Perception Magazine Fall 2016

volume XVII | issue 28 Syracuse University

Fall 2016 Linger here | 1

Perception is a free literary and arts magazine published once during each academic semester by undergraduate students at Syracuse University. Address editorial correspondence to perception.syr@gmail.com.

We hope to anger, to unleash, to exalt, to yield, to inspire. We hope we can share what we deem necessary to existence, art, love and words, with those who haven’t been touched yet.

Perception is now accepting submissions for the Spring 2017 issue.

Send visionary pieces of writing and art to perception.syr@gmail.com.

2 | Perception

Dear Perceivers, As the staff worked to assemble this issue of Perception, I often told them that I’ve been looking forward to this for close to six months.

And I wasn’t kidding. I have been deeply, nebulously, and sometimes unexplainably excited to finally sit down and produce this body of work.

I have sometimes been asked: What is Perception about? I’ve never really had a clear answer, because I don’t think my answer can be expressed in my words. It can only be expressed through the passionate, powerful, and always-changing emotions and creations of our artists and writers. The production and perception of art can accomplish tremendous amounts of emotional work, and I’m constantly reminded of how lucky I am to be part of a magazine that reflects the diversity and humanity of our community.

The physical production of the magazine and the emotional work that came with it have not always been easy, but they have made my heart full. To put it another way, this magazine is a labor of love. Love for language, love for art, love for community, love for others, and love for the self.

Warmly, Katherine Fletcher Editor-in-Chief

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THE INSIDERS Nittika Mehra Managing Editor

Katherine Fletcher

Editor-in-Chief

Julia Leyden Assistant Editor-in-Chief

Yat Sze Austin Cheng Chief Designer

Elyssa Thomas

Assistant Managing Editor 4 | Perception

Thomas Beckley-Forest Head Editor

Bridget Slomian Designer

Sophia Pennacchio

Communications Director

Karli Ann Gasteiger

Outreach Coordinator

Treasurer Carol Pelz

Editors Tina Rosace, Sophia Jactel, Joy Replogle Sarah Ibrahim, Kim Ramirez,Elizabeth Tarangelo, Gina Reitenauer, Hasmik Djoulakian

Sarah Peck

Student Advisor

Head Readers Malea Lamb-Hall, Shaina Shannan, Hunter B Martin, Sophia Jactel

Readers Kimberly Ramirez, Hairol Ma, Bethany Marsfelder, Sophia Jactel, Amanda Gibbs Lianza Reyes, Erica Wright, Sarah Crane, Danielle Bertolini, Elizabeth Tarangelo

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The Contributors Writing Monika Arbaciauskaite Lauren Hannah

Kenji Samuel Coleman-Yamada Katherine Fletcher

Farrell Greenwald Brenner

Emera Riley Cristina Colón Feliciano

Lianza Isabel Reyes

Fern Durand Hairol Ma Bethany Marsfelder Sophia Pennacchio Emily Markowski Anna Curtis

Ambar Paredes

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9 159 11 42 117 12 35 16 84 93 104 156 18 81 102 118 167 19 22 100 116 25 47 52 57 27 66 29 65 33 41 44 55 61 149 58

Stars Thinking in Textures The Earth Suit The Sand in Wellfeet Othering Undergraduate Eulogy to David Foster Wallace Chipotle and the Art of Ironic Eating Confession i watch a beautiful woman 11 months (i’m sort of okay now) him do not forget this Pins and Needles Christmas witch Jerusalem Ghosts and Dirty Dishes scene from a protest the world ended ten times Planetas License and Registration Workshop Same People, Difference Faces More Like Me Strangers Facts The Book we Read Together Clueless Joe the old man selling socks i don’t love you anymore Torrid Angel Until There Is No More Blood For months I’ve had trouble eating oranges, My Home Kingdom of Innocence A Liar Tells The Truth (Wo)Man, Child, Dog, & Tree

Sarah Peck

Amanda Gibbs Erica Wright

Elyssa Thomas Hunter Martin

Tiara Lowery

Yat Sze Austin Cheng 鄭逸思 Mary Hill Young Adelaide Zoller Hasmik Djoulakian

Katherine R Lucchesi

71 72 150 75 79 83 112 97 106 99 110 146 114 131 143 144 126 134 136 128 132 139 140 160 165 163

Botany Real Talk Prelude The Show Must Go On Common Sonder Dog’s Window 40 years In & Out Poisonous Fruit Blinded by Uncertainty Feel Like It untitled love ghostboy enjoy //portrait// Watershed 髮端 Hair Tip (English Translation) I want to fight Grippin Raptures Mercy of the Throws an emotional crabwalk A note to myself: three months ago Tooth Space Rain

Cover Art Front cover Back cover Inside front cover Inside back cover

Alena Sceusa – NYC sunset Melanie Dujmich – Criss-Crossed Colin Maguire – Untitled Sophia Jactel – Matte #1

Center Spread Raymundo Juarez – Untitled Yat Sze Austin Cheng – Blue is the Warmest Colour Zoe Karikas – Dad Sarah Peck – Senior Splendor Kristen Heglin – Cowskull Sophia Pennachio – Hashtag Alena Sceusa – Signora Leonardo Marino – Untitled

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Art Justina Hnatowicz Allison Leung Alena Sceusa Kelly Veshia Sophia Pennacchio Yat Sze Austin Cheng

Zoe Karikas

Nittika Mehra Akanksha Gomes Sophia Jactel Natalli Amato

Rebecca Sorkin

Bridget Slomian Raymundo Juarez Sarah Peck Melanie Dujmich Michelle Velasquez Alexander Smithline Colin Maguire Kristen Heglin Leonardo Marino

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10 164 24 28 148 32 154 40 45 98 130 158 46 82 113 153 51 145 54 125 60 103 63 70 166 64 73 105 115 142 74 78 77 96 138 111 129 133 147 155 162

Skeleton Mandala Alex The Commute Revenge сильная Happy Trail Hands Boyhood Home Kong Knoty Sendiment Fresh Prince Humming Bird Pitbulls Duality of Man Devil's Bridge Leaf Pendant Autumn Swan Noir Belleza Figure Collage Islamic Tile Collage Otis Mountain Get Down Wildflower Whimsy Addiction Bed Hair Swimming with the Fishes LA Affairs Koi Untitled Ithaca Commons Untitled San Lucas Toliman Summer Haircut Uncertain Identity Rosie the Riveter My Animated Dream Untitled Zebra Comic

Stars

Monika Arbaciauskaite We swallowed stars.

We felt the weight of their creation inside our chests. We sat and closed our eyes, taking in the molecular cloud as it built and built, only to collapse under its own gravity. We felt each clump of the cloud as it breaks off, forming its own identity, following its own gravity, creating the beginnings of a protostellar cloud. Each protostar that fell from the cloud inhabited every place within us, filling us with light. We sat under the sky until the protostars formed stars, until the stars formed complimentary constellations within us. You looked at me, all of the light within the stars within you shone out into the darkness, and you said, “Don’t fall into the black sea, follow the stars with me.�

We swallowed stars until their light swallowed us.

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Skeleton

Justina Hnatowicz

10 | Perception

The Earth Suit Lauren Hannah

The Earth Suit The body, which is soft and fragile while it holds a seed of life Becomes brittle bark when its tree has fallen.

The earth suit is the helm of an astronaut, Holding the fragile flesh together with veins and electrodes The body holds a seed in its hearth for a few season Before the seed spawns its wings and is carried off in the wind— A pinecone expanding in a forest fire.

The contours of the body, the space that it occupies Belongs to the seed only for as long as it can cling to that shell Until it bursts out of its casing and grows on, And, once left behind, the earth suit becomes a gum wrapper, Litter for the still-swarming living to fiddle with and prod as they may.

The perceiver of earth is gone; on of its snake skins remains To be consumed by the ferocious elements.

What is more perplexing than an earth suit without its seed?

Does the departed know what has been done?

Is the sparrow on the windowsill the new suit of the departed?

I may claw at the suit, I may eat it I may pray to it, may pray for it, may burn it and then pray for myself I may cling to it, but it will not cling back, and neither will my own earth suit I am, we are, he was—indefinitely in transit I will never see my own heart or liver, nor those of my friends Yet there they are pulsing beneath our thin skin Concealed from consideration, and there they stick Stubbornly anatomical Tumbling, crawling back into the blood-fertile soil Just as blood flows through my veins of flesh, Seeds flow through currents of space Dust is to dust and I am to another place— Another life, another shell, another tree, another funeral in winter.

This flesh is my emcee for a lifetime, Tissue of cells is my cradle into oblivion, I know this— Now, shall I cry or sing?

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Undergraduate Eulogy to David Foster Wallace Kenji Samuel Coleman-Yamada

I’m searching for a copy of A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again in my University’s library when it hits me: my life, up until this point, has all been about leading me here. I was born male, Japanese and Jewish, took strong and early interests in both language and math, failed to ever figure out how to make my hair look nice, and got into a just-okay University on a STEM major specifically so that I would go searching for a copy of A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again on a harsh Syracuse Winter’s day while dividing my thoughts between my Python class and my vegetarian diet. This book is bigger and better than me. Damn what’s in it—I don’t even like David Foster Wallace that much, though I’m not sure if my complaints about his sheltered and too-simple worldview are legitimate or if I’m just obligated to feel ambivalent about him on principle. No, the importance is in what the book itself, along with the rest of the good mensch’s œuvre, really is: faintly warm and home-grown but still somehow cold and terrifying on a very fundamental level. Junk food marketed to the people who are too smart to buy the junk food marketed to the people who are too smart to buy junk food. If David Foster Wallace was an All-American Soft Drink, he’d be OK Soda. Here is the person that I am. Here is what I ƒam. Here is all I am. Here is where every second of my life has led me.

Does that mean I have free will from this moment forward?

Electronically assisted, I find that one copy, donated in 2006, has been taken out and is due in May, five months from now. Too long to wait—damn the fact that I’ve read every essay in it multiple times, I need it now. There’s one more on the sixth floor in Special Collections for reference only. That’s fine. I log myself off the school computer— damn, that electronic catalog is a nightmare to use. I start heading up the stairs, only to reach the fifth floor and find that the sixth floor is accessible by elevator only. Defeat.

Hey, did you know that David Foster Wallace started writing Infinite 12 | Perception

Jest right here in Syracuse?

Immediately outside those elevator doors is world of walnut walls, extra-fuzzy carpeted floors, and lots and lots of sweater vests.

Damn, those sweater vests. I make a left and lose thirty minutes to an impromptu lecture about John Brown and the Secret Six—it’s interesting and not in my immediate studies, though, so I don’t mind.

I trudge into the first room I see. It’s dead silent, the wall lined with an exhibit on consumer plastics.

—Sorry… I’m looking for Dewey Decimal Prefix PSV… Can you help?

An academic-aged woman typing on an iPad looks immensely disturbed by this—or maybe my voice, or maybe both. Mimicking my low-but-immensely-audible whisper, she replies: —No, I’m sorry.

I apologize one more time on the way out just to verify the quality— or lack thereof—of my whisper. Everybody hears me, everybody’s head turns; I keep walking. Am I immensely satisfied.

I stumble into another room, this one with conservative Great University study-room decor. There isn’t anyone in here, but I holster my phone anyway. It feels like Shabbos in here.

The walls are lined with books. I don’t find what I’m looking for, but then I realize that I’m looking under the letter D rather than W. I don’t even like this guy that much: why the hell am I on a first-name basis with him?

Why on earth would I start thinking of David Foster Wallace in terms of first name? Why would I start thinking of any writer who I don’t personally know in terms of first name? Frederic Tuten will always just be Fred to me, but David Foster Wallace? Damn. Do I know a few Davids too many? Does David Foster Wallace, a writer who kind of Linger here | 13

creeps me out, come to think of it, really pervade my consciousness to that extent?

Yes, his name must be written out in full every time. He is insurmountable, monolithic unto himself: he is a brand. It’s the natural order of things to say the full six syllables, to write them every time.

Call him Wallace and he’s practically not there. Call out his true name—David Foster Wallace!—and legions of undergraduates just like me will slowly glide in your direction and give you their opinions, all as wordy as they are insubstantial. The only acceptable substitute for the full name is DFW, but then I don’t drink Pepsi either.

Well, too bad—he isn’t under W. Again: do I have free will from this moment forward?

Next to the W section: X. Next to that: Y. Yamada. Kenji Yamada.

I can and can’t picture it. I’m eighteen and brilliant, but then so is everybody else. Can the shelves somehow make room for an Electrical Engineering major where they couldn’t for David Foster Wallace? What about all the other Somethingorother Engineering majors who have also lived eighteen years just to become the sort of people to search for David Foster Wallace books? What about the Liberal Arts people?

Damn, the Liberal Arts people…

Something tells me that the man himself would have been happier off of these particular shelves in this particular room, at least. Something also tells me that he should have been somewhere here. It would have made an especially funny story if he was missorted. Hell, maybe he was missorted.

I can put it down as fate, but I’m ashamed of myself. This much for a writer who I don’t even like all that much? Maybe I just feel bad for him.

That’s the funny thing about David Foster Wallace: he really, really did want to move past irony, past the cold academics writing books that 14 | Perception

they don’t really mean – tee-hee, pranked you—past White Noise and The Crying of Lot 49, and all he really ended up doing was rebuilding the whole prison with another wall around it besides. He was a more insidious version of everything he passive-aggressively blasted in E Unibus Pluram—I mean, how could he not be? He came from the same TV-obsessed, irony-addicted culture. He was fed the same thing that those it’s-funny-because-I-didn’t-really-mean-it—or-did-I—no-I-didn’t postmodernists were. His proposed approach to post-postmodernism was too reactive to reverse the direction of American culture: move past postmodernism by forcing wide-eyed sincerity onto this big ironic mass? Please. Of course this only convoluted things further. He wasn’t stupid—he knew this and spent real time agonizing over it. It’s almost tragic, really. So his precious anti-rebels, alongside he himself, are only really adding another full cement layer around the supremely ironic supermax facility. Post-postmodernism doesn’t redeem anything. E Unibus Pluram renders sincerity ironic.

I went back to the dorm and ordered A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again on Amazon.

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Confession

Katherine Fletcher I. She’s humming loneliness in your ear like gospel, like sermons, but you don’t know this one so you wait to meet her at the “amen.”

She wears secrets like choir robes and burns the skin on her fingertips like candles on the altar.

You could love her like something holy if she would let you.

She won’t let you.

You press close to her at night and tell yourself that with enough practice you’ll stop getting tangled in her crown of thorns and start getting tangled in her sheets instead.

