the penn review LITERARY AND VISUAL ARTS JOURNAL UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA
SPRING 2016
50TH ANNIVERSARY ISSUE
[EDITOR’S NOTE] I am pleased to announce that Penn Review's Spring 2016 issue is finally here. You may have noticed, when you first picked up this magazine, the odd square shape of the pages, or the fact that the cover is actually a composite of other covers, representing the history of the magazine from its founding in 1966 as The Pennsylvania Review to the book you are holding right now. This is our 50th anniversary issue. I would very much like to say that this issue represents 50 years worth of our devotion to the literary and visual arts (and in some ways it certainly does), but for the most part, we are simply a group of people who share a love for stories, who like to think about poetry, and who are moved by art. This issue is the culmination of exactly that, but it is also an acknowledgment of the editors, authors, and artists — past and present — who have contributed to Penn Review and without whom this issue would not exist. For this reason, we have merged design elements from our earliest and latest issues, printing on square paper as did our predecessors in 1966, while maintaining some of the modern typography that we have used over the last few years. We have also chosen three pieces from past Penn Review issues as staff favorites. We are proud of the selection we made, but by no means was this an easy decision. There were many pieces from the last five decades that we wish we could have reprinted, if not for their merit alone, then for the desire to share our past with our readers. We trust, however, that the works we have included are worthy of your attention. In this issue you will find works that probe at violence and gender; personal essays about family and writing; images of nature, and nature reimagined; poetry in the form of a graphic novel; worlds on fire; a sonnet; and moments of peace. We hope you enjoy them as much as we have.
SOPHIA J. LEE
Editor in Chief
THE PENN REVIEW
iii
[EDITORIAL BOARD] EDITOR IN CHIEF Sophia Lee
DESIGN EDITOR Zoe Stoller
COPY EDITORS
Brianne Alphonso Daniel Finkel
PUBLICITY DIRECTOR Karis Stephen
DESIGN ASSOCIATES Alex Anderson Emma Ibrahim Victoria Xiao
COPY ASSOCIATES
Andrew Park Christopher Medrano
EDITORIAL ASSOCIATES Lea Eisenstein Meghan Miller Martha Swift
THE PENN REVIEW
v
[TABLE OF CONTENTS] Letter from the Editor Editorial Board Contributor Biographies About Penn Review Acknowledgments
iii v 58 61 62
[STAFF FAVORITES] Don’t Cry, It’s Only a Movie (Winter 1981) A Sunflower Stops... (Fall 1995) Watching Belle’s Daughters (Spring 2003)
Deborah Burnham Lesley Finn Gerri George
1 3 5
Colin Lodewick Jaz Nimansha Jain Claire Shoyer Daniel Finkel Rachel Erani Jaz Emma Ibrahim Naomi Elegant Ava Kikut Kaitlin Moore Gordon Goodman Anson Clark Miguel Aldaco Rachel Erani
9 15 16 17 20 25 26 37 38 41 45 46 49 51 52
[POETRY] Museum Glass Delivery unique (x=“Monday Night”, header=TRUE) The Night Before The Question Beats Can Be Deceiving Shoes Across the Sea from Home Relic Remember The Fibonacci Tree The Watercourse Traumnovelle Pinochet Gets All the Girls Blurred [Staff] Lines
[PROSE] No Goodbyes Äshfal Picking Marbles from Dirt Hebrew School Lament
David Marchino Kaitlin Moore Blaze Bernstein Julia Bell
10 22 24 42
Suzy Kim
27
Linda Lin Samantha Seto Emily Urban Emma Ibrahim Martha Swift Samantha Seto Emily Urban Samantha Seto Emma Ibrahim Madison Greiner Madison Greiner Emily Urban Terrill Warrenburg Lea Eisenstein
13 14 18 21 39 40 44 47 48 53 54 55 56 57
[GRAPHIC NOVEL] Goblin Market
[VISUAL ART] Like a Chinese Ink Painting Birds Rise and Soar Day and Night “Mr. Sun, Sun...” Biomimicry Edge of Greek Ocean Self Portrait Ruin Child’s Play Life on the Italian Market Living on 15th St. Still Life Knot Sight Unseen
staff favorites
winter 1981 DON'T CRY, IT'S ONLY A MOVIE DEBORAH BURNHAM No one assured me, “Movies aren’t real;” I cried at “Bambi,” thought the forest fire That killed deer would burst from the screen, moving Through the dark to scorch my hair; my eyes, Full of those burned creatures, changed cartoon light To danger on my mind’s screen. I had to run, Bawling, with my bewildered mother, from the first-run Kiddie show whose fires were hot and real — Like the books I read with stolen flashlights. Mad dogs, a circus tent on fire — All blazed from their cage of print to burn my eyes. If fire leaped from still pages to my sleep, moving Pictures, with sound, were worse. Guns and storms, moving Fast as flame through the dark house, made me run For a book’s safer cover. At movies, I shut my eyes At the first shot, made pulsing dark more real Than the bloody tangles on the screen. Gunfire, Wrecks, I screened out with my hands; I watched light Comedies darken into quarrels, groaned when the light In the hero’s eyes blinked out, his sighs moving Me to shamed tears and snuffles in my sleeve. But fire Terrified the most. At night, flames in re-run: My cat, my elm tree collapsed to char, reel After reel of cinematic smoke told my credulous eye
THE PENN REVIEW
1
DEBORAH BURNHAM
That movies showed tomorrow’s dangers. My eye Dreaded candles, even on film. Their light Could burrow through my sheets, making real Fire from those weak points of light, moving Through my hair, my schoolroom in each night’s run Across my brain’s reluctant screen. Fire Waited, even in the car. The key could fire Gas and oil, send flame into my eyes, Still brimming with the fright that made me run From driver training films. Now, in daylight, I’ll watch anything. Blood moving From split flesh, wrecks, cancer, — real Horrors run easily past my eyes whose light Shrinks them. I stand unmoved, unmoving, If nothing burns. But flames terrify — all fire is real.
2
THE PENN REVIEW
fall 1995 A SUNFLOWER STOP ON THE WAY HOME FROM THE BEACH (ITALY, 1994) LESLEY FINN My cracked, braised skin sighs with each lean of the car into the mounds and curves of the slender road, a svelte, teasing woman. I doze, still simmering of Italian sun, sand mosaics spread on my salt body. I do not feel the absence of motion until you appear in my window, swimming in a sea of plump yellow flowers drinking in sun and stretching to the blue with leafy limbs. You stumble on the thick stalks before you bend one like a snap pea at the waist: I swallow the image: your hair, a molasses cloud hovering behind your back, a sunflower cradled like a newborn in your arms. You open the car door, hand me the heavy gift, a dinner plate heaped with lumps of nesting beetles, flaming pollen, a honey-sweet nectar tasting of the land.
THE PENN REVIEW
3
LESLEY FINN
The flower lasts about a week in the emerald green pitcher, sitting in the filtered sun of my room. Each night her scent drifts with the soft air, each morning I awake to see another strand of her golden hair lying curled on the floor. On the day I leave, you want me to take her home wrapped in a shoebox. It was your gift to me, but something was so right in leaving the slouched flower in the pitcher, in the sunlight. Even after her weighted head loses its yellow halo, she will mix with the smoky night air and leave honey-sweet-kisses on all those who sleep in this room that once was mine.
