Perception Magazine Spring 2017

VOLUME XVII | ISSUE 29 Syracuse University

Spring 2017 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 Fall 2017 issue. Send visionary pieces of writing and art to perception.syr@gmail.com.

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Dear Perceivers, Now that I’ve settled into my role a bit, I’m able to appreciate the little things about putting together the magazine. One of the little things that I appreciate the most, especially this semester, is seeing so many familiar names in our table of contents.

Some names I’ve grown to recognize in my time with the magazine, and our returning submitters are always enthusiastic, talented, and dedicated to contributing the best work they can. Other names I recognize as people I know personally, and these familiar names add to my impression of the importance of the work we do for our artists, writers, and readers.

I’d like to end by taking some time to thank Nittika Mehra, who has been our level-headed and motivated managing editor for several years. I know with absolutely certainty that I wouldn’t be able to do my job at all without Nittika’s guidance, and she’ll be sorely missed at Perception next year, and we wish her the best of luck with her future endeavors.

Take it easy, Katherine Fletcher Editor-in-Chief

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The Insiders Katherine Fletcher Editor-in-Chief

Nittika Mehra Managing Editor

Editor Camila Wanderley

Head Readers Camila Wanderley, Cristina Colรณn Feliciano, Lindsay Murphy

Readers Laurie Thompson, Malea Lamb-Hall, Camila Wanderley, Cristina Colรณn Feliciano, Amanda Gibbs, Shaira Shannan, Kimberly Ramirez, Danielle Bertolini, Elizabeth Tarangelo, Bethany Marsfelder

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Bridget Slomian Chief Designer

Julia Leyden Assistant Editor-in-Chief

Elyssa Thomas Assistant Managing Editor

Thomas Beckley-Forest Head Editor

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The Contributors Hannah Griffin

9

71 93 116 139 Josh Smith 10 107 143 Michelle Rose Golonka 12 30 117 Bethany Marsfelder 16 137 Fern Durand 22 39 101 Monika Arbaciauskaite 20 140 Katherine Guerin 25 87 121 129 Katherine Fletcher 28 136 Farrell Greenwald Brenner 19 92 128 145 Thomas Beckley-Forest 33 Linnea Nordgren 41 86 112 123 147 Briana Dorley 27 Lindsay Murphy 44 Laurie Thompson 47 82 115

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Writing

When he asks "do the spots on your arms ever go away?"

I've Stopped Reading the News The Rooster A poem about Tim Giving love freely Therapy Initiate So Close Going Out For the Record Not a Love Poem Wooing the Illusionist And no, I still won't go out with you From Menah 50 Ankles Later Unduck Stuff Fall Sustenance Language and Sexuality Fatal Windows Poison The Testimony of my Reading Glasses Morning Elegy for a Southbound Plane Euology for Carrie Fisher oil on water This One's for the JAP's Red is the Color House of Flies. myth from the finnish archipelago i can't write love poems, but this is for you hymn for the finnish archipelago maybe the last time i write you a poem as my feet get caught.

Run Honeybee Melancholic galaxies Conscious Rosy eposures

Laritza Salazar Charlotte Balogh Austin Cheng Brian Hamlin

Rachel Saunders Ibrahim Alfawaz Amanda Gibbs Natalli Amato Kathryn Cassidy Henna Kulaly Cristina Colón Feliciano Shaina Shannan Elyssa Thomas Lauren Hannah

Alice Chen Matthew Marcott ZiZi Kalia Barrow John Grout

49 56 53 58 62 126 116 64 70 80 85 113 152 88 90 94 96 108 127 135 149 95 133 99 105 110 118

Front Cover Back Cover Inside Front Cover Inside Back Cover

The Eighth Wonder Fallling Up Esucarys The House Always Wins Whiplash A Divulgement In the Kingdom of the Sea Women in White 43°55N/76°7W 6:14 am, Saturday Morning Hues of Blue Right or Up? Horizon

By The Time You Read This Forbidden Love Sertraline Capacitance The Sand in Wellfleet Mannequin Me Chasing Sunset Othering On the Account of Love Privacy "Hope" Current Self Ecology Boo-Boos Prints

COVER ART Alexa Anastasio - Flower on Fire Bridget Slomian - Cherry Swirl Bridget Slomian - December Samantha Guttadauria - Reflection

CENTER SPREAD Akanksha Gomes - Shades Colin Maguire - Morning José Sánchez - Float Samantha Guttadauria - The Valley Mel Wherry - Wiseman Rebecca Sorkin - Dani Alena Sceusa - San Francisco Samantha Guttadauria - Mirrors of the Soul Linger here | 7

Art Bridget Slomian Katherine Fletcher Akanksha Gomes Lindsay Murphy Laritza Salazar Alexa Anastasio JosĂŠ SĂĄnchez Chase Lenahan Kathryn Cassidy Nittika Mehra Samantha Guttadauria Mel Wherry ZiZi Kalia Barrow Alena Sceusa Colin Maguire

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11 97 148 21 24 141 142 29 109 32 46 38 45 48 132 57 81 37 83 84 98 120 131 106 114 144 43 119 134

Suspended Pieces Biggie Vessels Soiree Rouge Buddha Egyptian Belleza the last hike grizzly bear vs. icy cove Untitled Untitled Ambiguity Bouquet Till Oasis Farewell Untitled Traversing Through the City A State of Mind Untitled War Winter Blue Layers of the Year Frozen Vienna Moth Comfort Lines Edge of the Earth

When he asks “do the spots on your arms ever go away?�

Hannah Griffin

It's not pity I feel for you, it's empathy, it's compassion You feel so uncomfortable in your skin. So critical of the person you are.

And I know that feeling I know it so well But that won't stop me from calling you out when you extend your judgement to me to my body I won't let the critic that occupies your mind Occupy mine.

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Therapy Josh Smith

If peanut butter were a drug, would I inject it into my arm — then in between my toes when people caught on?

Would I rub it on my gums, not even in an attempt to swallow, but to absorb?

Could I start getting violent if I didn’t have a Reese’s fix every sixteen hours? Would Reese’s cups even suffice after a year’s worth of addiction?

Perhaps I’d go straight for the jar, no knives, no jelly to cut the pure peanut — just diving in with an open hand, my clenched fist pulling back globs of unadulterated, fleeting high.

If peanut butter were a drug, what kind of stories would I have for my therapist in rehab?

Would I describe my rock bottom as, having licked the palm of a stranger in a back alley, who’d recently eaten a peanut butter cup?

Would I’ve been making secretive transactions, using code names, like rough, and tan; texting hookups on the low, like a soon-to-be disgraced politician?

Could I ever be allowed back into a grocery store as I lived a clean and sober life?

Or would I be kept on a short leash by my sponsor? Letting me into the dairy section, and through the produce, but yanking my collar when we neared that one particular aisle?

I’m told anything that one abuses, can be considered a drug.

I don’t actually abuse peanut butter; I just turn to it when abused.

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Bridget Slomian

Suspended

Going Out

Michelle Rose Golonka You used to say it would take a funeral to get them all in the same room at the same time. As always, Judith darling, you were right.

What? Too soon? If I were wearing that shirt we picked up in Mexico, you would’ve laughed. You’d laugh at Satan in that shirt.

They all look like taffy-stretched, hairier versions of the babies we had. Luke’s the baby who now smokes a lot of cigarettes. Maya is the baby with four overgrown babies of her own hanging off of her arms.

And Chuck is just a baby, fat and bald. I’m allowed to say that, dear.

Remember I told him to diet twelve Christmases in a row and on the thirteenth, Mother Nature gave him my type 2 Diabetes. Merry friggin’ Christmas.

It’s nice to see them together. I guess it’s because we made them all the same way, but they’ve got these eyes that just seem to echo one another’s. Three sets of the exact same lake blue eyes. We couldn’t even get them all to Cleveland for your 75th,, Judy. And now Maya’s rubbing Luke’s back, and Chuck’s running about setting all the plasticware and paper plates for the lasagna. They know I hate lasagna, don’t they?

Judith, tell them I--. Ah, foo.

It’s good to see them.

Looks like all of the grandchildren made it out, even the gay one. I think that’s the “partner” with him, the gay partner. Huh, you weren’t lying when you said he’s like a pretty James Dean. Lovely eyelashes on this one, really just something. The gay one’s crying now and it feels like if he cares this much I should’ve just gone to the wedding like you did. Or at least not feigned a heart attack when we got the invitation.

In my defense, it felt like a real one at the time. When I saw in the Plain Dealer that Taco Bell started serving breakfast, I told you my days were numbered. I ate a taco in a waffle a few weeks ago. What’s two men putting rings on their fingers gonna do to shift the cosmos much more than it already has?

There’s a group of the younger grandchildren playing Euchre in the corner. Where’d you learn to count cards like that, Mindy? Crafty bastard. Bastardess? Can we call our granddaughters bastards now? Is this what feminism has done for us? Anyway I’ve never been prouder.

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Hoo! Five tricks in a row on a loner!

“Grandpa taught me that one.”

I’m not blushing, Judy, you are.

Chuck’s finished setting up the banquet and dabs gently at a tomato stain on his shirt, using great care with a folded napkin like a French whore. Maya would always ask me how I knew in which manner a French whore would do something.

“How in the hell could you know how a French whore would eat a submarine sandwich, Dad?” I always told her it’s just an expression. But I’ve been to France.

Jokes, Judy, jokes.

He should really try toothpaste. They laugh when I say it, but you know nothing gets out a stain like toothpaste. It was toothpaste that got the blood out of that pressed white shirt when Luke walloped Chuck in the nose the day of his First Communion, remember? The hook on that boy, I’ll tell ya. If he’d have kept with boxing, I swear…he’d have gone to jail a lot sooner. Jokes. Luke gives Chuck’s shoulder a firm shake. Chuck catches his eye and he nods. They’ve got those same eyes. They’ve got your eyes, Judy. There’s a couple thousand and one infinities bouncing between them and it hurts my head to count. Yes, dear, my head still hurts. No, I don’t need a tonic water. I’d take a gin, though. Luke’s on a chair and his jaw’s hanging open in that way we trained it not to. We both know what that means.

“Hey, everybody. Thanks for being here. I know this isn’t how I’d hoped to see you all again, but fuck—it’s good to see you.”

His jaw unhinges a little more and he slingshots a look over at the kids in the corner.

“Sorry.”

“We’re all at least 23, Dad. We can handle a fuck.”

Damn, little Barry’s 23 now?

“I know I can handle a fuck!”

Shit, the gay one was always the funniest.

“I won’t go on because I know we’re all hungry, and because, well because I know Dad has about seven corrections for my eulogy already and I’m twenty words in, but I just wanted to say. I was three hundred dollars short on my rent last month. I didn’t say anything to Dad. I didn’t say anything because I didn’t want to know which brand of cheaper Linger here | 13

tobacco death sticks he suggest I switch to this week so I could at least be saving money while I slowly kill myself. No, instead when I dragged him out to Denny’s last week for breakfast on his birthday and I sent my card through, they brought it back to me and told me it’d been rejected.

Dad grumbled and threw his card down. He said ,‘Let me show you what a paycheck looks like, son’ or something like that.”

It was “Hard work makes for pancake money.” But that’s alright.

He’s got them laughing. I like it when they laugh.

“And five days ago, I trudged into my rental office, ready to see what the conversion rate was from shreds of dignity to dollars, when the landlord tells me my February rent’s been paid. That I’d paid for the next six months. That and that he heard Lucky Strikes were cheaper than Marlboros. Maybe give them a try.”

Ah, foo.

Chuck gives Maya’s hand a squeeze, and she looks at him like he’s her brother. Are you seeing this, Judy?

“Anyway, all I’m saying is there’s a difference between a right father and a good father. Peter Lowe was not always the right father. He taught me how to rig a deck before he taught me how to ride a bike. But he was a good father. And I am going to miss him. Hell, I miss him already. I feel like a thousand shards of glass and I just wish I had had time to say thanks. And goodbye. And I know none of us got to do that. And I hate that, and I hate him for that. And sometimes I just hated him. But mostly I love him. And I wish I had gotten to tell him that. And maybe it’s the sleep deprivation, and definitely it’s the gin, but I feel him here I think.

I’ve had a sneaking suspicion I should change this tie all day, and that doesn’t come from nowhere. So, anyway, for whatever that’s worth.”