II. You don’t know if she prayed at her bedside as a child.

You never thought to ask.

Did she ever pray for something like this, someone like you, someone like him?

Did she ever choke out pleas to God’s answering machine and press 5 because yes, she would like to leave a callback number?

The dial tone is more comforting than his breathing at night – 16 | Perception

steady and oblivious to the ocean she’s making in herself.

Forget the rosary beads, give her heart and lungs and bones.

Let her eat you alive.

Let it be the end.

The last supper was ten minutes of her hands on you and ten minutes of you wishing she’d ask you to stay the night.

You don’t stay the night.

You lose sleep wondering why.

III. She’s spent so much time carving hymns into her arms that you think you could have known them before you knew her body or her loneliness or her love.

You don’t know anything.

You don’t know if God is ever going to pick up the phone.

You don’t know if she is ever going to pick up the phone.

You wish you hadn’t made her a martyr.

It didn’t have to be that holy.

It’s just communion.

It’s just body and blood.

It’s just body and blood.

It’s just blood.

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Pins and Needles

Farrell Greenwald Brenner Pins and needles are your eyes, your nose pricking my collarbone with such an anaesthetic that i become numb, forgetful pins and needles are your rolled-up flannel sleeves i don’t know how i got here but i don’t think i want to go back retrace my steps on a haunted road Oh, won’t you carry me in your bared arms?

Set me down on something soft, perhaps yourself? i don’t know how i got here but it’s getting colder on this haunted mountain i think our ghosts should meet—it’s only polite They’ll talk about our hair, our recycling habits, our emotional health which isn’t really. i stopped feeling, you stopped poking and prodding—i am the contented pincushion but this ain’t your mama’s acupuncture and i hope that when it’s time to pack up, go back home down the mountain we can agree that it was better than a poke in the eye.

18 | Perception

the world ended ten times Emera Riley

1. my mother told me, when we were both drunk off tequila and lime, and her teeth looked sharp like little bits of frozen snow, crystallized that i was the happiest day of her life what a weighty sentiment.

2. my daddy locked the gun in a box, and locked the box in the safe. his children are crazy, open-mouthed fiends i gave myself the cyst in my wrist trying to break it against a cupboard, striking again and again the cracking sound an endless replay, distinct bone against granite, picture the wrist, the purpling, the noise my mother, screaming holy shit, my brother said, holy shit, pulling me away from myself don’t. don’t. please, don’t.

3. i am the honest child, never a liar, word-spinner, oath-keeper, my sister whispers her secrets to me i used to cut my kneecaps with a razor blade, i used to dream about dying, they look like dust particles beneath my eyelids, they look like tiny hairs on the backs of knuckles i would never lie, she says, i would never lie and our fingers look like criss-crossing roads sailing far far away from one another 4. i told my brother about the woman who blew her brains out but survived, with only 9 teeth 9 teeth, he remarked, and i could picture him Linger here | 19

distinct, rubbing his jaw, cementing himself so vain, my brother, so pretty 9 teeth, he murmured, just to fill the silence, not a promise then, never his truth don’t. don’t. please, don’t.

5. she bought me over the counter antidepressants in tiny white capsules as a birthday present, for things we do talk about in low tones, my secrets gutted between us, the knife shiny, blade raised, carving open the carcass of grief, so distinct, so bloody the pills tasted like plastic and were so light, so easy to swallow 6. my daddy locked the gun in a box, and locked the box in the safe. where no one would find it, i held it once, i liked the weight, the kickback, the noise the feel of cool metal resting against the bare skin of my shoulder. the ringing of it in my ears, the power of it the finality of it, i like to end things but my daddy keeps the key, far far away from me the ringing in my head, the weight in my hands don’t. don’t. please, don’t.

7. my mother told me, when we were both drunk off tequila and lime, and her teeth looked like the black and white photo of her dead father that no parent wants to bury their child and she made me promise, our fingers criss-crossing, intersections, her hands upon mine and it still chokes me, cradling me with such weight

20 | Perception

8. my brother tried to lock me in a crawlspace, once the darkness beckoning, my open mouth it would creep inside. it would change me, consume me fighting, begging, teeth and fists, his face so cruel, his mouth unsmiling as he dragged me toward the tiny expanse where no light filtered don’t. don’t. please, don’t.

9. when i was a child, i used to clamber into my parent’s bed on saturday mornings, the sun filtering through that white popcorn ceiling, and slowly they would wake up, eyes stiff with sleep their mouths stretched into a wide yawn, the others would descend into bed our limbs crammed together, all 6 of us, so small, so happy i don’t think i knew weight then.

10. someday our parents will die my mother burned, my father buried the gun will taste like a kiss, i imagine holy shit, my brother says, holy shit, trying to hold the bloody bits of me in, 9 teeth, 9 teeth, trying to hold me together, don’t. don’t. please, don’t.

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Planetas

Cristina Colón Feliciano Hay momentos, cuando el cielo está transformando su máscara, pero todavía el día sigue siendo noche, Que siento que mi cuerpo Se estira en el espacio Y no puede contener la angustia Que tan solo el pensamiento de mi Vida, totalmente acabada, sin ti Me causan.

El más sincero suspiro Me permite entender tus Palabras rompiendo la distancia Con un simple "lo siento", Pero incapaz de girar una vez Y aceptar que el universo se equivocó Cuando te colocó en mi camino Mi pena, mi dolor, Está en el saber que mi alma Pudo estar completa en algún momento Pero mi cuerpo rota en tu eje Sin poder escaparse de tu órbita.

22 | Perception

Translation There are moments, when the sky is transforming its mask but the day is still the night, When I feel that my body Stretches in space And I can’t contain my anguish That only the thought of my Life, completely finished, without you Causes me.

The sincerest sigh Allows me to understand your Words breaking the distance With a simple “I’m sorry”, But incapable of turning once And accepting that the universe was wrong When it placed you in my journey My sorrow, my pain, Are in knowing that my soul Could have been complete once But my body rotates in your axis Unable to escape your orbit.

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Alex

Allison Leung

24 | Perception

Same People, Difference Faces Lianza Reyes

i.

At first light, she wakes, Her eyes fluttering at the time, She slowly stands.

As she enters the shower with droopy eyes, Bare shoulders, Clean skin, Open pores, Tipped head, She leaves feeling whole, Carefully, she dries her hair With slender fingers, Against a whirring fan.

Then she sits down, With a sponge on her face, And begins to brush powder over it, To even out the roughs of mountains, To hide to feel comfortable.

She pierces her lips red Over a blinding smile.

She checks her nails, To see if anything has been chipped.

She tests out if her skin is smooth Blushes pink on her cheeks.

She decides today, She will wear a white dress, Gold heels.

Stockings.

Earrings. Bracelet.

Necklace.

Then she sets down and opens A bottle of wine at noon.

Careful not to spot her clothes, She bites the glass to sip, Linger here | 25

Then she leaves the house to ride the Shining, pretty car.

“Today is a good day,” she murmurs.

A day of class and dainty. ii.

She parks the car and goes up, Already barefoot.

Her heels in one hand, She stumbles upward, Already undoing the coiffed do, Then slams the light of her room open.

Quickly, she unravels the stockings from Her long, long legs.

She unclasps her dress over her head, The pearls, Her diamonds, Clothes, A mess on her bed.

The water runs The makeup remover Gone is the paint on her face.

She throws everything on the floor “I’ll fix it all tomorrow” As she strokes her face, She notices there is a pimple growing.

“I’ll deal with it tomorrow.”

She goes to sleep with leftover eyeliner, In her underwear, With Sleepless in Seattle playing In the background.

Is she broken?

We do not know. iii.

In a span of twelve hours, She is two different people.

Both just as beautiful 26 | Perception

The Book we Read Together Fern Durand

Love hasn’t any boundaries. SOciety does.

Our VOices danced all night on each word. Our fingers met on page five. Tracing every word I read aloud, her index finger touched mine as I singled out the ONe word I could not pronounce, ‘blanket.’ Half of the book in my hand, and the other half in hers. Her face as gentle as night clouds.

Her lips … soft … It was magical. DAngerous. The only place for us is in the woods. Away from every One. In a world full of do’s and don’ts. Where Society tells you what not to do, and fail at following their own rules. I say we do everything that is Human. To be curious. To imagine. TO wonder what happens when we embrace being human and show it.

TO be singled out. As I watch her sleeping. Her body covered enough to hide her private parts by the folded blanket that was lying on the sofa’s arm when I first entered her home. Her legs sticking out underneath. As I watched her asleep, I couldn’t help but wonder. ‘If I lie next to her and fall asleep… will our souls dance like, when we Were awake dancing with each other…’?

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The Commute Alena Sceusa

28 | Perception

the old man selling socks Hairol Ma

There’s an old man who sells socks at the night market a few blocks away from the high rise I work at. He has sat there, under the same building, the same socks in shades of white and gray and black spread in front of him for as long as I can remember. I recall thirteen year old me peering from where I was sandwiched between my aunt and my mom, holding a lamb skewer in one hand and marveling at how his wrinkles folded over his gaunt figure in a gross fascination.

I am in college now and he still sits under the same building in the same browning wife beater and rubber flip-flops. When I was thirteen I observed him in the way kids gawk at the old – scientifically, wondering how a person’s skin becomes too large for his shrinking body and how the spots of brown form on his hands. When you are thirteen aging means turning sixteen and getting your license. Now I am eighteen and I know what the word hospice means and how exactly an undertaker lowers a coffin into the ground. When I am eighteen I see the old man’s layers of wrinkled skin mottled by decades of the sweltering Taipei sun, the sunken eyes that watch the white tourists admiring overpriced egg custard desserts and the shrieking girls buying dinner together after work. None of them need the socks he sells – socks in all sizes made of the same generic polyester in the same monochrome shades of white and gray and black.

I don’t need the socks he sells. I walk quickly past the building he sits under whenever I frequent the night market. It is easier to forget he sits there when I visit the night market with friends. But there is vulnerability in walking alone: I see the mother chasing her screaming toddler, the girl who sells jewelry trying to rip off some tourists who don’t know better, the young man folding peanut and ice cream into thin translucent rolls. I see the couple feeding each other pieces of cotton candy and I see the old man selling socks, sweat dripping off his permanently hunched back in the unforgiving heat, looking at the masses that move fluidly past him and his white and gray and black socks.

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I earn 150 US dollars from my internship this summer, a position that was secured for me through a family friend. When my friends joke at what they think is a measly amount compared to how long I sit in a white cubicle, I laugh along, although for the amount of work I am doing I should be paid nothing. I sit in my white cubicle and think about what 150 US dollars can buy me in Taipei – a few afternoons in the cute and overpriced cafes in the shopping district, the discontinued Levi 800s I saw in the vintage store downtown. When I am overseas I am playing with paper money that comes in blue and red, lifted out of my daddy’s bank account and put in my Kate Spade wallet, a luxury gifted to me by a distant relative I’ve probably seen twice in my life.

Today I am walking through the night market alone. For the first time since I was thirteen I see a young man around my age pause before the old man selling socks. He picks up a few pairs, five for three US dollars, without checking the size or color. I move almost mechanically – I pretend to peruse the socks that all look the same before handing five pairs to him. His hands shake with age as he takes my pink bill and puts it in the plastic money container next to him. I am handed a plastic bag full of socks I have no use for.

It is then that I realize that my watch reads 10:12 PM and there are two pink bills sitting in the clear plastic. The night market has been in full swing for over four hours and he has earned six US dollars. Six goddamn US dollars that can’t even pay for half of a fucking panini from my favorite sandwich café in the shopping district. I am eighteen and I see a man shriveled and weathered from time, an old man in his nineties who still carries the same socks on his permanently hunched back to sell at the same night market every night in the same relentless heat. I am eighteen and I wonder where the sons and daughters of this old man are and I understand that at some point in his life this old man was in love. I am eighteen and I understand that the old man selling socks is resigned to the stool he sits upon under the building that casts shadows in the night. I understand that he sits on the same stool, swallowed by the shadows cast by the building above him, watching the ghosts of who he used to be before he became the Old Man 30 | Perception

Selling Socks. I cannot bring myself to look at his face.

The socks lying before him blur into ugly grays until they are nothing but a writhing monochrome mass of cheap polyester fabric and plastic price tags. An acquaintance wore the same shade of black when I spent a brief afternoon with him in the city. He laughed and called me “sheltered” when I told him I preferred spending the night in than going to the bars and drinking until I couldn’t remember my name. I wonder now if he’s getting wasted and posting blurry black pictures from nights he can’t remember. I will take my paycheck from an internship I didn’t earn and spend it on fashionable white and gray and black shirts and caps I’ll find childish by the time I graduate.

The bag of socks in my hand is indescribably heavy as I walk home tonight. Within the plastic holds all the people I do not want to remember and the Old Men Selling Socks I have ever walked past in a stifling haze of privilege and shame. The Old Men Selling Socks follow me back to America, where they wear dull gray uniforms as they mop the shiny floors of Silicon Valley startups and shovel snow in secondhand boots through the indefinite Syracuse winter. They carry invisible Sisyphean weights on their shoulders, moving rocks up hills they can barely see the top of, only to wake up every morning and start over. The Old Man Selling Socks will carry gray socks on his back tomorrow and my acquaintance will slip on expensive gray sneakers and call strangers bitches before buying drinks for them behind his girlfriend’s back. I will see a viscous sea of white and black and gray figures that look almost human under gaudy fluorescent lights and I will see the same tired eyes I once saw in the suffocating heat of Taipei.

There are Old Men Selling Socks all around us – let us not forget that they exist.

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сильная

Kelly Veshia

32 | Perception

Torrid Angel

Bethany Marsfelder i love an angel with charred, ashen wings (a dove’s, by design) yearning to stretch and to soar far away from us far away from her cage. (far away from me.) she searches in the crook of each tree, every subway tunnel in the shadow of each stone, every street in the murky depths of each babbling brook, every whispering rooftop (though the words they are saying wash over her) for feelings unfamiliar. (home. love. happiness. freedom.)

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she wishes (if such a creature—singular and strange—ever could) to paint herself into the canvas of the world though her brush is a cigarette her paint, the plume and the red lit end itself the artist’s signature. (she huffs the fumes of life through her cigarette. she is addicted.)

o wind of fate, happenstance, or chance carry her far? let her explore her dreams (not anyone else’s, not this time.) or if this does not please you give me wings on these tired shoulders so i might fly with her. (if i could hold the world in my palms bear the universe in my arms look at the sun every day, unshielded, through my eyes then i would call her mine. my torrid angel mine.)