4
THE PENN REVIEW
spring 2003 WATCHING BELLE'S DAUGHTERS GERRI GEORGE Three little girls cross the street in front of Hilary Grant’s car as she heads for the post office to stock up on stamps. She sees them in time, puts on the brake and then watches them. They’re side-by-side sisters, small, medium, and large, walking in the direction of the playground; they hold hands against the danger of cars, their bare feet fearless against the August sidewalk. Hilary likes being the driver of a car who stops in time to let them pass; she’s similarly fond of waiting in her car at a school zone and watching the movement of children cross with the guard. The simplicity and naturalness is a short moment of peace, a front row seat to the private world of children, as if she accompanies the sun on its daily journey, before it sinks into darkness. Hilary smiles at them, one in particular, Matty, the youngest. The girls are new to Gull Island, the coveted enclave of summer homes and year-round residents cut off from the mainland by a single bridge. They have come from Trenton with their mother, Belle, to live with their grandmother, a sturdy woman who daily rides her bike and has relinquished her privacy for the good of her grandchildren. Belle, accustomed to the malaise of a monthly government check, has long, salon hair and a harsh manner to all with whom she comes in contact, including her own three daughters. Gull Island is surrounded by intercoastal waterways, the bay and the channel. The houses, mostly bungalows from the 1930s, snug private splendid retreats, rarely go on the market, and when they do, they are snapped up even before the For Sale sign is hammered into the front lawn. Belle will probably inherit her mother’s house when the mother dies, the way Hilary inherited hers; Belle, in turn, will one day leave the house to Matty and
her sisters, if circumstances don’t force an earlier sale. Hilary and her husband, in contrast, have no children to inherit their bungalow. She’d been pregnant once, years before, an unforeseen event. She’d stopped taking the pill and before she and Peter could agree on an equitable replacement method, she’d missed a period. To Hillary, there were few things more certain than her intent to remain childless. There never seemed anything absent from her world that a child’s presence would be called upon to fill, no longing for a well-defined social feat that spoke for itself, no missing conversation piece to anchor small talk at a party. On her husband’s part, no passion for a child had ever surfaced, not in their heated courtship days, not in the days they both longed to set fire to the world, and never since. Still, at the time, Peter wanted a discussion about this baby thing. “Suppose we regret it years from now?” he said, not yet ready to leave it up to Hilary. “Future emotions are fairy tales,” she said, “and we’ve both grown up, at least I have.” She knew, even then, that the worth of a life could withstand childlessness. They were pleased with the way their days and nights had come to them, the manner in which they made their way through a shared independence, an obsession with solitude, a mutual zeal for spontaneity, like deciding last minute to see a movie or go to dinner or go for a drive, activities she knew to be trusted cures for assorted levels of angst. Her husband and the gynecologist and the short procedure room nurses were the only persons who knew what she had done. It wasn’t the kind of conversation you brought up at a cocktail party or at family gatherings. It
THE PENN REVIEW
5
GERRI GEORGE
was the type of secret you could keep to yourself, like an illness that didn’t show. Eventually, she would come to think about it only on the rarest of occasions, like now. The body is powerless to distinguish between the memory of an event and the event itself. Watching Belle’s daughters, Hilary feels the growth inside her, a strange wholeness of being with its own power and meaning, a stand-in ready to replace one unknown for another. The feeling seduces her with possibilities. She views a belief in fate or destiny as a sign of weakness. No convention or tradition governs her; she fears the predictable, the ordinary. The summer before, a fifteen-year-old boy committed suicide on Gull Island, hung himself in the playground overlooking the bay. The borough dismantled the playground for the purpose of forensics, no doubt, and hadn’t yet reassembled it. Now, instead of playing on the swings or the sliding board, Matty and her sisters were crossing the street to visit a friend’s house next to the tidy memorial erected in the playground. The mother of the dead boy lost her son in a devastation of doubt over what actually happened to the boy and why. His mother will likely avoid playgrounds for the rest of her life, and nightly cry herself to sleep. Hilary wondered if it occurred to the mother that it would have been better not to have had a child at all, than to risk permanent agony over its loss. It is a throw of the dice whether or not joy will outweigh sorrow. “You’re selfish,” Peter’s brother told her one Christmas Eve, as he loaded his four biological and two adopted children into his Saturn station wagon. He was sedated by the security of conformity; he anchored it with a steady stream of offspring. When his wife tired of childbirth, they adopted. “I would call you the selfish one,” Hilary had said. “You don’t deny yourself anything.” Belle’s mother insists that, out of respect, the three little girls call her Mrs. Grant, not Hilary. Hilary likes being a wife, and a sister-in-law, and it strikes her, as
6
she watches the girls, that she is not called Mother, and she wonders if it matters. How much more did she desire than she had? She regrets not having continued piano lessons as a youth but has no intention of their resumption; she bemoans the fact she gave up on French lessons after the first year but has no intention of learning it now. A vague dissatisfaction returns now and then, an imagined alternate life had she kept the baby. The child would be 17 years old. She pictured a daughter recalcitrant and enigmatic, a teenager who would refuse, in a surge of adolescent rebellion, to share her existence with the man and woman who gave it to her, a young girl who would banish her mother from her room and scream to be left alone. She imagines a boy as well, a son who listens through headphones, lost in the presence of his friends and music, ignoring the mother and father, screaming to be left alone. She and Peter would suffer in silence and try to reward rare moments of youthful compassion. Another dozen years would pass before the child would understand the personal need to regard one’s parents as human beings. Hilary smiles again at Belle’s daughters; Matty returns the smile, and the dimensions of the earth cannot contain it. They reach the other side of the street; they resume the chatter and the ungroomed world of children, a world that others cannot know, that Matty and her sisters will never understand, not now, as they live it, and not later, should they have children of their own. At the edge of the playground, Matty breaks rank. She searches her pockets, pulls out a whistle and places it next to the fresh flowers, stuffed animals, and snapshots of the boy. She rejoins her sisters and they enter their friend’s home. They will engage in games, snacks, and they will argue. Hilary drives on; there are bills to pay and letters to send and cards to mail and she has no stamps. Maybe later, she and Peter will see a movie, go out to dinner, take a drive to Atlantic City or Cape May.
THE PENN REVIEW
spring 2016
MUSEUM GLASS COLIN LODEWICK Sometimes my everyday assumes the quality of a preserved specimen. In the National Museum of Natural History in Washington D.C. I saw a giant squid (Architeuthis kirkii), suspended in its glass case, caught off the coast of New Zealand, a mystery mostly until now fixed under fluorescent light in a vat of embalming fluid so grey and dead and static, I fell into its blinkless eye. Sometimes my everyday is locked behind glass in miles of storage in some infinity museum. Locked and fixed today, yesterday, and forever in a clear crystalline ball, you can look into it like psychics do, with their phosphorescing signs casting colored light on endless sidewalks, I walk by them often. This month’s issue of National Geographic describes a new species of human ancestor found in South Africa. I wonder when in our evolution we acquired the ability to know and state exactly what we are. I find myself anywhere and I am expected to declare myself some sort of person. I pretend to know what that is just for the simplicity because my selfness is very diluted and composed of things of which I will never know the entirety. I’m supposed to be something what I’m supposed to be is perfect. Always, outwardly. How are you I’m fine How are you I’m fine How are you. I’m told what is beautiful and I think the fact that no one really knows makes us want to state: Yes, that is beauty. No, that is not beautiful. We are all terribly afraid, of course. On so many papers and forms I’ve told invisible readers where I was born and that I’m white and they sometimes ask what is my sexuality, usually. Little do they know that I am Nothing and Everything just like they are. Do you identify as a male or a female? Please circle one correct answer. Sometimes my everyday slows and eventually stops, frozen in ice, and under cool museum glass fogged cloudy with my breath, I hold still and feel the scrutiny of spectators who stand in line so patiently so that they can watch my static form. THE PENN REVIEW
9
NO GOODBYES DAVID MARCHINO I’m meeting someone for the first time. A man made of brown hair and muscles. My mother tells me on the way over to the park that he’s someone very important to her, an old friend. When we get there, she hugs him right away, and he holds her so tight. Like he’s trying to pull her inside of him. It’s very sunny out, so when the man looks down to me, the light behind him makes him hard to see. I don’t get the whole face, only features: a tender, long smile — mouth kept closed — and two brown puddles of eye above. He says I’m beautiful like my mom. I say I’m a boy. That means I’m handsome. The smile grows. He likes me, and I like him too. I sit in a patch of field and look at the broken beer bottles in the grass while he talks to my mother. The sunlight is bouncing off the smoky glass, which makes the shards gleam like old cinders. The crowd of trees bristles loudly as the wind blows above us. I don’t hear anything except the shika-shika-shika of the leaves, but I can see they’re still talking. The man is asking her something, leaning in, making promises. My mother smiles like she’s shy— she gets very small and gives him her answer. They kiss softly, and I realize that they are in love. We leave him. On the way home, I look up to her and notice she is crying. I want to ask her then — what are we doing? Who are we leaving behind? But, I won’t get an answer. I never see this man again. The very memory of him, too, is left back in that gleaming spring park. Just one of my mother’s secrets I’m not old enough to understand. ***** Fifteen years later, I’m listening to her voice crackle over the telephone, trying to broach the subject of the mystery man. In her age, my mother has become less evasive but just as sentimental. I can tell she enjoys remembering him. “His name was Sean, and he wanted to take us away to Alabama.”
