The Anthologist est. 1927
RUTGERS UNIVERSITY LITERARY MAGAZINE
no. 85
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: theantho.com RUSA Allocations Board, paid for by student fees. Send us your art or writing to: antho.rutgers@gmail.com
Editor in Chief
Doron Darnov Senior Editor
Social Media Director
Daniel Levin
Rudy Ogawa
Managing Editor
Art Director
Jennifer Comerford
Nodira Ibragimova
Associate Editors
Alex Arbeitel Jasminy Martinez
Graphic Designer
Rachel Ferrante
Copy Editors
Henri Danjolli Meg Tsai Amy Barenboim Christina Gaudino Abigail Lyon Talyah Basit Nick Buchinski Brienne Flaherty Vaughn Rossi Danielle Amatucci
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Table of Contents Poetry | Art | Prose
|bloom| — Shannon Ray//8 Making Omelettes — Celine Dirkes//9 Synesthesiatic Green — Amy Barenboim//10 Scene: family dinner — Alex Arbeitel//11 Suburban Condition — Anonymous//12 Twelve Ways of Looking at a Love Poem — SuperQuivocal//14 A Warning to Descendents --- Dustin He//16 Brief Instructions for Continued Living in Three Parts --- Celine Dirkes//17 Breakfast at 603, 2012 — Gregg Bautista//20 ella — Gregg Bautista//21 On Paris Time — Jennifer Comerford//22 Bath at Sunset — Jennifer Comerford//23 Dance of Life and Death — Aulona Scanzello//24 Sailing Dreams — Aulona Scanzello//25 Baxter -- Rachel Ferrante//26 Maeternal Burden of Constant Birth — Vaughn Rossi//30 Untitled (21) — Delfina Picchio//32 A Parable About Building Churches — Nick Buchinski//34 Sleeping in the Dark — SuperQuivocal//36
Poetry
|bloom| Shannon Ray Strangers brush together and transparent curtains fall; spring sounds down around our eyelids A cello recompiles worn seasons recomposed as the strings untie and intertwine us There was something else, wasn’t there? Something about being alive everywhere, all at once.
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Making Omelets Celine Dirkes If you Crack a sternum like an egg, Does it drip heart like yolk? Or does a soft Small Yellow life peep out, slick with newness?
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Synesthesiatic Green Amy Barenboim
After it rains Everything is so fucking green! There’s no spot left that’s not black easing away from Green, it scatters in false patterns down the bark, and I am reminded of the time In the mountains and I saw the Milky Way in its reality, folding into me; The way it seemed to start from a mass and trickle down to many Fine little points pricking my skin; dispersing on trees in a tattoo of green; Everything’s so green it hurts and smells like England and Rebirth and it’s impossible to stay present there’s music in the trees, Sway and whistle brushing past my eye closed, So, so green.
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Scene: family dinner Alex Arbeitel
my family’s family dinners sit at tables somewhere where the family watches where the eating sits and someone outside watches where the table settings set the setting seen and tables meet and here: is a scene of a family eating dinner. the lights rise right to up the lighted table where a family sitting or the sun as setting sets the scene of dated dates in here, where the family meets the met to time to show a centered center eating while the watchers eat the dinner sitting set the seat to time.
and here:
a scene of a family eating dinner
while my family sits in rows and makes the watch of watching dinner, and the sitting of the setting sets the time and place for eating, here still the still is settling down and watching while they dine.