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Chipotle and the Art of Ironic Eating Kenji Samuel Coleman-Yamada

Around the time when I had been in high school just long enough to really get into the rhythm of it but had just enough of it left to make it seem insurmountable, I’d hang out with my friends almost every day in dingy Manhattan apartments that always smelled like a combination of musty mahogany and cat pee. We’d smoke, hit a bunch of instruments in a Sisyphean effort to make some kind of coherent music come out, and joke about just how doomed late capitalism (we’d always use that phrase—always the full two words, never just “capitalism”) was, but never dare to offer up an alternative. We really thought ourselves revolutionaries for a moment there—in what sense, who could tell.

Then we’d go out to eat at Chipotle.

I was a little bit shocked the first time we went. There was a big tangerine-colored B on the sanitary inspection sheet hanging in the window. It was some hour either right before or right after eleven o'clock post-meridian, and this branch of the McDonald’s-owned chain wasn’t too shy about the fact that it was about to close down for the night. The whole staff groaned, grunted and spat loudly at us. I stared at everyone else present the whole time with wide, wide eyes. —Hey, I asked—since when do you like this stuff?

—Eh—’iunno, my flannel-clad, brain-fried friend said. —I was one of the first people to start eating here, though.

I shrugged my shoulders and awkwardly ordered a vegetarian burrito from the exhausted lady at the counter. She gave me the evil eye and held it on me straight through the process—so, mindful of everyone’s time, I did my best to expedite the actual consumption. It tasted like salt on salt. —Why on earth would I eat this when there’s so much better, cheaper Mexican food in my neighborhood?, I asked to whoever would listen. Right then, that happened to be some kid who I barely ever talked to. He looked up for a moment, let out a low chuckle, and went back to hanging his head as low as is likely possible for a living person. So went the first of many unsatisfying, overpriced Linger here | 35

and yet somehow irresistible visits.

We never ate there for the food. I don’t think anyone did. I knew this one kid who posted a picture of his Chipotle order on Instagram and captioned it: —I think I’m becoming a bowl person. I smirkingly passed a screenshot of that post around at the cafeteria table one time.

Everybody laughed.

On Halloween, Chipotle docks their burritos to the low-but-still-kindatoo-high-for-the-quality price of three American dollars for anyone with enough gall and resentment of the adult world to show up in a costume. They say “three dollars” because it’s convenient, but it’s really 60% off—that’s no sample sale. Naturally, you can find lines around the block at any given branch on Halloween. Naturally, my friends and I joined in last time around. I threw on a mask and a trench coat and said I was Don Giovanni (I still accredit my success to the counter-man being even dumber than me), my friend David threw on a full mask and walked there barefoot (ten city blocks on the Upper East Side, man— damn), and my friend Auden just carried around a little wooden hammer. We passed another burrito joint on the way to the chain. You know, Auden said, the burritos there are probably already like three bucks, not to mention probably better. We all nodded, put on tough-guy half-pouts, and kept walking. When we got there: —Nine dollars!

—Nah, man, I’m a lumberjack.

—Three dollars!

The three dollar burritos were just as salty as they were when they were nine dollars.

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making anyone feel bad. The lack of positive comments on the chain didn’t mean that there wasn’t anything positive around it—it was just the sort of cautious positivity with which we approached anything that we almost-sorta liked but not really. —Chipot-le!, an overexcited member of whatever crew I was with would often call out as we were on our way to the nearest branch. The rest of the crew would infallibly respond with nervous chuckles in lieu of a real reply.

The food has everything to do with the chain’s success precisely because it nothing to do with it. It isn’t outright bad, but nobody who’s ever tasted real Mexican food or even a slightly realer imitation of Mexican food would ever call it good. It’s definitely something other than just really, really salty, but it’s difficult to explain with any words other than really, really salty. It’s almost bland, but bland really isn’t the word either. You can’t taste any individual ingredient in anything that they serve: they’re all nebulous masses of almost-Mexican—well, stuff—and yes, saltiness. The design of each and every branch reflects this—the decor is vaguely hip, brownstone-ish and neo-industrial, but it still resembles any awful chain enough that nobody’s going to get scared or confused. Judging by the perpetual, not-even-that-quicklymoving lines, we can’t get enough. Is it because some of us actually like it, or is it just that it never really fills us up to begin with?

When making music with one group of my friends, I would, at first, try some really ridiculous out-there shit. —Nah, man, I’d always hear.

—That shit’s corny. I’d try some more out-there shit, someone else would, yet another poor sap would, and it would all be called corny.

Sometimes I was the one shooting something down. Eventually, one of us found that it was pretty difficult to be called out for being corny while playing barely more than two steadily alternating notes—which notes they were didn’t matter. Eventually, we all started every session like this and ended is quite the same way. Maybe someone would trail off the straight and narrow, but there were always plenty of nasty glares in store for that. I don’t remember anything that this lineup produced. It’s not that it was bad, or that I don’t want to remember—I just don’t remember anything that came out of it.

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Before the big E. coli panic, everyone was scrambling to figure out the secret to Chipotle’s pervasive millennial appeal. Some said it was the edgy decor; some said it was the healthy, organic image. As usual, the nasty old grownups were missing the mark by a mile—everyone I knew would laugh at anyone out-of-the-loop enough to call Chipotle’s decor edgy, and none of us were gullible enough to really believe that what we were eating was anything other than rat poison. Rather, we ate at Chipotle because it was easy. No super-cool crew eating at Chipotle ever has to expend any effort or show any vulnerability to do so. That’s Chipotle’s strength: its nothing-ishness. It’s a hyper-depersonalized fast food monster for an even faster generation: we don’t feel vulnerable eating there. Nobody would eat there if it was actually good.

Whenever we ask each other what we actually think of the place, we just shrug our shoulders. Maybe someone says that it kinda sucks— maybe someone says that it’s just okay—but we keep eating there.

The blatant lies regarding ingredients and disease outbreaks only add to the flavor of the place—they’re the exact dark, sarcastic semicommentary that we crave. The whole E. coli unpleasantness is already well on its way to becoming an in-joke. Maybe someone will make a meme about E. coli at Chipotle and it’ll stop being cool to talk about it—but Chipotle’s image will remain unscathed. Nothing’s cool—thank G-d we can still get excited over nothing.

They say that food and love are the life’s two great pleasures. I wonder—does anyone have ironic sex?

Chipotle lost a lot of customers during the E. coli scare, they say. I don’t know about that—I still saw lines during the scare, and I still see lines now. Even so, they issued an apology for a few closures and offered a free burrito to whoever texted the right word to the right number. Whether out of nostalgia or boredom, I claimed mine. While waiting on the endless line, out of pure curiosity, I asked the person in front of me whether she actually liked the food that she was about to order.

—Nah, not really, she said. —I was one of the first people to start eating here, though.

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I grinned and looked around. Some publications had said that Chipotle was dead, but there were lines around the block.

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Hands

Sophia Pennacchio

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Until There Is No More Blood Sophia Pennacchio

Hands up Bullets fly Sorrow sets in No justice Lives taken For taking a candy bar But we protest We march on We raise our fists We wear his jersey We stand with him Because he is right We fight for justice We fix the system Until there is no more blood

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The Sand in Wellfeet Lauren Hannah

The marshes I waded through at six years old Behind the dunes of the Wellfleet shoreline Adorned in prickers and things that bit my skin And clay mud where I would sink up to my pale calves Staining my skin and seeping into my memory So it would take days to scrub out The days of sun and sand rubbing me down clean A similarly joyful, sinful place I found myself exploring At twenty, just reaching my hands into the world And having them bitten again by prickers, larger now Prickers with eyes and hands of their own And other things to leave invisible stains That would seep and stain my skin for many months And I would scrub and scrub but no soap and water Could compare to the pink sand of Wellfleet And the simple clay mud between my fingers And the familiar souls that would lift me from the dirt And place me into a bathtub in the evening This time there was only slippery tile floor and Me and my stained skin and my decaying memories.

But I still dream of having everything stop— Sitting in the waves until rough sand peels me Down to my core and in time growing back A new fern in the summer wind And the tides bringing more and more sand To cover every tarnished thing that was here before Leaving a new surface where footprints, Evidence of smiles and laughter and Little hands holding ice cream and kites and dreams Are yet to come 42 | Perception

Some are radical and angry And most are simply poor But regardless, They are Them And we cannot open our doors They fail to learn our language They intrude and can’t adapt To our polished way of life They are Other, that is that.

The Others took our jobs And they burned our towers down They rape and murder children And bring drugs into our towns You understand that after this We cannot start to trust Or they’ll slither ‘cross our borders, Oh no!

They are Them and We are Us!

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For months I’ve had trouble eating oranges, Emily Markowski

they were sitting on the counter that night you threw your fist through the big window in my living room. we’re 6 floors up, and the glass took a few seconds to hit the ground. we both leaned out of the empty window and watched the chunks hit the car below us. you paid for the window to be replaced, but one month later, you broke it again. this time there were bananas on the counter because I had given up eating oranges.

I guess I can’t eat bananas anymore.

I’ve tried orange juice, but it just reminds me of your fists, and all I taste is blood. the pulp feels like tendons on my tongue.

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Yat Sze Austin Cheng

Boyhood

Fresh Prince Zoe Karikas

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More Like Me

Lianza Isabel Reyes The following story is true.

I do not tell people about the first time I disobeyed my mother.

Sometimes, I mention tiny anecdotes of my inherent insanity that nudges a chuckle or laugh from an audience. And then I took the last cookie anyway, and fed it to the cat. I thought Fluffy deserved to taste it. Other than this, I keep quiet.

For most of my early adolescence, we were not close. Later on, when I turned eighteen, she would admit to me that of all her three daughters, I was the one who most closely resembled her personalitywise. I am the spitting image of my father’s sister. Yet when I open my mouth, her modulated tone bursts. As a child, however, I underachieved. My grades, while acceptable, were not good enough to a classic Filipina tiger mother. I was obedient and mostly kept to myself. Bullied in school, I had more fun with my sisters. Average. In the middle. Not amazing.

Yet, the first time the rebel in me flexed her muscles, she was taken aback.

Her name was Mikaela, and she bullied me constantly. Her taunts often echoed in my ear. Gross. Ugly. Stupid. When she grabbed my books, I did not try to get them back. She pushed me down the stairs once, laughing when I cried. The teachers did not care, and I was too terrified of the consequences to tell my mom.

One day, however, I snapped. As a calm child, revenge was something beyond my understanding. She had pulled my hair so hard that she ripped it off. A laugh flared all throughout the class at the sight of my bald spot. The teacher hushed them, glaring at me as if I was to blame.

I felt my jaw tighten, my heart sinking to the floor in embarrassment.

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me. For once, I begged to disagree.

The next day, Mikaela left her crayons on the desk, which was at the front of the room. It was during the quiet hour, when we were given activities to do. The teacher did not look, so I made my way from the back—where I hid my head in books and daydreamed to avoid the taunting from peers—to the table. My classmates could see me. They all noticed because it was uncommon for me to allow myself to be seen by anyone. I made eye contact with them. My fingers found her crayons. She had the one I wanted: forty-eight colors and a sharpener.

Slowly, I broke them.

A gasp came from Mikaela’s seatmate. People gaped, but I did not break my eye contact. I continued, snapping her crayons into small pieces. I let some of them fall to the ground.

The teacher stirred. I froze in place, realizing I had been caught.

Instead, the teacher stood up and walked past me, not even sparing me a glance, to leave the room. Relief rushed into me and my eyes brightened with an idea. With everyone watching, I picked up her work. She had begun coloring the margins with purples and blues. It was pretty; it was something I always wanted to do with my own work.

I ripped it into pieces. I stepped on them. This activity was probably worth ten percent of our grade, and by tearing her work apart, she would have to start all over again and finish in less time. I smiled to myself when I heard the door open. Mikaela stared at me, having come from the bathroom, her mouth a wide “O.” I went back to my seat, calm and tranquil. Her eyes filled with tears quickly, and she burst into an ugly cry so loud that the teacher came back in.

That day, I was sent to the principal’s office. The principal looked at me, bemused. I was a good kid and never had any reports from teachers. How did I suddenly end up violating one of the most important rules in elementary school? I walked free with a telling off and a smug smile. They couldn’t put me in too much trouble because I had a clean record. Mikaela had more trouble on her record than I did, so I was let off. They mentioned they would call my mother, but in that 48 | Perception

moment, I did not care.

Until I came home.

When I closed the door, she whisked herself into the room in her work clothes. Her white coat, her heavy bag, the ID attached to her collar.

She gave me a hard stare. Normally, I would shrink. Instead, I leveled my stance, despite being a foot and a half shorter.

“What’s this I hear about you ripping a girl’s work apart?”

“She was bullying me. She wouldn’t stop.”

“Then why didn’t you tell your teachers? Or me?”

“I was scared, mama. I thought she would get me into more trouble.”

“Well, now, you’re in even more trouble! The teachers might think of you as a bad kid. What if they give you worse grades now? And your grades aren’t that great either!” she retorted as she crossed her arms. I could tell that if she weren’t going to cross her arms, she would slap me.

“Mama, the whole class is mean to me because of her. They all want her on their side. It had to stop,” I said, my cool façade cracking slightly when my voice wavered.

“I can’t believe you. This is not like you; you always do as you’re told. I’m disappointed in you.” She went on about giving me long punishments—something she did not usually do. She talked about grounding me, removing my television privileges, a spanking…

“Mama, she said you should have aborted me because I’m too stupid!” I finally said, my voice trembling harshly. Of all the things Mikaela did to me, it was that one insult that ticked me off the most.

She could have pushed me down the stairs ten times, but nothing compared to the pain of being told you should have been abandoned by your mother.

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She paused in her sentence. She was speechless for a while, even as she opened her mouth to reply. I stood there because, somehow, my stance did not crumple or slouch, even though I was crying and trembling. It felt like forever, as she stared at me ominously. We stood there in the living room, unaware to the rest of the world moving.

My head strong, my mouth firm, I stared back. She returned my glance.

I inherited my father’s eyes, but I have her soul. I see myself in her when I glare. Eyes lined with worry, tinged in anger. When we stopped this charade, she went quiet and went back to what she was doing. I returned to my room. We were no longer angry. Even in waves of rage, in the end, we forgive. She is, inexplicably and absolutely, my mother.

That night after dinner, the brief fury that took over her made way for a mild amusement. What she said to me as we cleared the table was, “You’re more like me than I thought.”