10
The riff of an overzealous saxophone wades from her TV through the phone receiver — she’s watching her soaps. “He could’ve been your daddy. That could’ve been our life,” she says matter-of-factly. She’s seventy miles away, but I can see her in my mind: cross-legged, sitting on her crowded bed and nursing a cup of tea. She’s dressed in her working clothes, a comfy pair of black shorts and an old t-shirt of mine, makeup-less. Her bushel of dark hair has been strenuously brushed down about her shoulders, hugging her torso down to her hips. It’s rare for someone to see her without her 1980s rock ‘n roll flare (she’ll have you know that it takes hours of work to look like you just rolled out of bed), but as she is now, her kiddish beauty shines through just the same. “Did that kind of thing happen a lot?” I ask. The puffing out of her chest is audible over the telephone, “Your mother got anyone she wanted.” There was Frank Schaffer, her first boyfriend and the only man to ever tease his hair bigger than hers. Edenado Principado, whose uncanny resemblance to Eddie Van Halen left a trail of star-struck fans in his wake and whose legendary member almost got him arrested during a search for “concealing a deadly weapon.” Of course, there was the kind man from the park, Sean McClain. Legend has it, the only thing faster than his souped-up muscle car (named Jake by my mother) was his killer right hook. She cheated on most of them, often with their brothers or best friends. Broke their hearts. She exhales deep into the receiver, drops her voice down low, “I don’t know, Dae. I was young, foolish. Didn’t feel safe with them. I had to keep moving before I got hurt.” Much as they tried, the men never really left her behind. There’s many a girl running around Philadelphia named after my mother by some heartbroken ex. Gorgeous little Tina-Maries, with whom I can’t help but feel some kind of misplaced kinship. Hell, there’s one guy (who I’m encouraged to call uncle) who has a habit of popping into my life
THE PENN REVIEW
DAVID MARCHINO
with blank checks whenever my car’s engine starts to sputter. I know for a fact we’ve never paid him back, but I’ve spied him with my mother stealing small friendly kisses. “You take care of us, Al,” my mother will whisper to him. The men don’t forget her, don’t stop loving her. They just don’t, and, honestly, I’m not sure my mother stops loving them either. She moves through the names of her old lovers, her voice airy and sweet. She forgets no one, remembers every date she’s ever had. The arrogant huff she put on earlier begins to vanish, replaced by girly coos. One phrase gets repeated over and over, “He was good to me.” And yet there’s one story, one man, who crops up more than any other. He never met us in any park, never asked to be my father, but I know this man like I’d seen him yesterday. She won’t let me forget his name. “The only man to have dinner with my family, only one to ever make my body tingle — swear to god. That’s Bobby Jonas.” Bobby Jonas, the skinny blond boy who lived down the street, perennially wrapped in a flannel shirt and crowned with his lucky baseball cap (“It only came off for two things, both starting with ‘S.’ That’s sleep and sex, Dae.”). She tells me about the first time they made love: they’re out camping with a group of friends. Kegs they’ve somehow acquired are being wheeled into place. Bobby runs over to her and steals her pocket mirror. He dashes into the woods while my mother listens to the rustling of his feet in the greenery becomes quieter and quieter. She lets herself forget him momentarily — helps her friends set up for the party when a small circle of light falls on her. It’s Bobby from in the woods, reflecting the sun off the stolen mirror. She goes in after him, and, when they meet — “like every flower in the forest bloomed all at once.” From then on, when she spied that little reflection, she knew Bobby was waiting for her. I imagine my mother as she is now, curled up girlishly, recalling this boy. She lets herself cry softly, “I don’t know why I left him, but I went back for eighteen years. The love of my life.”
***** “Have you always had to deal with people falling for you left and right?” I ask. She gives me that dry smoker’s laugh. “Your mother’s always been hot, but not always love. No.” Her voice suddenly crumbles in the back of her throat. It drops to a moist whisper. “I didn’t hear, ‘I love you,’ growing up.” My mother’s upbringing has long been a mystery to me, some kind of sad rush of events that everyone has accepted. Except my mother hasn’t. She jokes with me, channels laughs and joyfulness from some place I don’t fully comprehend. “Being the middle child isn’t easy for anyone,” she quips one moment. Everybody laughs, the trite little sitcom theme queues up in our heads, but she’s not done. I feel her hunker down on the other end of the phone, looking anxiously side-to-side to be sure that no one will hear her. “Everybody beat up on me, kiddo.” I pause here. Let the power and the fear of what she says make its way through the phone wires and fill into my room. I’m confronted by the honesty, the hurt — the grinding collapse of her façade. We breathe uneasily into the phone — she becomes hesitant. I can feel her fingers making their way up to anxiously braid her hair as she prepares to conjure another hollow laugh. I halt her. There’s a pleading in my words, a weakness — Let me in, Mom. She tells me about her mother, “a tough-as-hell Cherokee bitch who beat the piss out of me.” She makes herself out as the scapegoat — beautiful, popular, and, for this, routinely abused at home. “Slut,” my grandmother would bark at her daughter as she pounded her with unrelenting lefts. “She was either beating me or paying me no mind. I’d slit my wrist and fall in front of the woman, and she’d just step over me,” she tells me. Her only solace was the love of her father, a tired ex-navy man, whose small sense of pride came from working odd jobs to keep
THE PENN REVIEW
11
DAVID MARCHINO
whatever family he had fed and clothed. I can hear the joy creep back into her voice as she gives me a portrait of him. She’s curled up underneath a kitchen table, picking at the hem of an old polka-dot party dress. The curtains are drawn, the lights out — the light of the moon, itself, forgets the house. Absolutely pitch black. A heavy someone comes thumping down the steps and stands in the arch that marks the beginning of the dining room. She sees his old work boots and becomes motionless. Then, suddenly, she’s being pulled out into the open and she soars into this man’s arms. He flicks the lights — Daddy’s got her again. She squeals as he kisses her. “We used to play monster,” she giggles. “My Daddy and me. Make sure you write that down.” Those moments were short-lived. There came a night when my grandfather was home to see what his wife did to their daughter. A proposition arose: the beatings stopped or he left. My grandmother called his bluff, and he was gone that night. I ask my mother why he didn’t take her with him — why he didn’t do more. She sighs deeply, the shaking of her head apparent even over the telephone, “Your grandfather’s loyal as anyone. Hell, he kept paying our bills — went on to marry grandmom a second time after that. A good man.” She puts a cigarette between her lips and continues speaking out of the right side of her mouth, “But, he’s not one to shake things up.” I hear the click of her lighter on the other end of the phone. A deep inhale, “I got out myself anyhow.”
and tacks hold layers of billowy fabrics to the bed and her dresser, which makes sitting anywhere potentially dangerous. Animal print is the theme; she finds it exotic, sexy. Overlooking it all are the young faces of our family. She’s a sucker for photographs. The familiar faces reassure her, but there’s always been some that I haven’t recognized — the unframed photos taped to the wall beside her bed. The ones crowded by unaware, slouching (and often blinking) men. She’s given me their names now. I see Frank, I see Sean, and I see Bobby. I see them catching the camera just as the iris shuts, looking stoically out of the frozen moment into the present. They peer out at my mother wondering what she’s doing as if asking when she’ll finally return and join them back in their faded, static paradise. She got out, she tells me, left them behind. But she never lets herself forget. She owes them that much.
