The Round Issue XXIII

Page 30

Cover Art by Clementine Williams Inside Cover Art by Lola Simon
The Round Magazine Volume XXIII Fall/Winter 2023 Brown University, Providence RI

The Round

Managing Editors:

Aurelia Cowan

Julian Ansorge

Eleanor Peters

Associate Editors:

Justin Nourian

Marlena Brown

Caroline Knight

Kolya Shields

Design Editors:

Izzy Roth-Dishy

Carolina Cardini

Simon Yang

Outreach Team:

Beto Beveridge

Francis Gonzalez

Staff:

George Chudley

Susanne Kowalska

Caleb Schultz

Rowen Lee

Carla Humphris

Leanna Bai

Olivia Graner

Linnea Hult

Addison Kerwin

Maya Renaud-Levine

Yilin Xie

Navya Sahay

Skylark, Matthew Rohrer 9 Metamorphosis, Harshini Venkatachalam 8 Small Glass Habitat, Julian Ansorge 14 Discomposed, Livia Wiener 12 Diamond Causeway, Henry Koskof 10 Guests, Alondra Romero 10 Fondness Poem, Raphael Williams 16 Untitled , Clementine Williams 16 Peace, Amelia Cumming 18 Puncture, MickChivers 19 Nausea, Harshini Venkatachalam 20 Fisherman’s Funeral, Lila Banker 21 A Starry Wandering, Alondra Romero 24 Moon Lady, Alondra Romero 25 Venture Capitalist Pitch, Jefrey H. MacLachlan 26 Appropriated Palimpsest , Clementine Williams 26 Were it Possible, Aurelia Cowan 28 I Wanna Be the Star, Lola Simon 29 Table
Contents
of
Blue Territory , Amelia Cumming 31 Nestby Mick Chivers 30 Poem for Chaim Soutine, Matthew Rohrer 30 Carrion Carnival, Mick Chivers 31 Pentobarbital, Julian Ansorge 32 Muskrat Skull, AlondraRomero 33 SpaceStation, Jill Ruscoll 34 Resting, Hannah Bashkow 35 Dusk at the Pier, Caroline Maun 36 From the Dock of the Seekonk, Jaden Rose Bleier 37 Staying Afoat , Hannah Bashkow 38 Robot Dog at the End of the World, Robert Guard 39 Tender, Aurelia Cowan 40 Star Baby, Lola Simon 41 Dusk, Henry Koskof 42 Untitled, Guanhua Chen 44 If I’m Trappedin the Matrix Don’t Let Me Find Out, Raphael Williams 48 Love Letter, ClementineWilliams 51 About the Contributors 5 2 Inthe Warm Amber,Betsy Martin 46 NFM Bridge, Anna Fischler 47
8 M e t a m o r p h o s i sH a r s hini
Venkatachalam

Skylark

Siren swinging through a grey afternoon

I was not born until dinnertime and I was hungry a forced and unreal laugh from the street gets up here

where I am still in bed after all these years

merrily, merrily have I dreamed my way outside my phone keeps dinging like a skylark in a poem

9

Diamond Causeway

Dodge sherif shouldered on the causeway. Where are we going & why?

Where we are going & why: a county called Butts, cause their spigots are potable.

Cause we are too comfortable. A “crowd pleaser” is a song you’d rather not listen to.

Little red speaker lets me hold the music at a low volume while the others stake our tents.

Out of the woods weird noise gathers into glowing eyes. Night lumbers down horrifically;

10
G u e s ts -AlondraRomero

outside animals want in. This & the fact of my name keeps me up all night.

Henry. & the humidity. Tomorrow will be torrential, forecast for Savannah says,

the trees will drip with Spanish moss. Dancing In The Moonlight, trash bags encumber our arms until we drop them for racoons to rummage

through & face a proliferation of katydids, the sky’s boring jewelry

thinking who would want to name this?

oc mposed - Livia Weiner

i
D
s
13

Small Glass Habitat

There are no new ways of waking up, only new dreams to lurch out of. So I try going away.

So I try going for a walk but the do-gooders & their dogs all look at me the same.

I’m missing the part of the brain that makes one’s tail wag.

I go searching for it in the library’s green TEXTBOOK OF NEUROANATOMY (1995) but get lost in a sea of shrimp-pink folds.

I’m all folds.

I fold my excuse of a morning into a worse excuse of an afternoon. I schlep around like the animal I pretend I’m not.

Have you ever considered a squirrel’s breath? Or how we’ve stopped selling solutions, only escapes.