At the time, it did not make sense to me. But it does now. How could I forget? My mother, who, at nineteen, participated in rallies against the former dictator. My mother who took a master’s class in psychology to spite her father’s wishes. She forced herself to finish medical school to piss off the men who called her sexist names. When a coworker wanted her fired, she managed to take care of her sick mother while being promoted to head intern. We were both full of perseverance and forgiveness; yet brimming with spite, ready to be fired.

Shortly the year after, Mikaela moved to Australia. I have a running joke with my sisters about me being the cause of her leaving the country. Every now and then, I disobey my mother. Not out of spite, but for my own benefit. I look out for myself, even if it means breaking a couple of promises. Sometimes she yells at me, although these days, she only sighs. I catch her smiling sometimes, as if she found my hardheadedness all too similar to hers.

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Nittika Mehra

Devil's Bridge

Strangers

Lianza Isabel Reyes I am the skies after dark, Because the birds fly beneath the level of my clouds, They know that I can snatch them up Tear them by the feathers Because rain falls from But they, like most, do not know The cool air that Coos to flowers to grow And that creeps into the bones of Travelers and vagabonds Whispering them to wake And watch the sun hike over The lines of the globe.

I am dented glass meant To catch the eyes Only to be called ugly by those Who just do not understand.

They do not even know that With dented glass comes cracks And with cracks come Fine lines And with fine lines Come with intricate details Where stories are first woven And where wounds are first healed.

I am dented glass meant to Serve as a survival tale And to signal that not all shattered objects Are broken in two.

I am half-smiles Even though I am not half-meant.

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I am still teaching myself To reveal that I always mean Everything I say and smile And do and feel and cry over And love.

I am still teaching myself That there are people That mock me, although They will never, ever See That I am Half-smiles that give all.

I am anchored On woes turned joy On dusks to midday On death that gave way To life, Because this is where I began And where I will go Because this is what I have promised To my loves many years ago That even though I have been a great weight On the boat I will become its captain And eventually pour onto shore.

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Autumn Swan

Akanksha Gomes

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My Home Anna Curtis

Sometimes I am gliding on the broken seams of my socks. But then my feet stray from the soft and smooth and are stopped at the perimeter, as if I am made of breaks and gears. The surface of the wood changes as we step, leap, drag, leap, turn across the fragile paneling. And even when I’m coaxed to stop moving, the Rosin-crusted floor clutching the fibers of my socks, struggling to keep me from finishing the movement, I am forced to work that much harder. My smile never falters.

Half of my life I’ve spent on torn tights and moments in the mirror, wishing my reflection was real. Six days a week, thirty weeks a year, I open the door to my studio and ignore the bell that chimes too loudly. I’m used to the shock in my ears. We hustle into the west room, greeted by the musk so generously donated from the other dancers of the day. To the bar. Bobby pins slide into a messy bun. I fidget absentmindedly until the music starts and I can exhale into the scene.

Every class is different—a different style or vibe in the room—but I am always home. Whether I’m crammed in a line of twenty sweaty girls who are all trying to kick as high as the other, or I’m alone, lost in the builds and silences of the song, I feel the springs underneath the wood when they push me higher and absorb my falls.

I dance because I know how. There’s a level of certainty and confidence that comes with being the one who knows the steps, the counts, and the music-even the insignificant beats and accents that no one else can hear. I let accuracy consume me, and live blissfully in the moments where I can catch my breath.

But I dance on this floor, with these people, because I know where I belong. Every step I miss, they’re there to help me get it right. We do more than move together in time. We release the same exhale of exhaustion when it’s after dark and we are still fighting to accomplish our goals. We take the same inhale of excitement when the stage darkens and we scurry our places, waiting for the burn of the lights to Linger here | 55

illuminate our skin.

Sometimes I am lonely in the vastness of that room. But then my mind remembers how I’ve grown there, from a girl who loved to dance and was scared to start to a girl who loves to dance and will never stop.

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Facts

Lianza Isabel Reyes I don’t know her dreams at night And I don’t know her worried thoughts Or if she still plays piano Or if she hates math.

But I do know Her laugh is really cute The way she scrunches her eyes is charming She buys iced large milo because she likes it Her best friend holds hands with her, and she doesn’t mind.

Her mom is sweet but really protective She’s allergic to nuts because it makes her break out She really loves to write and She’s really, really smart Sometimes she holds hands with you for a few seconds And some days she’ll dare to hug you And when she does You smile at how small she seems to be I know she’s excited When her eyes brighten like the sun through leaves She’s fallen and hidden again and again in the things she hides herself in And she hides like she writes She dreams of being a psychologist and an economist She wears different jackets on different days And she ties her hair so that it bounces She stands like she would dare.

I don’t know any of this Because I’m only the friend she teases.

And hugs, and laughs with, and not much else.

I’m someone who doesn’t matter enough.

So it’s okay to look at her And smile when she passes by Because I think she doesn’t notice.

(And she never does.)

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(Wo)Man, Child, Dog, & Tree Ambar Paredes

Part 1: End Looming I’ve been thinking a lot what it means to be a woman. I know what I don’t want it mean. I’ve been exhausted of living in shadows. Shadows of my parents haunt me when I look in the mirror. As if their legacies stare right back at me. It is difficult to live up to their legacies if I don’t agree with them. I don’t want to live paycheck to paycheck, or circumstance to circumstance like he did. I don’t want my life to be riddled with necessity like hers is. I want my life to be an example of what WE could be. What both anchors me and leaves me hanging are the values that they’ve instilled in me. I have tried to take parts of both and make them my own, but every time I look into the mirror I see them often. But if becoming an example of what could be is my downfall, I’d rather stay in the shadows. What if on my way of becoming “the man” I turn into him? Becoming the same thing I’ve tried to escape. Old age makes people cold. They’ve forgotten how to feel. It becomes convenient to put life on autopilot. Is it a lot easier to pretend to know everything, or to know nothing? Searching for the end becomes instinct. Don’t know whether to be happy or depressed.

Part 2: Youth of the Oppressed We’re born in the dark. Our mothers’ wombs, dark with amniotic fluid.

All born into different wavelengths of light in hope of fitting into new environments around us. Sometimes were too young to ask if the environment around us is what must change. Maybe the memory that we are the change is erased at birth. Over, and over, and over again.

Maybe we’re told be o(ld)thers that we are the code they must correct.

But so much time correcting has made them forget as well. Always our job to remind them. Over, and over, and over again.

Part 3: Regression Reincarnation. The truth of all nations. A secret staring us in the face.

Hidden in the perfect crease under our nose so that we can’t see it.

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their world, since the one they were born into was not built for them, and has left them hungry for more.

Bonus Track: Battle between two opposites If I die now, will love die with me?

If I live now, will hate follow me?

If I stay tomorrow, will yesterday mean anything?

Is my goal unattainable? Is my vision?

Will my womanhood be prejudiced by my own power?

Will I miss out by choosing not to bring a child into the world?

Will the child?

Will I miss out on love if I don’t believe in myself?

Will he miss out on love if I do?

Why have I forced myself to ask these questions?

Time is the only thing that tells.

Over, and over, and over again.

Will I ever listen when I learn to speak?

Will he learn to listen if he speaks?

I don’t know.

“Wisdom only comes to us when it’s too late” – G. Garcia Marquez

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Figure Collage Sophia Jactel

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Kingdom of Innocence Anna Curtis

As a slightly over-confident, easily annoyed young adult, it baffles me how any intelligent parent could let a child loose in the grocery store.

At first, you don’t notice anything. Suddenly, torrents of them run down the aisle in light-up sneakers knocking over every cereal box in site. I have tiny humans scrambling under me while I reach for the milk on the top shelf, probably because it’s so strategically placed next to the Trix yogurts. They’re loud, they’re sticky, and they have no business being somewhere where others come to enjoy the trivial routines of life. But then again, I used to be one.

I wasn’t an untamable child, but I wasn’t leash bound by any means.

From time to time my cynical adult mind blurs the innocent memories of my childhood. Every time my mom or dad asked if I wanted to come to Kings Grocery I jumped at the chance. Sitting in the cart, arguing over junk food, and watching them methodically check off lists is where I learned the most about my parents.

Our grocery trips were one of the only consistent activities I did with my parents throughout my childhood. With my dad, we’d head off to the meat section to browse the beef and fish, first stopping at the cheese for free samples. He loved the free samples. He already had his grocery list in the order of the isles so we never had to turn the cart around. Every time the powers at be decided to change the layout, he would get tense and sigh at the inability of a grocery store to maintain continuity. We always left the store in less than thirty minutes, even with the Thanksgiving list. He never strayed from his agenda.

My mom and I were different. I don’t think I can even use the word structure. She never had me sit in the seat and never noticed if I wandered into another aisle, or started spraying vegetables with the hoses they used to leave out. But I was always calm. I’d walk patiently by my mother’s side while she attempted to decipher her own scribbles on random bits of paper and dash to get anything she Linger here | 61

needed. These trips usually took an hour or more and I never minded.

Kings doesn’t market itself as a place for family connection, and they shouldn’t. Looking back on those trips now, I noticed something.

I never went with them at the same time. Her forgetfulness and disorganization didn’t match with his impatience and perfectionism. If I had realized this then, maybe I could’ve predicted their divorce.

Critics can say that grocery stores are evil in their attempts to market to certain people and tastes, but I praise their ability to force meaningful family connection, even if it doesn’t last a lifetime.

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Natalli Amato

Otis Mountain Get Down

Addiction

Rebecca Sorkin

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i don’t love you anymore Hairol Ma

beliefs divided among tables and chairs. someone has to take the purple loveseat. 1986. self assembly. ikea. where the cat liked to sleep and where a baby to a boy becoming a man sat when he smoked his first cigarette. sit on 1986 self assembly ikea when going over the documents those little loose papers holding death of something that used to be purple and used to mean home. boy becoming a man watches with cat in his arms. hands shiver from nicotine and realization that it is just a chair now with a cigarette stain. cannot decide who takes the cat. boy is older.

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Clueless Joe Fern Durand

*Chapter 9 from a short story titled, “Y-ggep LiLac.” The Joe I am today being a different Joe from the young Joe I was yesterday, was a wild one. When I was in high school, neckties were the fashion trend. I used to wear my daddy’s old neckties. Some had food stains. Some were ripped. And some even had patches from old worn-out clothes my mother used to stitch the bad wounds on my pa’s neckties. And you know what… I didn’t mind wearing them. It gave me a proud feeling. In high school our cool guy was this kid named Joey. His nickname was Slick. For a long time during my childhood, I wanted to be Joey and not Joe. He always wore the best neckties!

One time, he wore a blue flannel wool suit. Suits then were made with wide baggy bottoms for a comfy fit, and out of flannel because flannel material doesn’t wrinkle easily. Joey ditched the vest, his belt, and threw over his white button-up, indigo blue suspenders with brown leather tips, and gold clip-ons. What made his get-up even more special was his tie. It was a wool brown tie. Simple but, it was the best outfit the girls saw that year. That’s all they talked about for months.

Did you see Joey today! Remember when Joey wore ‘blah blah blah’ that day.”

That same day I wore my best outfit too. It was, and still is, my favorite outfit! Some said it looked beat-up but to me it was just as fresh as when the tailor who made it finished putting the last stitches together!

Brown wool pants with patches on the knees, a white shirt, and my father's favorite necktie. It was wool brown with a long stich mark along its right leg. My dad preferred the rip but my mother insisted on fixing it. It was the first tie my pa bought with his own money. When he was a kid, he worked as a newspaper delivery boy. He bought it with his first earnings. In his mind, the tie would help him not stand out amongst the kids working for the company. Pa told me how his clothes used to always look beat-up and worn out when he was a kid. Ma sewed the tie and gave it to my father on their 20th anniversary. I wore 66 | Perception

that bow tie proudly that day! Joey and I never spoke but, that day, he invited me to hang out with his friends after school. Said they usually play marbles after school for money. Joey was a senior, and I was a sophomore at the time. I thought it would be the coolest thing to be seen hanging out with Joey and his pals. In my pocket was five dollars.

I’d been saving it, no real reason. Just saving to save. Something in my head said no but, my head nodded and out my mouth came the word yes.

It was down to Joey’s friend Rick and me. He had 49 points, and so did I. One marble left, smacked in the middle of the circle. Rick aimed his marble, flicked his thumb, and missed the marble by a hair. My turn!

I anxiously knelt down. I aimed my marble, closing one eye to make sure I got the best point. I flicked! And just like that. The twenty-five dollars was mine!

The rest of the week was spent hanging out with Joey and his friends.

We’d meet up in the hallway leading to the gym, and walked to class like a pack of wild boys. After school, we’d meet up at the flagpole, and talk there for a while until we figured out whose house we were going to. It felt good having friends! Usually, I hung out with my shadow. My peers often whispered crude comments about me, and laughed at how I dressed. Often enough, it took me awhile to catch on. Once, I thought this girl from high school named Ashley was checking me out. She was sitting with her friend. They stared at me and then Ashley whispered something in her friend's ear. I walked over to them. They got up and walked away laughing. I used to ask myself when I was younger, “If my shadow ever saw how I dressed… would he stay, and still be my friend?”

Anyways. It felt good having friends! Friday came around. Joey invited me to hang out with his boys, which was strange because we’d been kicking-it all week. Since my parents weren't home we went to my house. Normally we ate pizza and drank cold beers from the store.

Joey said for everybody to be at my house by 5 pm that day. Said he had to do something that was going to take him a little while.

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Everyone showed up at 5 except Ralph. He was about 15 minutes late.

Ralph pulled into my driveway honking the horn. He had to wait for his dad to come home from work to use the car. Ralph didn’t get out.

Joey just said Come on. He insisted that we had somewhere to go. I was sixteen then.

We pulled into a parking lot across from a nightclub. I was nervous. I think Joey knew just by looking at my face.

-Alright… It’s Friday. Every Friday, that club is reserved for the wealthy.

-Hey Joey. We gotta leave him behind. Look at him. He’s gonna shit himself.

-Cliff. Shut-up. Worry about what I’m saying, not him… Every Friday, the wealthy hand their car keys to valet to park their cars, go inside, and start drinking until they buy out the entire club. Now, keep in mind that, valet parks the car. They’re the most important part because… after they park the car they do not lock the doors!

I knew I was in for a shit load of trouble.

-Everyone, except Ralph… check as many cars as you can. Take whatever you find.

