Home | Winter 2018 by Grinnell Underground Magazine [GUM]

winter 2018 ho me

Fall 2017

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Poems • Clara Trippe

Nighttime • Lillie Westbrook

Untitled • Judith Tong

Untitled • Lillie Westbrook

Profiles 14 Photos • Leina’ala Voss

Under Camera Surveillance • Paul Chan

Rooftops • Rachel Eber

A Liturgy • Lucky Resch

The Same, Stale Place • Miriam Tibbetts

Fleeing The Prairie • Miriam Tibbetts

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ARSON Never ask a person why they didn’t leave. You don’t just shut the door behind you you burn the house down as you go, you commit arson on you childhood bedroom, your child-body.

INSIDE/OUT Here I am: shaking and my face is so red. I’d like to see my own insides please. There were the fingers I placed, very softly, against your hair.

INTERNALIZATION Never let go of anything. Hold onto that shit until you die. It belongs to you. No one else can take it.

by CLARA TRIPPE

Untitled

JUDITH TONG

WINTER 2018 — HOME

I drove away from fields of pigs, not because the idea of cross-contamination was too much for me, or because there was a garden snake lurking beneath my bed,

It’s not because the bloodroot here blooms fuller than I’ve ever seen at home (the soil is better) and it’s not because the gas stations I see frighten me more than murder does. It’s not because the road signs tell me to drive right through.

but because the rows of corn looked nothing like the clotheslines of Minneapolis. Some kind of dimension was desired.

No, it’s not because of that. And it’s not because the poetry is bad, either. Truly, it trumps all of the verses back home, verses that feel like freshly pierced and fishnetted children fathered by rich men. No.

It’s not because I was never meant to become a doctor or an engineer. I’m just not made for sanitizing procedures—I crave poetry, not sterility. It’s not because

But I did drive away from fields of pigs in search of some sweet-natured little breath of fresh air, because air pushed

the deep south loomed like a long-legged grizzly bear over my head, the farms of Iowa seemingly the next step to a shingled shotgun house blown through with hurricanes. No, it’s

into my hands by windowsill plants hurts less than the air rewarded by the toil of unwatered gardens.

not because of that. It’s because the snow down here just can’t seem to cope, and it’s because I can’t fathom

opened within me the same chasm which boasted brawn and crudeness,

It’s because the sweat-shiny envy of origins I wore when watching my friends play at being wives

making me the volunteer corn standing slight within its field. Not proud, not growing, a crow lost in the forest looking for the next available garden to consume.

WINTER 2018 — HOME

why walking for miles alongside the rugged khaki stalks of exhausted agriculture is just like watching the carbon cycle do its work.

PAG E 1 1

GRINNELL UNDERGROUND MAGAZINE

PAG E 1 0

by Miriam Tibbetts

GRINNELL UNDERGROUND MAGAZINE

Fleeing The Prarie

Untitled Lillie Westbrook

My shoulder burned the next week in school When she pulled me to an empty hallway So we could lace our fingers together And laugh about how long we’ve wanted this.

That night, After we had spent hours exploring in the dark, I rolled over to face the wall To face the ocean in my stomach Where a storm was raging And she, In her endless beauty And her near-sleep Rolled over as well To kiss my shoulder. Her kiss burned into my skin Two peach-colored crescents That carried more emotion Than I had encountered ever before The kiss said, “This is new” “This feels good” “I like sleeping next to you” “I don’t know what love is, And this probably isn’t it, But it might lead there, And I hope to God it does.” My shoulder still burned the next morning, When she flopped a burned omelet onto my plate And told me she expected me to eat the whole thing.