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(Hello little white pill carefully trained by lab coats to swim to my amygdala.)

Let me dream of car washes on mars, suds spinning impossibly far—

On earth there’s no cure for 2 pm, the living room matinees in which you play mirror.

Blinding days, awake but bent. Batteries not included. (Batteries never included.)

Clouds swallow the hills of Providence but the red houses blush through, swimming with lives.

Three crows paint themselves across sky.

I’m wary of people who are too kind.

There are two kinds of people, those whom emails find well, & those who cry at the zoo, watching a New Guinean Tree Kangaroo cling to its artificial branch of a life.

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UntitledClementineWilliams

Fondness Poem

after “Love Poem”

You lie back on the sand, tight-skinned at Brighton beach white to blind — blue collarbone, square knees.

Smogged-out shells balanced on your blunt fingernails. Your thigh swollen against my shin, a humming weight to swell and quiet me.

I span the sky and strap it to me, silk nightgown, intrusion. My body, you ask. Can it change and still be mine? The question a gift-wrapped horse in my mouth. Your lips dried, salted fish. Smoked joint futters a white fag

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on sand moat, asphyxiated fopping fish. I say yes. I say no.

Desire is family. You being here is having. You make a man of my memory. Abandoned moat fills itself with good times. I stife a laugh. Your chest a blinking stoplight over Brooklyn. The sea a fooded basement bobbing with buoys and plastic bottles.

I look at your face, because you can count on me to be afraid. I waited in this city so you could come and jellyfish into the water.

You say a starling turned to lead, once, stoned from the sky onto your chest, but your arms, still thin, reveal those rooms you were raised in, full of pretty girls and their ease and their fears. A lineage I have no claim to. And I surrender.

I’m just nursemaid to your music-box.

Now you have the briar I was born with, slick with downed fat. I touch your blade, headed home on the B train — sheath lost to the waterline. It’s just me, so knock on the thick door of my study. I mean, you’re me, you’re not me.

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-Raphael Williams

I believe in the smell of the evening bakeries as I believe in masts. Clean people keep on the road, and stroll by to find themselves overcome with a core of drowsiness, happy like hounds, necks thick, paws sturdy.

I believe in the smell of the evening bakeries as in a weary deep and slightly withered bitter forest, its dough overturned on the curled-up city.

And later when the bread is baked in a round crust of sadness and its breath fogs the windowsills, nostrils and fists in the smell of the kitchen, in the evening, we find that our blood has never hated.

translated by

e

Cred în mirosul brutăriilor de seară cum cred în catarguri. Oamenii umblă în preajma lui curați și sunt năpădiți de miez somnoros și sunt fericiți ca dulăii cu gătul gros și cu labe voinice.

Cred în mirosul brutăriil or de seară ca-ntr-o subțioară adăncă și puțin veștejită pădure amară răsturnată peste orașul obosit, încolăcit.

Și tărziu când se coace pâinea în coajă de tristețe rotundă și răsufarea ei aburește pragurile, nările și pumnii deodată în mirosul bucătăriilor, seara, afăm că sângele nostru n-a urât niciodată.

* Original, written in Romanian, by Marguerite Dorian.

18
Linistea Peac
Amelia Cumming
*

Punctur e

19
M i c
kChivers
20 Nausea - Harshini Venkatachalam

Fisherman ’ s Funeral

I skipped my big brother’s funeral. I’d been invited, our mother had even asked me, tears in her eyes, to write a eulogy, and I’d scowled. But you’re a writer she’d said, a comment only a mother can make, filled with appreciation and misunderstanding and resentment all at once. I told her I’m not that kind of writer. I heard his wife ended up giving the eulogy, packing it full of funny anecdotes and fish puns as she wept. Not going was perhaps the best, perhaps the only, decision I’ve ever made.

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The widow is here now. She’s dropping of the boys, seven and five. She doesn’t say anything about the funeral. She doesn’t say much of anything, and I think it’s because I look just like my brother. She can’t meet my eyes the whole time she stands in the doorway. She’s tall and blonde, a little overweight, with a raspy voice and a hollow laugh, but I do like herboys. They’re also blonde, with haircuts like she put a bowl on their heads and just cut around that, blue eyes that do not see the same things I see, gaping mouths and pouting lips that are always covered, or at least tinted, by their latest meal. Today it is lasagna. The three of us now are sitting around the table in total silence, and I feel that my decision to babysit them as their mom takes up extra shifts at the supermarket is validated. I get thirty percent of my eggs.

