Anthologist Issue 80

the Anthologist

the Anthologist The Anthologist is a literary and arts magazine that has served in preserving and inspiring Rutgers’ creativity for nearly a century, publishing high-quality art and writing.

For copyright terms and more information visit: antho.rutgers@gmail.com RUSA Allocations Board, paid for by student fees.

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Index

issue 80. fall 2014

Staff Officers

Jasmeet Bawa – Editor-in-Chief Deniz Tanguz – Managing Editor Philip S. Wythe – Senior Editor Elisabet Paredes – Public Relations

Editors

Tiffany Lu – Copy Editor/ Social Media Coordinator Matt Taylor - Social Media Coordinator Peter J. Rosa – Cover / Magazine Design Jennifer Comerford Meg Tsai – Copy Editor Daniel Anzolini - Copy Editor Lily Lee Amy Ho Rachel Rodriguez Hernan Ramos Grace Li

Advisor

Belinda McKeon

Index

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C ONTENTS 8 10 12 14 16 17 18 19 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33

Sestina for a Cat. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Stephanie Van Huss Vignettes found in my Journal at 3AM. . . . . . . Emily McMaster Nyctophilia. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Daniel Anzolini Untitled. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Tiffany Lu train stranger. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Nicole Gifford lightning bugs. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Fil Wojick Untitled . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Dylan Vetter Rememory. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Da’shon Holder Gray . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Kelly Hannavi Millburn . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Eugene Zeng Pinecicle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Daniel Anzolini Chahunga Main Tujhe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Anand Venkatkrishnan Furniture, Sales . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Hernan Ramos Seaside Heights . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Caitlyn Gilvary Alas, the struggle‌ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Marcus Hughes Untitled . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Tiffany Lu 016 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mark Dookharan garden child. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Shayla Lawz I am the Tower of Babel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Caitlyn Gilvary Tree of Life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Daniel Anzolini

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Letter from the Editor-in-Chief In third grade, I wrote a tale about a mermaid who loved to sing—later I learned that Disney had already copyrighted my brilliant idea. I do not remember much of the story, but that this mermaid had a lot of friends that sang along with her.

One I deliberately and lovingly called a tune fish. To make absolutely clear to my teacher how clever my wordplay was, I drew my tuna fish next to the mermaid.

When I got my story back, “tune” got a red circle and the vowel e was changed back to an a; my tuna fish became mute and tone-deaf, and my third-grade-writer-self was devastated.

Looking back, I don’t think I was particularly clever, or that my teacher took any great care to notice my intentions. The fraught relationship between editor and writer exists in flux, dependent on communication, understanding, and care.

The other day, my Creative Writing professor reminded our class to cherish the weeks we have together as a community of writers because there would not be many chances for that again. Being an editor for The Anthologist for two years, I forgot how uncommon it is for a group of people to come together every week for a few months, no credits, money or awards to motivate, just the desire to immersed in a room full of people who love words and what they do, how they fit next to, above and under one another.

Issue 80 comes from our editors who understand this labor of creativity and partake in this endless conversation between art and ourselves, and from our contributors who take on this labor to illuminate and challenge our understanding of the internal and external realities we face everyday. We hope that you enjoy this anthology as much as we enjoyed the process of curating it.

Happy reading, Jasmeet Bawa

Letter from the Editor-in-Chief

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S E S T IN A FOR A CAT Stephanie Van Huss

Will you watch them, the lightning fast fingers?

Moving and tickling and spilling out a vibe From the cultures of the many, all at once black.

He is surviving in the beat and straining not to be a boy They call the tune, they pass the solo, they pass the moonshine There is nothing outside the club but empty night.

Warm, sweet sweat hanging on the night.

Too many moving at once to follow all the fingers.

As the swoon changes with the flow of moonshine The old look so young and alive with the vibe, But the young look so old- he’s done being a boy.

They’re all the same here, they’re all ageless and black.

It’s a special type of music, black.

It grabs your ear and pumps your heart-waking the night To the here and now of sexy sounds, giving life to the boy.

Building a community through talented fingers, And passion to describe a connection through a vibeOnly heightened by the moonshine.

His face is flushed from rhythm and moonshine.

Hair is curled and black.

His swift shifts in tempo change the vibe And show his playing power, his control over this night There are no fingers like his fingers He dips you slowly into the pool of sound, clever boy.

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Sestina for a Cat

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SE S TI N A FOR A CAT

My strange, enchanted boy.

My pride, swollen in the glow of moon shine.

I fight to look at things beyond his fingers, But I can’t see anything outside the keys of white and black.

It is my favorite kind of night, Where I am in the pool, he brought me there, swimming through the vibe.

He plays with soul and swing and rides the vibes Bass in full bloom, sax at full blast, and there goes my boy.

It’s a night for standards, a standard night And when the groove is done and they’ve run out of moonshine The scene dies down for the morning to peak out of the black All of their sounds to sleep with tired, satisfied fingers.

