The Juvenilia (Issue 0)

© 2013 The Juvenilia All rights reserved. This publication may not be transmitted, reproduced or distriuted by any means without the prior written permission of the contributors to this issue. thejuvenilia@gmail.com www.thejuvenilia.com Cover and Chapter Collages by Bijou Karman Logo Design by Rachel Hardwick

“This wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death.

Either it goes or I do.”

-Oscar Wilde

the juvenilia

Edited by Nolan Boomer & Kolleen Ku Layout by Nolan Boomer Contributing Artists: Eylül Aslan, Jessee Fish, José Gallego, Rachel Hardwick, Anna Hollow, Bijou Karman, Christian Kluge, Kolleen Ku, Allison Leow, Genesee Nelson, Ann Pajuväli and Ellie Parker Contributing Writers: Emma Aylor, Nolan Boomer, Claire Friedman, Ellisa Goldberg, Julia Goodman, Anna Hollow, Kolleen Ku, Allison Leow, Lindsey Hutchinson, and Meha Semwal

Dear Readers,

I remember the exact moment when Nolan and I first conceived the idea for The Juvenilia. We were sixteen years old then, strangers from across the world who became best friends over three weeks in Greece. We spent the summer learning Ancient Greek, living off the Mediterranean sun and siestas, and talking about art and creation. The two of us wanted to find a way to share original art with young people like us—teenagers from all over the world who couldn’t meet by happenstance, but wanted to share their writing, art, photography, and stories with people who cared.

That was two summers ago. Since then, Nolan has gone to college in Ohio, and I’ve moved half my life from Hong Kong to New York. (My first Juvenilia bio concluded with the sentence, “One day, Kolleen hopes to live in New York.”) A lot has changed in our lives, but our love of sharing young, fresh, and heartfelt art and literature hasn’t.

The Juvenilia has seen lots of great work over the past two years, ranging from art reviews to travel diaries, fridge poetry, visual experiments, and thoughtful musings scrawled on the back of Chipotle bags. In this collection, Nolan and I chose pieces that we laughed at, cried to, and connected with—art that makes us feel a little bit more tender inside. I hope you feel the same way that we do.

I’m incredibly lucky to be friends with many of the talented contributors featured here, and I’m proud of their honesty, conviction, and innovation. I’ve watched our team of artists grow and experiment, push their artistic boundaries, and leave their own distinct marks on the world, one great story at a time.

Enjoy, Kolleen Ku

Hidden (12-13) Bijou Karman

Sleet (32-33) Emma Aylor

Benny the Bear (14-15) Genesee Nelson

Heart Swells (34-35) Ellisa Goldberg

Glimpse (16) Julia Goodman

Sun City (36-39) Anna Hollow

Mothballs (17) JosĂŠ Gallego & Nolan Boomer

Age Eighteen (40-41) Allison Leow

On Places of Solitude (18-19) Jessee Fish

Books and Funerals and Clothes (42-43) Ellisa Goldberg

Postcards from Iceland (20-21) Rachel Hardwick

To Pursue Medical School (44-46) Meha Semwal

Ruins of a Two Eyed Tower (22-23) Christian Kluge

Portrait As Teenage (47) Lindsey Hutchinson

Indian Summer (24-25) Rachel Hardwick Stills from Lake of Two Mountains (26-27) Ellie Parker Amber City (28-29) Kolleen Ku

Linoleum Prism (50-51) Julia Goodman

Twice (60-61) José Gallego

Formative Reading (52-53) Emma Aylor

Girls of Judas Iscariot (62-63) Kolleen Ku

Sex Sells (54-55) Rachel Hardwick

Self Obliteration (64-65) Rachel Hardwick

House of Glass (56) Nolan Boomer

Heavy as a Stone (66-67) Ann Pajuväli

Scatter (57) Claire Friedman

The Dead Bee (68) Eylül Aslan Dear Ross (69) Kolleen Ku

On blending in with nature

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Bijou Karman

For a week straight I followed a polar bear that I named Benny, and documented his adventures in my neighborhood.

R.I.P.

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Genesee Nelson

I danced at midnight yesterday, And if you dared to ask me why, I’d have to think, and maybe say, It was to lure a firefly.