He’s trailing off now. The jaw’s closing.

They’re laughing again as he stumbles a little off the chair he’s on, like a French whore. A few grandchildren run to support him, as he smiles and nods them off.

And there you are, Judy. My God, you look like a million bucks.

You’re entertaining your sister in the corner with stories of your yoga class, while she’s sobbing into a handkerchief. She always could make things about her, couldn’t she, Jude? Maya’s got her hand running through your hair now. You’ve cut it. Just a little bit. But I can tell. It looks nice, Judy. You look nice. Our girl helps you to your feet and you 14 | Perception

two walk over to the buffet.

You start to cry a little when you reach the table, and I wish you wouldn’t. You never cry, Judy. You told me I’m enough of a bitch for the both of us and you were right. Don’t cry, Jude. Don’t— You lean into Maya’s ear.

“He hated lasagna, you know.”

Your fractured smile sends me skyward.

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Wooing the Illusionist Bethany C Marsfelder at first, o, at wondrous first, you wonder if anything he does is an illusion.

enraptured, by his wrist the tendons flicking upward, the corner of his lip twitching up, and sparks flying out from his fingers. at second, 16 | Perception

for it all seems so real: you are held,

o, at mournful second you wonder if everything

he does is an illusion. for now it all seems

so

magic;

his mistake was to show his hand, for how could someone who can do so much even grant you a smile when there is more miracle in his eye than there is in your form. and yet. and yet;

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he gestures grandly, sweeps his arm, and, with a flourish and one mystical smirk as the curtain begins to fall, pulls your heart out of a hat.

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Eulogy for Carrie Fisher Farrell Greenwald Brenner

Let it be known: she drowned in moonlight, strangled by her own bra.

She died by the lustrous pearly light of the thousand moons she walked.

She walked grit-first, middle finger second, out of this soundstage and left us with just that: grit and middle fingers.

Write it down: she drowned in moonlight, strangled by her own bra.

Without the fetters of gravity and the suffering of fools her moon-spangled body lifted into the vacuum.

Hear this: she drowned in moonlight, strangled by her own bra.

Her last words preserved in the deepest vaults of sacred museums of space recorded and coded in the harmonics of just three notes on a saxophone But all else no longer of this world.

All together now: she drowned in moonlight, strangled by her own bra.

And for the first time her breasts, heretofore in a dodgeball arena of ravenous glances were free from both cotton and eye And upwards we wave, good bye.

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Fall

Monika Arbaciauskaite You feel like Fall, the perpetual breeze as I step outside, breathing in life, taking away the Sun. You feel like Fall, the constant shift from a time of energy and motivation to the promise of stillness and stoicism.

You feel like

the promise of warmth but the assurance of bleakness.

like Fall, you emulate an energy that makes me hopeful and apathetic.

You were my Summer.

You feel like My Fall,

with the promise of the Dead Winter.

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5A. Falling Up Charlotte Balough - (clbalogh@syr.edu) I don’t have the words on my fingers anymore but they used to be there, dozens of them, and they’d just fall out onto the keys like music but in reverse and I could sit back and watch as the keys unlocked doors and the music filled rooms and there was magic there.

Believe me, there was.

Vessels

Katherine Fletcher

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From Menah Fern Durand

I.

By Saturday next, She’ll be tossing her clothes, Unfolded, and wrinkled, In two her care E on bag.

She won't be boarding a plane But, out far west, goes she.

Leeving me, alone; Weeping in the cold east.

Tis how she moves, m’eye lay-d; Silently, stealing us away, with her eyes.

God cries, When women lies.

II. She was a clever seed indeed.

Spoiled rotten, yet, Appetizing!

How so, shall weakness power over strength?

My body fell, As though, I were anaemic, and ironless; The poison from your voice Filled my ears, Through the vessels in my suddenly! Weakened bones.

Vel me tuus! Menah?

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Spoke eye not a word of latin, But, made you every sense To my closing eyes.

III. Love! I regret you. Snuck she upon me wearing on top of her fire red haired scalp, the Helm of Darkness! Whilst I was in m’eye darkest hour, it was you I saw, standing over me in my sleep. Your were trying to make sense of my darkness.

IV. In the comfort of your bed?

If my wife knew, She’d have my head, Like a flag, on a stick; The emblem of your Front yard, motionless.

V. It’s her duty, stealing already promised men away, for; she is cursed to seek revenge. My love finds companion in the others that feel her pain.

Her husband had another, who bore his first, when she was fit to be a mother. She doesn’t hostage us in her poison forever. When the song stops, we become free, no longer possessed by her chants! The catch is, she steals your husband’s fruits.

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Soiree Rouge Akanksha Gomes 24 | Perception

Language and Sexuality Katherine Guerin

CHAPTER I. LANGUAGE AND SEXUALITY Language is a funny thing; there are so many mediums in which it can be presented through. One in particular that seems to get forgotten about is language of the body. So much can be communicated through a slight movement, a small gesture or a short glance. It is the art of sexuality; a language everyone should be fluent in.

CHAPTER II. MAKING CONNECTIONS Like a lightning storm in your brain- pulsing synapses ignite with passion. Dopamine chemicals flood your receptors and all at once you have a crescendo of inescapable, sensational pleasure. Contorted physically and mentally you breathe, breathe, breathe again. Your senses blur together in the most beautiful, crystal clear way as they never have before.

CHAPTER III. TALKING SEX AND THINKING SEX: THE LINGUISTIC AND DISCURSIVE CONSTRUCTION OF SEXUALITY Feeling it hanging there in the air, hot and heavy- it was perfect. Trying to catch your breath and make sense of what the hell just happened.

Nothing but bright colors and sharp shapes dance in your mind. There is no understanding it, only your body speaks the language. Accept it, embrace it, do it again.

CHAPTER IV. WHAT HAS GENDER GOT TO DO WITH SEX? LANGUAGE, HETEROSEXUALITY AND HETERONOMATIVITY Sex is pleasure, pleasure is comfort, and comfort is the ultimate achievement between two people. Happiness takes many different forms, there is no true definition; so why try to conform to one? Just do it, do it dirty, do it neat, do it weird, do it quick, do it slow! Whatever type of doing it makes you feel the best, don’t think about it and just do it. Feel no shame in who you are.

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CHAPTER V. SEXUALITY AS IDENTITY: GAY AND LESBIAN LANGUAGE Feeling it from within, it burns your soul every waking second to be bound and confined. This enchanted cage you call your mind will be the death of you. It is time to release yourself, accept yourself, know yourself, be yourself. Own your sexuality, declare your identity and relinquish your pain.

CHAPTER VI. LOOKING BEYOND IDENTITY: LANGUAGE AND DESIRE A wise monkey once told me to look beyond what I see. Deeper and deeper I went, looking past the obvious to find the obscure. The language I used to ask myself this question was one of desire and sexuality. I had to find myself in order to start looking for myself. How preposterous, but it worked.

CHAPTER VII. LANGUAGE AND SEXUALITY: THEORY, RESEARCH AND POLITICS A reaction to a reaction, suspended there for what feels like an everlasting eternity; and then nothingness. We have all lived in this moment, we have all felt the darkness creep up and consume us. To then come out of it feeling new, feeling reborn, seeing things so clearly it is almost blinding. Finding yourself will have that effect on you, don’t fight it, surrender and you will survive.

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Run

Briana Dorley The world feels topsy turvy all the time now. You give love and get none in return. You fall for a soul and break yourself to bits and you don’t even bat an eye. You chase after what you think is this euphoric kinesthesia of captivation and esteem, but you take one step closer and the glowing seed of awe in the palm of your hand turns to dust. You once idolized their being as if they put the very stars themselves in the sky and you floated on cloud nine for so long that you lost true sight of the thin line that separated you from a concrete absoluteness and some saintly other plane. If it was love how could it destroy you so?

You can never resist the urge to desire the beautiful creatures you can’t have… but you can shift the coursing waves of your personalized kismet and volitions. Love is dying and in one word all those past worshipped memories slowly die with it. Hope for some picture perfect moment, some destined instance of falling for someone or some miraculous realization that he/she is the one. The moment of knowing is fading. In this topsy turvy world, yes means yes and no, and no means yes and yes and no. Oh no! Here we are again, back on the run, into the cataclysm of infatuation and tribulation. When will the note be taken? A cycle of spirits that feel broken and abused. That run on the gushes of the wind angered by all failed attempts to fill the broken cracks of our hearts with the love we never knew. Dash into the twilight and taste the rapture we’ve confined to conventions and the imaginations of our minds instead of acknowledging and pursuing accordance with all the signals the earth has emanated. That little spell being love. Ascend from the void condition that binds you to a waking life of what ifs and what could bes and understand that the asomatous plane is an open field for us all to roam. In this topsy turvy world make a trail that is best for you. We are the broken people that shouldn’t feel anywhere near broken. We are the rebels juxtaposed to all the adversities that our topsy turvy world aims to normalize, to cripple and to damage our lives. In refined poise, we march on into the risks and we prepare to rage with the wars in our heads that drive us onto the tracks where we fall again and again in love, off love, in touch, out beyond.

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Morning

Katherine Fletcher The morning and evening suns have always shone differently to me, but I couldn’t properly articulate this difference until I wanted to explain it to you. The morning sun is light, soft. Gentle. The evening sun is heavy, darker somehow despite its hazy, golden rays. And that’s the kind of love you’ve found. You’ve been tending to your love in the evenings under that heavy sun, hollow and weary and reaching-but-never-reachedfor. You’ve been tangling your legs with anyone who comes along and makes your bed suddenly feel too big. You’ve been making room for boys who can’t or won’t make room for you. You’ve been trying to give them reasons to stay. And I don’t know if I’ve got a better kind of love to promise you, but I’ve got more than his rough hands and my loneliness and your evening sun. I can give you gentle morning sun. I can give you a bed that's the right size for both of us. I can give you legs untangling after the most peaceful sleep you’ve had in a while. I can give you someone who stays the night. I’m not telling you this because I want to fuck you on your bedroom floor one night and get drunk under the stars with you the next. I’m telling you this because even if I don’t have that morning sun love for you, it’s what you deserve. Stop chasing sunsets down beach roads in your old car. Sit back and enjoy what the night has to offer, and as the day breaks on an unfamiliar horizon, wait for your morning sun love to chase you for once.

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the last hike Lindsay Murphy

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For the Record Michelle Rose Golonka

I asked the cat that lives in my apartment (he’s not my cat, we’re more roommates than friends) if he’d ever fallen in love.

And his eyes swatted me over, I being a too-full flower vase and he a symptom of his species.

“Love?” He hissed.

Yeah. I said. I think I might be falling in love.

How does somebody know?

He scoffed at me, which is something cats can only do in poems written by lovesick girls with too much time and too little sense of reality and too many passing thoughts about what it’s like to fall asleep holding your hand and wake up holding your hand and realize that the dream I had in the middle in which you were holding my hand may not have

been a dream at all.

And I take a sip of water and muse about how you told me you don’t like ice in your drinks and I wonder to myself if you had any offending ice today. And troubleshoot how long it would take me to extract every ice cube for you.

Now I notice that the ceiling fan is hitting this balloon exactly to the beat of the Macarena and I think it would make you laugh and I smile thinking about the way your hazel eyes disappear when you laugh and wondering where they go when they do and hoping they’ll come back soon from wherever and that they bring me a souvenir of a tee shirt.

Or another laugh.

“You’re not falling in love because there’s no such thing as love” He finally retorts in-between indulgent licks of his own groin.

30 | Perception

Oh. I said.

That makes sense.

So anyway I’m writing you this so you know that I’m not falling in love with you or the smile that you get when you talk about playing the trumpet.

Truthfully, I’m just glad to have a definite answer on the matter.

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Untitled

Laritza Salazar

32 | Perception

House of Flies.