But day will die away and night will bring back the moonshine and wine, And cats’ll return to the black clubs and bad vibesAnd their fingers will fidget-ready to play, and my boy will play.

Sestina for a Cat

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V IGN E T T ES FOU ND I N MY JOURNAL AT 3AM Emily McMaster

i.

I write poems on my fingers for each day of the week I fall in love.

My hands black with ink. words lost forever, in the palm of my hands. ii. eloquence is an acquired taste, they say. no matter how much Shakespeare or Chaucer I read my favorite word is still Fuck iii.

Incantations cast each and everyday with three simple words, found in the buzz of gossip, and the habitual ‘love yous’ spoken into phone receivers.

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Vignettes Found in my Journal at 3AM

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V IGN E T T ES FOU ND I N MY JOURNAL AT 3AM iv.

Grecian urns have their own odes.

But where are the lyrical ballads dedicated to the pit in your stomach when you see the person you love kiss someone else. v. the thoughts that run in my head are just words picked up from the street like pennies and melodies. just things, without feeling.

Vignettes Found in my Journal at 3AM

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N YCTO P H ILIA Daniel Anzolini

I walk toward the draft of air cambering from the stale blue lake, to the static sparks lighting the trail behind me upwards, dimly -lit corridors etched into the night. God knows where I go: through soiled windows to the grubby panes of then, into whirlpool memory—when I stood by the heavy coffin and in the curl of leaves, the autumn death; previously, next to grandma, on her early deathbed; and deeper inwards to abhorred life by fly droppings, the wood stove, the broken brick, the dryness crafted into the powdery wall; and into the bush, gone picking bursting berries and running wounds.

And then, only after the thorn wreath reeks of bloodied hair and skull, I immerse in the wavering dark substance: no other company, friend or lover, has ever equated the mournful peace that night allows me. At the graze of air, the coolness settles and lifts, darkness drops into water, silently; and the icy, arid draft draws its starry calico to and fro across my face— let water break from the bellied lake, sighing wistful over the desperate shore and fall back into the smoothing ebb.

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Nyctophilia

Fall 2014

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UNT I T L ED

by Tiffany X. Lu

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TRAIN STRANGE R.

by Nicole Gifford

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LI GHTNING B UGS. Fil Wojcik

We spent that summer sleeping inside tents admiring the geometry of such a tiny little place

watching bug-beings being little pesky warriors, battling to break into our honest modest sanctuary or when we were so high we thoughts the tent vents were just clever hidden portals to an alternate suburbia and I laughed the hardest spitting lemon seeds out of iced tea into ripped paper bags because I knew you were the only one watching.

lightning bugs.

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the Anthologist tw: suicide

UNT I T L ED Dylan Vetter

Two twisted ankles, supine in the gutter — A sharp steel toed boot to the base of my spine.

I can’t help but choke on tiger’s eye marbles And I’m swept away in street cleaner turbines.

I melt among heaps of paper and plastic, My heart pumping refuse and debris in kind.

But then I burst upward with light and with movement, My edges ignite as I arc in blue sky.

I’m a rainbow in ribbons, a carbon paint splatter, I am bursting with life and am searing through time.

Yet again I do fall back into the tar pit.

I inhale black water and begin to cry — I reach the fringe of the dark And at last I do leap.

Tell them it was me.

Tell them that I was fine.

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Fall 2014

R EMEMO RY Da’shon Holder

I still remember the time that I made my parents, now mother and father, cry. I naively looked into their souls and told them that I have no fond memories of my childhood.

Lima Beans with Pork: On the surface, there were the hundreds of moments, all of which I was forced to spend primetime with the old mean lady, now grandmother, who would only watch soups, now soaps, as she declared that I watch it with her. Ma’am, do you think that we could watch Rugrats, I remember asking a few times. She would look at me with this awkward gawk, now smile, and insist that it wasn’t on until the afternoon; she made me watch Arthur and watch it with her. Why oh why did I have to watch Arthur, and with her. So I became angry and I became hungry. I voiced this hunger so grandmother made dog food, now lima beans with pork, for the both of us. And as we would eat this dog food at the table, now non-existent, we would bark, now talk. And as we would bark, she would howl, now cry, about how she and all the other dogs in my life loved me. And I would howl back explaining that I just wanted to be left alone, even though I didn’t, and that I was tired, even though I wasn’t. As my parents would come back in their let’s leave Da’shon attire, now working suits, I would run out of the house on West Forrest Avenue, leaving the mean old lady, soups, Arthur, and dog food tucked away as a fucked up memory.

Brandy: Before she even got to me she had been named after grandmother’s favorite spirit, though grandmother would insist that it was because of the color of her coat; I would’ve named her Sarah because the color of her coat. Sarah loved to dance to the Temptations, grandmother would always tell mother that father was a rolling stone and mother would cry herself to sleep at night hoping that it was just grandmother’s imagination. I didn’t know what a rolling stone was at the time, but when I saw father kissing my aunt Nikki, no relation, he explained that it was a secret between us. I like secrets; Sarah did too, and so I told her.