And I caught four, And then three more, Before I saw how soon that they would die.

I flew with stormclouds yesterday, And if you thought to ask me where, I’d answer just above the bay; The wind had burned all through my hair.

And as it churned, I yearned and yearned, To learn if in the clouds I’d see the air.

I climbed a mountain yesterday, And if you cared to ask me how, I’d tell you snow-soft was the way; Though imprecise, it did allow The ashy ice, To fall, quite nice, And slice unhindered in a silent vow.

I dreamed a million dreams today, And if I chose to speak of more, Of memories of yesterday, And how things might be as before, Those dreams would light, And spin, so bright, Ignited crystals from that distant shore.

I swam through oceans yesterday, And if you stopped to ask me when, I’d say it was as dawn turned gray; The salt was less abrasive then.

I do confess, It was a mess, The dress that bled into my liquid den.

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Julia Goodman

Can I metamorphose quietly? I wipe the sleep out of my eyes and check again--my fingers still let the dark fall through. I once read that if you make a habit of looking down at your hands during the day, you will continue to do it while you are dreaming, too. But dreams are unforgiving and the hands you see will be grotesque and you will shudder. I shut the curtains and hold myself. I stroke the moth and feel its fuzz, I touch the butterfly and it shatters.

JosĂŠ Gallego & Nolan Boomer

While the intricacies of humans themselves have always fascinated me, I’ve never taken kindly to crowds, parties, or any abundance of humans. I’ve found myself wearied and spent, as most introverts will, by extended interaction. It would make sense, then, that my most full and treasured moments have occurred in big open places of solitude. Here are a few of them.

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Jessee Fish

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Rachel Hardwick

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Christian Kluge

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Rachel Hardwick

Stills from a film by the artist

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Ellie Parker

A lot of people go to India for its exoticism and mystery, and they return home having either “found themselves” or “lost themselves” to drugs, spirituality, or charity. I’m reading The Marriage Plot

by Jeffrey Eugenides right now, and when Mitchell goes to Calcutta, he calls India “the perfect place to disappear.”

I went to India last year with my school group. We did some volunteer work, and spent the rest of our time taking tours of empty, deserted mansions. We visited Delhi, Jaipur, and Agra (where the Taj Mahal is), but I was the most struck by Jaipur.

Unlike some cities where you flit through buildings and the streets are a blur, Jaipur seemed like a real place to me. It doesn’t sparkle like diamonds, but it glows like amber. To welcome the Prince of Wales’s visit in 1876, the Maharaja painted the entire city pink.

For all that people talk about India’s poverty (and it’s true, it’s there and it’s shocking), India is really a magnificently beautiful place. And not because it is “authentic,” or “honest,” or “hungry,” or “spiritual” (although it is also those things). Parts

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of India are opulently beautiful. Versailles beautiful. Traditionally, aesthetically, artistically beautiful. A lot of people miss the beauty right in front of them when they’re buried in a search for something deeper.

All these forts are built on mountains to keep you away from the hot city streets. They’re elevated and beautiful and cool, with shade, but they’re also empty.

There are vast courtyards that no one walks across because the ground is hot from the sun. Pavilions are set right in the middle of them, so you feel like you’re always being watched. There are grand towers and buttresses that you enter through dingy corridors next to what used to be the toilets.

I wonder what these places felt like when they were occupied. Was it hospitable? Comfortable, even?

I can imagine it remaining quite still, tranquil. Aside from the low murmur of women’s voices and an occasional child’s shriek, the only ripple that could go through this place is the breeze. Saris flutter but eyes remained closed, the air thick from humidity and heat.

Out of all the churches, museums, and other sacred spaces I’ve been to, I remember visiting these forts the most vividly. No one really cares about you in India, and instead of being lonely, it feels more like liberation. There aren’t any guards

or security officials. There are no signs to toilets, no fences, no velvet ropes.

And if you want to get to the top, all you have to do is find the stairs and climb.