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Suburban Condition Anonymous We were born in the year of the Luddite, Pressed between The advance and decay of urban life The drawl and decay of the hinter-small life One of us was an inventor One of us was a medic One of us brought back the phone One of us considered death (the final product was 70 pages long and 10 pages wide—never published) Year ten of our youth: The suburban condition was arrested Rumors flew among the heat The Luddites were trying to solve The deadly instinct-against-instinct Mathematicians, bibliophiles, amateur detectives, conductors, Were hired, fired, redirected, reinstated In an attempt to cure the last modern plague Sanitariums were blamed Psych wards suspected Pharmacies questioned We tried to put winter ahead of us. The Luddites banned skyscrapers, subsidized muskets, Let the bridges rust and crumble into the murk You cannot break yourself from a single story, You cannot shoot at elbow’s length with an arm’s length arm; You cannot make a bridge infamous, that doesn’t exist. One of us was an anomaly One of us tried One of us tired of trying.
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Year twenty of our educations: Discovery has replaced invention, Prevention has replaced medicine Everyone is looking for a cure to the suburban condition, The contemporary static, the modernized mumble Looking for reasons that the Luddites were right Were wrong Were over-reactive or lacking, In their efforts to end the last strange murder-A new study came out: “Scientists have discovered that those who live in the best conditions are more likely to deathen themselves. They sense that something is wrong, but nothing is, so they fault their perceptions, and reason unreasonably that: They shouldn’t exist anymore.” We searched deep, and there was nothing wrong but the nothing Those outside the sprawl had long perfected the art of problems, Always had their impersonal connections, Cold compassions, skeptic empathies, And we never did. The Luddites said that our technological disadvance Would make us less and less disconnected-but as the suburban grows We shrink more and more apart, So that a stone’s throw cannot reach the other side Unless shipped there by biplane post. One of us stayed. One of us left. The starts, the ends, the denouements, they don’t haunt me any more But they don’t haunt me any less.
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Twelve Ways of Looking at a Love Poem SuperQuivocal I. “Do you think there are more living things or dead things in the world?” “Definitely dead things,” she said. But as she felt the grass beneath her back and looked up into the sky she began to reconsider. “Then again even dead things are still alive in their own way, so I guess living things.” II. The trick is to find somebody whose touch sinks so deep into your bones that you can save the feeling of their fingertips for later. III. “Would you ever want to live in a haunted house?” “Always,” she said. “I’d want to live in a house haunted by a ghost who used to be an interior designer so they rearrange my furniture every time I go out and then every day is just a huge interior design struggle for dominance.” IV. “It’s not true that people are made for each other or that they’re meant to be together.” “What makes you think that?” “There’s a reason all your favorite love stories end when they do. If they didn’t then they wouldn’t be love stories; they’d be tragedies.” V. “What do you think childhood is supposed to feel like?” She thought everything about a past that never happened to her. “Climbing to the top of a tall tree on a hot day and jumping down into a deep, cold river.”
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VI. “Do you think avocados are actually just deities trapped in legume form?” “They must be,” I answered, as I spread more trapped deity over my toast. VII. “What’s your favorite thing in the world?” “Watching raindrops on a car window while drinking hot chocolate. But only if I’m not the one driving and we’re going somewhere beautiful that I’ve never been to before.” VIII.
“Am I different from how you thought I would be?” “I realized you aren’t perfect all the time.” I already knew that about myself.
IX. There’s a silence between us that makes me think of a burntdown house and the ashes of a child’s bedroom. X. Everything that escapes. XI. “I know that my whole life will be full of things that I’m going to miss, like this rooftop or the coffee shop downstairs or the feeling of reading this book for the first time, but I won’t get to miss you forever.” XII.
“The point I am not making very well is that I love you.”
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A Warning to Descendents Dustin He
The perennial autumn freezes bone A mother clings to a pillar for support Why won’t the son speak to his father? A sadder tragedy there is none The perennial winter freezes bone His anger was dampened And lost its malignity In his understanding of the way the son wrote this poem “Mother, I have been a bad son Everything you have done was for me I have spent time away from home And never comforted you in my absence with letters I have caused you ample anxiety and grief I have quit my meritless jobs No more will I squander my time making bad friends I will return home and bow And apologize to father to his face” The perennial spring passed His heart kindled with excitement At thoughts past and future But Heaven punished his timing His knees went slack and buckled In front of the patriarch’s slab He ceases to speak, his mouth now filled with dirt The son grew mad with grief Forever talked oceans of nonsense Far and wide had pity on him
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Brief Instructions for Continued Living in Three Parts Celine Dirkes
First Aid for Heartache Apply tourniquet to aorta— Pain ceases With bloodflow. An Elegant Solution Cross-stitch my spine, Thread through my tongue And let the needle click between my teeth. Brief Instructions for Continued Living Fold the heartbreak Into your flesh. Knead until smooth. Let rise.