I hoped that father didn’t get mad. Mother would always fight with father at Rememory

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R EMEMO RY

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night, thinking that I was asleep. She would then come into my room and sleep with Sarah and me. She would cook father, Sarah, and I breakfast in the morning and be lost in her thoughts at night. Mother liked Sarah’s other name better, Brandy, as I would hear her talking on the phone with grandmother, with slurred words, about having too much of Brandy. Day soon mimicked the patterns of night when mother found father kissing Nikki. Mother gained weight and father had another child from kissing Nikki. Brandy ran away.

Southern trees: The trees, pastoral planes, and memory will forever be marked as Summer Happiness. I was finally at the age that I could associate family with happiness. My parents, now mother and father, would hold hands while driving down south. G’ma was in the back seat with grandpa and me; she spent hours telling stories about the sycamores and poplars and how they’ve changed through the years, promising me to remember the beauty that they now hold. “Dada, they ain’t always been that beautiful, I never want you to remember the fruit it once bore. These trees ain’t posed to bear fruit quite like that,” she’d say, disconnected from the present. Grandpa agreed and mother and father would look at grandma through the rearview mirror almost apologetically. Nothing played on the radio, so I listened to the sounds of the trees and they were crying, so I when we got to Virginia I asked grandpa why. He told me that they were the souls of the Blacks who died from being hung. “Ole Willie Lynch. They were strange fruits indeed.”

When we got out of the car I stabbed a sycamore with my southern cousin Shawn to try to let the souls out- they tasted like syrup.

Love: Mother told me that she would always love me no matter what decision I made and that I am her only son. Moments later my aunt called my telephone explaining that I would no longer live with my mother because she didn’t know how to deal with having a gay son. It’s just not right. I loved him and he loved me, though his parents insisted that he and I were abominations, abnormalities, anomalies, actually confused and that homo-social, what we now know as bromance, is alright, but homo-romantic and homosexual is not. Mother didn’t look me in the eyes that night or morning; she couldn’t bear to come to terms with having a homosexual as a son. The next week, he took it back and told me that he loved his parents too much to break their hearts. Did I not love mother enough not to break hers? Did he not love me enough not to endure? Mother told the reverend and pastor that she messed up and that she was a horrible parent. The pastors told me that mother wants me to be alright, which is why they insisted that I would come with them. They asked me if I was hungry and I told them that I wanted Burger King: chicken fingers, french fries, and a Sprite, 20

Rememory

R EMEMO RY

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ranch sauce to dip the fries—I didn’t finish my food. They insisted that I was confused and that prayer will make it better and that my mom is feeling really bad and that this would help her feel better. I wanted my mom to feel better so I bowed my head in the Kings fried palace. Three minutes into the 20 minute prayer, I looked up and saw people staring at us; did they, too, see the demon that was in me? I cried.

We still speak today; he says that he loves me. I love him too. We will not be together because he doesn’t want to see his parents hurt. Mother was very sorry for even thinking that she would get rid of me and learnt how to live with it. Love doesn’t mean selfishness, love means sacrifice and endurance. Anna Akhmatova wrote about love, she is wonderful. My AP English professor told us that Anna was a whore that lived in Russia during the age of Stalin and refused to leave.

She loved Russia. I don’t go to church anymore because they don’t love me. I sometimes wonder if there is a God and if Hir could love me. Lima beans with pork weren’t dog food and brandy never ran away, Brandy died, and the southern trees were used to hang thousands of Black bodies and mother was afraid and all of this is okay.

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Title from Toni Morrison’s Beloved

Rememory

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GRAY

by Kelly Hannavi 22

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MILLB URN

by Eugene Zeng

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PINECICLE

by Daniel Anzolini

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CHA HUNGA MAIN TUJHE Anand Venkatkrishnan

satyaṃ tvatsadṛśaḥ priyo na sacivaḥ kaścin mayā dṛśyate loke ‘smin gahane tvayaiva purato maitrajvalo dīpitaḥ | prītisnigdhamanaḥprataptaśucinā dedīpyamānasya me vācā gadgadayā tathāpi bata te nāmāpi na dhvanyate || it’s true: i’ve never seen a friend so dear as you; you’re the only one who lit a lamp of friendship in this deep dark world. and yet, as i burn in the flame kindled by my heart dipped in love’s oil, i can’t even bring myself to call out your name. my voice stutters.

Chahunga Main Tujhe

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FU RNITURE, SALES Hernan Ramos

One day I will be underneath an overpass with a sign that says

“Artist for sale�

I will sell my heart and soul for a meal I will show you fears I never even knew I had Dig through the depths of my skin to find them My confessions prominently displayed on my gift shop window eyes Please come inside I will welcome you with open arms literally open arms falling apart from the weight of my scars and you will hand me change from the barely opened window of your car Would the contact be too intimate?

Do you fear that I may contaminate?

