The Ivy | #8 | June 2016 by The Ivy

THE IVY ISSUE NO. 8 | PHS

1 RESURGENCE, RUTHA CHIVATE

THE IVY

ISSUE N . 8 O

*The Ivy began in the 1960s, but its serialization began in 2014.

CONTENTS 4 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 31

Cover: RESURGENCE | Rutha Chivate Title: NOTHING | Michelle Wang 4

A NOTE FROM THE EDITORS After working with The Ivy for the past two years, it is finally time to say goodbye. We have taken part in the creation of six issues which involved hours of production nights, hundreds of posters, and several review boards. These six issues also lead to countless memories such as cooking homemade pizza, playing Rockband, and going to prom with Mexican literary magazine, Repentino. Before saying our official goodbyes, we wanted to squeeze in one last issue. We put out a call for applications much earlier this year so we could have our rising staff members see what it is like to produce an issue of The Ivy before next school year. During the application process, Daphne Kontogiorgos-Heintz and Stefan Pophristic were named the rising editors-in-chief. Daphne has risen from our technology staff to our technology manager due to her diligence, professionalism, and leadership. She has spent hours editing and re-editing our drafts as she listened to our input and gave her own. Stefan has been part of The Ivy since his freshman year and has taken on the roles of business manager and managing editor. Daphne and Stefan have very different background experience with The Ivy but their outstanding collaboration on Issue 8 has demonstrated their strong ability to work together. Thank you to all who submitted to Issue 8. As usual, we were overwhelmed by your skill and creativity. Thank you to Mr. Gonzalez, Ms. Muรงa, Mr. Snyder, and Ms. Rotz for listening to our concerns, respecting our wishes, and taking time out of their busy schedules to work with us. Thank you to everyone who supported us during our two years. It has been an unforgettable experience. Sincerely, Angie Keswani and Katie Vasquez

photography

CONSIDERING FICTION, Caroline Forrey I felt so betrayed to learn that books, like movies before them, have not taught me everything. They have not taught me how so many things feel. They have not taught me what everything is truly like. Instead, I am awash in clichĂŠs. How people wish the world was, not how it is. Mindâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s images instead of mouthfeel. They do not say what it is like to rouse slowly softly in the middle of the night, left pinky finger curled in the bedsheet, scraping the inside of your ear with the impression you have just stepped from the shower. To sit up in the orange streetlight and realize with that motion that your heart is pounding so hard and so fast through the hollow space of your lungs that it throbs through your entire being as if your blood has grown weary of living inside you. To reach up to your throat with your middle and ring finger (like you learned in 7th grade) and find the vein writhing there, pulsing and shivering there, like a stuck snake in the grass. To believe that in all this time you have not taken a single breath and suddenly, without conscious thought, fill your lungs with hot air that tastes like dust and rot and the sea and its special kind of destruction. To sit there in the dark and the not-dark and ask: What am I afraid of? When have they ever told you how that is? So that we could be prepared. My favorite authors still write in shorthand, describe sensation in summary for those who have already known it, like friends who never have to finish their sentences to be understood. I am the third wheel who wishes they could just get it all the way out. I wish I could have known before I knew.

medium

THE GANGâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S ALL HERE, Julie Clement

gel pen on leather

NOTHING, Michelle Wang

watercolorwatercolor

ANCIENT ALLEYWAY, Abigail Goldberg

photography

SIR CHARLES AND THE SKY WORM, Olivia Hamblet acrylic paint, copic marker

MADRIGAL, Kyle Max Ode to thee o woeful lord whose halls are made of stone, And he who fought Dragonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s fire was indeed overthrown. Heavens hailed; ships did sail; the storm wailed and cried. Darkness fell, the beast, the beast from Hell, even the gods died.