***** My mother’s room is a monument to her, small and eccentric. She’s a crafty interior designer. Safety pins
12
THE PENN REVIEW
LIKE A CHINESE INK PAINTING LINDA LIN PHOTOGRAPHY
THE PENN REVIEW
13
BIRDS RISE AND SOAR SAMANTHA SETO PHOTOGRAPHY
14
THE PENN REVIEW
DELIVERY JAZ Poetry, how the heck u gon’ come in the middle of rush hour on a crowded bus with me up to my ears in books, hips and bags and a nosy lady looking over my pen? Then u got the nerve to be a twin! I’m bearing down ’cause I can’t hold u back Happy Birthday I think I shall call u Sonnet and Haiku.
THE PENN REVIEW
15
unique (x=“Monday Night”, header=TRUE) NIMANSHA JAIN …[History restored from /Users/Francis/.Rapp.history] >help.start(Monday_Night) >read.csv(“Monday_Night”,header=TRUE) One more memory is of the woman standing outside >save.image(7:43PM) the coffee shop on Main St. with four windows all decorated with white twinkling lights >attributes(Woman_In_Black) Her blonde hair tied back black turtleneck long black leather pants arm raised up >if(“cond”= She_Saw_Me) [rep(“She_Saw_Me”, 3)] [else(“cond”= 0)] > She_Saw_Me She_Saw_Me She_Saw_Me ### >help(Palms_sweating=?) Error: could not compute function Error in source(“/Users/Francis/Desktop/”):unexpected input Terminate
16
THE PENN REVIEW
THE NIGHT BEFORE CLAIRE SHOYER Fifteen minutes late still feels On schedule as we back out Into the matrix of miniature rain droplets Frozen in free fall. I see How the afternoon fog gives every light A bleeding aura that expands Like the inhale before a sigh. Hours tumble lazily into each other and still We play our slow, soft game Of follow-the-leader, trailing behind pairs Of demon eyes that sometimes wink left And sometimes wink right And sometimes glow with startling Hellish passion. I look toward nights that start early And push the boundaries of afternoon, Evenings of boyfriend button-downs, Loose socks and drinking straight From the bottle. I will forget the word for routine, Sitting and waiting for the sunlight Through the window to turn my skin Pale like the petals of tissue paper flowers, Left out since last year.
THE PENN REVIEW
17
18
DAY AND NIGHT EMILY URBAN OIL ON CANVAS BOARD
19
THE QUESTION DANIEL FINKEL A question has been troubling me For some time now Ever since I revisited those old children’s books So long ago cherished But now quite troublesome. The question, in short, is this: Why was Spot running? Was he being chased? Or had he finally gotten loose After years of captivity And was now making a desperate bid For freedom? And why did Dick tell Jane To see Spot running Was there something remarkable about it? Was Spot usually dull and sluggish? Or am I missing something? Were Dick and Jane really Soviet agents Trained in Novgorod to record Our daily mannerisms? And why did Mother have to be told That Puff was playing? Was she blind? If so, what sick mind game was it That Dick and Jane and Father played on her When they told her to see Little Sally jump? Troubling questions all, And as no answers are forthcoming I must relinquish them for a while And go on to ask myself What kind of horrible biological disaster Could turn eggs green.
20
THE PENN REVIEW
“MR. SUN, SUN…” EMMA IBRAHIM PHOTOGRAPHY
THE PENN REVIEW
21
ÄSHFAL KAITLIN MOORE Venn missed the stars most of all. The moon burned brightly against the blackness, but beyond the crimson haze, there was nothing. The molten cores and constellations had flung their fires into whorling supernovae, until even the scintillations of dust and gas had blown thin across the darkness. Venn remembered the old skies, silhouettes undulating between vast archipelagos of stars, helixes of luminous gas spiraling high above the earth. Venn remembered points of light like diamonds studded in velvet. And every light was a distant sun, and some of those suns surveilled systems of living worlds; each one filled with people who looked to the sky as Venn did and considered the immensity of time and space. And when they raised their hands, they eclipsed the firmament and held the light between their fingertips. But the eclipses forgot to ebb and fade away as the universe swung between its perigees and apogees, and the people died, allowing the adjacent silence to grow long and cold, to drown the stars, until there were few bright things left in the universe. But there was one — a signal flare burning at the end of all things. The world, the city, this final place, was called Äshfal. Äshfal was so named because its moon was on fire. As the light flickered and the universe died, gravitational tides between accreting galactic debris and dying stars fractured the moon's surface, pulled the skin apart. The crust split into livid black scars and magma seeped between the cracks, lava running like tears along the contours of chitinous gray rock. A volcanic cinder hung at the zenith of Äshfal’s starless sky. And so the soot and dirt and detritus fell from the burning moon, and the world at the end of the universe became Äshfal. Venn believed the tale because he believed all names for all things were the denouements of stories that had once, in another time and place, been true. So long as Venn remembered the stories, he kindled a small mote of immortality even after all other lights had been burnt and gutted.
22
Everyone made their pilgrimage to Äshfal in the end. They came to the final place or they died. At the end of everything, decisions hinged on a primordial, desperate impulse to survive. Venn was no different. The fires of Äshfal’s moon had burned even brighter amidst the darkness bleeding from the edges of the world, until the only thing Venn could see was the light, leading him out from under the shadow. Äshfal was a city and Äshfal was an entire world. The labyrinthine streets crisscrossed the planet like lines of latitude and longitude. Buildings rose like mountains and brushed against the darkness. As the moon burned, cinders rained from the sky, dotting the earth in smoking calderas. The trees were petrified minarets, caked in ash. Water bubbled from wellsprings deep underground; the taste was gray and bitter and gritty, like most other things in Äshfal. Sunlight had faded out of all memory, even Venn's. He could not remember summer days trapped under cloudless skies, the smell of snow blowing clear and sharp from the mountains, a life not lived buried under ash, crawling across the cracked and burning earth, reflected in a thousand tired eyes of a thousand old souls. But Venn had his stories, and he had his memories of the stars. And sometimes, that was enough. “What’s it, then?” said the Repairman in the Bodega, long after Venn arrived on Äshfal, not so long after Venn realized he had a problem with his starcraft. “Grit in the turbocompressor blades, scratched cockpit windows, engine flameout.” And when Venn forgot the smell of rain he trailed his fingers through the ash, drawing currents in the grime. "Damaged avionics.” “You're not going nowhere. Carve out her guts and live in her, that’s what an äsher do.” “I don’t want to live in my 'craft.” “It’s not like you got someplace else to go. Not like there’s much use for ‘craft here anyhows. Ash’ll choke her right up.”