Before I could say no or even back out, I found myself slowly creeping besides a 1955 Chevrolet Bel Air! Chevy was popular then, and depending on the model you had, people were able to tell the sum of your pockets. I could tell the owner of this one had full pockets. I sat in the car for a while before looking through it. Gas was 18 cents a gallon then. Dad’s dream car was the 1949 Pontiac! Green was his favorite color! He didn’t have the Pontiac. We had some beat-up wagon. Every Saturday he’d reserve a special seat for me next to him. Saturday was the day to get gas in my town. Steve usually sat in the back doing nothing, or disconnected to us as usual. One Saturday in particular, I was staring out the window while my dad drove. He said son, and 68 | Perception

interrupted my thoughts. I was thinking about a family I saw the other day. The family consisted of two brothers and a mom. The mom fed her sons whole fresh worms. For herself, she ate what seemed to be half of a worm that was left over from the previous day, or her previous meal.

-Son. One day. You’ll find a way to live better than your mom and me.

Always remember. Ask yourself, ‘Did I earn it? Did I earn this living?’

See. Your mother and I. We live bad but… we’re honest people.”

My father passed away before my tenth birthday. I was nine when he told me that. I think it was the scent of the new car that triggered the memories with my dad.

I checked the glove compartment first. Nothing. Then I looked under the first two seats, and finally. BINGO! The armrest! After sorting through all the junk in the armrest, I found a gold watch and a white envelope folded at its waist, filled with more money than anyone in my family had ever counted. At that point, when I looked through the envelope, all I heard was the sound of my mother’s voice telling me to put it down. I left the gold watch. I put the envelope in my right pocket, and got out of the car unnoticed. After I quietly closed the door, I ran back to Ralph’s father’s car tripping on nothing but the air around me. The other three boys came, swarming like yellow jackets into the car. Joey stayed in the car the whole time.

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Wildflower Natalli Amato

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Botany

Sarah Peck What brave flower for standing your ground, not wilting to others but letting your beauty emanate.

What brave flower for not wasting your time sharing the sun with those who can’t commit.

What brave flower for knowing better than to plant your seeds where love doesn’t exist.

What brave flower yet, what a lonely flower.

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Real Talk

Sarah Peck You think you can interpret me. But I don’t want to be translated. I mean the words I say. I say what needs to be said. I don’t do fill in the blanks.

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Bed Hair

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Untitled

Bridget Slomian

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The Show Must Go On Amanda Gibbs

He used to call you beautiful, but not anymore.

He used to bring you in front of his grease-stained, smoke-laced friends and watch you squirm. This is my daughter, he says. Stunning, isn’t she? Taller than all the girls. All the boys are after her, he boasts, but now you feel like something two-dimensional. Hollowed out. Here, but not really.

Their beady eyes scan you from top to bottom, and at twelve, you try not to cry. You blink away the daggers in your eyes and smile.

Thank you, you say, but you refuse to meet their eyes. Their eyes are dangerous, you think, but it is their hands twitching at their side that scares you. You smile. All this, and it is their greedy, buck-toothed smiles that finally breaks you. It is your father’s arrogant smile, his arm displayed out in front of him, pushing you forward like a grand performer. Your father.

After a while, they all start to blur for you. His beer friends and his hunting friends and his car friends and his work friends and his old friends, they all grow as one. The same beady eyes, the same danger, the same fear. The same pain. t He used to call you beautiful, but that was only when you were taller than everyone else and so skinny that you were barely there, when you had long, wavy brown hair and perfectly accentuated makeup, when you dressed feminine and approving, when you shaved every day, and smiled at everything he did. When he brought you in front of his friends, their heads nodded in approval and their yellow smiles smirked with interest. They would shake his hand, smile, and remind him of how lucky he was.

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are told to keep your hair long. You are told that your unshaved legs embarrass him and your unplucked eyebrows are unflattering. Your thighs will always be too big and the imperfections dotting your face need to be remedied. The words would make you turn away like you had been slapped. You don’t say anything. You swallow the lump in your throat. t He used to call you beautiful, but that was only when you did exactly as he asked. Otherwise, you were a burden he loved to complain about. When he opens his mouth, every word a wild violence, you bite your tongue so hard it bleeds. He yells and you recognize the tone of his voice, but you wish that you didn’t. Why don’t you like the things I enjoy? Why don’t you want to be around me all the time? Why don’t you have a boyfriend? Why don’t boys like you? Why are your friends black? Why don’t you have a lot of friends? Why do you dress like that? Why do you like gay people so much? Why aren’t you like me?

He asks all these questions and your tongue is bleeding red, but what he really means is: You should worship me, so why don’t you?

He tells you that he loves you sometimes, but you just smile. You may be strong, but no amount of strength you can muster will allow you to lie to him and say it back.

The way he speaks to people—vast crowds, convenient strangers, friends with lopsided smiles—he is magnetic. Charismatic and vivid, hilarious and wild. People are drawn to him, and there he stands, always, the focal point of all attention, standing tall center-stage. They wait with broad smiles and whiskey breath for the final punch line, the line that sends them over the edge. You shake something wild behind the curtain where he stands, the place where you belong. You watch the show unfold and cast out your smiles. Exaggerated waving hands, heads tilted in curiosity, belly laughs, beer-encased hands. He stands a grand performer, a hypnotic stranger with an addicting laugh. His audience loves him, and they expect you to, too.

But you never could.

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Raymundo Juarez

Untitled

Ithaca Commons Bridget Slomian

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Common

Erica Wright Remember that time we drove over to Sunset Ave. while the sun was setting?

And we pretended the street meant More than it did in a city like this. I think We kissed maybe once or twice.

And remember when we broke the rules And cut class together? We ran to the grass In a park where I fucked someone once.

We looked into an endless pair of irises And talked about the clouds.

Your eyes were hazel, or maybe blue. I Could never ask you to remember mine.

We smoked so often that we forgot our own Names some of the time. And we pretended That was important too.

Remember the degrees we earned and the Cities we moved to? We talked at 4:12am About how the places reminded us of each Other. Maybe you should come and see me Played between the phone lines.

And when we lived together it felt unbearable. I Would stare at you every day and feel sick From the commonness. I could predict the Things you’d say before you said them. I Couldn’t watch you wake up beside me again.

Now there are too many days between us for Anything. We can sleep barely remembering Each other’s lips. I can eat and shower and Write without hearing the sound of your voice.

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We’re hardly important to anything anymore.

And I’m happy.~

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Christmas witch

Farrell Greenwald Brenner My mind is on the Christmas witch who haunts me in November her pyrite spirals frosted at the roots icicles at the tips The Christmas witch caught me in her Baba Yaga tiger trap and now I’m doomed to think on her as penance for my sins She doesn’t bring gifts, she can’t cast spells —though she makes a mean rugelach— her familiars are all wooden toys who clack and clatter ‘round the crackling fire Her Sabbath meets between two and three those wanton, winding, witching hours I wake as if I have been falling falling knowing from my bed I have not moved She keeps me in her threadbare pocket loose change, lost marbles, a button or two The Christmas witch collects her trinkets for her spoiled nativity scene there is no god baby, just amulets and holly her salty laughter is my canary cage the door is open and yet I stay and sing a mournful tune for my mind is on the Christmas witch who haunts me all year round

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Humming Bird Zoe Karikas

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Sonder

Erica Wright I want to live in the man’s eye staring greedily from across the street, not for the rush of his want but for the soles in his shoes.

A thousand miles traveled across; the slick heel and toe.

Rainy afternoons in stuffy rooms, sex dripping from the windows.

I want the confusion of variability, the rough-shouldered encounters, the moments when the stage becomes a pedestal for gods.

I want humanity’s corrupted desires spelled in bold atop my tongue; vibrations from the floorboards, sensations of steady beat.

I want to feel the rage of a dying heartbeat’s flutter, the ferocity of life becoming known to the soul.

The addiction to the shifting that thrives in gas guzzlers as they truck and sputter for another 20 states.

The lust that one feels for the skin of another; a heavy heat suffocating the gray mundanity of an hour.

I crave to be consumed in these happenings of humanity .

If I am not, deem my life forgotten. ~

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i watch a beautiful woman Katherine Fletcher

i watch a beautiful woman leave going going gone and she is outta here

and she is out of love; didn’t anyone tell you she was empty? i put too much sugar in

my coffee and too

much trust in you and i listen to a girl talk,

speaking spanish on the telephone. for a minute

she sounds like poetry, disjointed; and i remember how to miss you again.

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11 months (i’m sort of okay now) Katherine Fletcher

this is you getting over it. new meds every month because you can’t eat, can’t write, can’t take just one. finally cleaning when your hands stop shaking so your apartment is in shambles. going numb and punching walls but of course you can feel it the next morning because you have to feel it eventually. not processing that it’s been almost a year because you don’t know what month it feels like, it just feels like drowning and this is you letting go. letting those grinding-gear parts of your heart finally stop turning, letting dust build in your mouth from not saying everything you thought you should say. no ‘i still love you,’ no ‘i thought you were the one,’ no ‘this fucked me up and i hope you’re happy,’ because this is you burying it. you won’t attend the service, won’t place flowers on this unmarked grave. you won’t choose an epitaph out of the lines you gave her when your own words weren’t enough. maybe they were never enough – not when it counted at least. when did it count? when didn’t it? you’re standing across the room from her.

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you’re trying to see her but you can’t, never could, not really. this is you healing in the worst ways. you’re trying to hold your hands steady but your lit cigarette is giving you away, the trembling beacon of an unreliable lighthouse. giving up on excuses to explain away everything you’ve done for almost a year. you left without leaving and that’s not something you can ever come back from. not really. you still think of her in sunrises and sunflowers, in waves and wanting. you still think of her hands as holy and her mouth as a temple. you still think of her. but you have survived almost a year and it’s spring again and you’re going to tear yourself apart if you have to. burn from the inside out. but you can’t let it kill you because you love her and you need to do it right. it doesn’t make sense that it took you almost a year to write her into someone you don’t fall in love with every time she says your name, but she doesn’t make sense 94 | Perception

and you love her, you do, but you broke each other’s hearts. you are done breaking each other’s hearts. it’s been almost a year.

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San Lucas Toliman

Sarah Peck

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40 years

Elyssa Thomas I moved around a lot as a child, tossed from grandparent to grandparent, eventually landing with the red-shingled siding of my father’s home. It smelled like dog and my school wasn’t all pale faces anymore. I had the lightest skin and the older boys thought it was funny when my legs shined through the water at a race. Through high school I figured out how to interact with all kinds of people just in time to become a small fish again. At University of Maryland, now a brotherhood was my family, and the house smelled just as much of vodka as my father’s did. School is stressful. Drink. Money problems.

Drink. Girlfriend dumped me. Drink. Go back home junior year. Drink.

Get a job with my father at Princeton. Drink. Meet a woman at the library. Drink. A blue plus sign on a white stick. Drink a lot and walk away. It took two weeks and one condom-less adventure and now her mother thought we were going to get married. I decide to do the good boy thing and make it work. We go to a bonfire and her belly is growing. Her sister mentions something about pills. What pills? Crazy pills? Drink. Apparently I’m an alcoholic. Drink. I leave again. Winter goes, spring leaves with it. Fireworks. Stop. The little wrinkles in that shining face and the small feet on a molded heart. Her cry could make my heart stop; I could never leave her. My daughter. I drink water. I decide staying with her mother is a bad idea. Years pass, I get married, I have two more daughters just as beautiful as the last. That doesn’t work out either. Years pass, I get married, I have no more daughters.

This one will work out, this one will continue. The first daughter leaves me; the last two are growing crazy with the influence of their mother.

There is no wine in the house but the stuff we use to cook with and the occasional beer for a turkey. I take photographs in my spare time; I’ve been promoted twice. Everything seems great. Everything is fine. I take out the trash; a blue plus sign. Drink.

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Home Kong

Yat Sze Austin Cheng

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Poisonous Fruit Hunter Martin

As a kid I could eat four, five plums during the summer when they are the sweetest.

And there lies one on my face, deep and pure violet. Who would have known he grew fruit.

Don’t put the raspberries away, I’m making a jam. I watched as my mother pounded the crimson berries. I wiped the excess juice from the counter with a rag. And did the same to his juicy knuckles, red like the berries but the kisses aren’t as sweet as I remember them to be.

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License and Registration Cristina Colรณn Feliciano

Both hands in the air As you asked for identification But the color of his skin Suggested danger Flesh and bone Just like you Just like all of us But what is 'us' when it's always 'Them' and not you Be careful, officer You might be confronted With words and paper Which can cut you But don't kill Your bullets did that They perforated the chest Of an innocent man As a little girl stood guard What are you going to tell her, officer?

Will you protect her?

Or will you invade her heart As she walks down the street What was his crime?

Reaching?

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Or correct your eyesight But officer, What do you see at the end Of your barrel?

I see injustice.

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Jerusalem

Farrell Greenwald Brenner There is a drought a fever in the soil yet umbrellas bloom like flora poised overhead as frozen birds of paradise (the flower, not the fowl), vermillion blue and canary green, you would never know by the lush parade above, the royal brick road below, that there was a drought.

There is an exile a fever in the stones a fever that begs picking up throwing out, out, out yet it is hard to hear the exile over such loud colors easy to miss in the squawking of flowers.

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Islamic Tile Collage Sophia Jactel

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him

Katherine Fletcher he’s got eyes that make you greedy, make you double-take: take and take again. he looks at you like you’re always bringing bad news, and you’ve got to give him credit for being right because you’re bad news. you’re partners in crime, devoted and fierce, dissociated and afraid, everything but the kitchen sink. a grab bag of bad days and worse nights, a scrapbook of close calls, a collection of white-knuckled road trips and disjointed metaphors. you’ve got to tell him, maybe about how his eyes are stars or how his voice is safe or how you hope he stays alive. jesus christ, you hope he stays alive because you can’t not be grateful for a boy like him. you want to say ‘thank you and i love you’ but it always sounds a bit too much like ‘goodbye.’ it’s not goodbye.

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Rebecca Sorkin

Swimming with the Fishes

In & Out

Elyssa Thomas The sad thing about adventure is eventually it gets old. I stand on the shore, dipping my toes in the shallows. I’m alone. I don’t bother looking out at the water and instead stare at the sand beneath me. It tickles my ankles as the waves pull the grains, slowly burying my skin until my feet are gone. I wonder about a world in which the rest of me could be buried in the sand too. I imagine I’d eventually float out to sea. I rub my thumb across the label on the bottle in my hands. It’s half-empty of its contents, but the rest of the pills jingle as I breathe.