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Art
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Artwork bt Gregg Bautista
Left: Breakfast at 603, 2012 Oil and acrylic on canvas 20 x 30 IN. 2016 Right: ella Watercolor and acrylic on Yupo and mylar 9 X 9 IN. 2016
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Photography by Jennifer Comerford Left: On Paris Time Right: Bath on Sunset
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Artwork by Aulona Scanzello Left: Dance of Life and Death Mixed Media 2016 Right: Sailing Dreams Mixed Media 2016
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Photography by Rachel Ferrante “Baxter”
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Prose
The Maeternal Burden of Constant Birth Vaughn Rossi Dear brother suns, walking my way, with their hands in hands they’re with, binary, zero and one, constantly fallingwaningflying towards one, and another, The vector perpendicular, the tangent of their … too great to touch but too small to leave, Two stop cattasttrophe, and two go bitting blackness— —0h! I wish to be suspended as in 0 time, all things moving away and towards me 0h! I wish to be falling as in 0 time, moving towards and away from all things MEthinks I see your edges now, solar flares flalling towards your brother Ne’er saw I, never I felt, a frustation so deep! An agonizing antropy awaits! What a sad sorrow sycle of sircles! What a sad sight the sycle of sircles! The sysys-ss-s The sysys-ss-is Look! I can not even speak! It resists words! It resists! It makes one feel like flea flying to break from, trying to break from, maetrnal youth, for, as it is suspended now, the flea’s life, like the suns’, is too short or long so that they both experience a similar end of entropy, The Fly always only in its youth, it is not given time to grow old, And the sun, who’s time is see mingly infinite, dies an early death as well, always progressively working towards entropy, re-signed and re-signed and resigned to its singular sign of 0 yet wishingwanningfalling towards one To fall round and round your ellipses, smoothsleeksexy curves, To/roottworoottwo fly, to/roottworoottwo transcend alone, Aye, there’s the rub,
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For transcendence requires a relationship with another. For even transgression has already been known by countless, it is a similar end to the ellipses, though it may say otherwise, they are all always falling towards one, towards the standard, and then the ideal becomes indistinct, as it is not truly known and so it becomes n0thing as everyone slings their bolts into the white albatross, killing the albatross no longer realigns the great chain of being, the boarders between minds is destroyed and the albatross may as well be ones own head, cut off, shown to the other philistines So what to do what to do what to do but try and catch yourself, hand in hands they’re with, yet some hands my be more apt to catch than others, and some words fly and fall freeer than others. But, indeed, all poetry comes to a similar end of entropy through understanding. History, in its constant birth, begets alw/only/ays death: the father enters the mother, 1 and 0, with passion and in then its to the OBGYN, Gynecologist, Obstetrician, Radiologist, Ultrasound Technician, Midwife, and then the fucking Pediatrician. I almost threw my glass down right there. But I decided not to because our mother spends many hours out in her garden and would know. Instead we went down the street, cups still tucked underneath our shirts. Davy and I walked into the intersection at the end of our block and broke the two glasses. Davy threw his straight down and in seeing that I threw mine down as well into mother earth. And up they went, higher and higher, at escape velocity. 11.186 m/ssquared. Falling towards Jupiter. Then Davy started running and then I started running. And when we were running our feet lined up, all the lefts and the rights, at the same time and everything. It was very cool. And all of my neighbors came out. And instead of scoulding us they applauded. Some clapped and some stood their with their hands clasped together against their cheeks with their heads turned and went “awww. We get it.” Then Davy went, “FUCK YOU” Then I went, “FUCK YOU” and then they disappeared and we ran quietly, left, right, left, right.