Thomas Beckley-Forest

The summer sun is out in Buffalo, New York, and the air pushes down heavily. It is a cruel, solid heat that bakes your skin brown, washing you deep with its radiation. You feel it in the sweat slicking the slope of your neck, and the growing damp under your armpits as your body struggles to cool. Your lungs swell and deflate slowly, drawing breath after laborious breath. The glare is stupendous, overwhelming, as if you’re in a police interrogation box with a flashlight trained on your face. You hide from it, sitting lidded by sunglasses, tinted lenses that glaze the coffee shop patio around you in honeyed amber. Sam sits across from you, a pack of cigarettes and a book lying on the wobbly wood table between, Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger. He’s saying something to you, or at you, but the words are blurring indistinctly into the periphery of your dilated consciousness—too much blood congealing in the warm coils of your brain. You do want to hear, to listen and respond, and so with effort you tighten your mind around that murmur, attempting to bring it into focus. “…and you’re reading the Washington Post, right? You really went out of your way to find it, too, because you heard or read on Facebook that the Post’s editorial page was publishing a column by Glenn Greenwald today, and it’s an event, at least in your world, when the Post publishes a column by Glenn Greenwald. It means something’s up, and hell if you’re going to miss it. Sure, you could have read it on the internet and saved a few bucks but for some reason you want to feel that paper between your fingers when you get Glenn’s take on the times. There’s something comforting about it, about the typeface they use on the letterhead, you feel connected to all the other men across the centuries who’ve ever sat on a coffee shop patio reading the newspaper. It lends this sense of fixed reality that you can touch and hold in your hands—it’s contagious, it settles you into your own bones in a way you didn’t know you needed. A few paragraphs into Glenn’s piece you start to lose interest, though, you’ve heard it all before, about drone strikes in the desert and little brown kids dying senseless deaths, out there on the fringes of empire where all is chaos and no one on this side of the page can bring Linger here | 33

themselves to give much of a shit, not even you, the guy who goes out of his way to buy the Washington Post when Glenn Greenwald publishes an editorial. He’s making good points, Glenn is, you know he is, but your attention just won’t hold. Your eyes wander over the fold to the opposite page, they’re doing kind of a point-counterpoint thing, where they’ve printed an op-ed I wrote, addressed to Glenn Greenwald actually, about how my head is full of spiders. My skull is teeming with spiders, it’s fucking infested, they’re coming out my ears and working their little twiglegs through the seams where my eyeballs meet the socket. Imagine the most piercing headache you’ve ever had, like your brain is pulling itself apart. There’s too many of them in there, man. They need to get out. What are you going to do about this, Glenn Greenwald? What are you going to do about the spiders in my head?”

“Oscar? Hello?” He slams a hand down, rattling the table. “Are you listening to me?”

“Yes, Sam,” you say, stretching your arms out skyward and twisting your core around, back and forth, trying to work out the dull amphetamine ache that has lingered in your spine all day. “That was beautiful. I should write it down.”

“You should be writing all of this down,” Sam says, jiggling free a cigarette and stuffing it between his lips. “When we’re famous, it’ll be worth money.”

“It’s already worth money,” you say. “Didn’t I buy that coffee you’re drinking? I paid for this freakshow.”

“You know, Oscar, a lot of people think very highly of my company,” Sam mutters stiffly as he takes another sip from the debt-coffee, flicking away several flies. “I’m regarded as an erudite and entertaining conversationalist in this community.”

“Yeah yeah. You’re a real charmer. Are we still going over to Calvin and Camille’s later?”

34 | Perception

Sam casts a furtive look up the sun-blasted street. “Yeah, sure. I don’t know. I have to meet Darius in Allentown soon, he’s got some merchandise for me.”

“Ooooh, merchandise. Goods and services.”

“Exactly. Fuck!” he ejects into the air. “I just know I’m going to run into Blake while I’m down there. Human cancer, that kid.”

“You should be a writer,” you say, swatting away a buzz near your right ear. “Such a knack for capturing people’s humanity in a single wellchosen phrase.”

“You don’t understand. I always run into him or her down there. It’s like they’re fucking following me, like they just need to be seen together so desperately.”

Sam looks up, his face fixing on something over your shoulder. "Selena!

Hola. Como estas?"

You swivel to see her. The girl locking her bike to the stopsign pole is pale as porcelain, a white doe in the jungle of concrete and patchgrass—not a drop of Spanish blood in her veins. Selena's hair is dyed a soft sea-blue today—last week it was a violent green. You’ve known her at arm’s length for a few years. From what you know, she spends the bulk of her time either painting or taking drugs with acid-happy skateboard kids in the downtown parks. She is wearing little white shorts and a spandex top splashed in rainbow that hugs tightly on her slim frame.

"Bueno," she chirps, unsheathing a cigarette from a pack that is already disappearing back into her sidebag. "Hi guys. Do either of you have a light, by any chance?"

Your eyes slide up and down her body, the opposing forces of desire and shame pushing and pulling at the wet clay in the core of your being. "I do," you say, reaching into your pocket. You stand, cupping your left hand around the lighter as she leans down into it and sucks the flame out of your hand—up through the fuse of processed tobacco, taking its sweet bastard chemicals deep into her lungs. For a Linger here | 35

moment her eyes flicker into yours.

Sam asks to see the lighter and the moment is gone. For the best.

The window has passed. Selena says goodbye and extricates herself, leaving the two of you alone again with the book and the plate, and the remnants of the bagel, and the flies.

You let your eyes unfocus, dragging across the sky—this endless blue expanse dribbled with white. In hours, this day will end, like each that has come before. Yet something feels different, something that sets hard into your brainstem, leaking out a hot melancholy that soaks through your flesh. Tomorrow will be your nineteenth birthday. A fly picks at the decaying shard of unfinished bagel on the plate in front of you. Two more join it as you watch. Three. Four.

“This is a bad time,” you mutter. “These are bad times.”

“You been talking to Mary?”

“No.” “When was the last time you saw her?” “….hm. Last Sunday.”

“So you’re at war.”

“I think we both are realizing we shouldn’t be doing what we’re doing to each other.”

“That’s a sweet way to put it. Mary say that?”

“Not exactly.”

“You’re a cool kid, Oscar Black.”

“Thanks, buddy ol’ pal. How’s Rosa by the way?”

“That’s different. Rosa and I are history, but you’re still in the trenches— only you’re going AWOL because you can’t cut the cord.”

“It’s basically over.”

“Sure.”

It is a form of paralysis, a sense of being that has lingered long after the attempts to dislodge it. Tonight you will get high and move fast, but there is no guarantee that this will change, this process you can feel starting in your head, in your brain, at the base of your neck. Tonight you might try, but tomorrow you will still be sitting here, wasting in the house of flies.

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Traversing Through the City Nittika Mehra

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Ambiguity Alexa Anastasio 38 | Perception

50 Ankles Later Fern Durand

A. No, matter the color her eyes, How pretty her hair, or Wonderfully dressed she is, Her ankles are what I Admire most.

How lovely they look in flats, The pant leg hanging over A bit, revealing the bone Of her ankles structure.

Keep the foot.

Show me your ankles, Love I can’t let go.

I’ll take them home, And use them to make soup.

B. Step on my back.

Tell me I’m bad.

Make me wish I Never disobeyed Your wishes and commands.

I’m not sorry, shit I’d do it again.

There’s something about pain (ankles) That drives me insane!

Step on my neck.

I’m usually very quiet, But not this time.

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It brings out the freak in me.

C. The same way, every book isn't meant To be read, not every word is to be said.

Yet you managed, you got inside my head And showed me the thoughts That filled the pages inside.

Blank pages Dark pages Half empty.

Halfway filled pages.

Pages, pagespagespages.

I was fucking embarrassed.

Now everyone knows, Ankles, horny Horny ankles.

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myth from the finnish archipelago.

Linnea Nordgren I ran through fields and scuttled up over glacial mountains, chasing elk and running from minks with my sister and our cousins - a coven of the smallest witches you could hope to find. Even before we all shared a common tongue, we were able to send out incantations in row boats and midsummer bonfires to be received by seagulls and nattfjärilarš.

Blueberries grew wild in white birch forests and strawberries sprung up in the summer wherever there was ground to hold them.

Farmor taught us everything we needed to know about magic.

In the forest: where the trolls lived, and the fairies, and which mushrooms were chanterelles and which were a trip to the hospital.

By the sea: why you must look for vipers, how to save their shed skin, how to kill them.

At home: why sea salt is best, how to make a salmon soup to cure all ailments, which boxed wines are ganska bra², where to find your family.

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Paulina in Sydney, and Emilia - my tiny magic sister is learning new magic in New Orleans.

We tell ourselves that someday we will buy back the property and rebuild the house where our fathers grew up and where we were taught to be wild. ¹ Swedish – moth; literally “night butterfly” ² “Quite good”

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Moth

Alena Sceusa

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Honeybee Lindsay Murphy

I wish we had known each other when we were young wish we’d known each other when we played with dirt and bugs behind my house wish we’d known each other when we sat on the swings, laughing until sunset wish we’d known each other when we laid on our backs in the grass and listened to the frogs and crickets under the stars I think we would’ve been best friends.

I could have never imagined a love like yours. never thought I deserved it, never thought I’d see or feel anything like it a love that I could only catch glimpses of in dreams, over and over again but never staying like fireflies lighting up and disappearing in Mile Long Field in June. a love warm like the smears of paint of those warm colors in a sunset we learned about in elementary school art class a love hopeful like the sun on my skin after the February of Syracuse a love delicate like the first daffodils in March, like the small wings on white butterflies in July I have never known a love like yours, I never thought I would get to. Live to, even.

With you it’s like coming up for air on Thompson Lake in August, being met by sunlight and the fresh scent of evergreens, the sound of Mrs. Polomsky calling us in for dinner with you it’s like walking into the house on Deer Ledge after a breakdown in October, finally feeling like I can take off my moccasins after months of feeling homeless finally able to sit and stay finally home Finally. It’s finally You.

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Bouquet José Sánchez

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Untitled

Laritza Salazar

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Melancholic galaxies Laurie Thompson

across my cheek is a speckle of metallic stardust aching to be set free.

It absorbs my color and escapes into the sky like ionized particles. across your lips is dusted, silver poison.

It stirs and swirls in tantalizing temptations, opening my salted wounds: It enters and insists like a cyst.

In the sky, drapes of luminescence carry my anxiety to a brim where I prop it up like an umbrella.

Your poison lets loose rain, And I shield your bullets.

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Till

José Sánchez

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The Eighth Wonder Laritza Salazar

Growing up, there was only one picture our house that was just of my parents. It hung on the fridge door, suspended with the help of a Punta Cana souvenir magnet. It was a picture of them on their wedding day, although it could be argued that it wasn’t a picture of them at all.

The photographer, my uncle, was roaring drunk at the reception. The walls of the venue were all mirrors. With the help of gin, my uncle realized that it would be better to capture reflections of people than to photograph them.

“People don’t look in mirrors, they see themselves in them.” he’d say, trying to justify the over 200 pictures that were mostly of a flash bouncing off the mirror; blinding the entire photo.

Pretentiousness aside, through the random, constructed chaos of the universe, he immortalized a moment: the fridge photo. The picture caught the reflection of my father kneeling on both legs and holding my mother’s hands. My mother, on her feet, turning her head away, as if to conceal laughter or embarrassment. Neither of my parents could recall the context of the photo– what they were talking about, thinking, let alone doing.

One too many times, I would take the photo and stare at it until I thought it gave me an answer. Dizzying myself, I would try to determine the intentions in the lines that carved my mother’s smile. I’d trace the direction of my father’s eyes, deciding whether he was looking at her or to her.

I was more drawn to their disposition than their youth or the evidence that they had their own lives before I was ever born.

One day, after examining the photo for some time, I went up to my mother and asked: “Why do people get married?”

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As if she had answered this several times before she said: “Because they love each other,” she said. “And they want to share that love forever.”

Inevitably, the answer was followed up with another question on my behalf: “Why do people love each other?”

She paused for a few seconds, trying to formulate an age appropriate response that would also put an end to the interrogation.

“Because love makes people happy, and happy means not being sad, and no one wants to be sad.” *** Your first marriage was worse than my second, but your second wedding was worse than your first.

There’s nothing wrong with getting married more than once. But tying the knot six months after your ex-husband died, well that’s just what the kids call…insensitive.

To be fair though, he died after you got divorced. So technically, you’re not a widow.

Death is the winter of life. You know it’s supposed to come, but nonetheless you’re taken aback when it comes. But there’s something about kissing death so young that stains a certain remorse on the inner walls of ourselves. What fit 20-something dies of a heart attack? Your ex, that’s who.

The real tragedy about dying at 25 is that nobody stops talking about it.