Even when I’m having a good day, I’m numbed out. They say you can’t have bad days, but aren’t days that aren’t good days just bad days in disguise? That’s why I stopped taking my crazy pills two Tuesday’s ago.

That’s why I’m standing in the ocean. “You’re fine,” I whisper under my breath. I’m not fine.

My father called me this morning. He told me I couldn’t come visit him in Kansas over spring break because my mother said so. He told me I should make my mother happy, but I could spend all of the summer with him instead. That meant I had to stay at home for a week, with no friends, and listen to my mother yell. I had to listen to her cry in the basement and listen to her laugh when she got high and invited Marcus over. I had to do the dishes because I had off and my mother worked so hard. I had to smell like the yellow of cigarettes because I couldn’t get fresh air with nowhere to go. I had to go through life for a week surrounded by my mother’s crazy, her alcoholic crazy, her refusing to believe she has any problems crazy, her bipolar depressed crazy, her anxiety crazy. I had to treat her right when she treated me wrong and pretend that she didn’t give me her problems too. I was used to it. I told my dad it was okay, said I loved him, and hung up. Now I’m here, at the beach, staring.

I clutch the bottle in my hands and stare down at the label that defines me as a depressed person. I sigh. People say it’s not okay to tell kids what they are, because that’s what they’ll become. Why, however, is it different once we hit the age sixteen? Am I suddenly immune to 106 | Perception

human nature? I pop the lid off with no difficulty and let it fall into the water. It floats for a moment, then glides away. My hands tip the bottle ever so slightly of their own accord. A small smile places itself on my face. It’s not very often I smile. I grin, watching all of the little white bubbles fall into the sea then fizzle out. It’s freeing. I know this feeling; it’s trance-like. There aren’t any feelings, so the smile is inevitable. I could drag a razor across my skin. I haven’t done that in a while. That’s child’s-play. I could keep walking. That’s big kid stuff.

I pull my headphones out of my skirt pocket and attach them to my iPod, scrolling around until the volume can be heard from a threefoot radius. There’s nobody else here to care. The sea-salt air drizzles moisture on the cord, but I won’t need them again after this. The sun shines down on me; the bright rays are encouraging. My hands reach up to touch the beams. Music flows through the buds to my ears and into my hands, the fingers attached rolling like the water around me. My hips sway at my silent disco and my feet shuffle further out to sea. I’m knee deep now in my greatest adventure and the smile I planted hasn’t stopped growing. Soon there’ll be blossoms sprouting out of my hair helped from the sun. I walk in slow circles, arms out, hands extended, shoulders rolling with the beat. The waves crash on command; they stay in time and my symphony orchestra glistens with the droplets on my thighs. I’ve lifted my skirt so as not to get it wet; this isn’t a black-tie-event, but I will be the lady dressed to the nines.

In my sandcastle ballroom, the seaweed sliding against my calves is calling me further onto the dance floor. My belly produces goose bumps in anticipation, my skirt now flowing behind me in the blue.

I’ve lifted my iPod into the pocket my bra produces, but I don’t need the music anymore. The rhythm has attached itself to my mind and the waves; I’ll sway with it until my feet can no longer touch the ground and even then. The sand is back to grains and I’m grateful that I didn’t wear heels for this affair. The water is up to my chest now and the waves knock me back slightly, but I won’t be deterred.

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chant, regardless of my pitch. My eyes squint at the brightness above me; I press so hard I start to see black and blue beneath my lids. “I’ve got sunshine—“ My voice cracks with laughter. I grasp at the air above me trying to grab my sunshine. The heat greets my skin from the east and I move towards it. Water is up to my neck now. My body is leaning into the water, my hair sprawled out around my head, framing my face and tickling my neck. The brown blends into the darkness of the ocean and I feel like I’m disappearing. I think I’d like to disappear. The music has stopped now, my headphones floating beside my limp body. The water is colder the farther I float, but I pretend not to notice. Rather than look to the shore, I position myself to the sun. It causes a blush to bubble up on my cheeks. They were already red from the strain of my happiness. I’m numb, but I’m floating. Where are my senses? Nothing hurts in the water and all recent injuries turn to a fizzling sheen of eggshell. I don’t bother moving my appendages; I wouldn’t want to go too far. Then again, the divide taunts me.

The shore seems so far and much too difficult a travel. Is it an adventure I can manage? My mother tried to teach me right from wrong, but the apple didn’t fall far and now I’m falling into her; falling into the sea. My breaths come slowly. In. I watch my chest rise and fall above the water line. Out. My eyes fall closed, my lids the only form of sunglasses I came prepared with. In. I think to myself that I caught the sunshine. Out. The buds are becoming blossoms now. They’ll sprout from my scalp and the police will be able to find the body from the sunshine bursting through my skull. I can feel them. In. I let my legs fall beneath me, but my arms hold their own above the water. Out. I flick my fingers softly creating my own waves, reminding myself that they’re there. In. I flitter my toes too. Out. They still exist, but what if they didn’t? In. It’s getting harder to keep this up. Out. The waves have escaped me now. In. I’m much too far away from their place of breaking. Out. The only form of movement now comes from my lungs expanding— like waves, in and out. In. My arms sink down now; my head will be coming soon. Out. I prepare my last breath, my smile never faltering. In. I open my eyes a last time and beam up at the sun beaming right back at me. Out. 108 | Perception

The bubbles of my breath float above me, rising to the surface and continuing up, up, up. I watch them pop, each one it’s own little explosion of a last celebration. My ball has ended and the doors are closing. My lungs start to burn with the increasing need to expand, but my body is like a leaf in the fall; I am gliding downwards to the floor. My brain makes fireworks in my head. I thrust my eyelids apart and look around. My hair floats past me and I can no longer tell which way is up. Things start to turn into a haze, but I greet it kindly. I’m still smiling. My face hasn’t exercised these muscles in months. I can’t feel the pain. The sea is protecting me now. My eyes flutter closed. I imagine how the sea will continue even after I have gone, how it will follow the wind infinitely. I’m late. I can’t go back. Out.

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Blinded by Uncertainty Hunter Martin

I don't remember the last time I showed my ankles in public.

I don't know if I'll ever be able to sever the attachment I feel for the pebble I've been kicking around for a while.

I don't believe in the supposedly soothing ability of inspirational quotes, but then why do people have them?

I don’t imagine they know something I don’t.

I don't think I'll ever eat an entire sleeve of crackers in public.

I don't recall if it's a memory or a dream.

A kaleidoscope of unsure notions, manipulating their way between the concrete thoughts within my head, displaying a colorful mess that forces me to squint. I work to see what's past.

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Melanie Dujmich

Uncertain Identity

Dog’s Window Erica Wright

I look out of the window to see you and all of the yous that travel the street.

I wonder what they smell and what they eat, what they feel when they’re alone.

They seem so eager to find what’s next, as if there’s something worth chasing. I don’t know them or their voices, just their pale, dusty faces. Sometimes they seem angry, at me even, and I wish for them to know me. What would their palms taste like? What would their bones sound like?—They never do see me. As curious as their necks may be, they never look up. I wonder if they’re afraid, maybe that they’d see a god. Maybe that they’d see cotton hopes floating in the updrafts.

But if they saw me first, maybe they’d feel better. Maybe their hearts would rest a beat to know that I see them ~

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Pitbulls

Zoe Karikas

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untitled love Tiara Lowery

I'll find you in the afterlife After my bones shatter and my brain melts After your intestines fail and your spine collapses I will find you With my heart flashlight searching for your smile In the darkness of the void

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Rebecca Sorkin

LA Affairs

Workshop

Cristina Colรณn Feliciano Upright on my seat As you spoke of metaphors and Slowing down the climax "Treat it as its own thing," You said and I listened And rewrote, According to you And your thoughts Because you know more than I do. I know nothing, yet.

I pointed my fingers against the letters You were forming And I saw myself pressed Against your body Wanting to feel your heat Your arms around me As I told you about my alcoholic Dad and you would say: "I'm your professor, You're my student" But it doesn't matter, I'm already making my way To intertwine our words And bodies Through touch and ink You'll leave me feeling Numb against your body You've seen too much 116 | Perception

Othering

Lauren Hannah *please note this poem is tongue-in-cheek, sarcastic, a cultural criticism of America Although it might appear as if Their skin sets them apart That’s not the case, it’s just the faith We carry in our hearts The villagers of Orient Are not as wise you see, They are not kind and gentile Jesus has not set them free They are accustomed to their squalor, Those poor creatures of the dust.

We are grateful for our fortune!

They are Them, and We are Us! They cannot be blamed because Their culture is unclean It is primal and barbaric still An uncivil, backwards scene They grow up simply different And don’t know equality They throw stones at their women Among other blasphemy They bring venereal diseases And they eat their dogs and cats They are loud and they are gaudy They are Them, and that is that.

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Ghosts and Dirty Dishes Farrell Greenwald Brenner

Washing dishes is my greatest catharsis. My sink is bountiful with the unclean dead: small yellow dishes passed down to me from my mom, a couple splotchy wine glasses I found at a pantry garage sale, pots crusted with the briny residue of pastas and soups. Immediately after waking, I amble to the basin and flick on the little light attached to the cabinets above. It illuminates the task before me, and nothing else.

It’s just me and the dishes in the crisp, cool morning. I don’t even feed myself before doing the dishes—not that there’s much of anything in my fridge anyways. My glucose monitor broke months ago, so I’ve since learned to feel my blood sugar, carefully tracking when I consume what and when I feel dizzy. It’s always low in the mornings, and I figure I have a little bit of time before I need to eat. Today, I feel as if I need to clear myself away before I can fill myself up again. The calendar hanging on the cabinet indicates that today is October 5 and my chest tightens. I sigh, forcing myself to breathe audibly. Easy, easy.

It’s any old day.

I turn my squeaky faucet, beginning the baptismal rite. A nub of broccoli bobs in the flow of warm water in my colander. I pick up the first bowl, and I begin. With every swipe of the fading yellow sponge, the reddish grease of last night’s curry washes away. My forearm moves in circles—the purest, softest of shapes. The suds come off easily.

Clean. Into the drying rack. One down. I take a moment to secure the bobby pin that keeps my greying hair on top of my head. I pluck out the next bowl from the sea of soapy souls.

I glance out the window, noting my rising breath. I will have to line the windows with plastic this week, since the heat is most likely never going to be turned on again. The street is quiet and still tinted with the blue of the early morning, before the sun rises. My apartment is attached to a small synagogue downstairs. At six in the morning, there is already a line forming out the front door, which is the entrance to a food pantry. Though I could use an extra can of vegetables here and 118 | Perception

there, I usually barter with neighbors for their perishables instead of going to the Beth Shalom pantry. In exchange, I clean. Dishes, laundry, floors—anything I can get my hands on. Washing away dirt and blood and pain is my business. Forgetting is my business. Vincent in apartment three is usually really nice about it and doesn’t ask for more than what’s fair for the tomatoes and spinach he grows out back. I think he misses his mother, who used to visit every month. He hasn’t heard from her since June, which means she’s probably dead by now. We don’t talk about it, but he seems to like light conversation when I come by two days a week. Others demand more (the heterosexual men ask for sex, everyone else asks for heroin), as if I should be grateful for their business, which they know I need to eat.

I turn my focus back to the white ceramic mug I’ve been holding under the stream of water. It has a faded slogan in a tacky font, which reads, WORLD’S #1 GIRLFRIEND. I haven’t used this mug in months, but I must have taken it out absentmindedly earlier this week. Something inside me cringes, but I concentrate on scrubbing the brown stains of coffee along the inside.

There’s a knock at the door, and Fannie rushes in. She’s got a cardboard box balanced on her thinning hip, and I hear the tinkle of glass inside. Though the color of her skin is brown, she looks sallow today. I don’t think she’s eaten in awhile. The circles under her eyes tell me she hasn’t slept either.

“Hey, Esther! I got the clean ones.”

“Perfect,” I mumble, picking up another mug. “Put it in the living room, there should be a tarp in the corner you can lay out.”

“I think an undercover cop saw me,” Fannie calls from the living room, where I can hear the shifting of furniture. I worry that she is going to knock over the red bin labeled HAZARDOUS WASTE in black permanent marker. It’s filled with hundreds of used syringes.

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“They’re not cops, they’re vigilantes,” I chastise, going at a clump of blackened grease on one of my only two pans. Fannie has been in Roscoe for less than a year, long after the local police department gave way to the militia. Same people, fewer uniforms. Same guns, a different kind of animal. The militia is kind of like a gang, but no one calls them a gang because it’s all white people, mostly former cops.

“Well, in any case, he saw me. I made a detour through Beth Shalom as a cover.”

“I’ll ask Vincent to keep an eye out for us today, but I think we’re fine.

They’re not subtle when there’s going to be a raid, you can see them staked out hours ahead of time.”

“You’re right,” Fannie says, leaning on the partition between the kitchen and living room. Her long, dark curls are tied back, out of her unsmiling face. She looks serious, a firecracker I wouldn’t dare mess with. I suddenly feel a tinge of guilt; she was supposed to be starting school this fall. I’d like to believe I didn’t influence her decision to drop out. The university was going to shit anyways. Classes were running only maybe every other week because professors decided they’d really rather not leave the suburbs and have a run-in with the militia. Plus, “Intro to Philosophy” doesn’t sound so appealing when one class costs more than your rent. I dropped out halfway myself, and when I met (or, more accurately, found) Fannie a few years later, she was already disillusioned and broke. Now, I clean the shit off my neighbors’ shoes and we run an illegal syringe exchange out of my living room. Stay in school, kids, a far-off voice rings in my ear.

Fannie gestures toward the drying rack by tilting her head. “Did Gloria give that to you?”

I glance over and realize she’s referring to the WORLD’S #1 GIRLFRIEND mug, glistening in all its hygienic splendor. My throat catches, but I cough to cover.

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“Ah. Yeah.” My hands are busy with a plate, but my impulse is to cross my arms. I can feel my throat turning red.

“I bet you miss her a lot.” Fannie isn’t one to pry, but Gloria is written all over the apartment—the extra jackets in the closet, the paintings stacked behind the door, the unmarked prescriptions in the medicine cabinet, the long and kinky bleached strands of hair in every corner— and we rarely talk about it. I don’t think I’ve heard anyone say Gloria’s name out loud for months.

I stare at the plate, which is already clean, yet I still want to scrub and scrub.

“Every goddamn minute.”

Fannie is not warm, and I am not warm with her, but she puts a hand on my shoulder and squeezes. I’m grateful for it, and attempt a smile.

“It’s been a year today,” I whisper, my voice spilling out of me like gravel.