THE PENN REVIEW
KAITLIN MOORE
“How you move about, then?” “Äshers walk. Äshers run. We got a tram. Sundry times it even works.” Everything had been buried under the ash, even those small, quiet thoughts in the back of his head. Venn wanted to fly but the emptiness beyond Äshfal was a roof arching over the sky. “I ain’t leaving here.” “Sure as grit is grit and this whole world’ll drift into the Forevertime. No place else to go, even if a ‘craft’ll swallow the ash.” The Repairman frowned. “Last station, Äshfal. You get?” “Yeah, I get.” Venn felt the dust in his throat and under his fingernails and stinging his eyes, as bloodshot as the moon. “Just leveled I’d have a ‘craft here, is all.” “But ––“ “No place to go, I get. But Äshfal’s a whole world. Take a Forevertime to till it. Would’ve been mite quicker with a ‘craft.” “What you tilling, äsher?” “Not an äsher.” “You an äsher nowtimes. What you tilling, then?” Venn wondered how long the Repairman had lived on Äshfal. He wondered if the Repairman remembered the numbers. “Tilling for the Braneworld.” The Repairman nodded. “Samer. And yeah, would’ve been more’n a mite quicker with a ‘craft.” “You till the Braneworld?” “All of Äshfal tills the Braneworld. All we got, nowtimes. The thought. The idea.” Venn took a sip of gray water and it tasted like dust. “The Braneworld is somewhere else, goes deep under the skin of the world, so this life won’t be it for us, you get? Braneworld'll lead us out of the long dark.” “We all get, friend. But äshers’s been tilling the world over since the time a mite before the long dark, and ain’t no one's tilled the Braneworld.” Äshfal was a bad place. A labyrinthian exoskeleton cast in ash, a city of bones. Empty rooms and empty
streets encased in marrow. Everyone was going to die and everyone was already dead, and Äshfal was there to cremate the bodies. Gray shrouds. Buildings arrayed by height like headstones. “Going to till until there ain’t earth to till no more,” said Venn. “Braneworld’s the way out. Way I level it, it’s a mite better than waiting for the long dark… and after the nowtime, the Forevertime.” So Venn left the Bodega and the Repairman and the glass of gray water. Äshfal stretched to the sky in jagged abrasions that marred the horizon. And time seemed to slow, until the moments froze in glowing fractals like the lightning cracking across the liminal space between the world and the moon. The whorling clouds of ash telescoped into a corridor of spherical lenses, a collimation of light, the walls a mosaic of stone and cinder and broken glass. Each shard was a window, and the windows were cracking. Through the splinters, a spectrum of worlds scintillated against the darkness. Venn believed the stories, of Äshfal, of the burning moon, of the Braneworld, because memory did not demarcate myth from truth. And Venn remembered the stars to steer his course, which had to count for something in the city that slept forever under the fiery and starless sky.
THE PENN REVIEW
23
PICKING MARBLES FROM DIRT BLAZE BERNSTEIN When I write, the world around me stops, and the gears in my head turn at a million miles per second. I write until I can’t write anymore, until the page is bursting with so many words and letters and syllables that if I were to fit one more period onto the end of a sentence the entire page might just burst and send missiles of consonants and vowels flying through the air, right back to where they came from. I have to choose what I put down on the page carefully, how the words roll off the tongue, how they mesh with their environment to create cohesive thoughts and sentences that drive forward the story towards its grand or garish denouement. The decision between brief and attaché or serene and halcyon lies only in the moment. I can always go back and edit and tweak what I have written, but it’s those first words that lick the paper that truly determine the story’s ultimate fate. The majority of what I write enters the Abyss, the river Styx, the belly of the beast, and it never comes back from its journey to find the edge of the world. It gets swallowed whole by my trashcan or the pile of papers labeled “save for later.” These papers may seem fine, but “fine” alone can’t save their fate. Among the fallen are stories about a siren coming back from the dead to find her one true love, a road trip to meet a demon or a god (which, we may never know), and a light switch that has the power to turn off the sun. There is no way to predict a story’s fate, but to the members of this stack, I can only bow my head and say a few last words before they join their brethren. Every once in a while, something I write finds its way into no-man’s-land and then back again. I won’t touch it or glance at it, but it sits there and waits, begging and taunting and pleading, waiting for one last final stand, knowing it will either publish or perish. And then, when I least expect it, I’ll sit at my desk and suddenly the story will unfurl its feathers to the world and the showdown starts with a pop and a bang: the devil paying a visit to collect her leather moccasins, a
24
coin trick that makes the world come alive, or a year in the life of a freak show with Electra the eel woman and Crystal the girl with clear skin. These stories get frozen in time and space, colored marbles in dirt waiting for me to pick them out and make them whole. Maybe if the gears in my head didn’t turn so fast and the words didn’t pile up on the paper like snow on mountain tops, it wouldn’t take me so long to finish a story. But then again, it wouldn’t be something I had written because the stories that I finish are never actually done. I want to write amorphous, everchanging, mercurial beings that dig deep and stay there, that burrow into the reader and leave him without knowing what to say because he has never read anything like that before. Writing gives me my voice, which is why my stories are in a constant state of flux. Even if I don’t change a word or a single letter, they move with me-down corridors of memory, through seas of emotion, and into worlds both real and imaginary. As I change, they change, but even after days or months or years I can still find a version of myself (a time traveler from the past, present, or future) sitting there in the text and waiting to speak to me.
THE PENN REVIEW
BEATS CAN BE DECEIVING RACHEL ERANI Every weekend, it blares in the shoddy duck-taped speakers of their house. “Swimming pool full of liquor, then you dive —” his lips shout in between sips and puffs, as he puts his hand on some freshman girl’s hips. But before Kendrick can get to his verse of failure and warning, they skip, hit next — Clichéd case of drunken impatience. Complacence is our virtue. Next weekend, next song: As Kendrick raises his black fist, he flicks his wrists to fling Ping-Pong balls into plastic red cups. Pour up, head-shot, pass out, wake up Faded memories of last night come back to him, as the soundtrack to his debauchery fades out.
THE PENN REVIEW
25
SHOES JAZ Please don’t wish to be me ‘cause then you’d have to wear my shoes — which are frequently too tight and unyielding Don’t long for my success ‘cause then you’d have to be this body which is incredibly worn with bruises from its own kicks from the shoes you covet.
26
THE PENN REVIEW
ADAPTED BY SUZY KIM
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
ACROSS THE SEA FROM HOME EMMA IBRAHIM In a house with bare white walls crow’s feet nestle grey eyes and white hair fades to blue. Lipstick stains a chipped front tooth and rubs between lips like satin. While the leaky faucet drip-drop-drips the television flashes in silence. Grey eyes can’t leave the soundless screen and the bullets that fall like rain. And so worry beads fly between fingers a whir of blue blue indigo blue in a house with bare white walls across the sea from home.
THE PENN REVIEW
37
RELIC NAOMI ELEGANT and it comes back to me now, watching the winter light shift in the afternoon, very far from where it all was, it comes back to me — the way the trees were, the way your ears buzzed when you went out into the quiet air, the heat, even at night. especially at night. and there was a softness, which I can’t recall anymore, and there was a feeling I remember feeling but now forget how it felt. oh — and do you remember — time used to pass us differently than it does now. we wanted everything to last. I remember wishing even then that if only I could grasp every second to press between the pages of a book and preserve for myself, laminate every moment, rainproof it all. i watch the light shift in February and wish it was May.
38
THE PENN REVIEW
BIOMIMICRY MARTHA SWIFT PENCIL ON PAPER
THE PENN REVIEW
39
EDGE OF GREEK OCEAN SAMANTHA SETO PHOTOGRAPHY
40
THE PENN REVIEW
REMEMBER AVA KIKUT There is no wall that doesn’t have the world behind it. Just when you think you have come to that point Where you have seen enough, learned enough, thought enough To know what life is going to be Just when you think you can assess the size Of the space that you will occupy That you know your limitations Someone will flip the switch And you will see those limitations Were just walls of a room A room that you thought was the universe But the world is bigger Than you could ever imagine If there is a way into the room Well there is a way out of it And the next time you meet a wall Don’t be fooled Remember when the world was The size of your living room? Imagine if you gave up then.
