stone-cutters Harvard-Westlake School Volume XXVIII
This is an annual publication of Harvard-Westlake’s Stone-Cutters Arts Collective, a studentdriven, faculty-guided group of visual artists, writers, editors, and designers. The purpose of the spring magazine is to celebrate outstanding creative endeavors and artistic achievements by members of our community. Submission is open to all students at the upper school via stone-cutters.submittable.com. The works are curated by an editorial board of students leaders and advisors; names and identifying information are removed during the review process so that each work is considered without personal bias.
To the Stone-Cutters Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you foredefeated Challengers of oblivion Eat cynical earnings, knowing rock splits, records fall down, The square-limbed Roman letters Scale in the thaws, wear in the rain. The poet as well Builds his monument mockingly; For man will be blotted out, the blithe earth die, the brave sun Die blind and blacken to the heart: Yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained thoughts found The honey of peace in old poems.
– Robinson Jeffers
Dear Readers, As the 2020–2021 school year wraps up and campus gradually reopens, we return to our pre-COVID routines. But we don’t want to abandon the struggles, lessons, and progress we made during quarantine, from the comfort we offered our friends in lonely times to the fight we have waged on the injustices in our society. And there is no better testament to our experiences during the past year than the art and writing that have still managed to take form and thrive. Thank you to everyone who submitted work to our publication. Please keep finding the courage to share your creativity, and hopefully we will continue together in-person next year. Until then, keep on keeping on. —Stone-Cutters (stone-cutterscollective.com)
Contents Cleo Maloney Kieran Chung Nina Neumann Grace Ma Mohona Ganguly Ella Moriarty Greta Zumbrunnen Jamie Kim-Worthington Aerin Duke Garrett Ingman Alexandra du Manoir Lana Lim Ava Tran Bronwen Roosa Sophia Evans Riley Tao Benjamin Brill Chris Lee Chris O’Brien Hannah Han Anika Iyer Gemma Lippman Sarina Smolev Nicole Austen Aiko Offner Maddie Morrison Julia Im Jade Zoller Olivia Sparks Ryann Castanon-Hill
4, 27 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18-19 20-22 23 24 25 26 28-29 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38-39 40
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No more rain, No rain boots, My socks won’t dry in the pooling water — Cleo Maloney ‘21, oil on board, 48in x 36in.
Love Letter From Space Jeanne, When they told us that a year on the Horizon would be ten years on Earth, I thought I understood. Ten years, I thought, wasn’t too long, and you agreed. We could wait ten years to see each other again. We were young, and we couldn’t imagine a span of time longer than the lives we’d lived, and so everything was hot and fleeting and forever. Then one year turned into two, then three, and before I knew it, five years had passed, and fifty years had passed, and then it was now, and now you are old. I don’t know what you look like now, but I imagine that your skin sags, that your face is a quilt of liver spots, that the tips of your black hair have split and turned frizzy and gray. I imagine that your bones rattle when you laugh, and God, what a laugh it is, and you are vernal under the winter coat of age. I imagine that everyone aches to be around you, because how could they not? And meanwhile, I am stiff and cold, immobilized in a cryogenic shell, while you live and spark and burn. I miss you, Jeanne. I miss sitting on the porch with you, drinking iced tea and watching the sun go down from Earth. I miss you in the violet dress you wore to the Italian restaurant on La Cienega Boulevard, with a barrette in your hair and wine on your lips. I miss hearing my name in your voice and your name in mine and thinking, God, this is us, struck with awe that I knew you, intimately, with every acutely vibrating cell of my body. I miss you because I love you, Jeanne, wherever you are and however you’ve grown, and maybe that’s selfish of me, but I do, Jeanne. I love you. Picture me not as I am now, but as you are, or as how I imagine you to be. Picture me, if you picture me at all, as if I hadn’t boarded the Horizon, as if we had grown together when we grew old, entangled, matching each other year for year, step for step, heartbeat for heartbeat. Picture a thousand nightfalls on porches with me. I would have bought you a dress in every color of the rainbow, and you would have worn them all in one night just because you could. What I wouldn’t give to be burning beside you, our bones rattling in our skin, hot and fleeting and altogether human. What I wouldn’t give to deliver this letter to you in person. I would pretend to be the mailman when I rang the doorbell, but you’d know right away, and you’d throw the door open and take my brittle bones into your arms, and my hand would fall open, and the letter would drop to the dusty porch. And I would read it to you over dinner while we watched the sun go down through the smoky furnace of the LA sky, and I would cry, and you would cry. And I would say, Jeanne, like a prayer, Jeanne, like a vow, Jeanne, like it was the last word left in the universe and I was the last person left to say it— Jeanne. With love, light years away, Sal Kieran Chung ‘23
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The Undiagnosables It’s a whole lot of rubbish and We’ve packed it to the brim. Neurotic. Necrotic even, to be unequivocally blunt.