Fannie’s mouth opens, then closes. She glances out the window, and squints.

“I think that’s Cedric coming now.”

“Will you take care of him? I’m…” I continue to stare at the dishes. I want to say I’m busy, but with what? The dishes?

She narrows her eyes at me now, looking impish. “Sure. But are you just gonna keep washing those plates all day? Because I’ve got a load back at my place, and I could sure use a hand getting them done since I’ve been running around as the Incredible and Undetectable Phantom Needle Woman all morning.”

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“Alright, kid, you would have made a great bullshitter in your freshman writing class, you know that?”

“Oh, I have no doubt,” Fannie grins and opens the door. Cedric, a hulking Mohawk man with a crewcut, steps gingerly in the door. He’s a cosmetologist, but I often see him doing odd jobs down by the train station too. He’s been coming by two or three times a week since January, but he’s still nervous every time. I don’t blame him.

“Hi, Fannie,” he says, teeth chattering from the cold. “Hey, Esther.”

“Hey, Ced,” I call back, waving the spatula I’ve been working on.

Fannie has donned her plastic gloves and takes the paper bag Cedric produces from under his hunting jacket. She drops it into the red bin, and I hear the tinkling again. They talk about the weather (too damn cold, it’s killing the cabbages) and the going rate for a gallon of water (either a day’s worth of carbohydrates, two packs of cigarettes, or eighty-five dollars). She sets him up with a fresh paper bag filled with ten new syringes, five contact lens cases filled with boiled water, ten cotton balls, and ten beer bottle caps. We collect the caps ourselves, and I boil them on my stove on Friday nights. Shabbat shalom, motherfuckers.

“Thanks, you two,” he says, a hand on the back of his neck. “You don’t happen to have more of those test kits, do you?”

“Nah, not ‘til next week,” Fannie says, her mouth twisting in dissatisfaction.

“That’s fine, that’s fine. I think I’ve been really good for a while anyways. Haven’t used an old one in like a couple months.”

“That’s great—we’ll be sure to save one for you in any case.”

“Thanks, you two,” Cedric says again. He heads back out the front 122 | Perception

door, his feet falling like far-off thunder. To anyone watching from the street, it will look like he had just dropped by the Beth Shalom food pantry. In reality, he, like nearly half the people in the neighborhood, is addicted to heroin, and the current definition of justice holds that he should die for that crime. Or sin? It’s unclear, what with the militia’s quasi-religious maverick law and order. Cedric is not ready to sober up—he’s dirt poor and can’t afford black market methadone, let alone the energy and time it would take to quit cold-turkey. The only place you can get free needles is military hospitals (in contrast to the private, gated ones in the suburbs), and the closest one is at least a couple hours away in Port Jervis.

On average, the militia raids one makeshift homeless shelter and one pop-up gay bar every two weeks or so. Usually they just burn the building down. That’s where Gloria got caught, one year ago today.

On the morning of October 6, militiamen watched the crumbling remains of the four-story walk-up across town, waiting for mourners who would then be implicated. I went to the smoldering ruins in the middle of the night with a flashlight, but I couldn’t find her body in the dark. I probably wouldn’t have found her body in the daylight either; there were no survivors.

Fannie and I have been dead careful ever since. All of our visitors are referred and vetted. It’s not written anywhere that an underground syringe exchange merits death by fire, but we know what we’re doing could put us at the top of several lists. I once had a close call with a preacher who lived down the road, and who I had thought I could trust and ask for help—he instead said that we were enabling drug users, doing the Devil’s work and whatnot. He died from AIDS-related complications less than six months later. The Devil’s got a sick sense of irony.

Starting up the exchange was Gloria’s idea. She had Hep C, a parting gift from a past partner. We were always safe during sex, but the real issue was when either of us needed needles for insulin. Addiction might seem like a fucked up epidemic, but someone should do a Linger here | 123

study on HIV and Hepatitis in our district. I’m sure that if the university were still functioning outside of sucking every remaining dollar out of this city, they would send a team of sociologists in surgical masks to investigate the veritable leper colony in Roscoe. But Gloria is gone now, and Fannie is right—I don’t like to think about it. I like to obsessively wash dishes and metaphorically wipe my own brain clean of the putrid stench of burnt metal and flesh.

I come back to the kitchen, rose-golden with the light of the rising sun streaming through the window. I’m working my way through the silverware, enjoying the musical clinking of the utensils in the drying rack. Fannie is on the floor in the living room, creating more packs of needles and injection supplies. I see a lot of Gloria in her—the spunk, the disregard for rules and personal safety. She never knew Gloria, but she knows how important she was to this community. And to me.

I make sure the syringe exchange continues because it’s what Gloria would have wanted, but Gloria doesn’t live on here. She’s dead, and I’m not into sentimental crap about legacies. We’re poor, sick college drop-outs in a dried-up food desert. We don’t have legacies. We just have ghosts, and dirty dishes.

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Noir Belleza

Akanksha Gomes Linger here | 125

Watershed

Yat Sze Austin Cheng 原曲 遺失的美好 原唱 阿沁

原作 黃漢青 原詞 姚若龍

Original Song: “The Lost Niceness” (yi shi de mei hao) by Real@F.I.R. Song by Real@F.I.R. Original lyrics by Daryl Yao Love is like a running river Never resting, till it meets the ocean Love, muddy also unclear But it knows so well destination River, scattered without fear I believe it, rushing towards my dear How I wonder, out of midd’ of nowhere Why on earth my splash you cannot hear?

Across watershed I’m standing still here Trying hard make my forces stretch out to you But I can’t go on any further Between us, a watershed runs through The watershed pushes you just by there But my mind cannot even reach out to you Could you please look out a bit further?

Across it, I am calling for you Across watershed I am standing here Trying hard make my signals sent out to you But I can’t go on any further Between us, allow me to break through 126 | Perception

The watershed pushes you just by there But my voice only knows to get around you Could you just look out a bit further?

Across it, I am calling for you Maybe that’s just me who worries True or false, I cannot shape my own landscape Why don’t think of them as breezes That whisper, make river river?

Across watershed I’m still standing here Trying hard get a signal sent out from you If I have chance to go on further Between us, I will have a breakthrough Watershed pushes you just by there Maybe one day my voice can get over you Could you just look out a bit further?

Across it, the river flows for you

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I want to fight Mary Hill Young

I want to fight with words and fists and feet lips and teeth spit blood teeth red ruinous grin and split lip but girls don’t fight.

I want to fight with glance and challenge and chance snarl and grit reckless laugh, spin back kaleidoscope eyes and spit curse but girls don’t fight.

I want to fight battered knuckles and bloodied and spent ragged and rent wild dance taken chance savage punch and blackened eye that’s how girls fight.

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Michelle Velasquez

Rosie the Riveter

Knoty

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Yat Sze Austin Cheng

ghostboy

Tiara Lowery

like phantom pains I hear the echo of your ringtone when I brush my teeth of your voice when I'm under my sheet of your soul when I let go and put you in //their// reach— you go—as I sit here gathering dust each week awaiting your grasp's delicate ebb and flow to dust me of my sorrow and polish me once more

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Grippin Raptures Adelaide Zoller

I am in the depths of the sea bringing out the storms within its people The next night I am dancing with the devil and throwing myself in the wild flames I make a mess of the novels I consume and their authors Stealing the works of the great rebels Using their words to bring out the chaos in my mind and to feel their gripping rapture almost as though it is veiled thievery I have shed my skin again and again and again and only after I have collaborated with the stormiest souls from both Heaven and Hell when I have thought the most dangerous thoughts When I learn every decree like a student and break them with every insurgent only then will I commence my pastiche as I continue to shed and feel the gripping raptures of rebels until I become the Artist 132 | Perception

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Alexander Smithline

My Animated Dream

髮端

鄭逸思

原曲 鍾無艷 原唱 謝安琪

原作 Christopher Chak 原詞 林夕

懷內你的歎息醺醺吞吐着依戀 無奈我不理解怎麼竟似未甘願 明明是你蜜運但仍然原地轉圈 凌晨喚我吹吹風卻愛看藍髮端 無事醉酒我的青絲化蔚藍的緣 然而你手腕的韁繩已證明繾綣 其實或許這裏寫個了斷 清清楚楚放下然後轉身歸去忘記癡怨 在你指際的髮端 再捲固我未轉 命中相識相愛曲髮直髮天性已預算 我那夜明白你隱秘愛慕亦太難斷 若我落髮亦算 我甘心因你破損

在我心軟的髮端 冷色配了微暖 但我必須一筆跟你分界不要惹恨怨

我一眼即看穿 你在綺夢內兜轉 請專心於愛戀 寧算我話你不知 分寸 曾在那刻你的呼吸只相隔幾吋 迴避到底也驚方位可給你擾亂 唯獨內疚尚未練成豪邁到看穿 其實是對她一位心底盼望相戀 難明白你為着孽緣流連樂園 求求你讓我別做罪人為難你兜轉 其實我想這裏寫個了斷 清清楚楚放下然後一心一意別再死鑽 在你指際的髮端 再捲固我未轉 命中相識相愛曲髮直髮天性已預算 我那夜明白你隱秘愛慕亦太難斷 若我落髮亦算 我甘心因你破損

在我心軟的髮端 冷色配了微暖 但我必須一筆跟你分界不要惹恨怨 我一眼即看穿 你在綺夢內兜轉 請專心於愛戀 被你愛慕可惜太傻 已經消散的髮端 再捲永遠未轉 命中相識相愛曲髮直髮一早已預算 我縱然明白你隱秘愛慕是太難斷 為你日勸夜勸 我青絲通通割短

在我心軟的髮端 寒冰貫縱微暖 任你癡心一片衷心苦笑不會有逆轉

我不忍這輩子 你在綺夢內兜轉 請專心於愛戀 忘記誘惑掌握好 分寸 我青絲都割短 抱月孤守鏡花緣 有朝一天可再選 寧願那夜從未醉就算

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Faat Duen (Cantonese Transliteration) Waai noi nei dik taan sik fun fun tun to jeuk yi luen

Mo moi ngo but lei gai jum mor ging chi mei gum yuen Ming Ming si nei mut wan daan ying yin yuen dei juen huen

Ling sun wun ngo chui chui fung keuk ngoi hong laam faat duen Mo si jui jau ngo dik ching si fa wai laam dik yuen

Yin yi nei sau wun dik geung sing yi jing ming hin huen Kei sat waat hui je lui se gor liu duen

Ching ching chor chor fong ha yin hau juen sun guai hui mong gei chi yuen Joy nei ji jai dik faat duen/ joy guen gu ngo mei juen

Ming chung seung sik seung ngoi kot faat jik faat tin sing yi yu suen Ngo na yea ming baat nei yen bei ngoi mo yik tai naan duen

Yeuk ngo lok faat yik suen/ ngo gum sum yaan nei por suen Joy ngo sum yuen dik faat duen/ laan sik pui liu mei luen

Daan ngo bit sui yat but gun nei fun gai but yiu yea hun yuen Ngo yat ngaan jik hon chuen/ nei joy yi mung noi dau juen

Ching juen sum yu ngoi luen/ ling suen ngo wa nei but ji/ fun chuen Chan joy na haak nei dik fu cup ji seung gak gei chuen

Wui bei dou dai ya gang fong wai hor cup nei yiu luen Wai duk noi gau seung mei lin sing ho maai dou hon chuen

Kei sat si dui ta yat wai sum dai paan mong seung luen Naan ming baat nei wai jeuk yip yuen lau lin lok yuen

Kau kau nei yeung noi bit jo jui yan wai naan nei dau juen Kei sat ngo seung je lui se gor liu duen

Ching ching chor chor fong ha yin hau yat sum yat yi bit joy sei juen Joy nei ji jai dik faat duen/ joy guen gu ngo mei juen

Ming chung seung sik seung ngoi kot faat jik faat tin sing yi yu suen Ngo na yea ming baat nei yen bei ngoi mo yik tai naan duen

Yeuk ngo lok faat yik suen/ ngo gum sum yaan nei por suen Joy ngo sum yuen dik faat duen/ laan sik pui liu mei luen

Daan ngo bit sui yat but gun nei fun gai but yiu yea hun yuen Ngo yat ngaan jik hon chuen/ nei joy yi mung noi dau juen

Ching juen sum yu ngoi luen/ bei nei ngoi mo hor sik tai sor Yi gin siu saan dik faat duen/ joy guen wing yuen mei juen

Ming chung seung sik seung ngoi kot faat jik faat yat jo yi yu suen Ngo jung yin ming baat nei yen bei ngoi mo si tai naan duen

Wai nei yat huen yea huen/ ngo ching si tung tung got duen Joy ngo sum yuen dik faat duen/ hon bing goon jung mei luen

Yam nei chi sum yat pin chung sum fu siu baat wui yau yik juen Ngo but yan je bui ji/ nei joy yi mung noi dau juen

Ching juen sum yu ngoi luen/ mong gei yau waat jeung ark ho/ fun chuen Ngo ching si dou got duen/ po yuet gu sau gang fa yuen

Yau jiu yat tin hor joy suen/ ling yuen na yea chung mei jui jau suen

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Hair Tip (English Translation) Yat Sze Austin Cheng

Original Song: “CHUNG Mo-yim� (jung mo yim) by Kay Tse Song by Christopher Chak Original lyrics by LIN Xi In my arms your drunken sighs stammered out attachments But sadly I did not understand why your love seemed unwilling It was you in romance but still circling In small hours you called me out for a breeze but only wanted to

look at the blue hair tip Intoxicated for nothing, my hair transformed into a bitter blue cause But the rein around your wrist proved a relationship already Actually maybe let us put a full stop here Put it down clearly and turn around and return and forget any resentment The hair tip between your fingers/ however twirled, too stubborn to turn All meets and loves, curly and straight hairs are destined by nature That night I understood your secret, your love was too hard to break If a haircut would work, I am willing to get hurt for you At my tender-hearted hair tip, a cool colour was brushed slight warm But I must draw a clear boundary, not to induce any hatred and resentment At first glance I looked through that/ you wandering round in circles

of romantic dream Please focus on your love/ rather I criticize you for not knowing/ propriety One moment your breath was only a few inches from me I avoided as also scared that you disturb the orientation Only I am yet trained as bold to see through compunction Actually I only want to be in love with that very her Hard to understand why you linger in lost paradise for such ill-fated cause I beg you please do not make me the sinner who persecutes you to wander Actually I want to put a full stop here Put it down clearly and turn around and please be faithful no more stubborn