Sometimes I dream of drowning in water coolers

of my legs melting into my seat

I dream of looking down

at my fingers in the morning sink

and they are bleeding

from the constant tick-tapping of cubicle keyboard keys

(As I write this on a screen that sees right through me) You get hungry but I am always starving Are you scared of me reciting lines of poetry in the street?

I am a house that you have stumbled into You will see that my furniture (like my diction) has been chosen to get the most attention Purchase me 26

Furniture, Sales

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SE ASIDE HEIGH TS Caitlyn Gilvary

I was eating a paleta at Seaside Heights, New Jersey when you asked me to marry you and I bit my lip saying “of course” through frozen fruit and iron.

Then, we had to decide where to die. It was noon and I was hot, although my mouth was cold and your mouth was cold from kissing my mouth.

So we walked from one boardwalk to another – “Here’s as good a place as any” – but I wanted somewhere in the shade because today was my day.

And you, the accommodating lover with a frozen fruit mouth, found us a place in the shade at Seaside Heights to die.

Now the passersby who served as our witnesses walk by a puddle of paleta in the shade at Seaside Heights & say, “how beautiful it is not to die alone.”

Seaside Heights

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stretched canvas - 12 x 16 - Mixed media (spray paint and Deco markers)

A L AS , THE STRUGGLE...

by Marcus Hughes

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UNTITLED

by Tiffany X. Lu

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by Mark Dookharan 30

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GARDEN CHILD. Shayla Lawz

Roses grow onto you like flowers sprouting from the tallest trees— tipping just before they touch the sky.

Warm winds wrapped you in their arms— they raised you not to fall.

You threw your oceans overboard and took refuge in your ability to swim.

Now child, there you are gardens on your skin.

garden child.

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I A M THE TOWER OF BABE L Caitlyn Gilvary

merely standing, I offend.

Tongue tracing lifelines, I take all I can.

Soaked in acid, finding roots.

Greedy ivy climbs my spine.

Twigs like infant fingers Split me at my sides.

It is too cold to live alone.

I can keep you warm and dry You will still need light.

I lie naked, jaw unhinged, sun-bathing on the roof.

Mouth full of dahlias.

Shears in hand.

Smite me down, Father, Confound me.

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I am the Tower of Babel

Fall 2014

T RE E O F LI FE Daniel Anzolini

I You told me a story of a tree from your home they had cut down because it was diseased I know a-I stood and left you there, breathed into a cup felt the morose breath of hatred dawn again saw the tree before my own house the vision of alchemy and the rap of twigs against the window the rap of claws on the door the sound of infamy stopping by the gate The sister father thought he had the death of the fourth of May the word of the dead he waiting ravens to scream, perched in darkness the tree before my house, standing still, dying on this sacred ground.

Adam and Eve never left Paradise; the World came in.

Heather, you told me the story of a fallen tree A story that drew out the heart and broke memory Heather, I will tell you a story of a fallen tree.

no continuity

‌ In present ripples of past, a skipping stone skipping backwards, suddenly four paces after it should be. or jumping through circles, in its second skip, So, excuse me when chronology dips in and out of focus, as ripples do that disappear and reappear years later upon the waiting shore; the lake remembers, and I am the lake.

Heather, Imagine an Eden in Hell, this is only half an image you see for my father was there too, holds half the memory, and where we meet at a crossroads, the focal point of reckoning is where we are father and son.

Tree of Life

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TRE E O F LI FE

Father and son, on each side of the house holding blades and ready to kill, I, one night, when I heard them crossing the tracks And father the next, with red, boiling oil in his veins when we saw them stopping their car headlights in the night red and yellow, tainted white, growling motor, roaring heart, Mika tethered and barking, patches of light and sound coming through the dark, I, the machete Father, katana.

The sleepless nights focusing the camera's eye towards the gates, waiting for them to come, waiting for hell to rise in a pair of headlights or three knots of black chord.

But they never come when we want them to, no film to make them fiction nor real, only memory. … there are so many things I remember but they are without order messier than Pynchon, a hydra of images existing at once help me, Heather help me, father you are not here but there you are with your sword and there I stand at the doorway with my own crude blade leaning on the wall, point down.

Memories ready to splatter out against the wall explode into a vertical pool of blood, streaming, large, eternal, mortally – now.

All at once father and I are in place a ladder spiraling downwards we are a puddle slapped against the wall, of substance interior on a spiral of skipping stones thrown across the heavy sky into the lake at once we are above and beyond, soaring on a spinning stone living in mid-flight in our stomachs and falling deeper into the air – until the shock of gravity hits us from below.

We are in memory's shell, unwound again the countenances strive beside us in the shadows (Heather, you should know, too). Father and I are driven aground forever in pools of water, and puddles, lakes bodies of water that echo the splash of stones, the spreading of circular ladders, rising like our mind's DNA, spiraling out of control...