Too much. Too soon. Welcoming arms just a tad too icy. The poised maternal figure that said “do it or die”
It seeps out of our gaping mouths, Like frigid water, from the rugged kitchen faucet amid an infinite December. Glowing with sustenance. It comes easy— That strong steady stream until someone smacks it Right on the head. Perhaps a tad too hard this time because it shuts up for good.
Because humans are too neurotic to be trusted With anything real. Anything kind, anything malleable, carefree—Swiss. So instead they steal—they want some sunshine for themselves too. An innocent motive (and motive is everything) So it must be fine, right?
Now it’s eerily quiet. Like the withering carcass once so filled with life— Dear child; class clown; heart of invisible fury Seeping out of his hands. A barren desert still gushing and giving, despite Having run completely dry. In a million unrecognizable pieces. But he isn’t complaining. He must be fine right? It comes easy… how could you not recall? Like that malleable ballerina doll that everybody wanted a piece of. But they broke her.
Neuroses rippling through stale air, Like that abandoned cottage we once called home: That green stick of citronella incense we waved around— a baton To fend off the mosquitoes in the wedlocked brother’s bathroom. Chase it out. Don’t make it die. Too easy. Unless it truly doesn’t possess the half brain needed to fly out the gaping balcony door. Because then it would be a mercy kill. An ethical murder.
That greenheaded buffoon. [ 6
Nina Neumann ‘21
Fabrication — Grace Ma ‘22, block print, 9in x 12in.
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Red Red is the mud, the ground during monsoon season; Red is the color of ma’s sari border bleeding against the crisp widow’s white; Red are the hair ribbons binding thick black hair into precisely two braids; Red is the paint, cracking, on my doll’s mouth; Red are the crescents and hammers painted on walls in that part of town; Red are the shouts and the screams dida told me she saw when they left and split our ground in two; Red are the schoolbooks with problems and english; Red is the lipstick we all shared during weddings; Red are my eyes when dida leaves; Red is my sari when we are united; Red is the sweater she wears when we bring her home; Red is everything.
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Mohona Ganguly ‘21
Thursday Night — Ella Moriarty ‘21, oil pastel, 9in x 12in.
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From Within (Into the Depths) — Greta Zumbrunnen ‘21, oil on canvas, 10in x 20in.
stages of decay 1. fresh there is a girl in your arms and she is bloody and dead. her mouth like an overripe pomegranate, her hands like frankenstein’s monster. maybe you didn’t mean to kill her (car, night, storm) or maybe it was intended (ex-lover, gasoline, matches) either way, she’s dead in your arms. 2. bloat you’ve never thought about how you’d hide a body until now. you briefly consider cannibalism—in life she was vibrant and perpetually moving, a stark contrast to the porcelain skin and face she is now. you liken her to a blue-figure bowl, especially in the way that her cheeks are gaunt and hollowed. 3. active decay was it on purpose? was it her that was meant to die? or was it you who was supposed to be bones and flesh, unmoving except for the slightest twitch. you tried so hard to be the one in front of
the (metaphorical, perhaps? actual?) gun, and you wanted so badly to be the one she killed, look where it’s got you. 4. advanced decay there’s no shame in housing worms. she has a stomach filled with apple cores and the [things that eat other things] the [unnamed worm], the [redacted decayers]. and she’s got a beautiful back filled with fungi, shiitake mushrooms for spinal segments and enoki replacing the peach-fuzz hairs of her skin. 5. dry remains it’s been weeks now, hasn’t it? the white pearls that formed and stuck to her skin have burst, the mushrooms plucked, the apple cores digested. and your eyes have been hollow peach pits, drained pools, since the day you held her heavy body. she whispers to you, ghostly and thin, i was ethereal but that doesn’t mean i was valuable.
Jamie Kim-Worthington ‘22
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Family — Aerin Duke ‘23, oil painting, 20in x 16in.
LAN Party — Garrett Ingman ‘21, oil on canvas, 36in x 30 in.
