mitt Ann New day: I stir my bowl of cereal -- cornflakes that will never be crunchy again. I boil, for days over, the same bag of soiled tea leaves. Tired, like a lazy man, sitting on the couch -- punctual depressions. Leaves and dead lizards pause at my doorstep. Why aren’t I, working man, going back

1. Lines 7 -8: “Punctual depressions” is a phrase inspired by another -- “punctual monsoons”, found in https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/randall-mann 2. Line 9 “Pause at my doorstep” is a phrase inspired, but not authorly invoking Edith Wharton’s ‘Pomegranate Seed’, which opens, “Charlotte Ashby paused on her doorstep.” 3. Lines 10 – 11: “Why aren’t I, working man, /going back?” references the line “ ” in Songs of Chu ( ), as per Qiu (2006) translation, “The grass in spring have become so lush, why aren’t the wandering aristocrats coming back?” Citation: Qiu, X. (Trans.). (2006). 100 Poems from Tang and Song Dynasties. Better Link Press.

生兮萋萋

OTR

王孙游兮不归，春草

楚辞

2021-22

SHAVE

OTR

Olivia Baldacci

2021-22

Recuperation

Beth Pereira

He cracks his daily Dad joke whenever I ask if I can get him anything “A loving daughter,” he chortles It’s a new dance that has yet to get old We pretend I’m not precisely that And he pivots to ask after my purebred “mutt” His latest thing is listening to America’s Got Talent ad nauseam I catch him sniffle with emotion I roll my eyes because the show’s name is a complete misnomer And how many times can you listen to a cover of Shallow? The man who joked, “Keep it clean, my kid’s in the car.” And called me Sugarplum Is aging in the worst way His questions come like beebees now How ‘bout them Yankees? Do me a favor? I answer knowing I’ll have to do it again and again and tomorrow again, again Reminiscing is our music After an endless day of nothing He flops on the bed like a betta committing hari-kari He’s some contorted letter c in shaky handwriting I say, “Try to be more like a lowercase L.” This new insubordinate body is wholly incapable I envision a successful invasive procedure Or Steve Martin acting as an evangelical hoaxer

OTR

2021-22

Healing him Rising up from his wheels and standing proud in Bombas on the wrong feet Last night Tired of play and processing He slides his Monopoly money over to Mom He says it’s because he loves her I say, “Hey! What about me?” With shaking hands, in a grand gesture He slides the whole inherited kitty over to me The game is over But the laughter remain

OTR

2021-22

Tableaux Automatique: Twin Lens Walkout

Robert Matejcek

I Will Work Harder (Glue)

Robert Matejcek

OTR

2021-22

Seven Mugs

Lauren Johnson

One: orange and yellow, littered with black paw prints from the little ceramic bear perched on the edge. A Walmart souvenir bought near Smoky Mountain National Park. In elementary years, I would fill this mug with milk (I didn’t like tea, then) grab a bowl of vanilla wafers, and dive into uncharted stories. Two: periwinkle, tall, decorated with stacks of nondescript books, gigantic, arching flowers, a white cat, a girl in yellow pants, reading. inner inscription: Take a sip, turn a page. A Christmas gift from Sidney, who read my first short story A Dog Named Oreo in seventh grade. Three: dusty rose and lilac,

OTR

2021-22

with a yellow braided handle. a Rapunzel mug from my mother, who saw me admire it, check the price, and put it back on the shelf. Four: thick transparent glass, etched with a snowflake and the words Campus Christmas 2019. To obtain it, I stood under the huge white tent in a black velvet dress with bell sleeves, foolishly attempting to enjoy the screaming music and thundering lights, but gave up, took the free mug, and left at 8:15pm. Five: cream with twenty-eight dog doodles surrounding the words “dog person.” a gift from Morgan, who mentored me and knew my obsessions. Six: ink-black inside, shiny white outside (besides a blue tome inscribed “book worm”).

OTR

2021-22

deep and wide. a 20th birthday gift from my roommate, accompanied by an intricate hand-painted canvas. Seven: gold-rimmed fine bone china wrapped in delicate indigo drawings of “Historic Oxford.” bought in Blackwell’s Bookshop, where I gladly paid hours to abide in the stories and stories of books. Mugs infused with memories, a ceramic scrapbook.