My shoulder burned two years later, When she texted me after months of silence, Our newfound sort-of-love long dead, Asking if I wanted to get coffee and catch up. Sitting in her car, Laughing at the same joke We laughed at the night She kissed me I felt the burn on my shoulder Reminding me of the storm That used to rage inside me when I Sat next to her. When I sink into my mattress And spread my legs into the emptiness I feel warmed By the two half-moons Burned into my shoulder I can still hear the sheets move As she crawled closer to me I feel her finger brushing my back Before she burned me With her peach-colored lips. She no longer lies in my bed But sometimes Like when nighttime cradles me I think I wish she was.

home

Malcolm Davis 2021

Talking with Malcolm the

day before

our shoot revealed that his go to food in the dhall is frosted flakes, his cousin Jelani, who lived with him in his home of rural Kentucky their senior year of high school, is also a first year at Grinnell, and that he can’t remember the type of milk his family has at home.

The next day Malcolm and Jelani

sat

the

BCC

pie (“good as fuck,” “everyone

eating

loves it”), about the places and

bowls of cereal and chatting. The

things that they call home. It turns

conversation, at first prompted

out that a perk of sticking with

by prepared questions about their

family is finding home wherever

homes, soon developed naturally—

you end up— as Jelani put it,

both clearly eased by each other’s

“just me and Malcolm chilling in

presence. They reminisced about

his room…that just goes back to

the free time they had spent senior

senior year…it’s pretty reminiscent

year going on long drives, about

of home.”

Malcolm’s dad’s peanut butter 14

Austin Wadle 2018

Driving with Austin on

home

the rural roads

of Iowa, they revealed that calling south Florida home comes with persistently warm weather, quality Cuban food, cheesy Jimmy Buffett songs, the annual threat of hurricane season, and in their case, a shifting physical home.

This past hurricane season, Irma

continued describing their nuanced

rendered their parent’s Key West

relationship with home, “I worry that

home unlivable. Austin grew up in

I think of it (Grinnell) too much as

Miami, not The Keys, and describes

home…it’s something I worry about

their Key West house as “sorta home.

‘cause it’s so temporary. I fear that

That’s where all my excess shit was

I’m placing too much value (on it)

but not the things that really make a

and that when I leave Grinnell, I’ll be

home a home… like nostalgia.” They

a lot sadder than I should be.”

Austin pulled their pickup truck over on the side of a dirt road and we got out, surrounded by prairie grasses and expansive farmland. Cows mooed softly in the distance and Austin seemed quite at home right in the middle of nowhere.

Sydney Quartey 2018

“

There’s this type of rice my mom makes, it probably

home

reminds me of home the most. I know how to make it now too, but my mom would only make it for me on special occasions. I was in boarding school in Ghana so when I came back home she would make it for me. And now even though I know how to make it I usually only make it when I return somewhere.

”

—Sydney

Ingredients Jasmine rice Chicken Onions Seasoning Salt Tomato sauce Fresh tomatoes Tomato paste Oil Peppers

1. Fry onions in the bowls submerged in oil (let brown) 2. Add 2 cans of tin tomatoes and stir 3. Add bowl of freshly blended tomatoes as well and finally add 1 tsb tomato paste and close lid, leave to cook for 20 mins, medium heat 4. Season, steam and then fry meat or chicken in separate pan (Keep chicken stock) 5. Add stock from steaming the meat into tomato sauce 6. Add salt to tomato sauce and peppers if you’d like 7. Add 4 cups of jasmine rice to tomato sauce and mix well. 8. Close lid and let rice boil in tomato sauce for 30 mins

Maya Dru 2021

home

Maya tells the GUM: She can’t live somewhere where the color palette is concrete

She tells us: That she grew up working on a lot of: • Farms • Greenhouses • Chickenhouses

She spent a lot of time in: • Boystown (in Chicago) • her poetry coach’s house • Johns Island Washington— people only live there 3 months of the year • various forests in the Rockies and Pacific Northwest and elsewhere

She tells us: “In total, I have lived in a tipi for a year When I was little I would go to the Chicago archives and ask for ANYTHING and see what they could give me.” And she lets us know she is a 5th class mountaineer