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Tree of Life

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TRE E O F LI FE

Darkness, sweet and bitter, cleanse consciousness with the break of waves, the shatter of regularity, the edge of stones finally unwanted by air; bring the spin to an end, sink in, rise, you depths, to my level; I am born from the lake, in the shriek of gulls and the rip of waves, containing me; rise, depths, and be with me in every darkness, make me darker yet. Rise, Eden, and be perforated by this hell; lose your emptiness – Adam and Eve never left Paradise; the World came in. * II You awaken uncentered, out of Eden and somewhere catching onto it; the tree is somewhere in you.

I saw the darkness spread its starry calico across the land, brush the faces; I saw it corrupted from Columbus and ages hence, from the blood on blades and la campaùa del desierto, the blood of the Indigenous Peoples in the pampas and the mountains, the crests of waves where disease occurred–mystical and white, the sleek of arms and armor to the grime of their disease onto brown bodies, the Monument's mind, Machiavellian and cynical, industrial fields, the wheel, the grind, the bell and the Crusade's dome

I saw darkness dehydrated and unquieted, the wet cloth torn, unmade; I saw the stars in shreds, thinned into threads: all of the night air uncoiled and the thick of subway fumes, threads tattered, smothered in soot, smoky petrol burning alcohol ratshit leeched backyard fertilizer, roadkill, frozen dew mummy, glossy eyed, Spring rot smell, emanating body cinders, cigarette butts, pasty with lipstick de puta, desolate cold and scent of fried pastries and dogpiss, odors of coal and sweaty grease meat, wrappers and glass, recycled dust, the street a wastebasket of excrement: carpet dust flailed out from balcony, inky water blackening sidewalk, human skin and oils, I saw the wringing hands twist around the squirming eyes, feeling to express; I saw the gems of life spoil into an ash cried upon: cough and germs of city days and city nights, the complacent eyes still in bed and by the bus stop, the wet stains on the shirt, ever-sweating and salty, beads spiraling down legs the gated life, the poverty and richness in one, one constant deadfall disparity in the faces, disparity in the thunder of glaring timbers, spinning, rising depths, doom; and stepping down, onto timid scene, quietude and green; falling into a crevice on this line, Day's end, walking back to Eden, and still the smoke from the wood-stove back home on my school blazer.

And all covered in political pamphlets: Peronistas, Comunistas, Radicales mierdas muertas de hambre wanting just power and the mark of history branded into the sky the face the thoughts the puddle the inkling the molecule of existence in the world's most unbeknownst cavern.

Tree of Life

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TRE E O F LI FE

‌

All Hell enters Eden, (Eden, Numero 403 Calle 12, Villa Elisa, Buenos Aires, Argentina) In visitors and in best friends, in people we could swear were of our own blood, in men of love, brothers and uncles;

in women of love, friends and aunts and grandmother;

they all came they all came...

they all betrayed, in one way or another.

Made to happen and made to lose, Eden, one way or the other, fallen from the tree, Everything on this earth is poisonous, and innocence is only a tool of experience; and even now, Heather, even now as weeks pass, in these hours we discover the traitors who were my brothers, my uncles, my blood I would have spilt for them my land given, my food shared, my arms woven Around them. But I impale myself on their falsehood.

Have you known love like that, Heather?

Have you known blind love, listening love, divine love?

I have looked passed falsehoods, concentrated on sturdiness of character But I should know—the soot of artificial streams cutting into nooks on Perseverncia and Libertad streets, milking the ground with juices of forbidden fruit —Yes, they are born from these soils, wastelands; but so was greatness.

Berisso, where my ancient family chose to be born again, and some curse having driven them there from afar, distantly time; kinship between sisters broken two generations before, 1940's Cursed, bleeding feet across Chilean plains, Cursed, Great-grandmother bearing, Cursed, Great-grandfather, womanizer mujeriego, shot dead, Cursed, So young, like sisters mother and daughter: Cursed, cursed, alas, cursed!

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Tree of Life

Fall 2014

TRE E O F LI FE

(This goes way back, I know. Take my hand—) Cursed eternally by jealousy between sisters, Cursed with betrayal, family disowning family, No one to survive this story but the Tree, Branches reaching eternal over the curve of the sky, Budding into stars, distant as our minds, Generations there, almas y Astros; even the dead are lonely, Pondering how to lead the living with their own delusions. ‌ Pain is built to last1, Pain has come packed, suitcases entering doorway, through chambers, aqueducts, vessels, tracts of red and clear, with the blood and water, where no light touches; into darkness, inside.

Back in time, where we all travel, every day, especially at night, when we are safe and most vulnerable to memory, unstoppable, us or it? Skipping stones, in the air, falling in sleep and plunging into wakefulness, undead. Help us, we are zombies of memory!

Memory, sometimes I want to drive you through with my machete, You betray me, if I forget all the people I knew perhaps there would be no damage: My head be kept in the dark, unused, un-remembering, but that would also be an illusion, wouldn't it?

Memento, return in my dreams, show me premonitions, figures of the past trembles in the water, like echoes informing the future, Conscience and causality, Rings in the water, fading...