When old people die it’s different. When you were seven, your grandmother was dying of cancer. In the hospital you would be driven mad by the heart monitor, hearing each beep gave me the same anxiety as the pacer test in gym class. The panic of not knowing whether or not you’d cross the finish line before the next break in silence. It was the same feeling whenever you’d wonder if her soul would reach the EKG in 50 | Perception

time for the next “beep.” Her death though, was breathing in cold air.

Like a scratch in your throat, but God, what a relief.

It’s hard to wash off someone’s existence after they’re gone. Their mail keeps coming in, and people keep telling you about this better place they’re in. If that’s true, then frankly, what’s the tragedy?

That night you could hear the whispers of the crowd bouncing off the walls like shadows, your name berated around in conversation.

You know what they’re thinking: “How can she move on so fast, and why is she wearing a pant suit to her wedding?”

You thought wearing pants to your second wedding was a good idea until it came time for the dance. You figured if people were still talking about it by now you had to be respectful, so you wore pants. You also didn’t want to make another slow entrance down the aisle, this was a rerun after all. A pant suit said: festive but serious.

But this was something my pants couldn’t make go by quicker. Slow dances are slow. Like death, romance is built on anticipation. You wait three days before you call, ten seconds before you lean in, and one week before you marry him.

He was a doctor in New York, and your brother-in-law showed him a picture of you one night. The one in the black one-piece bathing suit by the stream near your dad’s ranch. On the phone he said he couldn’t stop thinking about it.

You’d seen only one photo of him. He seemed practical. He caught a flight to the Dominican Republic four days later. He " to you a week after that. You’re not sure why you said yes, but you’re not sure if saying no would’ve been any better.

“You look like Christmas morning,” he whispers in my ear.

Original.

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“I’ve never heard that one before,” You replied softly.

Giving you compliments is like trying to put a wrinkly dollar in a vending machine. Frustrating and awkward for everyone. You’re still learning how to say thank you. For now it’s something like: ‘I know what you mean’ or ‘I think you’ve had too much to drink’. It’s a work in progress.

“I think your brother is drunk, maybe someone else should take over,” he said.

“Maybe his drunk eye has a vision” You said.

“Do you love me?”

You paused. You think. You’re unsure.

“I don’t know, but we’re here anyways” He gets down on his knees.

“If you don’t love me know, can I ask you something. Will you love me one day?”

You smile, his naivety almost makes you swoon.

“I will.”

Love is a secondhand emotion. Often, it’s rooted in fear. We fear dying alone so we believe in God, and we fear living alone, so we say I do.

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Esucarys Austin Cheng 2016-12-7 原曲 後來 原唱 張敬軒 原作 玉城千春 原詞 施人誠 Original Song: “Afterwards” (hou lai) by Hins Cheung Song by Chiharu Tamashiro@Kiroro Original lyrics by Derek Shih https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltKjky6ZmmI Meanwhile, I have collected six Esucarys I should leave, but I don't know, what I want to be Tell me, receiving all the courtesies Later on, I will meet you in the sea Let it snow, let it blow It’s not as cold as it’s used to be Walking up, layers of white I collected, my last Esucary By the duck pond, by the shores Orange all the way Everywhere are Esucarys You would pick one as I did And look into my eyes Before it, melts like a bleu cheese Brick and brick, stone and stone Silence witnessed old prosperities The waterway has stopped, no longer flows Dusty traces cover Esucarys Linger here | 53

Up the mountain, on the hill Branches link us all Be together, be a body One day on the same green quad We look up at the sky Full of stars, still know to party Is it one last chance to meet?

Will it be one last chance to see?

What’s used to be Will soon be changed except Esucarys Meanwhile, I have collected six Esucarys I should leave, but I don't know, what I want to be Tell me, receiving all the courtesies Later on, I will meet you in the sea Is it one last chance to see?

Will there be chances we could meet?

We all know well There is no landscape like Esucarys Lastly, I have collected six Esucarys I should leave, but I don't know, what I want to be Tell me, receiving all the courtesies Later on, I will catch you in the sea Truly, I thank you for all the Esucarys Gotta leave, but I’m so sure, what I need to be Tell me, we’ll save the world with courtesies Let me know, we will catch up in the sea Mapped out language of you and me We will save the world, with our Esucarys 2016-12-12 54 | Perception

Epilogue It didn’t take me much time to write these lyrics, neither did I amend any words of it afterwards. It started off with that kind-of-random word “Esucarys”, which I didn’t even have any meaning for it initially, and the chorus that came in just within like five minutes. I hope someone would soon find out about it’s real symbolism through the spelling.

As I was writing, I basically just let it flow, with that outline and ambiguity that emerged along my broken English. But I intended to leave them there as they were. Every line here I had the imagery in my mind, along with my mixed feeling. This lyrics, hopefully, sums up these three years in this city. In other words, this could be seen as a love letter to everything I did, and everyone I met here. If you know me well enough you could literally find reference to places and activities on every line.

The entity of this lyrics might not make a lot of senses, but who cares.

You feel it, and you know what I mean.

Happy graduation.

2016-12-16

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Falling Up

Charlotte Balough I don’t have the words on my fingers anymore but they used to be there, dozens of them, and they’d just fall out onto the keys like music but in reverse and I could sit back and watch as the keys unlocked doors and the music filled rooms and there was magic there.

Believe me, there was.

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Farewell

Chase Lenahan

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The House Always Wins Brian Hamlin

Grant Muir had about eight feet for par. It really wasn't much to think about, but he thought about every inch of it, each blade, the sun and where it stood, the shadows evading his line and the figures that casted their growing shapes. Grant had spent the better half of two minutes hunched over the thing, his ungloved hands, balmy, but steady on his grip as he bit and twirled the rubber.

Eight feet.

Grant took a lap around the cup one final time. He produced a green and gold poker chip from his pleated khaki shorts and laid it gently behind a Titleist 4. From his crouch he could make out the chalked threshold eight feet from him, seeing the back of the hole beyond the ball- his gaze demanded he notice the white rim.

Rising from his squat, and making one last read a few feet further behind his original stance, the cup beckoned him. He was almost afraid of what this one could mean, as his toes curled and dug at the sand in his shoes and felt his spikes ginger atop the turf grass. He was weightless above the little white ball with black cursive writing.

It’s only that far, Grant thought. You've made this one 100 times. It’s only eight feet.

He crept slowly towards the ball, his hands still sturdy on the handle, nerves tingling up, up, out of his chest and down, down both of his arms.

But there’s money on this one, Grant’s naivety cried from within. Grant made decent money caddying at the club, but an extra $40 on Monday night was enough for a tank of gas, a pack of Camel Blues, a coke, and then some. More than anything, and what really mattered, was the pride on the other side of these eight feet. All three shadows in the wings would surely cheer him if he made par here, two of them his friends and one his paid partner. As hot and nervous as Grant was, his veins were like ice, chilled by the evening breeze in the late August sun.

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Grant picked the chip from the putting surface and buried it in his right pocket. He barely noticed the rustle of the tees or the stick of the bunker sand on his moist right palm. He approached the putt on his toes with soft but swift feet, twirling the hammer in his right hand like a veteran blacksmith.

Someone on the front said this could be the last of the summer, as soon they'd be hit with the assured swarm of late summer rain showers and corporate shotguns at the club. On the other end of the month was school and snow, and only the occasional round with temporary pins.

Tot the Bookie watched as Grant paced and plodded around the meager eight feet. To him it looked weak, all this squirm and struggle for a putt that might cost Grant $37 tops. Tot had seen this putt a hundred and fifty times on the 18th green, and had seen it for much more than the price of an upper decker during a home stand at PNC Park. Tot had been up here every Monday night since he was 15, and had little patience for such small scruples. He hit Rivers Casino after every loop around the course, and the guys at the garage still claim that “Tot’s never not come outta the month in the black. One way or the other, sure as the rooster crows, Tommy O’Toole always wins.”

Tot was first to toss bills on a round and always eager to press, even on the front 9. Tot and Grant were next to foils, the former a ruffian, a swashbuckler, a scalawag on the links, the latter a purist and a stickler for the rules. But, tonight Tot had flipped a tee towards Grant, and voila, they were bonded in a 4-Man nassau with Steve Kowalski and David Rice.

There they were on the last green, all square with one putt for the road.

Tot was always for the money, but something about Grant’s subtle, practice nuances reminded Tot of a time when golf was about more than just hustle. Tonight he wanted Grant Muir to show him something-- Tot was gritty but Grant had a toughness, a resolve beyond that of physical swings. Resolve and toughness can make much out of a man, but to Tot the Bookie it meant money and lots of it. He wanted Grant Muir to subscribe to the Tommy O’Toole school of golf-- chaws, darts, presses, and gimmies from 4 feet.

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And hustle. Tot had all kinds of hustle.

Behind the ball now, Grant looked back at Tot. Tot looked forward at the hole.

“Back-a-da-cup. One for the money,” Tot said with a nod and a smirk.

And for a split second, Grant smirked the same smirk, and he thought about the drive home with Steve Kowalski and how funny it would be when Steve delivered the forty bones from his brown leather wallet. He thought about the two crisp $20’s and how empty Steve’s wallet would be when he stopped for gas at Jack’s Gas for his post-game Snickers. But he wore Tot’s smirk nonetheless.

Grant thought about all of this as he brought back the flat-stick, a smooth pendulum stroke like a grandfather clock. His face and lips were firm and his arms were like stone, the one piece motion just his poppop taught him. He always kept the ball below his left eye, and his lids always stayed peeled on that exact spot until he heard the ball say “yes” or “no.” He was careful not to notice too much of the final destination before he struck the thing. He dragged the mallet forward, leading hard with his left hand, wrists and palms firm against the black rubber. The No. 4 came off the clubface with a wonderfully thorough thud. It rolled smooth like a car does in cruise, as if a grooved track existed below the turf, guiding it gently towards fateful white finality at the end of the eight feet.

Steve watched from a distance, hands quiet at his sides, next to his partner, David Rice. Rice the Youngster was nervously gnawing at his yellowed golf glove. David Rice didn’t have $40 from caddying but he had hundreds from home. He was here for pride and pride alone, and losing another one to Grant would sting. So on the glove he kept on chewing, the ball now halfway there. Uphill, with pace. If he missed it, it’d be 6 feet passed.

Grant held the finish and kept his head down listening for the ball’s settling at the bottom of the hard white shell, the rattle of plastics, that constituted a cold-cash victory three inches below the earth’s surface.

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Grant hunched and waited for the sound of a good par, but instead he heard Tot in all his glory, boasting omniscience to the now heartbroken Steve Kowalski.

“I told ya he’d sink it!” Tot exclaimed in the cool summer evening. Grant dropped the putter and double pistoled towards Kowalski. Steve winced at Grant’s obsession. In a half second loyalties switched to royalties, and Tot the Bookie had another notch in his belt.

Grant had made a four for par, and a brutal new friend.

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Whiplash

Rachel Saunders If you don’t pay attention to her she’ll slip Through your fingertips Like sand She enrages Mystifies Amazes and Terrifies She is whiplash.

And just when I think I can’t take any more…

She smiles

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In the Kingdom of the Sea Ibrahim Alfawaz

I, of the Pelicans of the sea Which flew over continents to find our prey Crossed gashed lakebeds And bled ourselves for our children to be Ask you, O queen of the raging sea Too lustful for a goddess Too negligent for a fiend Keep the waters calm For I know you draw tides with the rattle of your jewels Lay still like a Klimt painting Let your eyelids embrace In the peace of the sea breeze Asleep, there she lays, the queen of the sea The fish, trapped under us Burdened by the paralyzed stream Cursed their merciless queen Then surrendered to our beaks Satisfied with our glorious day We turn to the queen of the sea O our merciful queen Grant us the joy of serving you Amid our chants we heard the chirping of seagulls Paranoid we screamed, O our queen A rattle is what we ask for, the rage of waters Our children whom we fed our blood Look at them, they are dead Motionless, the queen opened her eyes, Gazing a somber gaze O you migrant beasts, she said No creature is immortal In the kingdom of the sea Linger here | 63

Women in White Amanda Elizabeth Gibbs

Although the house looks the same, it does not feel like mine. Its frame in the early morning is almost impossible to see, and only the light of one street lamp allows my eyes to fixate on the peeling paint of the door, and the shut windows of the second floor. It is hard to recall the memory of us painting the front door, but I know that we did, around three months ago, and that it was a happy day. I remember myself laughing and playfully wiping excess droplets of paint on her, and I remember her smiling up at me because I had never been a painter.