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The hair tip between your fingers/ however twirled, too stubborn to turn All meets and loves, curly and straight hairs are destined by nature That night I understood your secret, your love was too hard to break If a haircut would work, I am willing to get hurt for you At my tender-hearted hair tip, a cool colour was brushed slight warm But I must draw a clear boundary, not to induce any hatred and resentment At first glance I looked through that/ you wandering round in circles

of romantic dream Please focus on your love/ loved by you who is unfortunately too foolish The hair tip already dispersed/ however twirled, would never turn All meets and loves, curly and straight hairs are destined very early on Although I understand your secret and that love is always too hard to break Persuading for you days and nights, I would love to cut all my hair short At my tender-hearted hair tip, icy coldness was penetrated with slight warm Neither your infatuation nor your genuine bitter smile would alter anything I am not hard-hearted to see that for the entire life/ you wander round

in circles of romantic dream Please focus on your love/ forget the lure and master the/ propriety I cut short my hair/ embrace the Moon and wait at the mirror image

of love alone If there had had a chance to choose again/

I would rather have not drunk that night

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Summer Haircut

Sarah Peck

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Mercy of the Throws Adelaide Zoller

There was pleasure in a path until I walked a pathless road Ignoring what I was taught in school breaking every decree Suddenly I was not trying to tread the sea nor keep my head above the waves We dove to the depths at the mercy of the throws The storm was brought out violent winds and all And though they were rock n’ roll your words felt dulcet not sent to tame not sent to quiet And my absent edges were sharpened once again to the tune of Fool In The Rain

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an emotional crabwalk Hasmik Djoulakian

A fly flew into my eye unannounced I blink, unsurprised and try to scoop it out from the corner of my eye with my right index finger my nail digs into the soft tissue and all it does at first is move the fly’s dead body around with the clockwise current of wetness I get a piece of its body, maybe a leg, maybe more it doesn’t matter and I don’t feel like hurting myself any more, looking for the rest of its body I feel mosquito larvae hatching, kaleidoscopic, in my lungs my lungs, an endless spiral staircase my lungs, a faulty automated doorway mosquitoes burrow through tissue and tendon and shoot through my veins, gorging themselves and I scratch my arms and legs and chest raw and bloody and burning because I can feel them, I can feel them in there and the scent of iron makes me nauseous There is a snake wrapped around my spine popping my vertebrae out of place its venom oozes down menacingly, leaving streaks of acid that soften bone my spine, being undone in a violent ballet my spine, falling in on itself My veins, a web of fractal patterns, are more chaos than order today, are singing with more entropy than normal today 140 | Perception

Don’t look at me, don’t look at me, please, I hate being looked at I don’t want to be seen your gaze feels heavy and I’m too far off axis to sustain its weight

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Koi

Rebecca Sorkin 142 | Perception

enjoy

Tiara Lowery blue upon blue upon blue upon blue washing over weary black holes from the head to the soles turning what was once yellowed whole to soft-green bamboo recline now with woes beyond arm's length as the body recovers strength through tension-less wavelengths and soft unfurrowed brows

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//portrait// Tiara Lowery

i look so beautiful waiting on you. anticipating your return with my phone wallpaper— the only physical presence i have of you for now. a ginger thump on your glass cheek brings smiles of memories on my face— an uncannily picturesque grin.

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Leaf Pendant Nittika Mehra

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Feel Like It

Hunter Martin I rip at the skin around my finger nails just to have somewhere to look.

I haven’t figured it out yet, but I’ll let you know when I do. Or maybe you could tell me (don’t).

No, don’t meet my eyes just as I look up that’s not fair, they need time to adjust and so do I. We’re both playing catch up, wait for me if you feel like it.

So(rry) back to the skin. Under my nail from when I constantly pried, it’s becoming dust.

Did you know that?

Well actually yeah, I did you prick. But go ahead I’ll let you feel smart and (yes) I’ll be the opposite of how violently I (so call) rip my own skin open (it doesn’t hurt). A hole where there shouldn’t even be a crease.

My mouth immobile, go ahead.

I have dreamed your scratchy carpet grabs a hold of me as I do you and I grow into it, pleasing no one I care about. It fills the gaps you left in me when I did.

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Colin Maguire

Untitled

Revenge

Alena Sceusa

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A Liar Tells The Truth Anna Curtis

Cried into me, for me Words whispered for hours As fingers traced my neck lying Spine by spine he told me of love The kind that’s cold and sold with a smile We slept, swept in breaths And kept our truths like a concept Locked out of reach in our minds.

Then he became the coward, Despised.

His stare while I stared at the lake Shakes as my fingers lay still.

The drops of rain fall over eyelashes that Catch your eyes in mine.

Moisture streams down and rests on upper lips Those lips, tipping my missing and yearning over the edge of that line A line you drew when you told me you loved her When you told me you loved me in a cracked whisper as you leaned over me A moment when I fell a thousand feet to empty glances and cautious words The lies that die when truth reveals it desire But the liar tells the truth Reveals the fears that open his mind The belief that this is child’s play is true Lies cannot cover mistakes Like a child hiding under a blanket The child needs light

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Prelude

Sarah Peck While Annabelle was away at college, she turned nineteen years old.

At eighteen years old she had felt too old for the pediatrician’s office, and now especially she wanted to start seeing a different doctor. Her mother had set up an appointment for Annabelle with an internal medicine doctor, the one her older sisters went to, which made Annabelle pleased. She had not felt like herself in a long time, and she needed answers.

On the day of her appointment, Annabelle brought her mother along for support. These days she leaned on her mom more than ever, shared more with her mom.

Dr. Weeds came into the room after the nurse took her weight and blood pressure. One hundred thirty-two pounds. Since leaving for college, Annabelle had gained approximately twelve pounds. The weight was unnoticeable on her slender body, but only three more pounds and she would have that infamous freshman fifteen. Although she felt like she should care about the significant weight gain and do something to prevent it, Annabelle just let it continue to happen.

Someone knocked on the door outside the office room. A woman with dirty-blonde curly hair poked in her head. “Hi Annabelle, I’m Dr. Weeds. It’s nice to meet you. What can I help you with today?”

Annabelle had not even started speaking yet and she could already feel her eyes starting to well with tears. Her mom noticed and began to speak for her.

“We’re here because of how Annabelle has been feeling lately.

She went off to college in August. She was so excited and couldn’t have been more ready to leave. It seemed like she had one foot out the door her entire high school career. She’s always been our most independent daughter,” her mom said. “But then after she arrived at college she would call us and just start crying on the phone, and we 150 | Perception

didn’t know what to do. It’s hard to comfort your daughter when she’s an hour and a half away. I’ve never seen her this way before.”

That last part was a lie. Annabelle had felt this way before, just never to this extreme. Perhaps she had done a good job of concealing it from her mother back in high school though. Either that, or Annabelle had grown to share more with her mother since going away to school.

By now Annabelle sat there full on crying. Dr. Weeds offered her a tissue and she accepted it, annoyed that she did not think to bring some of her own from home.

“Why do you think you’re so sad?” Dr. Weeds asked her.

“I don’t know. I wish I knew. Otherwise I would do something to make it better, but I cry all the time and I don’t know why.”

“Is it school that is making you upset?”

“That could be part of it. But I used to be someone who never cried, and now I can’t stop crying.”

“Does depression run in your family?”

Her mom answered that question for her. “Yes. Both grandmothers have shown signs of depression and my husband and I take antidepressants, him for work-related stress and myself for migraines.”

“I believe it’s possible that you may have clinical depression and that for some reason, it is just now happening in your life,” Dr. Weeds said.

“I’m going to have you take a look at this paper, and all I want you to do is check off whatever emotions you’ve felt within the last three months.”

Annabelle stared at the sheet in her hands. Feelings of sadness, emptiness, or unhappiness. Loss of interest. Tiredness. Changes in appetite, weight. Feelings of worthlessness. Trouble concentrating.

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Frequent thoughts of death. They all sounded so serious, yet she had experienced every single one of them.

Handing the paper back to Dr. Weeds with numerous checkmarks, she sat there patiently waiting for her to say something.

A few minutes later, Dr. Weeds spoke. “Well, Annabelle, you exhibit a significant number of the signs of depression.” Annabelle’s body tensed as she heard the words. Never before had she identified herself as depressed. “I’m going to prescribe you an antidepressant, and in about three weeks you can return for an appointment and we will see how it’s working.”

Annabelle had never liked the idea of taking drugs to feel better, but at this point, she was willing to try anything. She just wanted to feel like her old self again, have a desire to live.

It was not like she wanted to die, but if she were to step out into the road and get hit by a car, she would be pretty okay with that.

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Zoe Karikas

Duality of Man

Happy Trail

Kelly Veshia

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Zebra

Kristen Heglin Linger here | 155

do not forget this Katherine Fletcher

because she didn’t really hit you if she doesn’t remember, if she doesn’t apologize, if she swears she doesn’t remember. she swears she doesn’t remember so she didn’t really hit you. didn’t really hit you, so you don’t really flinch every fucking time someone touches you. she didn’t really hit you if you don’t remember either, right? where were you? where were you? you only remember the Remembering: the panic attacks in temporary bedrooms the panic attacks in supermarkets the panic attacks in crowded basements the panic attacks in passenger seats. the Remembering is tug-of-war between you and the vision of a girl who doesn’t apologize, doesn’t remember, doesn’t love you anymore. you don’t love her anymore, 156 | Perception

so why are you still holding the rope? it’s too easy to let her win this game and let yourself forget. it’s too easy to take the rope from her hands and tie a noose. but you don’t have to damn yourself. you don’t have to forgive, you don’t have to forget.

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Sendiment

158 | Perception

Yat Sze Austin Cheng

Thinking in Textures Monika Arbaciauskaite

I think in textures of the earth.

I think in lace, in velvet, in glass.

My thoughts are smooth, patterned, transparent.

They come in shades of maroon and navy.

I think in clay; in the murkiness of water mixed with soil.

My thoughts are the combination of two of the most prominent things found in the natural world.

I think in rock.

My thoughts build the mountains that reach the sky.

I think in textures of the universe.

In topographical defects in space.

I tend to think in textures that are unstable to collapse.

Textures that shrink and radiate away all their energy.

My thoughts result in a gravitational field that moves surrounding matter.

My thoughts are out in space, relics of a cooling, expanding universe.

My thoughts are tangible additions to the world.

I think in textures of existence.

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A note to myself: three months ago Hasmik Djoulakian

When you meet your grandmother for the first time she will be waiting for you in the blue dress she just bought wearing the heels that give her roaring blisters and clutching roses and daises and baby’s breath she spent a fifth of her salary on Her eyes will dart from person to person in the airport crowd and she will worry about not recognizing you right away When you meet your grandmother for the first time she will not have many questions for you Instead, she will spend long minutes studying your face trying to commit its curves and ridges and furrows to memory She will laugh when she hears you squeak as you yawn and think it’s sweet that you hiccup a lot and you’ll think that she doesn’t really know you But this moment is nice, and maybe that’s enough When you meet your grandmother for the first time Thoughts and questions will percolate your mind: What has changed the most about Armenia in the past 50 years?

What has changed the most about you? but you won’t be able to complicate the space between the two of you, so you will ask to see baby pictures of your mother, laugh at how fat she was, and help with the dishes until your grandmother shoos you out of the kitchen When you meet your grandmother for the first time She will spend the first few days convincing you to eat meat by telling you about a program she watched the other day that said red meat is healthy This will eventually make you cry, then she will feel bad and never mention meat again She will fill your every plate—twice—with salads and breads and vegetables 160 | Perception

She will be embarrassed by their outdoor toilet, You will assure her it’s fine but worry about how slick the stairs get in the winter and think back to the time she shattered the bones in her wrist while walking down those stairs You will often retreat to your grandmother’s bedroom She finds you later and cuddles with you You try to memorize the smell of her breath, the wrinkles on her face, the smooth lines of her eyebrows When you meet your grandmother for the first time you will see all the childhood photos of you that line her dresser, nightstand, and piano The one of you wearing a Scooby Doo sweater, a pensive look on your face, and with your hair in braids is her favorite [1] “Kyanks!” she will cry looking at it, touching the photo with a hesitant finger, forgetting for a moment that you’re right next to her [1]

Armenian word that translates literally to “my life.”

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Comic

Leonardo Marino

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Rain

By Katherine R Lucchesi I have loved the rain for as long as I can remember. The soft pitter patter of cool droplets on the tin roof of my screened-in porch, or the rush of a thunderstorm on my childhood lake. It put me at ease to know there were so many things in this world that just happened naturally. The sky just opened up sometimes and poured out as much as it possibly could. As a young girl I would lay on the sidewalk and hope the rain would wash me away, creating a huge ocean that would flood the streets of my empty town. I would close my eyes and let each drop fall upon me, never flinching. There was something so serene about hearing the rain fall, it was the kind of noise you could never just ignore. Sometimes life felt like a thunderstorm, harsh and unapologetic, never wavering for the person who forgot an umbrella.

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Mandala

Justina Hnatowicz

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Tooth Space

Hasik Djoulakian I lean over the sink and spit into the drain A thin thread of saliva clings to my bottom lip Shining like spider silk in the fluorescent light Of the dingy, pink-tiled bathroom I wonder if I’ve cleaned out all the spaces Between my teeth I need to make sure Because words get stuck in the nooks of my teeth And decay and fester if left alone They lose their shape and become barely recognizable They will rot the tender pink of my gums Jaw bones will loosen and pop out of place And all the words—contraband they’ve seemed—I’ve swallowed will gush from my skull, millions of letters my mother’s last name melted street signs, fragments of receipts, The word no a warping echo of fractal patterns the correct pronunciation of my name which no longer belongs to me the worries I surreptitiously scrawled in the green notebook with a bucking horse on the front that I used to think breathed life into what I wrote Rinse again, slowly Feel the swish and pull of water find all The words, crying from aloneness And I’ll soon forget their rancid taste and ragged feel on my tongue

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Whimsy

Natalli Amato

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scene from a protest

Farrell Greenwald Brenner bubbles in the night the thinnest purple and green spheres of soap, neon lights, fly into the light-polluted sky as the angry angry widows march down the street chomp at the humid air with their words their shouts their teeth a light-up-sneaker child with a carton of suds and a stick in one hand blows bubbles the other hand holds daddy’s the angry angry widows chomp chomp chomp but they can’t catch the bubbles— flying is for children.

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Many Thanks to Sarah Harwell The ETS & WRT Departments Vicki Risa Smith Melanie Ann Stopyra The Student Association All of the Professors who encouraged their students to submit 168 | Perception