watercolor

WHALE X WHALE, Cynthia Ma

YEAR-ROUNDERS, Claire Schultz It is six-seventeen PM and the waves are gray in the fading light. Dusk’s tendrils lap across the sand, turning everything faded, cold, forgotten. A lone seagull laughs in the distance, a dark, dismal ha-ha-ha that is soon swallowed by the sea. The sunbathers have all gone home for the season, back to their year-round jobs and strip malls and warm beds. It is just Adam on the beach now, curled under a dark blue blanket, keeping sand out of his coffee, watching the sun melt into the horizon. He’s not usually the only one here. There’s supposed to be a gaggle of neon-colored teenagers chattering away around him, preening as they celebrate the end of the season. Labor day come and gone, their little private world theirs again. There’s supposed to be his mother teaching him to skip rocks, guiding his little hand in a perfect arc before release. One-two-three-splash. There’s supposed to be his father teaching him to fish, his brother teaching him to sail, Joe from the boardwalk showing off the art of a good frisbee toss. Adam can feel the storm long before he sees the fat clouds rolling across the sky. The air is unseasonably cool, the wind and salt plaster his hair to his face. The seagull stops laughing. The year-rounders are a hardy stock, rarely bothered by a little rain, but the news has been talking about this one all week—tempestuous, they say; biblical; the storm of a century. The boats along the dock rock in the choppy waters. They look so small, like the toy sailboats he used to race in the pond as a kid. Adam’s always dreamed of having his own, sailing it around the world: Africa, China, Australia, as far away as he could get. They seemed much bigger back then; now the Destiny is near capsized and salt water licks up the hull of the Carol-Anne. It would be a miracle for the little dinghies to survive the night. cont. on pg. 14 13

The sky is full dark now, blanketed in a thick swath of clouds. Adam leans back to look at it. His coffee has gone cold. Somewhere, far away, his brother is lying on a college quad looking at the very same sky, only his isn’t heavy and overcast; it’s bright, cloudless, California blue. Adam will probably never see that sky, with its full-day sun and smoggy hope. His brother’s only seen it a few weeks, but those few weeks are forever. The most eventful thing in Adam’s few weeks has been half-price ice cream on the boardwalk. The town is small. Objectively, Adam knows this—there are barely a thousand year-rounders, though the population swells to the bursting in the summer—but it doesn’t always feel so confining as today. This afternoon, he rode down Main Street, the crumbling pavement crunching under his tires, the faded red of his bike frame blending with the old buildings. Every single shop was closed. Gone Fishing, read one window. Closed due to weather, said another. Shut for the day, for the season, for the storm, they declared, one after another. This is not a town for the whole year; it is just a small cluster of buildings and a pebbly beach all but abandoned come September. Adam has not seen another person since lunch, when he left his mother doing laundry and his father hastily locking their patio furniture in the basement. He sits on the beach now, as he has for hours, relishing the quiet. The first raindrop falls on his face, then another, then another. He pulls his sandy blanket closer to him, closing his eyes, hoping that, when he wakes, the sea will have carried him far away. 14

ed cop p

pie

er w it h e n

UNTITLED, Amelia Wright 15

A RE DECEDUNT,

Emily Wang

They wander from the point

Gritty scars run along her face Etched intensely as if to resemble lines on a map Delineating a lucid path to the edges of a bloodless mouth Full of decaying teeth and the noxious fetor of fresh blood. They call her a demon A spawn of the Devil born to terrorize As their unseeing eyes perceive the deceitful illusion of a hideous monster While they look upon the ethereal face of an angel. She was once a babe as beautiful as a rose in June With eyes blue like the azure surface of the southern sea Framed by ebony lashes that swept radiant sunrises Onto a set of rubescent cheeks.

OE IL

In societyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s eyes her face is marred with imperfections A visage of abominations perceived as utterly repugnant With the bizarre curve of a once-broken nose Shadowed by the drooping skin under a defective eye.

EUF O EB

photography

But the first physical deformity came soon after her fifth year of life. When spread her virtuous wings about a young boy Tortured by male adolescents with nefarious motives Only to have their vigorous fists meet her precious button nose. Her next blemishes came from events much similar A drooping eye obtained while protecting a lily-white girl From the befouling hands of salacious men And deep-running scars due to a churlish kitten she rescued From the grasp of the biting cold of a relentless winter. With each altruistic action she performed A part of her once-stunning appearance deteriorated away Only to reincarnate as another piece of a luminescent soul And an auxiliary layer to a coruscating heart of gold. But no matter how brightly her angelic soul beamed Benighted eyes continued to be blinded by the dark glare of her misleading features Only perceiving qualities they linked with monstrosity And with spawn of the Devil. A Re Decedunt. They wander from the point. 17