We fear the place of no return; We make love, We have children, We make Monuments, We invade, We give Mementos, We make memory.

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*

KT Tunstall, Heal Over

Tree of Life

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TRE E O F LI FE III

The story begins here: Punta Arenas, Chile 16-year-old-girl-sister darkhair Chilean local futureinbottles, 1940'schild Her sister had a boyfriend, Womanizer-man, Bullet made for him, Punta Arenas, quiet town, hold your children tightly, Thin-lipped rumors Spreading like the flees, The smell of cold weather Making icicles in my nose, Sister of mine from another time, What have you done? You are like A daughter to me, great-grandmother Of mine, but you have cheated on family; Those reasons will be lost to time, to the wind, Like black pearls in the sand, blown into the world's abyss With the rest of the procession—escape with your life for now.

Impregnated with your sister's promised man, (No longer a man: a devil, garbage, abomination) The town convenes and begins its journey to the night, Bastille upon the hill, and begins its communal justice: Silhouettes with flashing eyes come through the door A clap of thunder, a cry, a streak of blood—mid-air; Alive and deadly, pitfall the ground vibrates Wooden floor, splinters coming out of their grooves, Like tossed spaghetti, crackling and jumping Brown shudders, like a crying woman, red-eyed bloodshot bloodstained Blood prickling onto floor, dissipating, never reforming, entropy.

For one man, the universe has been taken apart, and contracts at the moment after, then he is no more.

Years of decay pass in a gunshot the house falls apart, It is burned under the vengeance of the people's law Great-grandfather, how can I come From You? You are the scum of the earth,But you made the woman who died On the Fourth of May. You made me who I am today, entropy, way of life way to die, you have made the ripples eternal, contracting expanding: entropy, I am here. …

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Tree of Life

Fall 2014

TRE E O F LI FE No wonder they called you sisters, You had her when you were 16? 17?

Young mother in that time misfit; Did you use that guise?

You both first moved to Rio Gallegos And eventual found a life in Berisso; (—Dad would be born there years later ('59)) There is no name for you: not widow, nor wife; not girlfriend, sister, nor daughter; no friend no family.

Mother.

Mother and daughter, so young both of you: People mistook you for sisters; grandmother, Lucila, I imagine you 10-years-old suddenly In a town: houses of corrugated metal, rusted, Decaying; what must they have done to your mind?

What did the plate-perforating rust, the sharp and rough edges of flaky metal, excrement of oxide and iron; what did it all mean to you? Brown, green, red, colors diminished by the water, salt and earth; wasting the wastelands into themselves, downward spiral, LatinAmerican Epic. Lucila, did your mind change to these Images of the land? Did you see the decline from then and before you were born? Did you see family reaching Apocalypse? No, you couldn't have even with whom your own Mother was: a warning.

Berisso, Argentina, 1957: You are twentysomething. Swirling in your mind is Love in the form of an Italian young man, he is dancing, holding you in arms you are ruined by his tragedy, heartbroken for his motherland; and something else, unplaceable, catches you about him. But This romance ends, abruptly, when goes back. Leaves you pregnant—familiar— {excuse me this detail has been lost in honor of the dead} you get him back somehow. And begin fabrication of ideals intensification of love for the man, for the family. But you are dark, and they take that against you; Spirit of Europe, it is whitening borderlines, intermediary contact, the lovechild of Nazism in a country where anything can be done, anyone can live, freedom of supremacy; but this Italian young man is different: he married you, nothing less. Lorenzo. …

Tree of Life

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the Anthologist

TRE E O F LI FE The story begins here:

San Michele, Italia 18-year-old-boy-brother-son youngman ran into ditches pushing mama on a bed-cart under bombs, clinging to the sewage.

Would run through streets cry of planes above, WWII in his backyard.

San Michele, quiet town, hold you children tightly, they will leave you nonetheless, slit throats blown out guts smell of children dying, or the drain of tears for parentless children.

Brother of mine from a different war, Where are you now? I have heard your echoes of life through the lights, as father and I spoke at the table. You return to us in the oddest ways. I never met you, grandpa, Lorenzo, I never saw your face but in a photograph (or mirror); but that's family, isn't it? Loving you across time, across space, above the earth's surface.

You are not my Father, but you are a father of mine, too.

Darkness spreads in ashes when think of you and grandma; the darkness interior changes forms; yes, in the place where light never touches down, I am water, I am ice, I am ashes for you. I am grandson, a pillar of sand when I turn my head to the fallen city: I am with the dead. Newfound molecules of you inside me, upon my face, upon every silver surface, upon the lakes and the rivers flowing in me the truth is we see each other everyday I keep you alive, but love is mutual and you are there with me at my graduation, in my old age, in the spring and mostly in the fall, at Rutgers three months from now.

We see each other everyday Grandfather, if you were alive— when you are alive I can tell how much you love me, too. Lorenzo, let me recognize you as Santiago you are my other father of the photographs, made of the same thoughts I have late at night making my muse, you I see in my neurons, your life remains there, somewhere above us all, and below, in the sublime earth, not far from where we, the living will reach.