THE PENN REVIEW
41
HEBREW SCHOOL LAMENT JULIA BELL I dig an exploratory fingernail under the scab on my elbow. “Before we conclude the service, I ask the congregation to pray for our fellow congregates and listen to some closing announcements,” Rabbi Steiner thunders from the bema. I peel the edge of the scab. It stings a little, but not too bad. “Please pray for Joshua Goldfarb, whose shingles have returned and waylaid him to bed. Please pray for Mr. and Mrs. Kessler’s dog, which has been missing for a week.” I pull until the scab rips off in one piece. A pool of blood bubbles up on the exposed skin. “Please pray for Cantor Simon’s safe flight as he returns from his kibbutz this Saturday.” Blood trickles down my arm. Maybe bleeding in services is against the rules. I cover my elbow with my hand. “Finally, Rebecca Lieberman requests that all baked goods for the Purim bake sale are made with gluten-free ingredients to accommodate those with dietary restrictions.” I had heard my mom complaining on the phone that Mrs. Lieberman was using her son Ravi’s gluten allergy to undermine her position as the synagogue’s chair of fundraising. “Have you ever heard of a glutenfree hamantaschen? I’m not saying we shouldn’t be accommodating, but that’s practically sacrilegious.” Ravi was the reason we had to eat lemon bars instead of brownies at the Hanukkah party. His hand was always raised straight in the air while the rest of us puzzled over the difference between Heit and Teit in lessons. And even though yarmulkes were optional at our reform synagogue, Ravi’s was always clipped neatly atop his head with a small brown hairclip. After the service, our class files out of the temple behind our teacher. “David,” she says to me, “you’re bleeding.” She addresses the class, “Will someone walk with David to
42
the nurse?” Ravi’s hand shoots up. “I will,” he volunteers. I walk begrudgingly with Ravi down the hall. I’m already cursed to carpool with him because our moms knew each other in the sandbox and playgroup days. A knot of boys in our Hebrew class make a sport of casually ridiculing Ravi, and I am afraid the stain of his delicate eagerness would rub off on me if they thought we were friends. I walk a step or two ahead of him. The hall is papered with Kindergarten artwork for Purim. Glaring King Haman and smiling Queen Esther’s flutter in our wake. The nurse looks unimpressed. She dabs the dried blood away with a wet paper towel while Ravi stands at attention. “You shouldn’t pick at yourself,” she says. She hands me a Band-Aid. “Now don’t touch it again.” The adhesive side of the bandage folds and sticks to itself. “I sent Rabbi Steiner’s junior assistant out with mono a few days ago,” the nurse says. “And the rabbi just came in here complaining that he has no one to flip his cassette tapes over for him while he chants. If you want to get out of class for a bit, you could help him in his office.” “Yeah,” I say, “sure.” “I’ll call and tell him you’re coming,” the nurse says. Ravi walks back to class and I head to the rabbi’s office. Rabbi Steiner is the mythic patriarch of the New Jerusalem Reform Temple. All students live in fear of rebuke from Rabbi Steiner. If he catches a pupil saying the name of the creator or hiding their cellphone inside of the Talmud during services, he yanks the sinner out of their seat and admonishes them with a wrath worthy of Him. Oren S. told me that the rabbi once gave his older brother a minor concussion by whipping The Jewish Book of Why at his head for talking out of turn. I knock on the door at the end of the hall and a gruff voice says, “Come in.” I edge into the office. A bookcase crammed with
THE PENN REVIEW
JULIA BELL
Hebrew and English titles leans against the back wall. The rest of the room is decorated with religious prints from the stories that no kid wants for their Torah portion: the plagues of Egypt, the burning of Sodom and Gomorrah, Jael driving the nail through Sisera’s head. “Hello, Rabbi. The nurse said you, uh, might need help because your assistant is sick.” “Yes, you must be David,” the rabbi says from his desk. “Close the door behind you.” I do, sealing myself into the office. “Come here,” he says. He is burly and has wide shoulders and big forearms. Gold-rimmed glasses are balanced on his nose. “I will be practicing my cantillation for the Purim service. When I tell you to flip the tape, turn it over. When I tell you to change it, put the next one in.” He is sitting at his desk in a straight-backed chair with the Book of Esther in front of him. The ancient cassette player is behind him on the bookshelf, so I stand facing his back. I play the first tape and he begins chanting rhythmically in Hebrew along with the scratchy recorded voice. The harsh syllables crash together. In the rabbi’s dusty office, they sound even more solemn than they do in temple. “Flip,” he says at the end of the track. I turn the tape over and he begins the chanting again. He never stumbles over a word, not even when turning the page. His balanced voice twists with the recorded chant coming from the cassette player. “Change,” he says. I change tapes until my legs start to ache from standing for so long. My mind drifts and I stare at the back of the rabbi’s curly hair and black yarmulke and unmoving shoulders. I am not dismissed until we hear the frenzy of students pour into the hall at the end of class. “Come back next week,” he grunts. “Worthless Zachary is sick.” I scramble out of the room, feeling like Moses after he saw a glimpse of God.
While we wait outside for our rides, a cluster of boys asks what the rabbi’s office is like. Ravi is silent beside me, watching for our car. “It’s nice inside,” I say. “There are a lot of books.” “I was in it once,” Eli says, “but I don’t really remember what it was like because he was yelling at me the whole time.” “You’re so lucky,” Josh says. “I can’t believe you get to miss class two weeks in a row.” The next week, I walk into class and announce, “I’m going to Rabbi Steiner’s office again.” “Actually, you don’t need to go to the rabbi’s this week,” the teacher says. “Ravi offered to go in your place so you don’t fall behind in your Hebrew studies.” “Oh.” I look at Ravi smiling by the door. “Okay.” I sink into my regular plastic chair. Ravi flounces out of the room. I am a not-special non-rabbi helper once again. It’s not fair, I think, I was the one chosen. I imagine Ravi being the private audience to the rabbi’s chanting. He doesn’t deserve a beady once-over from Rabbi Steiner. He doesn’t deserve to get leg cramps from standing beside the tape player. He doesn’t deserve to be special. I start picking the scab on my elbow, but it’s mostly healed. A few weeks later mom comes back from her book group flustered. “Rebecca Lieberman is running against me for chair of fundraising,” she says. “She had one successful bake sale and suddenly she thinks she can beat the incumbent chair of fundraising.” She starts dialing numbers on the phone. “Well, she can kiss her carpool goodbye.” “Everything is politics to those people,” my dad says. “Alph Lieberman is a rat bastard. He has my tennis racket.”
THE PENN REVIEW
43
SELF PORTRAIT EMILY URBAN OIL ON CANVAS
44 44
THE PENN REVIEW
THE FIBONACCI TREE KAITLIN MOORE Given x12 = In the back of the abandoned station is the hydroculture laboratory, a long, narrow room filled with rows of hydroponics tanks; behind the thick, opaque glass, the white roots twist and curl through mineral nutrient solutions; the station grows legumes: soybeans and kidney beans, lentils and alfalfa, peas, lima beans, entwined in a tangle of knotted vines that grow above and over the rim of the tanks—boughs and thick, fleshy stalks brush the ceiling, covering the skylight and the walls like the archways of a great green cathedral = x11 + x10 where x11 = There are solar panels on the roof and geothermic vents under the grated floor, running heat up from the perpetual fires burning at the center of the world; even though the sky is dark and the sun is far and faint, the hydroculture laboratory is always warm and the air is kept heavy and damp and x10 = Everything smells of moisture and green, growing things––the lima beans’ stalks are as thick as small trees, their seed pods dangling from bent and breaking boughs, silky folds bejeweled in beads of dew = x9 + x8 where x9 = And we stand under the canopy of vines, looking into the ceiling of lentils and lima beans, swollen like fly eggs and x8 = We trace the curves of intestinal roots, the feelers pushing against the glass x8 = x7 + x6 where x7 = We wonder if they prefer the darker world and x6 = If they escaped the ghosts and x5 = x4 + x3 → Choked the silence = Broke through + Into x2 = x1 + x0 → The = ...... + ......