Kolleen Ku

In summer of 2008, before my senior year of high school, I worked at the Bahama Sno Shack, a trailer the size of a king bed with chipped concrete tables and sticky yellow umbrellas outside. We had a shaved ice machine, a hundred bottles of syrup, gallons of sugar water, a cash register, a Styrofoam cup for tips, and a radio that was always on, tuned to Top 40.

Between then and now I’ve heard these songs often—“I Kissed a Girl,” “American Boy,” “Just Dance.” At senior prom, in Nova Scotia, at Hardee’s, for nostalgic value at a house party: wherever I am I will hear the choruses and immediately taste sno cone—in particular, the blackberry one, super-saturated, fake as chrome fingers, with a marshmallow fluff and sugar water mix pumped on top.

During my first shift I ate five snow cones. It was something you learned, working there: no one was watching you. The manager came only at close to count up the money and take the trash, and so we melted little bits of ice and fructose in our cheeks. I told myself I was learning the product.

We made the sugar water in huge

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jugs, filling them at the spigot behind the Shell station and then heaving them back down the hill, adding heaps of sugar before shaking them with our thin high school arms. To make the syrups ourselves, we would mix flavor concentrates with the sugar water.

My first shot wasn’t vodka or spiced rum; it was sour apple concentrate in a little plastic medicine cup.

Sometimes A would visit, once on his way to his hosting job at a Chinese restaurant in the white polo and black pants he had to wear. That day he got a large Tiger’s Blood—cherry and coconut— and stained his lips redder. This was before we started dating but after I wanted to and I’d never needed anything so jagged and lightlike as him.

Most often I worked with M, who had just graduated. I had King Lear for my summer reading, by that time specked with food dye, and she had a red phone and long thighs and dated a few older guys at once.

We were paid monthly, always on Sundays, and in August we were working with everyone’s July paychecks on top of the fridge.

We were making minimum wage, and M turned up “Lollipop” and jimmied open the guys’ checks to find that every guy there made more money than us. Girlhood became curse; I was its shy knees and she its blazing shoots.

A bald man, ruddy-faced and always dressed in the same Hawaiian shirt and khaki shorts, came to talk sometimes, starting with his bad friends and loneliness and segueing to sex. He came twice when I was working alone and I don’t know how long he was there each time because my ears were thin lines and I couldn’t catch the radio. I was in a vinyl box in sundresses or shorts. My hands were cold from the broken shaved ice machine, seventeen-year-old hands. I wanted a hammer or a gun or a dick. Even now he sets my teeth to drums.

When I did the night shifts my parents stipulated that I be sure to work with one of the guys. I lied, usually, too quiet to ask the manager and rationalizing that that man had only come during the day. I would work with M some nights, M who was half my size with tined elbows. She filled me in on the fights that had happened

the summer before, between “rednecks and blacks,” she said, when they had to call the cops several times. Even now the rednecks kept nooses tied in smooth red nylon rope or thick twine in the back windows of their trucks when they came on Saturday night. It was better this year, she said, so far. As she talked she tied a length of string she had into that little knot, whirled coils around its base, hanged her index finger until its tip was smashed eggplants and sleet crumbed on the tile.

Emma Aylor

I do not think that there is a greater thing to wish for someone than that the first concert they attend will be their favorite band, and will be the kind where you scream along to every word and get crushed and thrown around by people dancing and your arches hurt from jumping and your throat hurts from yelling and you’re sweatier than you’ve ever been in your life. And you scream and scream and almost collapse under the weight of people body-surfing, somehow without having gotten on the stage, and everyone is vocalizing along to the instrumentals and someone’s hair is in your face and you’re all crushed up against some stranger’s sweaty chest, and you haven’t had a drink in hours but you’re not thirsty. And then you leave as the crowd rushes out, and when you finally get outside it’s fifty degrees out and raining and eleven thirty on a windy April night.

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The band you’re seeing is Los Campesinos!, a Welsh septet who should by all rights be terrible just by virtue of their Spanish name combined with a lack of Spanish heritage, not to mention both the exclamation mark and the fact that the members of the band have all adopted Campesinos! as their last names. But instead they are all sorts of wonderful, and you can tell the audience thinks so too; from the point the band comes onstage, everyone in the room is jumping and shrieking and singing along at the top of their lungs to the screamiest twee you’ve ever heard. Towards the end of the show, Gareth, the lead singer, drags his mic out onto the floor and you can tell everyone wants to touch him but nobody quite knows how to go about it. People cling to the microphone cord leading to the stage. One man rubs his head, and Gareth just keeps scream-singing

until he finds his way back to the stage.