The bittersweet, recent memories seem distant, however, and I find them hard to believe. This is our my house, sitting in front of me, on the right corner of a very long, winding street, but it does not feel like my home.

I turn away, angling my body away from our the darkened home and follow the white lines of the street to find myself in a place other than this one. My gaze focuses on the steady, solid white line underneath my feet, and I can feel my eyes ache with fatigue. I pull the length of her my coat tighter towards my chest and exhale deeply into the frosty, early morning air. Although walking is the only thing I have been doing for quite a while now, my aching feet insist on continuing, and I do not hesitate.

I wait until the sign displays a fading green, and cross the empty street. Glancing down, I recognize my hands shaking; the ring on my left hand turning cool against my skin. Second finger from the left. The stone placed in the center of the ring is onyx, and it reminds me of her eyes—the stark boldness of them—although it really should not.

There is no one outside—no one at all—and this reality is bitterly cold. A few lit store signs illuminate my path, and I follow the cement sidewalk for what seems like hours.

My breathing is still obviously faltered, but I do not believe that the harsh, cold air is to blame. It is the angry push and pull of my thoughts 64 | Perception

bouncing off of the inside of my skull. They are bitter, vicious voices that insist on imminent failure. The wicked tone of my thoughts urges me to walk faster through the streets, harder against the pavement. My head is sore, and the sharp wind nipping at my face ignites a stronger rush to my head.

I exhale a deep, heavy sigh as my feet push off the cold sidewalk, and let my thoughts race.

— I pay the cashier exactly three dollars and twenty-three cents for my cup of green tea, and when I finally sit down—in our my favorite seat by the back window—I bring it softly to my frostbitten lips. Ringlets of steam dissipate over my cup, and I watch them swirl in the warm cafe air as I exhale. The tea tastes warm and inviting, and for a moment, I almost forget her that I am sitting with the only company I have had in three days: this old, cafe chair.

The clock on the painted cafe wall reads 4:23 AM, and it reminds me of the last time I slept soundly with her, three days ago.

I glance at her the name tattooed in cursive on my forearm, blinking at it absently for a few moments, before I regretfully look away, my thoughts shaming my persistent attempts to find any trace of her left in my memories from before three days ago.

It has been three days, but that is four-thousand, three hundred, and twenty minutes that I have lost in bitter silence. I have spent the last three days attempting to erase eight years, two months, and three days of my life, and I have gotten nowhere. I am walking in long, blurred circles, and they invite me to stay.

I pull my sleeve down, and cover the name whose owner I have irrevocably memorized for eight years, two months, and three days. I clear my throat, and hope the trembling of my hand is not noticeable to the cashier who has noticeably begun to worry about my daily solitude.

She glances up from the register, folding twenty dollar bills into piles as she squints at me, watching me stir my dying tea. Worry lines form on Linger here | 65

her forehead, and I muster a simple, orchestrated smile to relieve her worry, as my thumb traces the side of my cup. She smiles in response, pleased, and shuts the door to the register. I watch as she walks to the classic, vintage record player in an abandoned corner of the cafe and starts an old record. The music starts, and I recognize our song the tune immediately. I hum along, and I know that no one will hear me, but it is the most I have spoken in three days.

The song closes with two simple notes, and I find myself silently asking for the next. I have not heard her voice music in three days. The cold, emptiness of my current apartment allows for a quiet, thoughtprovoking three days. Three days surrounded by white ceilings and empty walls and cold floors and I desperately fear the length that these three days may span into. And this tiny, rundown, empty apartment that has exactly one fridge, one bathroom, and one bed, lying directly in the middle of the living room floor. I cringe at the bitter memory of my current home and a hollow aching forms in my chest, as I miss her my old home. I press my lips to the cup of tea once again, hoping to cool the bitterness of my thoughts. I hope for another song to aid in this, but the cashier seems preoccupied with her table shifts.

I glance at the clock: 5:23 AM. It is 5:23 AM and I am approximately alone. I am not alone, not really, because of the nearby cashier of course, and the few customers in the front of the cafe, and the lady on the radio, but I feel otherwise. My thoughts seem to tangle now, and suddenly the too familiar, badly painted table and the cold tea and the empty cafe seem horribly out of place to me. I cannot decipher my bad thoughts from the good ones and the realization of this deterioration dawns on me quickly and abruptly.

Swiftly, I grab her my coat, and walk into the streets of New York. It is later morning now, around five-thirty, and the streets are busily filled, and it is in their entire capacity that makes me feel endlessly hollow: just tunnels and tunnels of thoughts. — Four miles, perhaps. Certainly not five. I walked around four miles after dashing out of the cafe. There was nothing for me back at the apartment, but 66 | Perception

an empty bed and cold, tile floors, and so it was within the streets, I stayed.

It is close to seven now, with the sun growing along the skyline, and I can feel a light heat on the top of my forehead. I run my fingers through my hair and smile into the embrace of the sun. It has taken me eight-thousand steps to brush away the rubble in my head, and now, I know where I was heading.

But I so vividly remember that around mile three, I thought of when she and I first met, when I was fifteen and she was sixteen. I thought of how she looked, and where we were, and did I know that that day would change my life? Something I had read long before popped into my mind then, a nostalgic memory of the way I felt running around the summer I met her, sunlight in her eyes and stars in mine: It is sheer good fortune to miss somebody long before they leave you. And, it is true, I think. I always missed her, but not in the way that hurts.

And when my eyes first landed on her, I remember shaking my head and smiling this crazy smile, because she was the tallest girl I had ever seen and my god, I was only fifteen, I had never seen eyes that deeply brown before. I never saw her coming, and perhaps, she did not see me either, and maybe that is why today I am still wondering how this all came to be.

I slowly approach my destination with tired, careful steps and a weary heart. I enter the quiet, picturesque bookstore and the tiny bell above the glass door rings as I walk inside. I pull the door closed, locking out the cold air, and inhale. The scent of books has always been my favorite, and it is books alone that have allowed three days to pass as quickly as possible for my unsteady mind. I follow shelves and counters and boxes of books all the way back to the third shelf on the right against the far back wall, where there are no windows, and surely no people. I meet with the sign that reads POETRY, and allow myself to be immersed.

I spend maybe two, probably five, hours leaning against a faulty bookcase in the corner of this bookstore. I find all my favorites— Emerson, Dickinson, Whitman—and perform the words out loud for an Linger here | 67

audience of none. I find that poetry indefinitely ceases the push and pull of my intertwined thoughts, and so with poetry in hand, I exhale.

I know that my decision lies somewhere in these books, and in these lines, and I can read for days and hours and minutes because this feels like my last hope.

I fold my legs across the floor and reach for the third shelf from the top—Pablo Neruda. I move my hands through the pages, and melt into the binding of the book. I read through one, two, three poems, and this is the closest I have found myself to her in three days. I easily find her myself in between the lines of Pablo Neruda and I recognize eight years, two months, and three days in the script of his thoughts.

I slowly take in his words and feel them explain my crooked thoughts concerning her in every way imaginable. I read: “...you came to my life with what you were bringing, made of light and bread and shadow I expected you, and like this I need you, like this I love you,” and I think of the first time we spoke.

It was in a library, and it was close to dusk, and I had never felt more alive and free in all those fifteen years of my existence. Maybe it was naive and foolish to think so, but there was no doubt that I would not stop seeing galaxies in her eyes anytime soon, and eight years, two months, and three days later, I can say that I still agree. I remember the dress she was wearing, and I can distinctly picture how tall she stood in front of me, seventy-two inches versus a mere sixty-nine inches, and how it seemed that I had forgotten how to stop smiling.

Turning the page, I quickly regain my presence of mind, and blink away the nostalgic memories. I read another line: “...I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair. Silent and starving, I prowl through the streets. Bread does not nourish me, dawn disrupts me, all day I hunt for the liquid measure of your steps.” I know that this is both true and indefinite, and that there is no measure of time that could erase this.

I close the old poetry book, and hug its frame to my chest, exasperated. I lean my head back against the wooden shelf behind me, and let my thoughts compete, because I already know which will win.

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Today is Wednesday, and three days ago, it was Sunday, and I do not know how my judgment dissipated since then, nor do I understand how I managed to find it once again. I do not know if eight years, two months, and three days has the capability to turn into a lifetime; I do not know if the broken-down, shattered skull I have left can conquer what this is.

And I do not know what tomorrow will be like—I may be at the cafe, on a bike in the Carolinas, or maybe I will be here, turning pages against old wooden shelves. Either way, what I do know is that I will never want to stop counting stars, and that Pablo Neruda knows this, and that he discovered it before I did.

— “Heather?” I speak so quietly, I am not sure that she will know to respond.

A pause. “Yeah?”

“Okay.”

“Okay?”

I nod my head silently, and begin.

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43°55N/ 76°7W Natalli Amato

You knew me in a pickup truck before the rust got at the floor and it was sent to the junkyard to become a forgotten thing, when the back roads were still gravel and our grandpas insisted on filling the potholes in themselves.

I knew you as the master of the screen-door sneak-out before your mom replaced the word cottage with Lake House and the cracks in the foundation could be put off for another summer.

We knew each other in between sunset and sunrise, where we picked off our innocence like blistering, itching scabs.

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I’ve stopped reading the news Hannah Griffin

I’ve stopped reading the news because nothing about it feels new anymore Atwood, Huxley, Orwell I’ve read it all before.

I’ve stopped reading the news because it keeps me up at night between 2.30 and 4, I’m stuck on stories of hatred I cannot fight.

I’ve stopped reading the news because I can no longer decipher the truth and if I do find it, is it really any use?

I’ve stopped reading the news. because I don’t know why what if everyone stops?

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6:14 am, Saturday Mourning Kathryn Cassidy

Ode to the Mountain fog adorns her body a Heavenly shawl draped around her shoulders clouding her from the Dark, safe from the Cold Night.

And when it rains careless glances through the window feel BitterSweet to her.

Her sloped figure leans to the side, worn down by the years Quietly Possessing her Place on this Earth.

She awakens with the Sun 6:14 am, Saturday Morning.

Light gently streams in, nudging her awake.

6:14 am – she appears again, Reunited with the day.

She had been admired, even Loved by some.

-

But now it rains.

And when she is touched, she is touched by a fog. she feels empty. she stands alone.

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k.e.c.

Untitled

Kathryn Cassidy

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Conscious

Laurie Thompson Tipsy pink walls harbor delusions of solitude.

Vodka lines her esophagus and the cracked windowpanes.

She’s surrounded by isolated bodies that rock against one another in sickening motion.

There's nothing like the creeping mood as she feels raw electricity bite against her brains, and the seductive urge to slither out the window with the cigarette smoke.

Up at the ceiling she imagines a speck some stranger may have stared at, but it’s hardly consoling.

She sees faces but no recognition.

Under her eyelids, she can breathe slowly And exist peacefully as the music fades and her heart pumps loud. It’s only for a moment.

Consciousness seems to float in the stifled room, never-ever-landing.

Voices crawl and bodies whisper but I remain and calmly blur.

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Nittika Mehra

A State of Mind

Untitled

Samantha Guttadauria

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Hues of Blue Henna Kulaly

There it is— the color blue and all its hues. It has always been my favorite color growing up. It was always around. My father’s work uniform was a navy blue. It fit him, although he would try to deny it.

My mother agreed with me. She was always struggling with the blue that belonged to her. She wanted to share it. When I was 20 she bought us matching cobalt blue purses. I took it, but I knew it wasn’t mine. My little sister thought nothing of the color. I hoped she would stay that way. No need for a young girl to entangle herself with the hues of blue.

Right before 21, I decided to look for my hue. It was 2:13 on a Thursday. I sat quietly on a spinning chair at the salon. Hours passed, and I sat still, unable to see or speak. When the clock ticked past 8:36 I knew the hue was there. Visible, vibrant in its own way. The hairdresser swiveled me around and there it was. My hue of blue. It was subtle, blending into the dark. In the light it held hints of grey ashy-ness. It suited me. I had my hue.

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i can’t write love poems, but this is for you.

Linnea Nordgren

And air is clear and green. It is, except for when it is red cold breathing into your sinuses, creeping into your skull to squeeze the last bit of the Atlantic Ocean out of your brain. And it doesn’t have body, it doesn’t have anything, but you still see it when it leaves your face.