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evol- ution love traced my steps on my walk back to my childhood home last night every time i turned around i noticed that my footprints were deepened hollowed and embraced i was not the only traveler on this journey but words knot themselves into my mouth and sew up my lips when i try to call out to purity and nostalgia: an ancient definition of love i miss when kisses were just kisses and when i could embrace you in a bubble the world sinks and i know why i stand on my own two feet don’t need to rationalize my existence anymore the best feeling is nothing but warmth; as if my heart is a sunset lacking a timer silence bellows through my chest and i am complete - for a moment and then i am utterly empty - for a moment - & then i am lost again, a sinister cycle of searching for my childhood home.
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Alexandra du Manoir ‘21
midwest — Lana Lim ‘21, digital painting, 5000 x 5000 px.
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Pretty Lady Dinner Party — Ava Tran ‘21, oil on panel, 18in x 14in.
Outskirts — Bronwen Roosa ‘22, oil on panel, 14in x 18in.
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13 The Little OneOne HasHas An Idea — Sophia EvansEvans ‘23, digital, 16in x 8in. [ 18 The Little an Idea — Sophia ‘23, digital, 16in x 8in.
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Persephone Sapiens Since the Persephonian language so heavily utilizes echolocation, it is difficult to create a satisfactory English-Persephonian dictionary—doubly so due to the limited time we had to study the Persephonians in their native habitat. However, one possible method of transcribing Persephonian language into human-readable writing relies on a quirk of Persephonian linguistics: all Persephonian words are based off of mimicking the feedback Persephonians received when echolocating certain objects, and as such, all Persephonian words represent physical objects as well as broader concepts. Collected for posterity are some of the most historically significant Persephonian words, displayed in chronological order: The sound of a pod of migrating Persephonians. Literal translation: “family”. Different Persephonian subcultures had different migration patterns, and as such their word for “family” varied slightly between tribes, analogously to regional accents. The percolation of bubbles rising from the ocean floor. Lit. “warmth, life, home”. As Persephone is a rogue planet, its surface is entirely frozen over. The only source of warmth, which supported Persephone’s liquid oceans and therefore life, were the geothermal vents scattered throughout the seafloor of Persephone. The high-pitched hum of the Daedalus I submersible. Lit. “alien”. Although the 2041 Daedalus I probe was built with the knowledge that Persephone had a liquid ocean, and therefore potential life, the discovery of sapient beings beneath Persephone’s cryosphere was unexpected. As such, despite the attempt to observe Persephone without interfering, the very sound of the Daedalus probe’s propellers had inadvertently altered Persephonian culture. (Note: The 2043 Daedalus II manned submersible had a different pitch, and its effects on Persephonian linguistics should be considered separately.) The explosive detonation of a cavitating vortex ring. Lit. “vortex cannon”. The extreme difficulty of crossing the interspecies communication barrier, and the suspicion and borderline hostility with which native Persephonians viewed the Daedalus crew, caused efforts at communicating with the Persephonians to make little progress. Due to the urgency of rapidly establishing communication with the Persephonians, it was decided that the cooperation of an Persephonian tribe had to be secured, even if it disrupted the native culture and ecosystem, through the giving of gifts. Initially, gifts of medicine or luxuries were attempted, but feeble understanding of Persephonian biology and culture caused these gifts to be ineffective. Finally, after a study of Persephonian
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Riley Tao ‘21
tribal warfare, the Daedalus crew decided to arm a struggling tribe with vortex cannons. This acquired their gratitude and cooperation with attempts to communicate, at the cost of inflaming inter-tribal conflicts. The International Board of Persephonian Affairs foresaw backlash from activist groups, and decided to hide the methods with which they acquired the cooperation of the Persephonians. The first speech made by the Daedalus probe’s artificial diaphragm. Idiomatic. “Alien contacts cause wars.” By 2053, enough progress had been made in crossing the species understanding gap that the primary mission of the Daedalus crew could be fulfilled: convincing a tribe to emigrate to Earth for scientific study. Performing this rapidly was crucial—Persephone was on a loose flyby of the solar system, and would be beyond humanity’s ability to reach by 2076. Attempting to convince the Persephonian tribes to voluntarily flee their homes was a pragmatic step as well as a moral choice; due to the difficulty of projecting force onto Persephone, forcefully abducting Persephonians on a large enough scale to acquire a viable breeding population would have been monumentally difficult. Using the words they had researched over the course of their stay, Daedalus crew informed the Persephonians about the closing window of opportunity, and requested volunteers to permanently be stationed on Earth. Unfortunately, a