Maya writes: Rub thumb and forefinger. Call this home and holy. Hallelujah chorus of houseless hope. Hand lotion helps. Hold head up, ignore hollow stomach. Here, here, is home, always, if you can hold home in the palm of your hand. I write my hands into every poem, an obsession or prayer or callused vanity. I trace my finger along an answer for “where are you from?” My hands can hold anything but coordinates. 20

LEINAâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ALA VOSS photos by

Going Home

Industrial Sunset

24 But a house can’t stay in the limbo stage forever. Eventually you have to stop feeling things out and build the thing. Once you have a blueprint, it’s all rigidity and rules and there’s nothing you can do about it. And once it’s built, you forget it was ever under construction. I guess I had been under construction that summer too, and I was all completed now, but I wanted to go back to what it felt like to be missing windows and floorboards, when it still felt like my best friend would be my best friend forever.

by Rachel Eber I used to go on walks with my best friend back home. We’d meet in his backyard and spend hours exploring our town and get home too late and my mom would get mad. Sometimes he’d meet me on his bike, which he’d throw in a bush and hope that no one would find. Other times he’d meet me with his guitar which he’d strum as I lay down in the grass, each blade tickling me gently between my toes. We’d stay out so late that the morning birds would start chirping and the sky would lighten, and sometimes we snuck into houses that were under construction and climbed up onto the rooftops to look at the sky.

me the way he did. I wasn’t sure what it was that I felt for him, but love felt like a good enough word. “Yeah. I do love you. Do you love me?” He said that he wanted to love me, but that he wasn’t sure he knew how. We never talked about love again that summer. In fact, we barely talked, period. He gradually stopped responding to my texts and when I saw him at parties he’d ignore me. And then, before I knew it, the summer was over.

We used to talk about how important places become generic so easily. We’re constantly intruding on someone else’s special place, trampling on a location that was once meaningful to someone. Soon, some family would move into that house. They’d probably never go up onto that roof.

— A couple nights before I left home for Grinnell, I wandered back to that house, where I hadn’t been since June.

There was one house we discovered toward the beginning of the summer, near his old elementary school. He climbed up When you go to a construction site for first and helped me up, but I slipped and fun, you forget the condition it’s in is scraped my arm. He said he was sorry and temporary. But when you go back later I said it was ok. and see the newly installed windows and covered insulation and it looks like an As we sat on the roof that night, gazing actual house, it’s a sobering reminder that at the distant Boston skyline, he asked, everything you thought would last forever quietly, won’t. “Do you love me?” I looked up and thought about my best It was too dark to see his face. I thought friend and I sitting all the way up there, about that question all the time, but for back when I thought that I loved him some reason we’d never discussed it. Our maybe and that he loved me maybe, and relationship was special to me in a way how we still had the entire summer ahead that I couldn’t quite place -- sometimes of us to figure that out. it felt like no one in the world understood

continued on page 26

PA R R I S H

2018

ROSE

CAPLAN

2021

relief print by MISHA GELNAROVA

K AT I E

It is almost 1am on a Thursday night, and I am sitting at Cleve Beach, finally talking to my best friend again on the phone. It’s been months since we last spoke, and even longer since we spoke honestly.

And, after a pause, he tells me that he’s pretty sure he did love me.

I walk along the train tracks while he lays down in his backyard. “Wanna talk about what happen- We talk about stupid things for a while, and then important things, ed over the summer?” he asks. and then more stupid things, just I say yes, of course, and so he like we did back home. tells me about his depression When I hang up, I have never and how he’d never told anyone felt more alone. As I climb up about it and how hanging out with anybody made him feel terrible. He the steps of Read Hall, my face says that when you want human soaked with tears,I feel a pit in my connection so badly but your stomach grow deeper and deeper brain doesn’t let you feel it, being and deeper. Tonight, Read feels around other people feels worse like the opposite of a home. than being alone. —

Yesterday in the mirror I noticed the scar from that rooftop is still there on my arm. It’s faded, but I think it will be there forever.