And did you tell your mother about them – about the leaves? God, if she could see peak season in the Finger Lakes region she would know – by the magnitude of colors and the richness of the cooling and also the odd harmony with which everything is happening – how much you love me (and why I can’t get married in a Catholic church).

And well, I would right now – I would marry you with coffee rings from an old wooden table, with bouquets of rosemary and sage and giant sprigs of dill, with red wine and no gown and a veil of frost – by the moon and the lake and the popcorn kernels stuck in your gums, I would do it.

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Fatal Windows Katherine Guerin

Green eyes that sometimes look blue Crystal clear; existing only in this euphoric dream state created by the sweet ecstasy of your presence Nostalgic feeling looking at Places I’ve never been and faces I’ve never seen Cold water rushing down my Cheeks, for my tears no longer contain warmth Hundred thoughts rushing through Here I lie: waiting, dying, living only through those delicate wonders Did you ever really Die—how could you have when I know you so definitely; existing in front of me now I thought we would But I was perverse in the belief, and now I am forgotten— glancing through fatal windows, attempting to make sense If I ever were to die Ebony roses would ravage my remains—shadows beware—the starless midnight has ripened us Because I wonder if Forever is a true place or simply a lie we tell ourselves to overcome the lasting glow of mortality

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By The Time You Read This Cristina Colรณn Feliciano

Every day that passes Is a day that I'm closer to you Advancing towards my goal Of holding you in my arms For as long as you'll let me Every minute that I spend away from your Eyes on me as I recount the tale Of my day on the quad with People I knew during the summer Who I fell in love with but no Longer Will I be enthralled by your Voice and the words you utter By the time we reach the end Of our sweetly-juvenile poem About how I count the seconds Until I reach sixty-one because That is when we became one One day ago I didn't know if I Would make it to our meeting Point but I find myself reaching For the bottle in the cupboard Once, twice I dip my thoughts Onto your lap and you Scoop them up like ice cream I'm melting away one drop At a time My watch broke when I kept Passing each day only Imagining myself touching 88 | Perception

The bright end of the sparklers We lit the day our orbits aligned Will you dance with me Even though I can't move my feet To the rhythm of the music Playing from your beautiful mind?

Dip me and I'll fall into your arms For as long as you'll Allow me

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A Forbidden Love Shaina Shannan

They pushed us together told us to become friends And we did But as we grew closer, They could see it And so they tried to stop us Told us we couldn’t be together We obeyed their rules Out of respect But when they couldn’t see, Our love was a forbidden love Laying on the couch Cuddling and watching TV Our fingers were laced together Under a blanket Where no one could see But they told us to sit up.

“Friends don’t cuddle up like that.”

We obeyed their rules Out of respect But when they couldn’t see, Our love was a forbidden love Prom was their idea, “You’d be so cute” So I took you to my prom, Where everyone could see The feelings and the sparks That were flying between us.

But we had to deny it 90 | Perception

We obeyed their rules Out of respect But when they couldn’t see, Our love was a forbidden love Around the corner out of sight Behind a tree in your yard Long and passionate or short and bittersweet We stole kisses when they couldn’t see because we couldn’t let them know We obeyed their rules Out of respect But when they couldn’t see Our love was a forbidden love They put us together Told us to be friends But when we fell in love They pulled us apart Told us to drown our feelings We tried to fight And did for a moment But they’d told us we shouldn’t feel We obeyed their rules Out of respect But then they could see Our love became a nonexistent love.

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oil on water

Farrell Greenwald Brenner truth comes out like oil on water but lies can fool you into thinking they’re sweet, honey and when you boil oil with the purpose of feeding you are engaging in an act of treason fracturing the sacred pact between shame and truth calling on your shut-in neighbors Naomi and Ruth your math teacher may not have mentioned the more uneven laws of algebra to nourish is to kill to burn is to grow I can think of no equation that would make your people’s plight make sense But I can think of no recipe that would justify death

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The Rooster Hannah Griffin

One day Jack brought home two baby chickens.

It seemed a good idea - we could have eggs, and it bode well with our “eat local” Environmental Studies student identities.

I worried about whether they would survive a week in our backyard.

Their journey had been long they looked battered standing in the small make-shift chicken coop Jack had constructed.

They survived.

And one day we woke to see the bigger one perched in the tree by the clothes line.

It began to call. A roosters call.

He had to go.

We researched the best ways to kill a chicken, I can’t remember what we concluded.

We each liked the idea of doing it. With our own hands.

Like it somehow would let us face all the death in the world, to come to terms with its inevitability.

There were six of us living in that big old house on Raroa road Three women and three men.

None of us could do it.

So I asked you to.

I don’t even know what method you used, but you did it. Unflinchingly.

I admired you for that, how you were not afraid of blood. of death. of life.

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Sertraline Elyssa Thomas

Put the pill in your mouth.

It was blue, then white, now it’s purple, You’ve buried them all in your stomach A slight resemblance to the food you aren’t supposed to stress eat.

You always stress eat.

Take it with water, take it with milk Take it with nothing and gag on the chalky taste Or maybe you’re gagging on the idea of Erasing your feelings with 25 milligrams.

The doc tells you it’ll numb you out, This one will give you seizures if you drink, Good thing you don’t drink.

This one will make you yawn, That’s the best side effect you’ve seen yet.

This one will probably make you anxious before you get better.

What motherfucker came up with that?

Bury it all, down the hatch.

If you don’t find a way to swallow it down The depression swallows you up.

Maybe you like the idea of being swallowed up, You forget what it’s like to be crazy.

You haven’t looked up the side effects to an overdose.

You wonder if it’ll kill you or your kidneys Or the boy that’s praying you’ll be okay.

There are plenty of boys praying you’ll be okay.

Bury them too.

Cover all of the good in your life with a pill that erases the bad.

Erase the bad too.

The purple pills stop working, Next you try yellow, This one keeps you up at night.

You can have vivid dreams with your eyes open, Dreams of a life that’s fair And an open hole with room for you and all your vices.

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On the Account of Love Alice Chen

On the account of love, we try and watch as many videos as we can to get a hold of love, to try and understand the complex emotion. They tell us that dopamine is in charge of it all and if a guy texts you first, that is love. I find myself looking at my phone to test this out but the results vary. I pick up romance novels and weigh them in my hand, joining in adventures about princesses and warriors fighting for their lovers. I look at myself, holding up my weak legs and flimsy arms and wonder if I am a hero to someone. I talk to strangers on the street, my best friends and my mother but they all give me the sly smile and whisper, “You’ll just know. Be patient. I know you’ll find that someone.” I nod and smile while fiddling my fingers. I tell myself to be patient, but I can’t help but gaze upon everyone and wonder if my fingers will slip in between theirs.

I click through Thought Catalog articles in hope that someone out there sympathizes with me and somehow I find a secret manual on what to do next. Unfortunately, that’s never the case. I even attended the last psychology lecture that ends at 8pm about love. What I got was 15 extra credit points, an attempt to conceptualize it (scientists don’t even know how to) and I check my messages and breeze through my memories in an attempt to nail the peg into the hole. On the account of love, I can say for sure that we desperately need it.

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Capacitance Lauren Hannah

Most of myself and my thoughts Are stimulated through copper wires.

That are grounded to the spaces around me The current flows through my limbs and to my brain And back down to my hands.

I am a resistor soldered into a circuit by all ten fingertips As they slide across my glass screens And the rain soaked sidewalks outside are the ionic strands That carry me home to the motherboard My eyes are high resolution monitors; flashing lenses are my eyes, I am spinning with the gears that infect me, Elastic; insulated Thinking, processing, but not quite – Encrusted with lights and sounds Infused with invisible voltage Charged to my maximum potential Indoctrinated in a network of wavelengths Who intersect in my organs and channel through my nerves.

I am a peg – one single resistor with two wire-feet attached to the green plate, Just one Ohm in a sea of millions.

I am a body electric, wired shut, mechanically enclosed Brain and body in a state of indefinite capacitance, Digitally instructed, externally programmed, Vibrating, perhaps even magnetically inclined – And fully accounted for in every movement In all the abstract spaces I may occupy.

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Pieces

Zoe Karikas Linger here | 97

War

Mel Wherry

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"Hope"

Matthew Marcott I am Nazi killing civilian folk; I am Stalin preying on people’s hope; I am Jew of yore whose breath I took; The poorness of Man To never be sold— But richness of soul.

I do hold hope.

I am creme brûlée to famine’d mouth; I am Big Man's tool to Slave the South; I am Hand of God whose touch so cold!; The greatness of Man To never be told— The Maker's song: "O' but fools hold hope!"

But never be sold.

I do hold hope.

I am sinning corpse that hangs so high; I am indifferent soul that walks on by; I am Hitler in flesh and Jew that dies; The evil in sin; And beauty in lies— But so be surprised: I do hold hope.

I am fire’d-cross on dark man's lawn; I am dark man's grit— the rich man’s pawn; I am neighbor peering to open'd lawn; The poor man's struggle; And rich man's cries— Linger here | 99

But: Man’s soul so precious; His soul be so prized, Let the people sing out: “I do hold hope!”

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Unduck Stuff Fern Durand

1.

The other day, my brother said to me, “Be true to yourself.” Friend sparrow, I am. Even though I was the quack Amongst her farrows, the pig took me in. We’d roll around in the mud all day Long, and after my feathers were dirtied, The dog taught me how to clean myself.

I know, it’s strange when I moo, say nay Or sit on the weakest tree branch, however, The pond I was made to swim in, The pond that was made for me to swim, kept dry my webbed feet. My best friend is a turkey.

My Pa was sold for a fee, to help the village survive. What will my love look like?

I hope they’re vegetarians.

2.

The other day, my brother said to me, “Be true to yourself.” But friend rabbit, I am being true to myself. Really, I am.

It’s just; when I quacked, they laughed Because I sound like an ass. When I’d Hunt, they laughed because, they didn’t Understand my craft. I wasn’t the best at Dabbling, nor was I, the best at diving.

I ran away after the fish bit my snout, because I couldn’t stand to the laughs.

But, now that I hop.

Now that I eat carrots.

You say to me no, Look at your jacket, HA! Linger here | 101

3.

When I quacked, they laughed because I sound like an ass. However! I’m Unquestionably smart, smart, smart.

I know how to drive a car. The pedal On the right means go. The pedal on The left is there so I can stop at a red light.

And if I press the gas hard enough!

I can beat the yellow one too.

I’m just a quacky duck.

My tongue-ties.

I feel like everyone else.

Yet, no one Loves, Me. 4.

I’m not duck enough to be dog, Because I don’t bark.

I’m not duck enough to be cat, Because I don’t fart.

I’m not duck enough to be a bat, Because I’m a tart.

I wear shoes inside the house, And play a guitar.

But, I’m a duck, I am, I’m a duck.

I can’t quite quack, but I can practice until it’s perfect.

I know it’s in me. You can’t Tell me I’m not a duck.

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Meow Mooo I love you.

Meow Woof Moo You love me2 Woof, woof Meow, meow I’m hap E now.

Woof, woof Meow, meow Meow, meow.

6.

Hippos make good pets Until they grow up.

You won’t know What to feed them Or how to clean them They can’t fit in The bathtub They can’t fit in The sink So why not Buy a duck.

I’m up for sale.

I clean myself, And I won't eat you.

7.

The signing duck Linger here | 103

Where do I gooooo What should I doooooo Where’s my hoooooooooome I miss youuu.

A duck’s not a duuuuuuuuck Without his lady luuuuuuuuuuck I miss youuuuuuuuu I really dooooooo Hm, hm, hmmmmmmm Hm, hm, hmmmmmmmmmmm Hm, hm, hmmmmmmm Hm, hm, hmmmmmmmmmmm Where’s lady luuuuuuuck. I miss youuuu.

8.

If love be a flower, then it has died a long time ago and when she returns each time, she becomes less pleasing to gaze, yet, all the more tempting to pick!

Without freedom, she drowns herself in shallow ends then returns to the surface for air. She fills up her lungs, then drowns herself again.

I sometimes contemplate, jumping in after my love If I could swim through fire, I’d save her from the golden ball and chain weighing her downward, Underground, Love is a frog.

T’is my mermaid, I almost drowned for.