photography

CITY OF GOLD, Rose Gellman

watercolor, graphite, and white charcoal

DISCOVERY, Nicole Ng

NOTE TO SELF: KEEP ON FORGETTING, Lydia McGrath Our life started with a burning, endless blaze It scorched our memories, the episode “previously on,” That intro doesn’t exist anymore. We’re not supposed to throw anything away Even the stardust that composes our molecules and very elements of being; It’s recycled yet again. We are made of mixed-up parts, of the same things So why do we keep remembering to forget? What memories keep you awake, When you stare at your flawed alter-ego in the mirror? It’s three a.m. and you still don’t sleep Why do you try to destroy and not heal? I believe you don’t remember The worth of life If you keep on trying to say nothing and do nothing While the dance and the war continue on. The fire that burned us away is back again You need to make a choice Before your screams fade away, before your words mean nothing Will you remember? Or will you forget? What will you destroy? And what will you save? The world breaks under your unresolved tension Your choices bring weight to the force called gravity. 20

oil on canvas

ROADKILL, Kevin Yang

Dear Addie,

DEAR ADDIE, Anonymous

I love you. I promise I always have. Even before last April, when I didn’t know your name. You’re my sister spirit, Addie, and you always will be. And I’m telling you that now, because I’ve needed to talk to you for a while. Because what I’m about to say to you might be hard to hear, and I need you to promise me that you know I still love you, ok? No matter what. Addie, I can’t keep up anymore. I just can’t. You move too fast. You have all these interesting things to show me, but you keep jumping from one to the next. I need to spend more time on all your gifts; I like to study and appreciate them. Each idea is distracting from the other, and I can never slow down enough to focus on one thing alone. And Addie, all those ideas are not a bad thing. I’d rather have the problem of too many ideas than not enough. I mean, without you I never would have found the connection between Geometry and Philosophy through nuanced concepts of infinity. I never would have come up with the phrase “negative peanut butter” to help memorize how to multiply matrices, and I wouldn’t still remember Jupiter’s moons from the dark 7th grade classroom in ways I couldn’t explain to anyone else. Because of you, I would go to school forever if I could. I would go to every art museum in the world. I’d visit every country and have conversations over coffee well into the early hours of the morning with everyone on the planet. I’d read every textbook, every novel, even the poorly written ones so that I could pick apart the aspects that make them unappealing. I’d reach fluency in every language so that I could understand the raw and honest expression of anyone willing to tell me their story. And Addie don’t even get me started on the art I’d make. There is as much inside of me as there is out; there won’t ever be sufficient enough paintings, books, murals, songs, dances, plays, papers, jobs, equations, theorems, poems, or words allowed in this essay to adequately express everything I have to express. I could fill eternity, Addie, and I have that because of you! But, my Addie, the problem is that time is not limitless, at least not for us. It’s as stubborn as a metronome, and it won’t wait for us to finish running around. And it won’t slow things down enough so we can see everything flying past us as we run. We just have to learn to let some things go, Addie, because there isn’t enough time or space for all of them. There is no such thing as enough time or space for all of them. We can’t be an 22

anthology. We can’t be bookshelves spilling over with precious yellowed paper, or filing cabinets of salvaged documents. At a certain point, we have to make the time we have be enough; otherwise, we’ll never get anything done, and that’s a worse crime to commit. So Addie, you have to believe me when I say it’s not your ideas that are the problem. The problem is that your endless bouncing keeps them out of reach. Because of that, I take the pills you don’t like—the ones that make us go slow so I can study what I see. And Addie, I think I’m okay with that. I’m okay going slower, even if it means we don’t see everything, because if we go fast, then I can’t see anything, and that’s worse. Addie, I take the pills not because I don’t like what you give me, but because I don’t want to waste it.

THE CITY THAT NEVER SLEEPS, Audrey Zhou

Love, An Artist Who Suffers From ADD

acrylic on canvas

oil

can

vas

wit

ire

BEE LINES, A my Lin

VIRGINIA, Lydia Duff The pavement is grey. The soles of my shoes give against the gritty surface. I’m tired. My muscles burn and my sinews stretch and my bones are heavy. I’m a Totentanz skeleton with a stucco grin pasted on, and I have to keep moving or I’ll crumble into dust. The air is zukunftsträchtig, because “heavy with promise” doesn’t sound promising enough. Its heavy over my heavy should be suffocating but it’s not. It smells of petrichor, of damp sawdust, of oilslick. An urban womb. The wind is barbed. It pulls my warmth into its vacuum and leaves needle scratches on my hard palate. I’m trying to shout louder than the trees, and it works for a while. I’m clinging to the surface with my boots and pulling at the air with my arms and coming apart at the seams. The thing is, I’m not sad or screaming my existence into the void or anything. I’ve zoomed in on the details, turned up the volume. The other girl is walking faster than me. She’s a little taller, a little warmer, spread a little less thin. I think I feel this much all the time, when I care to.