I will meet you there, across the bombs, across the mountains, across the ocean, in the village, beside our silver lake. ‌

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Tree of Life

Fall 2014

TRE E O F LI FE

Los pronuncio marido y mujer Marriage of roots, marriage of past; I accept all that you are And I accept all that you are, too Was there ever a part of you that didn't love the other?

Would you, both of you, have to accept that part too?

Secrets that died with you in your graves, Secrets you never told to your son, Secrets in eyes that look away, secrets that die in pride Secrets that extinguish in tears repressed, Secrets, grandma, secrets!

Yes, you married “secrets” after Renzo passed away...

Fantasies that prevailed after the death of your husband, life beyond him turned into life behind his ghost; your old age returned to childish dreams of love and family, an old woman, a wrinkled eye-lid drawn to the worlds inside and drawn out of the world with your daughter in it.

At the center of the tree of life poisons from past generations like stars to foretell our doom roots are branches on the other side (you would know that now in the Reckoning), mirroring buds above ground.

You never asked for help with the devil; You made a truce with her You let that world into Eden, You let your Eve and Adam speak to the snake, The snake was your own, too Eden is scorched scorched eons after you let your snake inside the world's damned lands damned eden.

Argentina, how similar you are to the children you have bred you are roots to our branches You make me wonder if I too am naturally evil...

Argentina, your earth is splitting you carry the genes of disaster dare to emulate capitalism and yet politically you want to be communist in somewhere in between you worship a military general (Viva Peron!) / (Viva Evita!) and his wife. In the soul of the political priests: even they know you were imperfect, after Evita died, you hooked up a waitress married her made her president.

The only option you left for democracy was a military coup.

Argentina, you host of strangest things elevator of animal Shame must have fallen asleep to the silence of the birds in the Pampas.

Argentina, you make it happen: you are the tree of life, the venom the apple the snake you are life you're God you are devil.

Argentina, you are the sublime of desecration, your genes lie in the fungi and in the defecation desolated by the last dog that is now 13 kilometers away.

Argentina, you make solitude beautiful because you are replete with wonderful mountains and terrible people.

Argentina, “Un pais con buena gente.” Why do you lie yourself so?

Tree of Life

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the Anthologist

TRE E O F LI FE IV

Entropy is waiting to be born in the apple It came from the seed that became the tree; Like trash caught up in a whirlwind, like the lost languages and words of eyes, A scheme dwindling but there, slowly dipping into chaos, too many people for our humanity to read.

Turn me back into an embryo, to the beginning when solitude was innocent and a void of pleasant existence take me back; at the same time, I wouldn't want to be anywhere else.

Unborn is unknowing of love, but all this entropy I have had enough of.

Existence flailing out of control, children become monsters, husband dying, mother dead and still smelling like alcohol in her tomb, the smell of forgetfulness, secrets giving birth to wrinkles; like age that wears away the Teflon on the black-coated pans, the refrigerator that must be replaced, the browning of old plastic, the spoon's oxide that never rubs off.

Me, old and alone.

Heather, imagine my face wrinkled and aboriginal, my hair colored golden or blonde, like most old woman in my country; imagine the secrets of my dark eyes that never told my son what type of sister he had, imagine my son defending my daughter against (for instance) the housemaid that stole from me, what proportions of monstrosity that were behind his back while he faced a little rat, defending me—oh, I was proud of him! He was such a good child when I was alive, or when my husband still lived; Renzo kept Olga at bay because she loved him with her hatred and her jealousy for her brother.

Heather, have you met my grandson? I loved him so much. How ironic, I must have lasted the time he took to get here after my cerebral hemorrhage. Tell him it wasn't his fault. Tell him he was only trying to do the right thing when he told me that he was leaving for a week—I just got nervous, I wanted him close.

No, tell him my daughter killed me.

Maybe I gave my son more love than her, maybe some people are born evil.

I protected that evil to keep my fantasy alive, To block out consciousness that our family could ever fail, The family that I came from had already fallen when I was born because I was born. (Heather, Sister, I have sinned.) My son has always cared too much about justice. (I couldn't tell him.) And here I am refraining myself from telling you, sister. From Eve to Eve, let me tell you to always study, never do drugs, get good grades, get married, we try to leave the little we have to hold onto to our most faithful children, before our souls no longer stand our own corruption, inert from ancestors doomed from birth.

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Tree of Life

Fall 2014

TRE E O F LI FE

You see, My daughter starved me until I only had potatoes in my refrigerator, Then she sent me to a care center; I was medicated and my mind grew duller I suddenly began to die, more quickly, more quickly! Meanwhile, My son couldn't find me at home and was terrified when someone told him I was in the care center. He found me there, by the daisies, Convincing myself that the sun was good enough, and asked me what had happened. I— I didn't know what to say. Who was my daughter anymore?