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Current Self Ecology ZiZi Kalia Barrow

Overwhelmed & tormented Right where I left off but worse but all the opportunities are better let stream of thoughts flow or force it ?... forces are what?

Iron. Water. The forest at sunset.

You’re sorry – I’m indifferent and visa versa I couldn’t narrow down an articulation I feel like such a fake, such a flake.

Materials in place, probably wont make that thing I could write that letter I should would you call me (?)

I don’t grant us a balanced self-worth Art: is(n’t) everything, has not been nothing No, things aren’t questioned much around here, Apparently.

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Layers of the Year Zizi Kalia Barrow

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Initiate Josh Smith

Adrenaline junkie but no one knows visions of fury that never show.

Insanity is an art form, the world is a canvas immobilized in slumber drowning on a mattress.

Reality isn’t real, live for the moment.

Don’t mind the past after given your atonement.

A fractured mind, an impenetrable heart, existing in the same being, yet a world apart.

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The Sand in Wellfleet 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 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 108 | Perception

grizzly bear vs. icy cove Lindsay Murphy

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Boo-Boos John Grout

“Wait for me!” I shout. “I wanna come! I wanna come!”

My dad looks down at me, his bag that he takes to work every day still in hand. “I’m leaving in five minutes. If you’re with me at the door, you can come.”

“Thanks Daddy!” I reply as I bolt over to the entryway. I scan for my shoes. They’re right where I left them. I plop down on the cold, uneven slate tiles. With my five year old coordination, I wrestle with the left first, shoving it on my foot. As I turn to the right shoe, I hear the slow low cadence of my dad walking down the hall to my parent’s bedroom.

With the second shoe on, I fasten them both to my feet. All the cool kids at school have shoes that light up when you walk and that don’t have laces, but rather Velcro straps. Mine only have the Velcro straps, but it was a battle just convincing my mom for that much anyway.

I get up and bolt to the door by the garage. My dad’s not back yet. I’m too excited to just sit, so I spin around and dance in place. After a little bit, I see him turn the corner and walk down the hall, out of his work clothes.

He sees me by the door and asks, “Ready to go?”

“That was only four minutes!”

“Oh well then we can wait another minute…”

“No! Let’s go!”

“Alright,” he grins. We walk into the garage where no cars live.

Instead, it’s still filled with moving boxes from three years prior. Dad goes over to the side door, leash in hand and whistles once. Only once.

Give or take ten seconds later, our golden retriever comes screeching in from the yard. His nails have overgrown and make it so he has trouble gripping on the smooth concrete floor. He’s massive, bigger than me, 110 | Perception

with a fur coat the color of the Golden Gate. My dad kneels down to put on his weathered, blue leash, “Yeah, that’s a good boy, yeah.” With a click on his chain collar, we’re ready to go.

Dad hits a button, raising the garage door and we walk down the driveway past the white Volvo sedan and blue Chevy astro-van then take a left around the block. We have a row of red rose bushes in front of our house. They’re past blooming and preparing for the coming winter rainy season, but still smell just a fragrant and look as vibrant when you walk past them. We continue on, past the neighbors, take a left, up the hill. It’s hard for me to keep pace. So our walk is peppered with my calls of, “Slow down.” When we reach the top I ask if I can walk him. My dad relents. It’s less of me walking the dog than it is him pulling me along.

We’re halfway through the walk when he freezes! Another dog. Outside.

Playing with a ball. My dog is a statue, ears pricked up. Then he breaks into full sprint, my hand still clenched to the leash. I hit the ground with my chin, dragged along the concrete sidewalk. I raise my head to protect it and my weight shifts to my knees. They’re eviscerated. By the time we stop I’m lying on the ground limbs covered with warm blood and bits of rock. Time blinks by. My father carries me in one hand, leash in the other. We double time it back home.

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hymn for the finnish archipelago.

Linnea Nordgren

It always felt like Stävö was golden.

The two yellow summer cottages, the sun never ducking fully below the horizon, the swans and vipers and elk all, somehow, coexisting.

The peeling bark of the birches – gold leaf parchment waiting for the indelible pen of midnight dusk to write fairytales into its fibers.

I was a goddess, or maybe just a witch, and no place woke me the way the archipelago did.

Pappa sang and my mother was the kindest ambassador anyone could imagine. I was always in the woods or scampering up a rock wall or diving for seagrass, and my sister – who was definitely a pagan deity – watched for vipers at my ankles and mosquitoes at my ears. I was a witch for certain.

Nothing is as calm as a sunlit night, and nothing is as wild.

No one is ever surprised by how warm it is in the summer. Everyone danced while Farfar played the accordion, and nobody saw the tear fall from his smiling eyes because everyone was champagne sparkling from the inside out and the bonfire was glowing and the sun was just at eye-level as everyone sang “Helan går.”

The vodka shone gold in all its little cups.

Farmor took Farfar’s hand and kissed him on the head the way she always did.

“Sjung hopp faderallan lej!”

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Right or Up? Henna Kulaly

I opened my eyes to the breeze tickling my nose.

I opened my eyes and saw the world in rosy hues.

I sat up, separating my back from the yellowed grass blades.

Surrounded by souls trapped in heavy bodies breathing out green smoke.

We ashed on a tray exclaiming, “I’d swipe right,” But, would I? Why would I? What would it indicate?

Only the shallow thoughts of someone looking for love in the wrong place thinking, “Maybe if we started somewhere else, it could have meant more” This angered the Romantics.

The slang of Internet dating kept far from their grip, Put it in its petty place.

There is no more falling, They explained, Only the drifting of smoke to the clouds And I wondered to myself “Does smoke talk with the clouds?”

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Frozen

Alena Sceusa

114 | Perception

Rosy exposures Laurie Thompson

Burrowed in the clothing of my skin, I’m afraid to smile.

Heart rate is steady, Skin still porcelain pale.

Chilled.

Cold.

Suddenly—frozen.

A spike of ice is lodged through my ribs and I breathe cautiously.

Blood rushes to my cheeks, and I’m exposed like a firefly in a cave.

My light flickers abnormally and plainly: they can see the icicle like an x-ray of my organs.

Heat rises like an overpowering scent of rose petals, and I’m struck in the face.

They do not care—they can no longer see what I feel.

I pack my icicle into fresh snow, gather up the pink petals littered by my toes, and crawl back into the clothing of my skin with lips pursed into a languid grin.

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A poem about Tim Hannah Griffin

I stole a mint once, or maybe it was twice. From a blind man called Tim. He would sit in his rocking chair and we would dare each other to try to take one of his mints without him noticing. Blind people have good hearing. Tim would always be sitting on that chair, talking to Mum and Dad. I don’t know what about, I was too busy watching the flies scour his legs and toes. Those long chipped toenails. Too busy thinking about how everything on his body seemed to be orange. I couldn’t find a spot on his leg that did not have a freckle on it. what makes a person? tangles of memories entwined in some blurred fashion but even the memories aren’t true we don’t see the world separate from who we are memories fictions created by what makes a person a person have you ever stolen something?

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Not a Love Poem Michelle Rose Golonka

There’s nothing that propels my lunch from me quite like a love poem may.

I cringe at the words “How do I love thee?”

And hurl when he counts the ways.

This form that’s used to run from the end to hide cloaked in a simile from the reaper is also used by a seventeen year old Walt Whitman to proclaim his prom date is a keeper.

So I’m not going to write a poem about love.

I never have and I never will.

I won’t write about how you’re all I think of.

If I did that, I’d self-request a mercy kill.

I definitely won’t write about your eyes.

And how my favorite color’s sporadically switched to hazel.

And if I described how when I walk with you my cynicism dies, I’d have to do so in a voice fraught with farcical nasal.

Your laughter ties the stars together is what I’d write if I had a death wish.

Your voice is a song I’d listen to forever Hey, does this vomit smell like tunafish?

Love poems are Lucifer’s gift to earth.

They all read like designer brand poo.

They strip the days of any and all mirth, but my days are still euphoric ‘cause I have you.

Shit.

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Prints

John Grout Water marks left on the stones just outside a pool during summer. The stones bake and broil, but the image of human feet remains. They live a short life, but they are still a miracle to behold. A trace of the past that persists through the present. Small or large there’s something intimate about them, something personal. Each one is different. A Sharpie that only you can use. They quickly become distorted in the hot afternoon sun. Shrinking by the second until the evanescent trail runs cold and not even the most skilled tracker could pick it up it again. Though should someone migrate to the beach, they would give a path leading all along the shore. An impression this time. Representing not just size but also weight. More massive individuals leaving deep depressions in the sand, while light-foots leave little more than a faint divot.

Tracks tarnishing an otherwise pristine blanket of snow. For humans they become bundled up by boots, but not so for small animals.

Their footprints marked with bare appendages. Look for claws, if you find them, you’ve got wolf. No claw means wildcat, its retractable claws conjuring up a disguise in the footprint. Pretending to be inviting.

Making others think the creator of the tracks to be a fluffy little animal that wouldn’t, nay, couldn’t hurt a fly. But it’s a cleverly crafted ruse.

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Colin Maguire

Comfort Lines

Winter

Mel Wherry 120 | Perception

Poison

Katherine Guerin You wear me like a tattoo you regret an ugly stain on your life a blemish you can’t cover up a scar you can’t forget about

you feel soiled, tainted, tarnishedI broke you.

You loved me and I abandoned you you gave me everything and I took it all Darling you must know I’m psychotic

my beautiful little fool, a bit deranged too, slightly sick everything about me had seduced you

my strange touch

my exotic taste

my unique pleasure

my sweet passion

my mysterious light

my wonderful lust I was wicked, toxic Poison but my flavor was too delicious to deny and so your grasp on reality lessened, you faded into my inescapable gravity of insanity you fell, hard. you developed an insatiable appetite, craving only my love but I let you starve.

I gave you nothing more than my earthly body

my blood was Linger here | 121

spoiled my flesh was putrid I was a rotting corpse.

Deformed from years of self-mutilation riddled with diseased desires

I was consumed by the misery,

swallowed by the torment I devoured all that was pure but you loved me stillyou thought I was beautiful

you knew me that’s why you were my greatest casualty.

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maybe the last time I write you a poem.

Linnea Nordgren My mind reaches out for you like Adam for God on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

It's not a cloying, desperate, choking desire anymore. I am reclined, relaxed in how I think of you.

I have watched you float further and further away. Every time I do not ask you out for coffee, I slip deeper into the ground in your head.

I will not be the memory for which you dirty your hands, but I will live in fertile soil. You, who gathers dead leaves to line your walls and understands how far away stars are, have made a garden inside you. You will not pull me out of the ground, but I will push flowers up when they struggle to grow. I will kiss their roots and you may not know I am doing it, but you will pause when you see them.

Each flower a memory like fog – a blonde head, sheets of paper, a vague but overwhelming sense of sadness. I picture you placing a teacup in my hands, cupping Linger here | 123

yours around mine.

I walk by a Dali painting in a gallery in London and I write a poem about you.

Nights when I am too drunk to tell the bartender it was a vodka soda, not vodka Sprite, I will whisper to any passing ear how queer I am and I will hope that one of them will be yours.

I always hope I will tell my parents too, but – well, it’s a nice thought anyway.

You became a central force in the forest in my head space.

You found your way in on the back of a snake and found in me a sapling struggling to survive in the shade of the trunks surrounding it.

I watched you climb inside the sapling and saw you breathing life into it – you worked miracles to help it grow.

Even after you left this tree grew and I think I will always see you in its boughs.

I work in your garden and I try to grow a rubber tree so maybe you will remember.

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Something lives between the fingers of Adam and God. Something lives between us, and maybe for you it will always sleep. But for me it wakes daily.

You woke me. You woke me, and I have not been the same.

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A Divulgement Ibrahim Alfawaz

Before you, I was a limping old man Tunnel visioned by the sight of his home’s threshold Excruciated by the thought of distance Haunted by the idea of giving up And Before your alluring lips That hymn of art by your snug voice Which carry the fruits of your voluptuous mind I was born a new man, gifted with a tree’s vision Indoctrinated the principles of mindfulness You rang the explorer’s bell in my head And I, guided by the aura of life around you Accepted your call And went back, and wrote you a poem.