Do you like baseball I ask them as I open the cupboard, searching for three bags of Lays potato chips.

The older one nods and the younger one shakes his head. I look at the older one for a moment. They call him Junior and I think it’s stupid, so I say his name, my brother’s name. Benny, you remind me so much of your father.

Benny shrugs. He’s going to be a lobsterman too one day, but not the kind that drowns and leaves behind a burnt out wife and two sons. I turn to the younger one and ask, what do you wanna be when you grow up? He looks at me with those big blue eyes, and it seems as though he doesn’t speak english. When I was young, I begin to confess, I wanted to be the man on the moon.

Two wide grins. Have you ever made your dead brother’s boys smile? It’s the same as nicotine.

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My name would’ve been Winnipeg, Winnie for short, and I would’ve gone up thinking it was just a big thing of cheese but it’s not. And even though I like cheese, I’m not disappointed. Living on the moon is a dream.

Laughter. They think the word cheese is funny.

I can see every thing. I can moonwalk. There’s no gravity, nothing tying me down, and when I’m watching a place on earth get too depressing I can just shift focus. I love seeing the Amazon Rainforest from the moon.

Benny says he learned that the Amazon Rainforest is on fire. I tell him everything is burning. Where did your dad go?

I feel the strangest inclination to teach these kids about death. Benny answers that Daddy is lost at sea as if Daddy drove his boat too far and now he’s fishing octopus of the coast of Thailand. The younger one just stares at me. I really do look like my brother.

On the moon, you know, I would’ve seen it coming. The high tides would’ve warned me, voices tinged with regret and sorrow. Winnipeg would’ve watched what happened to your dad from a perch on a crater. He would be very sad but he wouldn’t have done anything. I tried to ask Winnipeg where the body is because I hate the thought of an empty coffin, but the letter was returned to me. I’d stamped it all wrong.

Winnipeg isn’t real Benny reminds me without a moment’s hesitation to consider everything we don’t know. The younger one looks at me, his eyes focused on the memory that I did not go to the funeral.

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A Starry Wandering -AlondraRomero

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Moon lady -Alondra Romero

Venture Capitalist Pit ch

lady & gentlemen

we’re poised to disrupt the shareable horror space

yes we do finish each other’s thoughts competition is savage for slasher content together we license jason voorhees live stream sound notification before every encounter here is demo thirteen ma ma ma ki ki ki we set it to censored

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notice smart blur tracking each areola and blood geyser

thirteen efects

filter encounters axe or adze intestine dance

immigration projects sustainable encounters horror extracts profit when audiences act as co- conspirators

Appropriated Palimpsest - Clementine Williams

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were it p o ssible

I could glimmer like cold light, fickering shapes on a passing train, ecstatic, shifting, impossible

If we were infinitesimally small: only light hitting aluminum and dust, foating, titillating, fast

riding on an unseen current; that which the dog barks at. Unsettling and sparse.

To another worn out backpack on a seat fecal matter on sanitized skin do not lean on the closing door, we’re all stolen in the blue fashing light. Marijuana stained, acrid blue on chrome.

Our capillaries humming underneath a swarm of skin. If we, bokeh dots, teeming with entropic fervor hurtling further in impossibly cool tubes. Hard to swallow.

I would pour through the ceiling above you, tongue lapping corroded iron as I drip rustingly onto the platform, dribbling down rivets and bolts. Hardened globules of sage paint weeping in harmony with me.

A sharp glint on your periphery.

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- Aur
elia Cowan

I Wanna be the Star - Lola Simon

CHAIM SOUTINE POEM FOR

The perfect asses of statues in the garden are blinding the wind twists the lanes and trees up like a dream

(this is a poem for Chaim Soutine

hiding in the forest like a deer until they grabbed you)

In some rooms -- in certain light-the paintings finally come to life the branches tremble but make no sound

(what’s it like to be underground?)

30 - MatthewRohre r
UntitledM k Chiv ers ic
Nest

Blue Territory (1971)

A dog lazes in gently cleaved landscapes, dollhouse rooms, hourcolors he still lives: on Lake Michigan, or the Seine, Georges du Soleil sunbathes, rests his head in the corner of the canvas. You welcomed him in Vétheuil, from the chalk white, the rust forests, the ferment beneath New York. No color death wears for the synesthete: convalescent winter, Midwest sandpaper—

the land traced in the mind lies razed without, cathedral valleys to be carried.