OTR

2021-22

Dumpster Fire

Robert Matejcek

Tableaux Automatique: Blue Moon Waning Robert Matejcek

OTR

2021-22

Superhuman Identity Constructs: Poise Robert Matejcek

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2021-22

Snake Oil

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Robert Matejcek

2021-22

Mama Said Kock You Out Robert Maejcek

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2021-22

Bring Your Whole Team

Robert Matejcek

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2021-22

Sophie's Lounge

Katherine Williams

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2021-22

These Boots

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Katherine Williams

2021-22

Contributions Forest Oliver is working on their MFA at Vermont College of Fine Arts, while living and working in Atlanta, Georgia. They are a proud graduate of Hunter College, and the CUNY BA Program, class of 2021. Kenechi Tabansi is a Sophomore Film Major and Media Minor. They are originally from Nigeria where they lived for most of their life before coming to New York so these pieces are very important to them and focus on a struggle a lot of people have faced as Nigerians. Edonis Bacaj is a Film Major and enjoys creating stories and ideas and adapting them to screenplays and, eventually, films. This screenplay was their first attempt at a drama short film. It was to cover despair and move past a dark place after losing someone important in your life. Steven Abell is a writer from Missoula, Montana. A poem of his is forthcoming in Bat City Review. Along with three poets in his MFA cohort, Steven was honored by Natalie Diaz with the Marshall Chair Award for Radical Pedagogy in Poetics. He received his BA in English from the University of Montana in 2017 and an MFA in Creative Writing from Arizona State University in 2020. Joel Little is an English Major in their junior year at Hunter College. They live in Riverdale with their parents and two cats, Abe and Squeak. Tatianna Spotorno is a Senior at Hunter College, majoring in Art History and Studio Art. Avidor Auden is a Freshman at Hunter College. They have been writing since they were young, first ramblings at their father's computer, then later, a science fiction novel they intend to publish. Tyler Martinez is an English Major in their third year. The first sentence of their story was taken from a comic by Amy Hwang in the September 27th, 2021 issue of the New Yorker — after that, they are entirely different stories.

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2021-22

Contributions Katherine Williams is a junior at Hunter studying Sociology. In their free time, they like to collage, doodle, take film photos, and knit. Mario Loprete is a graduate of Accademia of Belle Arti, Catanzaro, Italy. They live in a world that they shape at their liking. They do this through virtual, pictorial, and sculptural movements, transferring their experiences and photographing reality through their mind’s filters. Victoria Francisco is a creative writing graduate from Hunter College. As a native New Yorker, she has bounced around all boroughs, rarely enjoying the amenities and always working impressively unreliable jobs. She has been published in Orchard Poetry. Rei Wolfsohn is interested in social commentary and what it is that interpersonal stories reveal about systems, philosophical questions, and human nature. She’s interested in how human nature is pliable. She explores these through various conditions, both in her life and in her art. Her chief influences are Octavia Butler, Grace Paley, and Isaac Asimov, as well as her own family. Skyla Blue Lombardi is a poet based in New York City. They're currently working on a website and a self-published poetry collection to be done and issued within this year and published through Kindle Direct Publishing. Joshua Pulsifer is a writer and student based out of New York. His work can be found in the New York Times, Thought Catalog, and various zines. Aroosha Noor is a Senior majoring in Economics and minoring in Psychology. They love to paint, sketch and draw. Abhijit Sarmah is an MPhil student in the Department of English, Dibrugarh University and their poems

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2021-22

Contributions have previously appeared in the Glassworks Magazine, Gasher Journal, The Albion Review, The Rigorous Magazine, South 85 Journal, The Scriblerus, Not Very Quiet, and others. Boaz Kaufman is a computer science and classical studies major and a senior. They are a TA for Computer Theory I at Hunter and the HS lead coding instructor at the East Harlem Tutorial Program. Gigi Lin is currently a sophomore majoring in biological sciences and studio art. They've always been interested in powerful narratives/stories that can be told through art. Mollie Grinberg is from Brooklyn, New York and is currently a freshman in the Muse Scholars program at Hunter College, planning to pursue a degree in Creative Writing. Writing and visual arts are her two main artistic passions. She likes to take inspiration from her own emotions and experiences as well as the many simple and complex occurrences in the world around her. Her goal in writing is to transport her readers to all sorts of different worlds, whether they be relatable or fantastical ones. Mitt Ann is a writer based in Singapore. Influenced by T. S. Eliot, Derek Walcott, and Marianne Moore, his poetry has been published in various literary journals in Asia. Olivia Baldacci is majoring in Media Studies with a concentration in Journalism and minors in Women’s Gender Studies and Art History. Her preferred art forms are collage and drawing. Beth Pereira is an Upper East Sider. She is an award-winning elementary school teacher and private tutor. When she isn't watching Bravo or strolling the halls of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, she can be found walking her pampered pooch on Park Avenue.