THE PENN REVIEW
45
THE WATERCOURSE GORDON GOODMAN Halting waters navigate the grade Down once familiar paths now overgrown Reclining in their beds of lingering shade They shudder at what’s left of what was known Their dark neglected dams require repairs For weakened locks and fractured open gates Tall reservoirs must spill what can’t be spared While overflowing needs are forced to wait The lonely springs alone can’t stem the loss And watercourses all must reach their falls Brute downward pressure overwhelms remorse That schemes to circumvent response and call But in their falling nothing else compares As lightness lifts our waters through the air
46
THE PENN REVIEW
RUIN SAMANTHA SETO PHOTOGRAPHY
THE PENN REVIEW
47
CHILD'S PLAY EMMA IBRAHIM PHOTOGRAPHY
48 48
THE PENN REVIEW
TRAUMNOVELLE ANSON CLARK I almost felt like some provocateur, Swirling the cream around the dirge coffee. The chocolate sprinkles, soldiers of my imagination. My life, that of an Austrian sankt; Meaning something, like the death of that man On the cross meant something. I always dress smartly — and my husband wishes Me to be sent to an asylum, for preferring Mahler To his best body of work. Perhaps I am proof that it is possible to admire Freud and Kraus. This funny old world where Opposites both make sense. But where is North’s heart Without South? My life is a triangle, all pointy; acicular like The leaves of the pine. A middle class person Has the right to be fussy, as if it’s acting as a barrier To the chaos surrounding. But then I think of Mahler, And I feel close to the above world. People like to associate themselves with things That define how they want to be. Mahler; the bridge Between the old and new made me feel relevant but Respectful. In my husband’s eyes, I fade through life as A recently decedent Fish; gelid in life’s algidity, whose eyes bulged, bursting With the remnants of once Youthful vigor; overpowered by my gender’s propensity To swim towards seas of lunacy and disgust after the period of initial Excitation. Myself: anile. He: distinguished.
THE PENN REVIEW
49
ANSON CLARK
My husband experiments on me, as if he were Freud (a beard and walking stick does not automatically make one Intelligent.) Sleepwalking through life like a drunk with his pants down; He, fluctuating between the calmness and fury of the sea, Like some monstrous Titan, flailing between the two worlds. Caught In some old Italian painting, eyes bulging formaldehyde, as the Youthful vigor dissipates to some downward spectrum. Klimt looks pretty (they say I like the gold) and sparkly like an Oriental tea ceremony. As if the tea never misses the cup. I imagine it does, staining The history books silly; but those men with beards and walking Sticks spend most of the time talking about What made the cup. Life obliqueness, arches defined as angles, positions on a board. We move piece-like to the reflective end. Is the man greater than the symphonies, or are they his slaves? Am I greater than who I am? Still, as the raging chaos that wants to take a one-way journey Into a river, threatens to overwhelm, turning the orbs in the sky Upside down, I hold back the tide with thoughts of those symphonies; The adagios of life. Though he had to convert to Catholicism; at heart He remained the same. Though I converted to him, I remained The same too. My husband has organized an appointment with the doctor. Must wear A mask to the Judenplatz; to haunt the nothingness, the decorum — That silly tea ceremony. A possible new lodger is meeting with my husband today. I hope he doesn’t smell like we are treated. America the new beckons but my husband is rooted here — Silly old tree. So America and a new state exist purely in My heart. And if I am merely heart, that is enough.
50
THE PENN REVIEW
PINOCHET GETS ALL THE GIRLS MIGUEL ALDACO Monsanto sounds like that South American city — Anacondas and in duffels tumble torsos — spelled out in drain pipes, sieve up the sewer system. Out with the bathwater go the archipelagos and a lot more you care not to know. You imagine it’s a place where you speak in helium to the dictator, while he’s stymied by what computers do over brunch. You tell him something general something electric, and a whole molecule of things lost and found. He argues on the strength of what things sound like — how his best years were spent inventing electric bunk beds, even flipped a switch at the city’s first discotheque. Note: Under Pinochet, the “discotheque” was the nickname of a secret detention center known for playing loud music to drown out the screams of its inmates.
THE PENN REVIEW
51
BLURRED [STAFF] LINES RACHEL ERANI There I was elbows pointing hips swaying from side to side legs shifting my body weight from one to the other the corners of my mouth curling up in a guilt-laden smirk It felt good Until they banged on the walls of my ventricles and broke down the barriers of my skull it hurt I try to resist to block them to protect myself but they penetrate me the words they penetrate my grey matter like it’s pink I try really hard not to think so as not to encourage them it really hurts A word to the wise: Stay away from trebles Don’t flirt with basses And be careful next time you invite the beat in
52
THE PENN REVIEW
LIFE ON THE ITALIAN MARKET MADISON GREINER OIL ON CANVAS
THE PENN REVIEW
53 53
LIVING ON 15TH ST. MADISON GREINER OIL ON CANVAS
54 54
THE PENN REVIEW
STILL LIFE EMILY URBAN OIL ON CANVAS
THE PENN REVIEW
55 55
KNOT TERRILL WARRENBURG MIXED MEDIA ON PAPER
56 56
THE PENN REVIEW
SIGHT UNSEEN LEA EISENSTEIN COLORED PENCIL ON PAPER
THE PENN REVIEW
57 57
[CONTRIBUTOR BIOGRAPHIES] MIGUEL ALDACO
is a new father. His baby says he's pretty cool, but what does she know? She's only five weeks in. His writing is good, but whenever she tries dad to get poetry out of him, he tries out his dad jokes. Pacifier humor anyone? Zzzzzz....
JULIA BELL
is a freshman in the College of Arts and Sciences. She is a prospective English and environmental studies double major. Julia is a Seinfeld enthusiast and a student of the Elaine Benes School of Dance. Black licorice jellybeans aren’t her preference, but she will eat them if they are offered in a mix with other flavors. Julia is a staff writer for The Daily Pennsylvanian and a member of the Philomathean Society.
BLAZE BERNSTEIN
was born in Orange County, California and has lived there all his life. When he's not busy writing, he enjoys photography and playing the piano. His writing has been published in several other places including the Bangalore Review and Inkblot literary magazine.
DEBORAH BURNHAM
has been at Penn longer than some of the ivy. She is currently the Associate Undergraduate Chair of the English department, a job that she really loves. For many summers, she taught at the Pennsylvania Governor’s School for the Arts. She leads poetry workshops for high school students, and for cancer survivors. She has a volume of love poems in circulation, and a volume of elegies in process. She lives in the ultra-cool Powelton area of Philadelphia in a row house which allows her to eavesdrop on the boys next door and their video games.
58
ANSON CLARK
currently lives in the UK and has recently completed a creative writing course at the University of Oxford. When she's not writing she often finds herself drinking copious amounts of coffee and watching Two Broke Girls. She's happy living in England though she is still waiting for her invite to join Taylor Swift's crew.
LEA EISENSTEIN is a 19-year-old who likes to make and look at visual art when she isn't doing other things.