And so you walk six blocks in the drizzle in the most beautiful city in the world, you can’t wipe the smile off your face, you feel purified, better than you’ve ever felt before in your life, and all you keep thinking is you have never felt so light, and why can’t we do this every night. Your chest hurts, and the sweat would freeze on your skin and in your clothes if you weren’t still so hot, so the cool wind and rain on your face is like heaven. All you want is a glass of water and for this walk never to end.

But it does end, and when you get into the vestibule, you lean against the door and sigh, still smiling so hard your face hurts, feeling like you were just born into the world, this rainy, sweaty, humming, beautiful world that is New York City on a Monday night, walking home alone after your first concert. You’ve spent the walk

breathing deeply and tilting your face to the rain, and now you lean against the door to catch your breath, to adjust to the fact that any minute now, it will be time to come back home, back to your life. But for now, you just smile at the rain, and feel more happy and at peace than you ever have before.

When you tell your father, who has waited up for you with his guitar, about the show, your voice catches and you smile stupidly at the ceiling, and he laughs and tells you that you’re acting like someone falling in love for the first time—not even the second, but the first and the first alone.

And all you can do is hope that love will feel half as good.

Ellisa Goldberg

Sun City is one of four identical retirement communities designed by Del Webb in the 1960s, located along Interstate 215, in Riverside County, California. It spans four square miles, contains two golf courses, and its primary purpose is to accommodate folks ages 55 and older. This concentrated demographic of the elderly provides for a plethora of eccentrically decorated homes—I set out last week to explore and photograph some of them.

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While out snapping, I was approached by a Mr. Sam Bybee, who looked curiously at me photographing his front lawn. “So you like what I’ve done with the place?” he asked me, pulling out his wallet and showing me a badge. “I was a Texas Ranger for 32 years. This lawn is a tribute to a life I once knew. Want a tour?”

I followed him into the backyard, passing an overweight beagle, whom he referred to lovingly by the name “Peaches.”

“I’ve owned 117 dogs. I just had to bury one today. I get them from the pound up the street, so they don’t have to put as many of them down. If any of your friends ever want one, I get them their shots and give them away for free. Never could respect anyone who charged money for a dog.” He opened a sliding door and motioned for me to follow. He said jokingly, “I’d like to buy a pretty lady a drink.” I found myself sitting at a kitchen counter, sipping a 7Up, while he told me more. “I came to California to do some training in

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Fort Roberts. There were dances held once a week up in Newport, and that’s how I met my first wife. We were together until she died in ’84, then I moved here. One of her girlfriends followed me, and we ended up married—been that way since. She just had a stroke a few weeks back, which left her paralyzed from the waist down. She’s fine though, a real trooper. Camping out in the living room right now.” He took me to meet her. I didn’t know what to expect, but when I walked in, a very small, cute lady in (I’m only guessing, now) her early seventies was sitting in a rocking chair, crocheting with the television on. Mrs. Bybee had short red hair and wore enormous bifocals that made her eyes appear to be as wide as tea plates. She looked up at me and smiled politely. Mr. Bybee introduced me and told her about my interest in the front lawn.

“See Marjorie, someone appreciates the way I decorate,” he said proudly. ”You like it?” she asked me, in utter disbelief. “My, my.

That’s all I have to say about that.”

My chat with the Bybees lasted for about an hour before my mother called me home for dinner. When I got up to leave, Mr. Bybee slipped me a calling card of sorts, which I found rather humorous and stored safely in my pocket to include in this recounting (shown above, but with some of the information covered–for privacy

reasons, of course). From her rocking chair, Mrs. Bybee waved goodbye and said in her small, childlike voice, “It was lovely meeting you. Please come back very soon!”

Anna Hollow

This certainly isn’t my best writing, but I think I like it better that way. It’s messy and not fully thought-through, but it captures what it felt like to be sleep deprived and content in the backseat, scribbling on a paper bag (pictured to the right) on the way home from an adventure.