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2018

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2021

V I C T O R I A P A R K

Moon is Lonely by Amelia Darling

KIRA

DUFF

A Liturgy

Scripture: Daddy – Sylvia Plath

Hymns: Tired of talking – León Call it off – Shamir Eh – Death Grips Writer in the Dark – Lorde Hard Feelings/Loveless – Lorde

She’s big enough and has done it for a while.

Assurance of Pardon: She’ll do it you know. She. My mother. And my god. God our mother. God, our mothers. Will be my father If you make her You and I Both know

Prayer of Forgiveness: I hope.

One: Glory be to the Mother, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. As it was in the beginning, is now, and will forever be. Amen.

You: as the day rises to greet the Sun.

Call to Worship: One: Oh lord, let my soul rise up to meet you.

2020

A Liturgy by Lucky Resch

read the full piece at gumag.org

The Same, Stale Place by

Miriam Tibbetts

Home is in you, in us, in just. Us three. Until the world is spent. My sister is not dead. She is not dead to me, either, but that doesn’t matter because she is not here. The last cut from our warm, filthy chasm came late on the last day of oil and salt, a day of wooden hands. We said goodbye like gulping fish, swallowing water desperately as if we could breathe better if we sucked down each other’s air; I knew it was foolish from the start, we pull each other’s hair and then she does it herself and men can’t stop raving about the color of mine so I talk about her constantly but she is not dead, and I will never lose her, so remember that. Losing her would be like slicing my chest in half with my very own hands. She is a cicada. A string bean. A spring lamb, a coil, what am I? Don’t answer for me: she is the only one who can do so and she is not here so don’t answer for me. I could not bear it. Her teeth bite. Mine bite harder. On someone new. Her teeth are accusatory and bite and ask me why I felt the need to replace her with someone new to love, we never had this problem with our brother, so remind yourself that he is our brother, not my brother, and my sister and I are not Siamese twins but the marks on our arms are the same, scratches of charcoal and persona bleeding on our wooden bedroom floor, bruised, orangelike crescents from the books we read, a bee sting on my lips but it can’t matter because we don’t need to talk anyways, bug bites on our calves because we have lived in the same, stale place all our lives, and the nicks and bumps from all the strange men are the only things that change. But we aren’t proud, so we don’t leave. We aren’t, so we don’t.

We walk together, we live our separate lives, we fight because we will never lose each other, we relive our life together on a flickering screen, thank you, Father, now we remember that we screamed in unison, now we remember that mother could only feed two of us at a time, now we remember that babyhood has no memories, are we really sisters? And is she dead? Am I dead to her? I have a drawing that says she isn’t, and please remember that there are three of us, and that the most important question plunges deep within my stomach, and hurts. If I had babies I would want three babies. But I cannot think of when that will be or why, or how it will happen, we ourselves were different, would we love each other more

if we had happened by chance? We all struck our mother at once. Didn’t she know us from the start? Did you know that I think about my sister when I am loving someone else? Yes, I do. I do, and it doesn’t bother me, the desire to talk to her while I kiss someone I love, but this is still very painful for me, because we are worms buried in the earth with grief, and dogs bent down in some semblance of prostration; I am a mountain and she is the river which flowed through it, but goes around it now, away towards the sea. Remember that I used to listen to her breathe at night I used to wake her when she wheezed, I used to think that she would die. But she never did and now she is gone but not dead to me at all, no, and I would like very much to seize her hair and pour her through a sieve into my outstretched hands, to keep her just like this, next to me, home. But I know that she would just find her way through my fingers, again, drop by joyful drop, until she finally freed herself from us.

a photo essay by

Paul Chan

EDITORS Vivian Cheslack Elliott Maya Paige Oamek Nicole Rosengurt Jeremy Sparagon