- Am elia Cumming

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Carrion CarnivalMick Chivers

Pentobarbital

Skyscrapers mingle in 5 o’clock light. Wednesdays spook me. How satisfying is a satisfying day at the office? I’m a speck in a sea of cloth & teeth. Memory is a beige lobby. Lately I’m just carpet. Brittney Spears says the secret to happiness is having no memory. I know lostness. I don’t know who to listen to. I don’t listen to the man on the corner preaching. I don’t preach to anyone. In kindergarten I was a serial thief. Caitlyn broke her foot & didn’t let me sign her cast. The world was an almond. Dog backwards spelled God. Teddy was my God. Scratched God’s belly he liked this. Set God’s water bowl in the middle of the living room. God was neurotic. God licked his paws till they bled. God only drank dad’s bathwater. God went to the vet & came home a collar.

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- Juli an Ansorge
33 33
Muskrat Skull - Alondra Romero

Space Station

I foat through this airless house the windows sealed with silence as it orbits around the days I glide by digital displays where heads I talk to glow in small boxes turning on and of like beacons sometimes my feet drift above me the toes looking for a current as the bedroom screen teaches yoga still the electronics’ soulless chatter cannot quiet the leaden stillness of this lifeless space and at times I cannot lift my arms even though I am weightless

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Resting - HannahBashkow

35

Dusk at the Pier

He’s at the pier most every day, rain or shine. He lives for the hit that comes when you feel the pole drop—the curve of muscle, no longer free, at the end of the line. He’s back today to feel good, or to run from worse devils. He hooked the walleye, not trophy-sized, but great eating, hoisted it up with a net, and bagged the yanking fish

in a white garbage sack. We talked awhile, as he kept fishing, about breading and pan frying, oil and butter. Darker now, the fish still struggled, the bag glistening in the sapphire dusk, twisting until the fish’s face and moist eye, out of the bag now, could see the moon glow.

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37
- Jaden Bleier from the dock of the seekonk
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- Hannah Bashkow Staying Afloat

ROBOT D OG AT THE END OF THE WORLD

At five o’clock in Miami the rain falls warm And no one hurries. The rain falls backward Pulling the fallen up to the sky. We steam Like crabs and are happy. It’s somewhat, what Some of us believe is heaven, no one hurries. We have all the time in the world, which is to say, Nothing but everlasting light. All but the robot dog, Clicking staccato through the sunlit puddles. Robot dog snifs, ten billion zeros and ones march Through his liquid mainframe, taking in the air, Taking out the trash. His thoughts multiply Like bacteria, he senses the heat, that we are one Heartbeat away from extinction. The rain falls, The rain falls backward, and no one hurries.

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Tender

As twenty somethings tend to bathroom mold

In strange sloping ceiling and foor spaces, music blasting out the feeling they might not be alone hot sauce rolling across the undulating foor

A sliding desk chair pulling away from the wall

Tender as the wine stories they tell each other

Under a deep ghoul bat attic with tilted beams with a fat little loftling living up there, all warm A funny screeching thing who hates egg smoke, and bread smoke, and all the things they do

They know loftling has a favorite spot up there, through the kitchen’s shit speckled skylight

To eat roof warm cherries and leave the pips out staining and then blame it on the birds

Tender as their herringbone foors, thin above cavernousness. It’s possible downstairs neighbors are gone, leaving wide two open gutted out foors and a bigger, rounder houseling hums from below knees tucked under its chin, filling out the building. Possible that the soft crown of its head pushes up their doming foor, creaking beams and warping doors.

The upstairs loftling doesn’t like madonna

It shuffles nervously when they put her on

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Star Baby

41 - Lola
Simon

Dusk

A sunset is a type of prank.

All day you keep your eye on the horizon. A certain decoy takes it away.

Your family member, for instance, or a puppet.

When you’re done dallying the day’s throat’s been cut over the water.

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People talk about Respect. They make you not take pictures. You tell them Death is photogenic.

If you weren’t lying you’d have done a photoshoot with the red smear that happened after you smacked your forearm, or lying down next to a bird who’s no longer a bird, who thought your house was more sky.

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- Henry Koskoff

Untitled - Guanhua Chen

In the Warm Amber

On the table are crumbs of banana bread, and bits of chocolate, vintage teacups, and a half a pot of Pu-erh, a rich, dark tea from China, made by fermenting the leaves in a pile, like compost. We sit

in the living room with our friend, who is stretched on the couch, simmering in and out of sleep, difusing

toward his forebears in tanniny old photos. We bring him a pillow.

His wife grips his hand in the warm amber of late day light.