There’s something about this that just screams with the newfound freedom of age 18. I’m in the backseat of a friend’s car on the 4 hour drive home from Baltimore—my first out-of-state road trip ever. Road trips mean road trip games, but I won’t be able to tell how badly I’m losing to Dave at the license-plate game until the bruises from each punch from each license plate not spotted set in tomorrow on my arms—sure to be spectacular and rainbow-hued.

We’re trying to figure out the perfect road trip song so we whistle, debate, and dance our way through me and James’s iPods. I tuck my knees into my chest and settle comfortably into the hum of traffic and James’s off-beat whistling.

I feel the sudden urge to document everything about this moment.

I try to capture the sunset from the back window. I close my eyes to weigh the results of sleeping at 5am after a night of doing absolutely nothing with 3 of the best people in the world. “Equal parts exhausted and content,” goes into the mental filing cabinet. I’m writing this in Sharpie on the inside of a Chipotle bag for fuck’s sake. Maybe I never want to forget what it feels like to be 18 and in love with the world and hate everything at the same time.

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Allison Leow

I’ve been sleeping so strange with these crazy dreams that are more like novels (in this room where I’ve run out of shelf space); dreams I forget, having internalized them in my sleep until I remember them days later, and have to remind myself that they never really happened.

Today, my grandmother came by with my uncle.

He dropped off a desk chair; she left a sweater for my mother, who’d bought it for my grandfather; the tags were still on it, since he died in October, before it was cold enough to wear it.

When my mother came home, she told me what it was, sort of hugged it, saying under her breath, “Oh, my beautiful Daddy,” before sighing and putting it away and I went downstairs before I could start to cry.

I never wear the right thing to funerals.

In October, my dress was too thin and the funeral home was air conditioned and I shivered for five hours.

In November, my dress was too thick and the restaurant was too hot and I rolled up my sleeves watched my aunts make their matzo balls look like people

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and my cousins put leftovers and ketchup in a glass and made my little brother, the youngest cousin, drink it and we pretended it was just another boring family thing and the entire world looked slanted, too bright as I realized I’d never heard Abuelito sing, never asked Grandpa Seymour which poem made him buy that book.

So the books start to invade my floorspace as I waste hours trying to sleep, remembering all the things I never asked just because I know I won’t remember them in the morning.

Ellisa Goldberg

I’ve trained myself to expect the worst. To steel my skin and harden my tendons for rejection because, if I don’t, then I will hurt. Because: I’m soft and pink as a crustacean who was born without a shell, or the good sense to run from the nets (because why would someone be trying to hurt me?). My roommate sometimes makes fun of me; I’m a crier. She can’t quite fathom how those tiny, traitorous molecules of salt and water—and every little creature of hope and hurt that’s been hiding in my belly button, aching for release—coalesce so easily, so quickly. Sensitivity: it makes one look a bit foolish in movie theaters.

And in public. And in general. I like to think of myself as a superior specimen with heightened serotonin levels (because that’s what all the latest psychology research urges me to believe) but the truth is: it’s harder to verbalize emotion, to pack a feeling into just one word. It’s a complex system with moving parts.

Sophomore year in college, I went in to talk to my Sacred Hindu Texts professor. I stood by his door, clearing my throat, mentally rehearsing my polite yet firm yet

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unassuming speech that I had practiced in the mirror and on my walk over. I readied myself to defend why I was applying for this scholarship—deep down I didn’t feel like I had a chance at winning so perhaps I was a bit embarrassed to ask—and I readied myself for him to say that he has so much on his plate, sorry. But instead, in a voice so kind it could turn dandelion to puff, he said he’d be honored to write my recommendation. Not glad or happy but honored. When any one teacher understands the power of words, recognizes that their opinions percolate thoroughly through every layer of our brains, leaving indelible, powerful footprints in our minds—and then chooses to hold that power in the palm of their hand as one holds a small, tiny, delicate thing, like a lacewing or a baby earthworm—the effect is breathtaking. I left his office scoffing at my past anxiety: he was my professor, of course he said yes! what was I expecting anyway, a reprimand for applying for a scholarship?