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Untitled Delfina Picchio
I never knew what to do when this time of night rolled around, when I could feel the ice spreading around my heart, her eyes cracking it in an instant. It was just that morning she was fluttering around the kitchen like the little bird she was. Her tiny, delicate composure coupled with her energy reminded me of a hummingbird and the constant, rapid beating of their wings. Her angular cheeks and sharp chin are the focal point of her face, like a bird’s beak. Between cracking eggs and sprinkling spices, she wrapped her always chilled hands around my warm neck, thumb pulsing on my veins. “Your hands are like a fresh load of clean laundry,” she’d say to me. “So soft and warm I could jump into them.” And she practically always did. She’d always grab my hand to warm up hers, or place my hands on her body to where ever she needed heat. She sat across from me now, one knee bent, the other dangling off the high chair, loose sock barely reaching the linoleum floor. One hand flipped through the crisp newspaper pages, the other reaching for more coffee or sporadically for my hand. She talked and talked about the most ordinary things she read about but presented them in the finest light, cutting out the most interesting classifieds and photos to hang on the refrigerator for the week. Her excitement filled the room; she was the atmosphere. As the minutes drew by and the night continued to get darker, an invisible block of plexiglass had shot out from the ground, impeding my path to her. I could hardly see her eyes through the glass as they became distant as a sailing ship in a far off sea. Her lip quivered, slow at first but gradually increasing in beats. I kept my gaze on her, hoping she’d see me too and be transformed back to the woman from the morning.
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It wasn’t as simple as I’d hoped. I knew I’d only see her lips curl upward once again, soft tongue and hard teeth beneath, when the morning light peeped. I’d silently prayed that she’d wake in the midst of the night and see the moonlight shining on my bare chest, tempting her. It was her favorite place to lay, like a curious cat listening to my breaths. I thought I might fall into the rift valley that lay between us in bed, the space so vast.
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A Parable About Building Churches Nick Buchinski All the men who built the church wore glasses so that they could see where the bricks should be laid. It took them fourteen months, and, when they had finished even with the stained glass, which they had not built because it takes a certain man to stain glass, their sisters came with lemonade and biscuits and said, Oh, this is lovely glass and all of these bricks are laid in their right places. The sun was particularly yellow-white on that day, particularly interested in the grass and the trees and the images of the passion that hung around the church on that day. The ceremony, beautiful as it was, lasted only one hour and two minutes, and the priest brought the sacrament to the tabernacle and reminded his guests that this was now the home of God. The mothers remained in their homes and smelled the cups of their sons and husbands. A few years later, a group of smiling children ran into the church with arms full of oranges and hyacinths. They scattered them around the pews and sang glory glory glory, alleluia. A priest appeared from beneath the altar, wearing fully his long vestments and the ordinary colors as dictated by the liturgical calendar. He said, Dear children, why do you leave these flowers and fruits around the pews? Don’t you know they will wither or rot and leave a smell? The children said, We know, we know, Father Dante. Children, he said, my name bears still a historical and poetic significance, and you must respect me as such. Father, the children said, you have seen the face of God and yet you speak to us inadequately. You are a simple man, and the faith is quiet like your writing. You think of Virgil when you should think of the she-wolf. He sighed and skulked through the wooden seats, fingering his rosary and collecting the oranges and hyacinths in a paper basket. All summer it rained, and soon the Deacon found a leak leaking into the storage attic and onto the Christmas wreaths and all the