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2021-22

Contributions Robert Matejcek Lauren Johnson obtained his BA in Art, Magna Cum Laude, from Fontbonne University in St. Louis, Missouri. Robert's work, a combination of traditional and new media, has been exhibited both nationally and internationally. Robert and his wife, Anna, currently reside with their dogs, Willow and Indy, and their guinea pigs, Honeysuckle and Poppy in La Junta, Colorado.

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2021-22

Meet The Staff Editor-In-Chief/Art Editor Jordan Ortiz (he/him) loves psychology, art, sleeping and will single handedly devour EVERY Starbucks Coffeecake he crosses paths with. Vice President Mia Carranza (she/her) is a Creative Writing and Spanish Translation major who loves writing poetry in the notes app on her phone, drinking toffee nut lattes and dreaming about her next vacation. Treasurer Meghan Elberti (she/her) thinks, therefore, is baby Secretary Andi Sauer (she/they) is probably playing Divinity Origial Sin 2, loves queer theory and reading, and will shamelessly guilt you into giving them any candy that you may have in your posession. Art Editor Olivia Baldacci (she/they) is majoring in Media Studies with a concentration in Journalism and minors in Women’s Gender Studies and Art History. Her preferred art forms are collage and drawing. Poetry Editors Sheena Rocke (she/her) is addicted to sushi and hates feet. BTS forever! Oh right, I’m a triple major in Anthropology, English Creative Writing, and Africana and Puerto Rican Studies. Sylvia Welch (she/her) is graduating with a double mjor in classical studies and clinical psychology. She dreams of baking extravagant cakes, and absolutely refuses to follow a recipe.

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2021-22

Meet The Staff (pt. II) Prose Editors Jenna Song (she/hers) is an English Literature and Chinese double major who hates reading and writing with a vengeance. But she enjoys "petting fish" (means lazing around in Chinese) and watching Chinese dramas all day. Anling Chen (she/her) spends her days daydreaming about cookie dough ice cream, Caribbean beaches, and Airhead spud belts. Other times, you may find her computer, you may find her studying for her computer science major or working in finance. Drama Editors Elizabeth Ratkiewicz (any), likes poetry, long walks on the beach and is a passionate fan of the Trolls franchise Publicity Team Arifa Baksh (she/her) is addcted to green tea fantasy novels, both of which keep her up way too late. When she's not curled up with a book or video game, she's exploring NYC for the best eats! Sowjanya Sritharasarma (she/her) is a Computer Science major with a minor in English who loves detetive fiction, plants, naps, and chocolates with hazelnut cream.

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2021-22

History of The Olivetree Review Since the Fall semester of the year 1983, The Olivetree Review has been a Hunter institution publication, allowing student writers/artists to submit their work and see it published. Under the auspices of their faculty advisor, Professor David Winn, a small group of Hunter Students successfully petitioned for Hunter to fund the publication. This allowed The Olivetree's original staff members, Pamela Barbell, Michael Harriton, Mimi Ross DeMars, and Adam Vinueva to create their issue of student work and dedicate it to the memory of the late Hunter College professor and poet, James Wright. The Olivetree Review has come a long way since that first issue. Digital painting allows for both the inclusion of full color images and extra design elements to be available for all projects. We begun including photography submissions in Issue #7, and advancements in scanning and digital photography have allowed for us to accept nearly any art form that can be captured in one of more frames. We have also begun accepting Drama pieces as of Issue #52, meaning we are finally accepting and printing all forms of creative writing and art that is currently possible.

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2021-22