BREAD CRUMBS, Eddie Cai

oil on canvas

ALMOST THERE BUT NOT QUITE,

Leslie Liu

Hannah Davies

ballpoint pen

how do I swallow a ghost inhale an enigma that suffocates my sanity the ethereal that is somehow real gasping and sputtering as I force it down my throat as smoke drowns my lungs, envelops my lips my tongue in wisps of whispers that echo words once mine long gone

STAGES, Katie Vasquez

Technicolor sand was the substrate. Sand dollar was the currency. Dead jellyfish in empty milk jugs were our pets. Our home stretched from Pop Pop’s house to the sea. We lived for sunscreen and ice cream and Bruce Springsteen. We shared a hair brush to calm my brown frizz and to style your strawberry blonde ponytail into a Yankees cap. Then the magic brush turned into our microphone every time we’d sing “Thunder Road.” ~~ The minivan drove us an hour away. Our house was surrounded by miles of fields instead of beaches. The sand was traded for hard wood. The sand dollars were exchanged for American Express. The Yankees cap stuck around but soon your ginger wig introduced itself. The world stretched from school to Doctor Reiss’s and we sang less as we were home-less. ~~ In silence, Dad’s BMW took me to a new city...or at least it felt that way when juxtaposed with jetties and farm land. I saw the big library lit up at night and I think you would have hated how it made education seem like a metropolitan luxury.

oil on canvas

CALYPSO, Grace Zhang

After one of the editors-in-chief organized the visual art submissions into a Google Slides presentation and the literature submissions into a Google Document, the current and rising staff members met to discuss the works in a review board. During this process, the identity of each artist remained anonymous to all but this editor. After a three hour long discussion of how each piece could fit into The Ivy, the staff members were presented with a Google Form that gave the title of each piece as a question and the options of “yes” and “no.” A staff member could choose yes, no, or not to vote on each piece. The pieces with the highest percentage of “yes” votes were accepted into the magazine. The only exceptions to this rule were pieces by an artist who received more votes on a different submission. The Ivy only publishes one piece per artist in a given issue. Fewer literature pieces are featured in this issue because most of the selected literature is longer than the usual literature submission length. Many pieces require an entire page, and some even require more than one. This resulted in a 2:1 ratio of visual art to literature. 30

FONTS COVER | New Yorker regular 60pt, 12pt TABLE OF CONTENTS | Open Sans semibold 14pt, Lora italic 14pt STAFF LIST | Open Sans semibold 14pt, Lora italic 14pt COLOPHON | Open Sans semibold 14pt, Open Sans light 48pt, Lora italic 14pt, Lora regular 14pt SUBMISSION TITLES | Open Sans light 18pt SUBMISSION TEXT | Lora regular 14pt PRINTING PAPER | House Laser Gloss #80, 8.5x8.5 inches Printed by Short Run Printing. 2016

COLOPHON

EDITORS-IN-CHIEF Angie Keswani Katie Vasquez MANAGING EDITORS Stefan Pophristic Claire Schultz

STAFF

SECRETARY Cheyenne Setneska BUSINESS Harsh Raythatta (Manager) PUBLIC RELATIONS Hannah Bradley (Manager) Carson Donnelly-Fine (Secretary)

CONTRIBUTING RISING STAFF MEMBERS Alexander Blackwell Eddie Cai Jackie Girouard Leslie Liu Claudia Orostizaga Caroline Tan Michelle Wang Keri Zhang Jingyi Zhang Audrey Zhou

COPY EDITORS Rose Gellman Sierra Zareck TECHNOLOGY Daphne Kontogiorgos-Heintz (Manager) Grace Zhang

ADVISORS Mr. Gonzalez Ms. Muรงa 31