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temporary things waiting for their time. He sat next to a steel bucket, listening to the tick-tack-top of the falling water. Once he had finished his prayers, he lit a wax candle and set it in a tin dish to melt. He read the stiff missal until gently he slipped into sleep on a pile of purificators and corporals. In his dream, he swam to the shore of a circular island with a white tree growing in the center. The sky was wide and bleak over the measureless sea. The Deacon shook the tree at the base and it became a swirling tunnel of doves, chanting the Nicene Creed. A naked, gaunt woman crawled out from the root-holes of the tree and grabbed him by his shoulders. She said, The island moves endlessly, but sacred geography is unimportant. Remember: eat less to live, and always trust your senses. He awoke with the candle a flickering stub. It will be all right, the church said, I, too, am getting older. Soon, the city grew around the church, and people whispered under the leafy produce boxes in the market place. They said that a bigger church with a larger, leaner statue of the Virgin was to be built on the other side of the river. What could be done, the mothers said; they crushed lice between their fingers and hoped their sons would write stories about the feeling. It had been nearly two hundred years since the church bricks were laid, and the neighbors had built an ornate fence around the holy grounds, out of respect to the history. Pastor David sat idly on the stairs, looking over the trees and watching the cars roll past on the distant interstate. A transport truck parked parallel on the street, and three men in blue logoed shirts and glasses unloaded the new electronic crucifix and flat-screen TV. After he had directed them to the placement of the technology, he asked if they could spare any change for the vending machine. We’re sorry father, they said, but we are all three positivists, and there is no evidence to support either the benefit of giving change to a stranger or your institution in a general way. Ah, he said, well thanks boys. I suppose it’s time for you to get home to your women anyway. That night he pulled a translation of the Italian farmer’s almanac from beneath his soggy pillow and wondered which seeds he should stuff between the pages of John’s gospel.
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Sleeping In The Dark SuperQuivocal
I felt something run down my spine as I tried to go to sleep one night. It was as gentle as a fingertip and as sharp as a knife’s edge. Even under thick blankets it felt like a winter draft had crept in through an open window. I peaked over the edge of my covers, but as my eyes adjusted to the tumbling darkness I could see the windows were shut. Across the room my brother slept soundly. I was always the restless one between us, and the last to whisper “Are you still awake?” as the night grew quiet and still. I would know from his silence that I was alone. Our room always looked different to me at night, as if it was somehow both smaller and larger at the same time. Both familiar and strange. I never heard the clock mounted on the wall above my brother’s bed during the day, but at night it rang with a clean, piercing force that purged the whole room with every tick. I could make out the silhouette of the ceiling fan. I realized as I traced the motion of the spinning shadows leap from wall-to-wall that there was something wrong. In the center of the room was a patch of black so deep that I could only see it in contrast to the the tamer, grayer darkness that framed it on either side. It rippled like smoke. It breathed out a silence so thick I could feel it choking my voice before any noise had even left my throat. It was impenetrable. It was absence. It was moving closer. I threw my blanket over my face and buried myself against the wall on the opposite side of my bed. I shut my eyes so tight that not even tears could have escaped.
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Thinking God had sent death to find me, I began to plead with him. I promised God that if he let me live I would be a better son, that I wouldn’t spend so much time talking to my friends when I should have been following my teachers in morning prayers, and that I would devote myself to him every night and every morning. After exhausting myself into every promise to God I could think of, my eyelids began to relax. I couldn’t feel the cold anymore. There was a new kind of darkness—one that made me feel as if I were laying on my back and drifting over a wide, tame ocean. But the fear hadn’t worn off yet. I realized just as the darkness began to embrace me entirely that I didn’t know if accepting its embrace would mean waking up the next morning or never waking up at all. I could sense the ocean had a nauseating depth. I imagined an arm like a spiderweb rising from the swirling, black water. I imagined it grabbing me with a swampy grip and pulling me deeper into the waves until I couldn’t breathe at all. I decided that if it came for me, I wouldn’t struggle. Falling asleep began to feel like drowning.
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