Two weeks later she moved me again; I began to grow fat from the pills, We hibernated in deathbeds until my son had had enough and he “kidnapped” me to his house. I had aged 10 years in one month. My grandson couldn't recognize Me. Once, I could speak, I could be smart, I could make people laugh, I was grand; But my daughter and modern medicine killed me. How could I be hated?

Heather, how is your tree? Is it poisoned by past too?

Did your mother sleep with her sister's boyfriend, Was he shot upon the vengeance of the town?

Did they escape in the night; were their lives a novelty, A tragedy? Did darkness sound in the clang of falling wine bottles?

Did nightmares shatter and impale your mind with hopelessness; Where your tears the tears that your mother drank herself to sleep with?

Did your son feel embarrassed when he came back From school to visit his grandmother; did he stop visiting her Because of it? Tell me, Heather, do you live with the four-meter shadow Of a curse from the very bud you emanated from Hanging over you? Did the tree of life shudder in the night, As it did to me? Heather, Heather, bear this pain, like I; Heather, bear it and cringe so that it never happens to you.

Heather, I wish I had a daughter like you, I wish I could be proud and unafraid of the things You would do to me. Heather, yours is a good heart For reading this far. Heather, do me a favor, And avenge me by being who you are, Avenge me in your silence, in your being …

The story begins and ends here: Did I cause the stroke?

Did I kill my grandmother?

Heather, forget me, Forget all of this poem, forget that I am Argentina, Forget that I am family and never put your roots down; As much as family gives, it will take everything away,

Tree of Life

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the Anthologist

TRE E O F LI FE For I am

the last goodbye, I am dark eyes in the shade, amber in the light, the last look of sadness, the guilt in escape impossibility, unpredictability of death, deathbed, the last ember, the heart of darkness, the drought, the sentence

I am

sweetness of apricots when I was a child, raviolis she'd make when I was eight, the flood of light my grandfather left behind, anticipation of joy in every hour before my arrival her arms fattened, her body after the stroke, without speech, without place, without home;

I am the final viscous fluid that comes from the Tree of Life I am the death sentence, endoftheline; the spiral down Argentina, you have made me into the shadow I am today, I am three knots of black cord buried beside the fallen Tree, I am the end, the doll heads without hair, freaks of the night, Umbanda, the circles of fire, the shapeless lines of witchery I am rituals performed to kill a fatherandson. i trickle onto obscurity, represent my darkness, the amalgam of my faults. i wear my shadow on my face, being the ripples in the water, remembering the skipping stone falling into a predestined halo at the center, pushed by entropy, falling, and finally fallen the tree of life is dead, but i am the bud resurgent, and the bud still remembers from whence it came.

I can be the afterthought of death, the family that lives in remembrance, I can be the phantasmic, the replica, I can be every greatness she was, I still can live for her, be all the best of her. ‌

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Tree of Life

Fall 2014

TRE E O F LI FE

It has been three years hence, The sentence of Argentina has left my lips; I leave it alone, in solitude. But it is the afterthought That keeps me awake, the residue it has left in my interior, The melancholia unmatched by unsettled tears; this conflict never ends, Many things are left unsaid, my heart is half empty, the meowing of a black cat May leave me unsettled, the taste of orange juice may remind me of flies on our dining table, And flies irritate me the way dreams would if they were conscious. Did I ever grieve, or was it Anger?

I have felt dangerously—, I have since Argentina.

The foliage was yellowed stains of brown as if teardrops had aged every leaf the color of the day was like it is somewhere in New England Berisso never gets like that but your funeral took place somewhere magical in my mind the air has an amber tint we wear black on a beautiful day and I am somewhere in the ether, geography has no place, the leaves look like maple in my heart's memory, rustling across earth, beside and beneath; a coffin handle transforms my hand so inhuman it felt made for appearance i can't let go-the earth is uneven-shoulder might pop-i am bony as the dead underneath necks twist arms fall to sides eyeballs shift there we are men on sides carrying the dead, but one carries the dead alone; you don't want to forget their voices, and a voice can never be explained, can't be shared, only felt in a moment.

I never went back to your little temple, but stood by the door where you gave your final breath, the sentence death whispers that we repeat. I sat in the hospital, in front of it, closed, unattainable; a wooden tombstone for more than one.

That was two months ago, the first time a returned in two years.

I'm sorry I stayed away, but none of it matters now.

Hell came into Eden, and Eden always in the middle of Hell Argentina could never have escaped that spiral; I know not what is actually outside, But I know some of what is inside: darkness, my friend Heather and the dead, the Tree of Life.

Rest me in peace, Heather, Rest me, sister; take my secrets, Keep them safe, because I'll get claustrophobic with them in my tomb;

‌

Heather, be this heart; Heather, be my hearth, Embalm the black veils, the amber tint, The flies at dining table, the foliage of the graves; Embalm my memories; a part of me, a part of you now

Tree of Life

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the Anthologist

TRE E O F LI FE

Fall 2014