Still, those stubborn tears began to form because there was something else. It was that moment when you go out in the

world and you feel so alone—you’ve imagined being in this position of adulthood, and of having to fight your way or defend and explain yourself because you’re untrained, small, obscure—and then suddenly, unexpectedly, you stumble upon kindness. And this kindness is visceral. It catches at the back of your throat, trickles down your esophagus and makes your heart just. Stop. Fill with rich, vermillion blood. Oxygen. Life. It’s a breathless feeling to encounter kindness, like that feeling I had when I climbed the Colorado Springs Incline, stood at the top of that mountain, in shock that I succeeded, every cell in my body celebrating, cheering, chanting with the other climbers: can’t you see that we’re infinity? On my way out of my Professor’s office, the school chapel began ringing and the sun took on the gentle patina of memory and sacredness. It reminded me of the many moments in my life when I felt small and scared and had braced myself for a hit but instead found warmth and love.

It is in these moments that I understand why this body had been made so sensitive, why my neurons have learned to

fire at even the slightest blip in my environment or the most tepid provocation. I suddenly am aware of how young I am but also how ancient I am. Call it reincarnation or a human legacy sewn into our genetic code, but we are truly made of infinity. Even thought we are trained to fear the worst, to expect our regrets to turn ghosts and sink their nettled claws into our ankles everywhere we walk, their bones jangling like chains to remind us we could have done so much better, we must realize that our regrets aren’t made of infinity. It’s the hope, the instinct to survive, and the compulsion to tell our stories that are eternal. Instead of finding shame and guilt, or a reason to hide in our caves, or to stuff our secrets and weirdness deeper down into our suitcases, we will always find this strange magic, this humanity floating in the air like pollen, iridescent no matter what season or what century.

That is why I cried. That is why I cry. It is always that moments—in stories or in real life—when we reach our hands into the darkness expecting monsters, wiry hairs of a spider, fear, rejection, anger wearing

the mask of loved ones, the miasma of failure clinging to our skin—that we find a new dream instead, a new hope, words to express the apple-cinnamon warmth that singes and surges and dances through our bloodstreams. I didn’t win the scholarship but it’s clear to me what I found in its place: the immense potential of kindness.

And now, here I stand, at the beginning of a new decision, a rewiring of my identity, a rewriting of my life’s path. I say: I want to be a writer and a physician. I’ll admit I’ve visualized my success but, just as readily, I’ve seen the choking of one gift for another; like twin fetuses, what if one takes the blood of the other? I’ve shielded myself for the damning words that held me back in the past: your sensitivity makes you a weak doctor, you are not steady-handed enough, and what of your squeamishness of intense sensory information like death and pain and needles? Can you really shoulder such a great mantle of responsibility? Can you face the mortality of a patient? Of

yourself? Can you face being wrong and the price being another’s health, vitality, life?

Yet how can I deny myself what I believe in most deeply? In the training and practice and discipline that has gotten me to where I am and will see me through the future? In the unexpected kindness of people and life and choices? In the fact that, even when you expect pain and setbacks (which do come, and must come, I’ll admit) that somehow the story unfolds like silk—catching on branches and tearing and staining—but also shimmering in the sunlight, the moonlight, the starlight, the cloudlight. All I want out of this journey is to find unexpected kindness, and to give my kindness in return, to the people who need it the most, in the way I know best: through the art of science and the wisdom of caring for our bodies (so inextricably intertwined with our souls).

So let the stars fall where they may.

The story will unfold as it wants to and who am I to do anything but record it?

Meha Semwal

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For EAP

Understated hum in the cul-de-sac, swift turn to sit wrist vacancy wrist. Stereo, a dark we feel born for. Dull vinyl drums clumsy and seventeen degrees no heat windows open cold as a gasp and here. Steps between comfort and knowing quiet. At home we forget our worth. Wake hours apart to the thinnest eyelids, nothing better to do than watch day come whooping over the tree line to a hot rattle-sigh at the bus stop. In the middle, everything was an e-mail to you. Regarding: fierce honest in the lobby. Forward: You shorn, boarding a mournful train. Six summers repeat the boiling air made me think of you a while and what to do but suffer the span. Bay, river, bridges riddled with give. Small tears to mend in the serratus anterior, core hooked thick to the ribs in a long reach.