NAOMI ELEGANT
is a freshman in the College studying history and English literature. She is essentially from Malaysia, but grew up in Beijing, and enjoys watching movies, criticizing the Wharton school from a Marxist-Leninist perspective, and buying various articles of ripped clothing, much to her mother's consternation. In her free time she bombards her friends' inboxes with memes, incoherent rants, and photos of dogs.
RACHEL ERANI is a junior studying English with a concentration in creative writing in the College. She is from Brooklyn, New York. At Penn, she is involved in the SPEC Concerts committee and City Step, and serves as the promotions director for WQHS, Penn’s student-run radio station. Rachel also writes for the 34th Street music column. She is interested in writing about music as a potential career path.
DANIEL FINKEL can usually be found at his desk with
a cup of hot chocolate, imagining himself hard at work.
LESLEY FINN
is a fiction writer and writing instructor. She is currently at work on her MFA thesis in creative writing at the University of British Columbia, Canada. Lesley holds an undergraduate degree from the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania and advanced degrees in medieval literature from the University of Cambridge, England, and Columbia University.
THE PENN REVIEW
GERRI GEORGE. Literary Editor, Wild River Review.
Award-winning writer, literary journals including Literal Latte. Stories, essays, interviews, articles, screenplays. Pushcart Prize nomination. Work read at Hastings Festival, Hastings, England (last minute smart phone submission). “Night” — retired Madam unable to sleep tells her life story to a cab driver on nightly rides around Times Square — read by an English actor, London. Barbara Deming Memorial Fund Writing Grant for women artists. Tried to send Joan Didion a Friend Request. Moved back to the city, the place where senses muck about in all directions, a little joyful madness. Leak. Splash. Plunk.
GORDON GOODMAN
is a Penn and Penn Law alumnus. At Penn in the 70's, he served as editor of Era Magazine, a literary journal of the Philomathean Society. He has held senior positions at Conoco, DuPont, Occidental, and currently NRG. He lives in Houston, Texas, and he and his wife have four grown children.
MADISON GREINER
is a 20-year-old artist from Havertown, Pennsylvania. Having grown up with a love of art she is pursuing a BFA in the dual program with the University of Pennsylvania and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. A sophomore painting major and Philly enthusiast, she often finds inspiration from the people of Philadelphia. On an expanding series on the issue of homelessness, much of her work incorporates portraits of people she has met on a whim and from volunteer work with the homeless. Art has always been and will continue to be her biggest passion in life.
EMMA IBRAHIM's friends would not think to look for her here.
NIMANSHA JAIN
Science Across Ages and enjoys teaching science to elementary and high school students. She is also involved in neurology research to better understand the underlying mechanisms in neurodegenerative diseases such as frontotemporal dementia and Parkinson’s disease. Some of her hobbies include drawing and creative writing.
JAZ is an actress, published poet, ASCAP member-
songwriter and singer from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She has performed at multiple venues throughout Philadelphia, New Jersey, and New York. Jaz is the author of two chapbooks, The Carving Out Of A Butterfly’s Wings, Parts I & II. Mankind’s storms and rainbows inspire her life and writing. She loves that poetry is a classroom and that she gets to be its lifelong student. Some of Jaz’s other passions are karaoke and watching the Animal Planet Channel.
AVA KIKUT
is a junior at the University of Pennsylvania majoring in English with a creative writing concentration.
SUZY KIM
is a senior English major studying Victorian literature. She owns a typewriter with a sticky "P" that she bought while stress-shopping online, which she uses to organize her thoughts at three in the morning. She is a member of PennSori A Capella and the Underground Shakespeare Company on campus. When she is not in rehearsal for these groups, which isn’t often, she likes to doodle, read comics, and gush over novels by the Bronte sisters and Charles Dickens.
MICHAELA KOTZIERS is a junior studying English literature and German at Penn.
LINDA LIN is a college sophomore majoring in Art
is a junior in the College studying biology and chemistry. She hails from Omaha, Nebraska. Nimansha is President of Penn
History. She enjoys finding beauty in her daily life and uses her camera and phone to see. In her photographs, she explores the conceptual intersection between nature, abstraction and the passing of time.
THE PENN REVIEW
59
COLIN LODEWICK is interested in the ephemeral and hazy, in things that undulate and dissipate and reform over and over again. He’s interested in taxonomy, lists, benign interrogation, foliage, nuances in perception, and sunlight creeping across the floor. His favorite poets include H.D. and Charles Simic, among others, and he has dreams of one day visiting a desert so that he might watch the sunset over it. Currently, he says he will major in comparative literature and biology. Between the words ‘patter,’ ‘sequester,’ and ‘bumble,’ his favorite tends to be 'patter.'
DAVID MARCHINO is a graduating English major
at the University of Pennsylvania and a Philadelphia native. When he is not cursed with bad luck, he enjoys writing creative nonfiction and running. He has worked as a tutor for the Kelly Writers House’s Write-On Program and as a college mentor for Mentor for Philly. He is also a pizza delivery boy; tip him generously if you see him. Joys in his life: red sneakers, reading outside, punk rock.
KAITLIN MOORE is a sophomore at the University of
Pennsylvania studying creative writing and philosophy of science. Once an astrophysics major, Kaitlin likes to write stories that experiment with time, space, and superpositive cats that are both alive and dead. Kaitlin is the author of two novels and several short stories and essays. Her work has appeared in 3Elements Review, Filament, Tinge Magazine, and Blue Door Quarterly.
SAMANTHA SETO
writes poetry that has been published in Ceremony, Soul Fountain, and Black Magnolias Journal. Samantha also has work published in the Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine, Brown University's Cornerstone Magazine, and The Harvard Ichthus. She is a member of the National Student Poets Program and has received a silver key and honorable mention from the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards. Samantha wrote a poetry chapbook titled
60
Midnight. She is an undergraduate student at Johns Hopkins University. Samantha won third prize for her poem, "Impetus of Momentum," in a writing contest at the Whispering Prairie Press.
CLAIRE SHOYER
is a freshman in the College of Arts and Sciences and a potential communications major. At Penn, she is also on Venus, the women's club ultimate frisbee team, and she is training to be a CWiC public speaking coach.
MARTHA SWIFT is a third year English and history major. She is currently studying at Penn for the semester, but attends the University of Melbourne when at home in Australia.
EMILY URBAN
is a sophomore at the University of Pennsylvania, double majoring in fine arts and visual studies. She is originally from North Wales, Pennsylvania, where she attended North Penn High School. In her spare time, Emily enjoys discovering new artists, sketching her friends, and listening to music. She has studied art her entire life and is excited to create new, exciting work in the years to come.
TERRILL WARRENBURG is an artist and designer
living in Philadelphia, PA. She is a senior at the University of Pennsylvania majoring in fine arts as well as minoring in art history, and French. She does art and design work for commission and has exhibited in solo and group shows in galleries and museums in the Philadelphia, New York, and New Jersey areas.
THE PENN REVIEW
[ABOUT PENN REVIEW] Penn Review is the premier mainstream literary magazine at the University of Pennsylvania. Devoted to the literary and visual arts, we print original poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and visual artwork. We publish two issues per year, a pocket-sized chapbook in the winter and a full issue in the spring.
TO LEARN MORE, VISIT US AT issuu.com/pennreview pennreviewlitmag.wordpress.com facebook.com/pennreviewlitmag
OR EMAIL US AT pennreview@gmail.com
[ACKNOWLEDGMENTS] I would like to thank my fellow Penn Review editors who came to so many late night meetings, who worked tirelessly to review submissions and to put this magazine together. I would also like to thank Victoria Xiao for designing the cover of the magazine; the many artists and designers who created the past Penn Review cover images that now grace this issue; the Student Activities Council and the Kelly Writers House; and Deborah Burnham, Lesley Finn, and Gerri George for allowing us to reprint their wonderful writing.