splinter group of the Persephonians perceived the Daedalus crew’s words as a demand for the capture of their fellow Persephonians, and used them as a casus belli to invade several nearby tribes. Automatic alerts in the vortex cannons rapidly caused the Daedalus crew to understand the situation and disable their weapons, but the damage had already been done. The local tribes of Persephone had devolved into warfare. Fears of negative press caused the Daedalus crew to cease their live reports, citing a recent solar flare as having disabled their communicators. The International Board of Persephonian Affairs decided that, as Persephone would be rendered unreachable to humanity in under two decades, Persephonians on Earth were needed now, in order to begin the research necessary to simulate the Persephonian environment. When the Persephonian tribe presented the Daedalus crew with several Persephonians showing no signs of life, the crew warned the Persephonians not to repeat their stunt, but shipped the Persephonian bodies back to Earth for scientific analysis. The distortion of sound as it passes from water to air. Lit. “communication with aliens”. To avoid public backlash, the Board of Persephonian Affairs obfuscated the
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origin of the Persephonian corpses. Much to the scientific community’s surprise, however, the Persephonians sent to Earth were not dead, but in a hitherto-undiscovered dormant state. Upon being warmed, the Persephonians reawakened, and scientists scrambled to keep them alive. Communications efforts went much faster without communication delays with Terran linguistics experts, and the Daedalus crew’s exploitation of the native Persephonian tribes was explained in detail by the Persephonian survivors. As communication progressed, the Persephonian research team found themselves sympathetic towards the Persephonians, and released transcripts of their conversations to the public. Massive pressure from multiple sources caused the Daedalus vehicles to be swiftly repurposed for the goal of returning the Persephonians to their homeworld. The splash of a Persephonian returned to the water. Lit. “gratitude for freedom”. In 2075, the Daedalus crew was ordered to assist the captured Persephonians back into their native environment and return to Earth bearing samples of non-sapient life only. Although the decision to cease attempts at bringing sapient Persephonians back to Earth was met with much controversy, after the captured Persephonians shared their story with their home tribes, none of the natives could be voluntarily convinced to visit Earth. The Daedalus crew, and humanity at large, was forced to leave Persephone forever in 2076, allowing the icy rogue planet to continue on its cosmic journey alone.
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Riley Tao ‘21
Secret Message #2 — Benjamin Brill ‘21, oil and spray paint on paper, 12in x 18in.
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La Lune — Chris Lee ‘20, block ink, 9in x 12in.
Cracked Screens — Chris O’Brien ‘21, photography, 12in x 8in.
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insert [stereotype] We are [glossy hair], [silky] enough to swallow whole. We birth [exotic], sweet guavas overripe in our stomachs. We breath [I’m sorry, please forgive me]. When you cleave us open, we spill lemon sugar scrub, acrid nail polish, long fluorescent hours. We splinter, delicate nails littering linoleum tile. We dream of crawling across your saltwater moats, [stealing] the gold fruits dangling heavy from your ancient boughs. But you call us [Szechuan], too hot to the tongue, unpalatable, humid childhood summers leaking from our bones. We [Fu Manchu], [Long Duk Dong], thin braids swinging from pale scalps, your syllables breaking on our [alien] tongues. We arm ourselves with [calculators], [ 26
Hannah Han ‘21
speak [calculus], hunger for [1600s and 36s], [ivy lawns]. We are in an epidemic. We [barbarians] breed winged disease in cages, eat your [pets] during Thanksgiving, fighting over ligament, gristle, shards of bone, as you sit slack-jawed in your white houses. A century ago, we lived in tenements because [we wanted to]. We dreamed of laying our bodies across spools of steel track to fulfill your manifest destiny. We [wanted to be] [stripped of] citizenship, our names eroded like limestone. If -American is a suffix, it does not protect us and perhaps never did. For us, [foreigners] = [animals], and we will always linger just outside the cage.
Untitled — Cleo Maloney ‘21, clay, 5in x 4in x 3in (left); 6.5in x 4in x 4in (right).
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This Isn’t How Romance Should Go It’s nice, you know, thinking about you on days like this, when the rain falls softly, water running veins across the windows, the music softer still, now that you’re gone. You always loved days like this, when you had no choice but to stay inside. You would sit for hours at the piano, fingers dancing across black and white, the ceiling lights forming a halo around your head. I always loved days like this, when you had no choice but to stay inside, to stay with me. How was it that we ended up together? You were, by every definition, beautiful, but I certainly was not. Whereas my hands only scratched and clawed, you loved with your hands. At night, I would praise your eyes, your lips, the curve of your neck, the hollows of your cheekbones, but never your hands— those were sacred, and they weren’t for me.