“The boiling air made me think of you a while” is quoted from The Mountain Goats’ “Hello, Old Rabbit.”

Lindsey Hutchinson

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Julia Goodman

One of my favorite books when I was little was e. e. cummings’ Fairy Tales, which I didn’t realize he had written until my family moved when I was sixteen and I found it god knows where. At the time I was obsessed with e. e. cummings’ poetry, having had no idea that I’d read him over a decade before, memory quiet.

I remembered this earlier and it got me thinking—along with the many blog posts and articles about National Poetry Month and Poem in Your Pocket day, especially two beautiful ones from Harriet, the Poetry Foundation blog—how much words form who you turn out to be.

I was lucky: I grew up in a shy, bookish family, in which spending time together meant reading quietly in adjacent rooms. Home to me is silent sunning trees and dark wood bookshelves lining walls; the only sounds my mother’s tea spoon stir-

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ring in sugar, the cat chewing, wind, coffee continually bubbling from the filter.

Here, then, I wanted to write about books I distinctly remember finding, from childhood to present, to roll in the serendipity of finding what you need precisely when it’s needed.

My father brought Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone home in paperback. I remember thinking the cover looked dumb but he read it out loud to my brother and me and we loved it. When the movies came out we figured out that we’d been mispronouncing Hagrid and Hermione for years.

I found Emily Dickinson in the school library, stone and sticky with murals, in the sixth grade. A white cover with a bland cluster of pink roses—an image I now associate inexorably with Dickinson despite its incongruence to the intensity of her feeling, her fierce quiet. I memorized “I

heard a fly buzz—when I died—” from reading it too often in the hard-cushioned, waxy-sterile armchairs that seem unique to school libraries.

In my first week of college my mother sent me a card with a Rainer Maria Rilke quote, and I had read before in Plath’s diaries that Rilke’s poetry was fantastic, so I bought his Letters to a Young Poet and, just when life was weird and very alone, I had someone to tell me: “You must realize that something is happening to you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand and will not let you fall.” I put the card on my desk every time I go somewhere different, to remind me.

Last semester I posted a Jack Gilbert poem I’d found randomly online—“The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart”—on the online discussion board for my poetry workshop. That night, with-

out having read my post, my professor got up and began a reading of his poetry with the same poem. I borrowed his copy of The Great Fires, from which the poem comes, read it that night with a coffee mug of wine, and bought a used copy which arrived in my mailbox pre-annotated by a person I’ll never know who writes in blackinked block letters.

Emma Aylor

Collection of five altered “tart cards� (cards put in phone booths to advertize the services of call girls) placed around London

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Rachel Hardwick

Originally silkscreen printed on sheets of glass SHE USED TO WEAR SHEER TIGHTS AND LIVE IN A HOUSE MADE OF FOGGED GLASS; IT HAD TANKS OF JELLYFISH AND BOTTLED BEVERAGES. BUT SHE FELT TRAPPED AND IN THE WAY, SO SHE OPTED FOR A GLASS HOUSE IN A FIELD. FORGET THE TIGHTS, SHE DOESN’T EVEN NEED UNDERWEAR HERE. DURING THE DAY, SHE STARES AT HER VEINS AND TOUCHES THE FAINT OUTLINE OF HER COLLAR BONES. AT NIGHT, SHE HOLDS A FLASHLIGHT UNDER HER FINGERS TO SEE THE BLOOD. THIS RITUAL OF HERS BEGAN WITH A TRAUMATIC RUN IN WITH A HERD OF GAZELLE: SHE AWOKE ONE MORNING, TO THE THUNK OF AN ANIMAL HITTING ITS HEAD ON THE WALL OF HER HOUSE. SHE JUMPED UP AND THE GAZELLE’S EYES WIDENED, LOOKING STRAIGHT AT HER. SHE BEGAN TO UNCONTROLLABLY SOB, AND IN HER CLEAR HOUSE THERE WAS NOTHING TO HIDE BEHIND. IN A LAST EFFORT OF PRESERVATION, HER GAZE TURNED INWARD. NOW ALL SHE CAN DO IS PATIENTLY WAIT TO DISAPPEAR. Nolan Boomer

56

Shiver tip, paint me a portrait for loss, for the color orange the summer I was sixteen, and for held hands like your mother’s china.