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NFM Bridge - Anna Fischler

If I ’ m Trapped in the Matrix Don ’ t Let Me Find Out

It’s not that the AI art, that sick dreamscape, couldn’t have been made by a person. Nor is it that I’m content, really. But for the machine it’s like breathing: I have become obsessed with my contentedness. Take me quiet, take me ready for the next moment but never salivating at the thought of it. Tell me: what’s it like to be perched on the edge of a great disaster and a great revelation?

In the future no one will have heard of truth. In the future we will see a face and it will scare us.

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Like the last twenty years, I guess. Save me or destroy me: I thought self-driving cars would be it and then I thought it was robot dogs or Furbies and then I thought it was deepfakes and then I thought it was my passwords getting leaked or prosthetics that connect to your brain. There aren’t really too many reasons to be content, anyways. Stay ecstatic or contorted with terror. I’m sure it will be the last behemoth iceberg collapsing.

In the future I’ll still get my period, stand in the shower and unstick bloody curls of pubic hair. In the future the summer won’t glide over me. In the future my animal will still rule itself.

Every documentary a new religion, a new tsunami headed like swarms of bedbugs to the shore. A new vision of hell. Jizzing on a knife’s edge is very contemporary, very B-D-S-M.

I said even if you took the blue pill, you would still be stuck with the itching sense of wrongness that led Neo to Morpheus in the first place, wet air on the back of your neck. My friend said that’s the way everyone feels anyway; I can’t argue with that. Maybe though

Neo comes every night to Morpheus, trapped in the tropical storm of his own suspicion, and every time the fear wins. He backs of, takes the blue pill. Wakes up the next day having forgotten the meeting, maybe

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He has a hangover, but he’s the same person he was before, with the same questions. He keeps coming back. Eventually Morpheus starts to run out of blue pills and says Look, dude, we’ve done this a million times—just take the red one and we can move on. Maybe

Neo doesn’t want to. He says, But I’m having fun. He says, I could be on the edge of discovery forever, suspecting the worst, never guessing the scope.

He says, I’ve only just found you, and I believe you’re going to fix me.

He says, I’m salivating and I don’t want to swallow.

He says, Don’t make me fill the empty space with what’s real, oh god, you’re going to hurt me if you do.

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L o
- Clementine Williams
ve Letter

About the Contributors

Julian Ansorge is a junior at Brown studying Literary Arts and English. He’s from Brooklyn and his poems have also appeared in Hanging Loose.

Lila Jean Banker is a sophomore at Oberlin College majoring in Creative Writing with interests in English and History as well. When she’s not in Ohio, she splits her time living in Brooklyn, NY, and Vinalhaven, ME. Outside of writing, Lila works in a pottery studio and enjoys knitting, cooking pasta, and watching basketball.

Hannah Bashkow (she/hers) is a senior at Brown studying Visual Art. She is an Honors candidate and Department Undergraduate Leader, and loves talking with other students about their art. Hannah also likes crocheting, cooking, and the Grateful Dead.

Jaden Bleier studies poetry and printmaking at Brown University. Her works have appeared in Stonecoast, The Indy, In Parentheses, and Maudlin House and have been granted Scholastic Art and Writing awards. Jaden enjoys spending time in the sunlight, and you can find her online at jadenbleier.com.

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Guanhua Chen is originally from China. He did his first bachelor’s at Beijing Normal University, Zhuhai, majoring in Finance. He changed direction after that and went to Los Angeles to study physics at Santa Monica College for three years. He transferred to the University of Miami and studied for another three years, eventually getting his second bachelor’s in pure physics, core mathematics, and studio art. After his undergraduate study, he has continued with his physics journey and is a first year masters student at Brown. In terms of art, he mainly does painting and drawing. He is currently interested in contemporary art without a very specific direction.

Mick Chivers is a sculptor and commercial fisherman who uses a variety of sculptural mediums inspired by bone to fabricate abstract objects celebrating both natural form and the underpinning fractal framework of our macroscopic world. His work explores the ways that the periodic ordering of molecular and atomic interactions manifest into systems of life, decay, waste, reuse, harvestry, and husbandry. Through these sculptures, Mick aims to celebrate the lives of animals consumed to sustain populations while appreciating the inutterable beauty of skeletal forms and grappling with his long-standing participation in regional commercial fishing operations.

Aurelia Cowan is a senior at Brown University studying History of Art and English. She lives in London, England, and outside of writing she sews, sculpts, and makes jewelry.