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Anika Iyer ‘23
I certainly wanted to praise them— elegant, strong fingers, callused from practice, and beautiful lifelines tracing across your palms, but I would not mar their beauty with my bitter sin. After all, who am I to touch you, to love you, to preserve you? By what right may I be near you, close enough to hear you when you scream? Why have the gods allowed me this, to revel in your hands, your beautiful, bloody hands? But now, you’re gone, and I’m alone again, because your hands don’t make for good conversation, now that they’re all rotten.
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Dedigitation — Gemma Lippman ‘22, oil paint, 24in x 30in.
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Lone Road — Sarina Smolev ‘22, photography, 12in x 8in.
A Walk The world is burning. It is burning in silence, a vacuum of viral air. Smoke rolls off the dry ice of the world. I drift down streets, the sidewalk starved for touch lifts to meet me. I photograph the spring flowers, floating in aloneness, taking in the sickness in the wind. I breathe and the burning world breathes. The distance between all of us settles on my shoulders like a cape that scrapes the starving ground.
Nicole Austen ‘21
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Teenage Wasteland Clumps of conditioner fall from my razor and I realize My brain is more a shower drain than a bodily organ And I realize My fascination with Davinci’s paintings and oddly shaped poems may pass Through the grimy tunnel like auburn hair with a million split ends And I realize There is no catching hair down the shower drain Or a tear that wonders if art is finite Stripped naked with nothing but Dove and my thoughts I wonder If I will be better off a starving artist Than clothed and catching hairs down a shower drain
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Aiko Offner ‘23
sticky fingers — Maddie Morrison ‘22, acrylic yarn and oil paint on canvas, 16in x 20in.
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Thinking in Flower — Julia Im ‘23, oil pastel, 8in x 11in.
Mask Off — Jade Zoller ‘22, photograph, 23.5in x 29in.
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Field Notes on Wishes 1. For those with sinking hearts who are unaware of this unfortunate circumstance all i can say is you will be remembered 2. you live life empty of love each moment sends sharp pangs of remembrance that haven’t been thought of distant plumes of busy streets reek cigarettes and long nights With empty cafes selling lonely disguised as self care a premium package wrapped up in a silver bow (for a price of $32.99) so force yourself into the familiarity of oversized sweatshirts and essence the feeling of feeling ghostly 3. you can’t bear to realize that you have become nothing but a shelf dusty of dying wishes 4. we all want the same thing but only some of us are lucky can’t see nor hear sniffing of broken tears so we smile long hard smiles wishing of the embrace we once felt
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Olivia Sparks ‘22
5. i’m sorry about the way i will leave you
i didn’t mean
to take up
so much
of your time
and space
6. it’s not your fault how could such a beautiful [face] be so dreadful and mine? i wish things could get better that you will get better i just wish wishing worked but looking back i realize how foolish we were two sinking hearts could have never lifted the other We only dragged ourselves to the pit of our stomachs Full of shredded notes that never made it home
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[ 40 Grief — Ryann Castanon-Hill ‘23, paint on canvas, 16in x 24in.
Editors-in-Chief/Head Literary Editors: Nicole Austen ‘21 Maya Doyle ‘21 Head Visual Editor/Resident Photographer: Santiago Salazar ‘21 Head Junior Editors: Elise Chen ‘22 Izzy Welsh ‘22 Joie Zhang ‘22 Junior Editors: Milla Ben-Ezra ‘22 Alexa Druyanoff ‘22 Maddie Morrison ‘22 Ari Ogden ‘22 Frances Ross ‘22 Carina Villalona ‘22 Staff: Lily Lee ‘23 Ofek Levy ‘23 Anika Iyer ‘23 Athalia Meron ‘21 Aiko Offner ‘23 Riley Tao ‘21 Chiara Umekubo ‘23 Layout done by Joie Zhang, Maya Doyle, Nicole Austen, Anika Iyer, and Milla Ben-Ezra. Special thanks to our faculty advisors, Jesse Chehak ‘97 and Lucas Gonzalez. Thank you to our wonderful senior editors — Maya, Nicole, and Santi — for leading Stone-Cutters with such incredible creativity and wisdom, especially during these unprecedented times. We wish them all the best in their future endeavors. All typeface is Prensa.