Teach me remembrance, and the hollows of your neck when you were fourteen and I thought yes was the greatest one syllable I had ever heard.

Dedicate my seventeenth birthday to your parted lips, to gravel and perfume and to smoke rolling off cars and clothes.

I told you I loved your elbows and it was true; you forgot my last name and left town.

Claire Friedman

60

JosĂŠ Gallego

I wonder what Jesus felt when Judas kissed and betrayed him that last time, you said—before surging towards me, lip to lip, two girls betraying our heavenly bodies.

We inhaled and exhaled, Eve and Eve. No serpents here, we dove instead of fell. Through repentance or maybe love (but what’s the difference), you got on your knees that night.

You still believe.

Leviticus 18:22. Genesis 19:1-11. Romans 1:18-32.

It is an abomination.

King James Bible, leather bound.

But how? I thought. We knelt too hard and felt too deeply, hearts wound up like little grenades. Drowned within each other, running out of air from one another; all the usual cliches.

62

It was on your tongue that I first found salvation.

You danced from transept to apse to nave, singing, Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. Forgive, forgive, forgive.

Inhale, exhale, heartstrings ticking like faulty clockwork.

Your Sunday skirt dangled like a limp, shredded flag, while I thought of the pink in your skinned, knocked knees.

The heavy woodwork of aisles, filtered light, the smell of musk. There’s a steel flagpole holding your spine ramrod straight, You have no room for warping inside.

I think it felt like this, I replied, A little tender but more bitter than sweet. Maybe sad; inevitable defeat.

But most of all, it probably felt good. Relief, and release.

Kolleen Ku

64

Rachel Hardwick

This series is about the feeling you get when you’re over-thinking something and hit a brick wall: the moment when you want to beat your head against the wall to get your troubled mind back to functioning properly. Your head is so heavy that you have to lay down and all you can do is stare at the ceiling. It almost feels like time, in and around you, has stopped. It is the low point before the high.

66

Ann Pajuv채li

Say hello to my thighs! They used to be more slender. But then I was eighteen; now I am twenty-one. Three years make a big difference in your life, and I’m not only talking about physical changes. I am happier with my photos than ever. I might have lost my pretty legs but I’m able to take better photos. So I am dedicating this photo to one of the many dead bees that I saw in that pool and to my thighs.

Eylül Aslan

68

Written while viewing “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) by Felix Gonzalez-Torres.

I went to the Met yesterday and picked up three pieces of you. Wrapped in silver, gold, and blue; tasting like caramel or chocolate (or so I hear, I didn’t want to diminish you).

Felix gave you to the world asking for nothing but salvation. So I put you in my coat pocket next to some balled up receipts, and now you sit on my dresser, existing.

I don’t know if you know what your love story does to us, Ross. What candy, light bulbs, and a pair of ticking clocks could ignite within young queer hearts, fleeing to New York. What Felix did was extraordinary—he took your ashes and set them free. Now they last longer, blow faster than through the wind or through the sea. Your love, wrapped in foil, travels through Manhattan like a pulse. And now to me.

It’s been a weird week, Ross. I rounded the corner at the Warhol exhibit and saw the Portrait of you and started to cry. Time runs out, and that’s okay. A boy I know just got diagnosed with leukemia. A girl jumped out of a window on my first day of school. I’m terrified of going home to find everything different, missing, gone.

There are too many sirens in this city. But although they keep waking me up at night, at least I can fall back asleep now.

Above all else, it is about leaving a mark that I existed: I was here. I was hungry. I was defeated. I was happy. I was sad. I was in love. I was afraid. I was hopeful. I had an idea and I had a good purpose and that’s why I made works of art.

When people ask me, “Who is your public?” I say honestly, without skipping a beat, “Ross.” The public was Ross. The rest of the people just come to the work.

-Felix Gonzales-Torres

Kolleen Ku