126 | Perception

Mannequin Me Lauren Hannah

All splayed out and vulnerable Ready for her sexual vivisection With her mechanical motions and plastic moans The feminine spectacle insults me When I see my own body, I am forced to see That Mattel mannequin, lush array of things to be grabbed To be dressed up, painted, and abused for the faceless voyeurStep right up, come in and see!

Fresh caught game straight from the forest of Neverland!

The illicit, humiliated, writhing, exposed like never before!

Come right in and join the audience, All eyes on the spread-eagled exotic doll!

I am the porn star and she is me.

Dead eyed and empty faced, Almost-anonymous receptacle for depravity Upholstery adorned with bumps and curves Recorded, modified, torn up and re-stitched And then sent off into the cold with a fistful of cashMaybe enough to last a week.

It’s no wonder I don’t want to see myself nude I look just like that penis-poke voodoo doll From Brazzers or Bangbros or whatever people pay for.

It’s no wonder I feel like a short circuit As I am assaulted by my own image.

Sometimes when I feel too much resistance, When it feels like I’m falling apart, I can’t imagine a higher purpose for myself And my white girl body, Than pornography.

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This One’s for the JAP’s Farrell Greenwald Brenner

This one’s for the JAP’s and their chainmail mascara may their sneers cut through crowds like sabers we often forget that pink is the color of meat after it’s been cooked or that existence outside of men’s heads is a vast space and no, you can’t use that word This one’s for the girls with nose jobs who are still trying on fuck you! for size This one’s for the loud girls, the pushy girls for every apology they’ll never hear This one’s for the hairy girls adorned in a charcoal kudzu rich in tenacity and flavor and for the girls who love other girls and for the girls who love themselves This one’s for the concrete hard girls The polyester depressed girls The angry and bitter blister girls This one’s for the unblessed girls The embarrassed girls The best guess girls and the restless mess girls This is for the girl who can’t spell conscience or accommodate no matter how many times she tries, who has resigned herself to perpetual 80’s on her vocabulary quizzes This one’s for all of the above and for every scantron too narrow to hold all of her

128 | Perception

The Testimony of my Reading Glasses Katherine Guerin

Take me away with you put me on and go for an adventure letter turn into words, words into lines, lines into pages, pages into novels, each one filled with new places, new people murder mysteries romantic love stories homoerotic gothics poetic depressions fictitious realms how beautifully we read each genre together we are transportedyou use me to see I use you to feel each of us making up for what the other lacksas we read these fantastical stories I cannot help but wonder, What is our story?

What are we made up of?

Do we tell lies like a fiction Do we solicit suspense like a thriller Do we spill out our emotions like a love story Do we bleed passion like a forbidden romance Tell me I need you to tell me Tell me!

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You are firm I am fragile you are flesh I am fabricated you bounce back I break So tell me now who are we and what is our story my darling- you answer- we are what we are. I cannot give you the answer you desire. We read of worlds above worlds, love overcoming tragedy, dragons breathing fire, hearts broken by death, girls in love with girls, harsh truths of forbidden seductions. These are our stories.

Who says we need a story of our own when we can pick any one we want and together get lost in it. We could call any story our own.

Looking into your eyes I believe you, so let’s go, take me away with you put me on and let’s go for an adventure page by page we will discover our story together

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Blue

Mel Wherry

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Oasis

José Sánchez

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Privacy Alice Chen

What you are about to read is private – from the inner folds of my mind to the desires of the flesh. I warn you to proceed with caution, but don’t think of me any differently. From wishful thinking, they became reality. From reality, they become my carefully sculpted words that are able to connect a group to a singular idea and at the same time, contain me.

My stoic nature of my star sign speaks its truth as I walk down the streets with the lyrics you were the shadow to my light echoing in my mind. I don’t give a fuck at all and no one can change it. If someone were to walk in my way, I wouldn’t shift my shoulders and adjust my feet. My body would barrel through yours and before you could shout “Hey bitch, watch where you’re going!” you would regret all the good choices that you’ve chosen.

I earned the title the quiet girl when I was seven, and it rings true as I learn how to care for the first time. My hands shake from all the pushups I’ve done just to support the weight of your soul, quite possibly temporarily, most certainly for a specific amount of time. The countdown has begun from the beginning, but I continue to fill each divot with my whispers and kisses and hope that any word and each word has the ability to melt the ice.

My brows quiver as I watch the pair sing a duet, their voices melding together like a successful marriage. You approach with an open mind and slow gait, but I start to run as fast as I can and hold myself close whispering, “This is what I can do and what I shall only cherish.” Yet at the moment you throw up your arms in exasperation, I fly to you with wings I just learned how to use.

Your soft eyes and the dimly lit screen are alluring, so I lean forward but my knees begin to shake. Without warning, I’m collapsing and all of the sudden I find myself falling into the hole that I dug for myself. I see pointing arms and mocking familiar faces and when my breath leaves me, my value escapes from the cage like a trapped canary to rest in the palm of your hands.

What you have just read are a series of words and sentences that don’t appear to contain any meaning except to the creator. I dare you to inquire about each paragraph. I dare you to break the barriers and invade every aspect since I’ve already laid it down in front of you. I am contained within these truths that appear as a lie and hyperbole, but I assure you that I’ve made it evident in a dozen pieces that the words on the page are my honest voice with just enough space to delete what I deem wrong. Consider it a privilege to witness my life and witness the chaos slowly unfolding in front of you as I take that time to sort it out.

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Edge of the Earth Colin Maguire

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Chasing Sunset Lauren Hannah

Time certainly is a riddle for an object in transit But grounded on two feet this truth is difficult to see Time only reveals itself to be a falsehood at great speeds A clock made of hands and hidden gears rendered useless As a traveler moves infinitely east Or infinitely west, chasing the sunset A strange human locality that is best understood by departing earth entirely Soaring through space and chasing the falling orange glow If you chase the tail of the sun from Atlantic to Pacific Encased in a jet cabin where bodies are arranged in neat rows Your body will age by five hours But when you arrive, the digital time frame will tell you That only two hours have passed – only two hours lost From the chronological construction of human labor Our illusion of the spaces between day and night An hour passes, a wage is earned, Yet if you were to chase the sunset forever Time would unwind infinitely, for if you were to dig a tunnel through the world As we vainly tried to “dig a hole to China” as children You would fall down a hole into what is technologically tomorrow And if you were to chase the sunset forever, traveling at a rate of Circumference of the earth divided by 24 hours in a day – per hour You would age until you died While no digital time passed at all And darkness was forever behind you – Only a spectrum of lights ahead

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Elegy for a Southbound Plane Katherine Fletcher

Wide sweeping arcs of highways intersect careful residential grids.

Planned yellow and white dots cluster together as if for warmth, and then spread further, grow dimmer.

We ascend into the clouds shakily, our own lights beaming back at us. Finally we break through, and we are in complete black. I wonder if we still exist. The faint stars in the near distance tell me that we do. I strain my eyes to comprehend a faint silvery-white sliver of horizon. Or maybe I’m just imagining things to ignore the fear that the world has dropped from under us and there is no going back — that there is not even a “back” to go to.

And there, through the thin clouds and beyond, I see lights once again bursting on the surface of the otherwise dark earth. Some lights jump out in sharp detail, but other cast a soft, muted glow.

The plane dips slightly, and for a second I am weightless above the world. I hang suspended like an out-of-place star. I blink to clear my head, and another plane blinks back. I think of all the other residents of the planet who are currently suspended: carelessly hung in the sky, obscured by clouds, marveling at the separate world that exists between earth and space. I wonder how many of them have been in love. I wonder how much love has found a temporary home on an airplane.

It is a good thing they do not charge us for all the love we bring with us. It is a good thing love is not physical, not tangible. I imagine you trying to fit your love in a suitcase, sitting on it and firmly buckling the clasps. It springs open almost comically, love bursting all over your bedroom. You look at me, and I look at you, and we both laugh because your love is too much for suitcases, too much for airplanes.

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And no, I still won’t go out with you Bethany Marsfelder

i. you are not made of paper nor am i made of wax you do not hold the fire to burn me up and i do not have the spark that set you alight yet something, somewhere in that heart ignited

(perhaps i was the mirror, i do not know)

and you decided i was your sun ii. i am a storyteller and my pages raced through your fingertips as you promised me dreams but that’s all they were you didn’t read it, did you? no, you spoiled the ending (you wrote it yourself, after all) and i had just started the prologue. iii. so, no. you are not too fragile and you cannot tell me when and how i can shine

(i will not, not for you. you will not give me the chance.)

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you are not a poet and you cannot tell me what and how to write

(you didn’t care enough. you read ahead.) iv. we are not going to work. because if you are thinking of the end, what is the point of me beginning?

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Giving love freely Hannah Griffin

On Tuesday night I got to say “I love you” I wondered if you felt anything.

“I love you I love you I love you” there, three times again did you feel that? did I? I know the words felt good leaving my mouth your eyes on me turning the pages will it happen again? who are these characters?

I thought Salinger was so popular because his characters were relatable Giving love freely who can relate to that?

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Sustenance

Monika Arbaciauskaite Feed me words.

Breathe into me every syllable of every single one of your thoughts.

I have fallen in love with the rhythm of your tone, the way it pulsates inside of my body.

Pour me poetry.

Let me drink the rhymes of your rhetoric.

I have fallen in love with the way your consonants feel on my taste buds, how they raise every sense in my mouth.

Touch me with your prose.

Form every single one of your sentences on my skin.

I have fallen in love with the sounds your mouth makes and how every letter oozes into my skin, filling every pore with the remnants of your mind.

Be my sustenance.

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Buddha

Akanksha Gomes

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Egyptian Belleza Akanksha Gomes 142 | Perception

So Close Josh Smith

One moment ago you gave me a moment to build an empire on.

You inspired me with a vision that could carry out my legacy.

I was given a chill up my spine… …this feels like a million-dollar future!

The emotion I was hit with would require: two court stenographers, an Egyptian scribe, and Velma from Scooby Doo to write down!

Inspiration!

My next great idea!

I can…

I can…

Damnit!

No! No! I can’t forget!

I was so close!

I was one card away from a royal flush!

One strike away from 300!

Come back! Come back!

Restore my mind, muse!

This isn’t fair!

What about me?!

What about my future?!

I had imagery in my head!

The sun, the stars, every celestial body had aligned!

I was so close…

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Vienna

Alena Sceusa

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Red is the Color

Farrell Greenwald Brenner On a porch halfway down Howard Street in a rocking chair whose creaking is muffled by a quilt of snow there’s a woman with hair like the northern lights hair like the corkscrew of a cello’s unraveling copper strings hair like a suite that cello could play if only they’d figure out how to translate it to sheet music never having heard the cello suite she cannot be sure it exists and remains skeptical thereof she douses her cigarette Good night. Good work. Sleep well. I'll most likely kill you in the morning. draws a bath of oil her hair screams arches backwards and wails copper wires fraying, conducting electricity straight to the scalp her hair gets all tangled up in frustrated russet desire like a rocky beach tumbles unto itself and calls for fingers to wrap around and spill over fingers to claw, to yaw shavings of ginger sail by in the bathtub off-course as she begins to molt I sometimes happen upon past skins paraffin wax shells shed in the hallways of gynecologist offices or in the back of the #33 bus The hair remains Linger here | 145

sparklers that put the sun to shame and grasps at me, vital as ever even as parts of her have sloughed away I grasp back and though I have not played in years my fingers embrace the cello’s neck with carnal ease

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as my feet get caught.

Linnea Nordgren

I wake, feet caught in the sheets - tearing at the threads like children at the beach, desperate to get in the water.

Skin, scabs snag, stick in the blanket.

Bleeding heels on a carpet in a boot, in a bed, on a dirt road looking for safety.

My feet bleed like a hamburger hemorrhaging fat not a country hemorrhaging people.

I do not wash my feet I wash my sheets, my hands of winter. I lick the blood off my knuckles as they pop through my skin.

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Biggie

Zoe Karikas 148 | 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 stillAn 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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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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Horizon Henna Kulaly

It was a story of phantom people.

At the house no one spoke.

I thanked the stars – mentally, of course – that I had not been inflicted before.

My dad went to sea.

I only saw my mother cry twice when I was little.

How you love yourself is how you teach others to love you.

We loved each other, didn't we?

I've tied it behind and I've tied it before and I've tied it so often, I’ll tie it no more.

It was dark when we turned back.

What can I do when the night comes and I break into stars.

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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 152 | Perception