Amelia Cumming is a student in the Brown/RISD Dual Degree Program studying Environmental Science and Illustration. She is a big fan of words and images.

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Marguerite Dorian (1924-2021) was an illustrator, writer, translator, botanist, and poet born in Bucharest. Marguerite was educated at the University of Bucharest, the Sorbonne in Paris, Radclife Institute at Harvard, and Brown University in Providence where she lived beginning in 1952. Daughter of Jewish Romanian poet Emil Dorian, she published her first collection of poetry, Ierbar, at 21 years old.

Anna Forrest Fischler is a sophomore in Illustration at Rhode Island School of Design and is originally from southwest Florida. She works with a range of media but favors oil paint and gouache specifically. Anna historically works in semi-realism but has recently branched out into more abstract and expressive approaches to her work. She is heavily infuenced by natural phenomena, interpersonal connections, and memory.

Robert Guard has been published in Harpur Palate, Amoskeag, Chaffin Journal, California Quarterly, Clackamas Literary Review, DASH, GW, Nimrod Nixes Mate Review, Poet Lore, riverSedge, and others. Robert attended the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop and studied under David Baker and Rosanna Warren. He worked for thirty-five years in advertising as a writer and creative director. Robert teaches yoga and has an energy healing practice. He also conducts workshops on various health and fitness topics including meditation and stress reduction.

Henry Koskoff is a fourth-year Creative Writing and Dance major at Emory University. Right now he is working on an autobiographical thesis collection about privilege, maleness, and disillusionment. His greatest poetic idols include James Tate, David Berman, and Louise Glück.

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Jeffrey H. MacLachlan also has recent work in Landlocked, RipRap, Swamp Ape Review, among others. He is a Senior Lecturer of literature at Georgia College & State University.

Betsy Martin is a visual artist who has advanced degrees in Russian language and literature. Their poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Atlanta Review, The Briar Cliff Review, The Broken Plate, Cloudbank, Crack the Spine, Delmarva Review, Diverse Voices Quarterly (Best of the Net nomination), Evening Street Review, Green Hills Literary Lantern, Juked, Litbreak Magazine, Louisville Review, The Penmen Review, Pennsylvania English, Pisgah Review, Pudding Magazine, Slab, Straight Forward, Typehouse Literary Magazine, Weber—The Contemporary West, and many others.

Caroline Maun is an associate professor and Chair of English at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, where they teach creative writing and American literature. Their volumes of poetry include The Sleeping (Marick Press, 2006), What Remains (Main Street Rag, 2013), and three chapbooks, Cures and Poisons and Greatest Hits, published by Pudding House Press, and Accident, published by Alice Greene & Co. They have also been published in Asheville, Poetry Review, The Bear River Review, Bitterzoet Magazine, The Cape Rock, Crack the Spine, Delmarva Review, El Portal, Euphony, Evening Street Review, Failbetter, Green Hills Literary Lantern, Laurel Review, The MacGuffin, The Main Street Rag, The Midwest Quarterly, Pennsylvania English, Mount Hope Magazine, Third Wednesday, The Opiate, Paragon Journal, Peninsula Poets, South Carolina Review, Sweet: A Literary Confection, Sweet Tree Review, Waving Hands Review, Word For/Word, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and Eleven Eleven, among others.

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Matthew Rohrer is the author of 10 books of poems, most recently THE SKY CONTAINS THE PLANS, published by Wave Books. His first book, A Hummock in the Malookas, was selected for the National Poetry Series by Mary Oliver in 1994. He’s won the Hopwood Award, the Believer Book Award, and was shortlisted for the Griffin International Poetry Prize. He was a co-founder of Fence Magazine and Fence Books, and one of his tattoos has appeared in two books of literary tattoos. He lives in Brooklyn and teaches at NYU.

Alondra Romero is a student at Bowdoin College majoring in Psychology and Latin American Studies with a love for the medium of printmaking as a creation process. Having a mom as an artist has pushed her to look at life through a lens of color and design. Most of her artwork focuses on the interactions between the human world and the natural one in an efort to remove humans from their hierarchical pedestal and portray them as existing in harmony with their surroundings.

Jill Ruscoll has participated in multiple writing classes with Nancy McMillan and with poet Holly Wren Spaulding in the past four years. In her work life, she is a creative director of design in the healthcare field. On her days of, Jill enjoys hiking, biking, climbing, and being outside while spending time with family and friends. Her poems appear in the 2022 Connecticut Bards Poetry Review and are forthcoming in The MacGuffin and the Evening Street Review.

Harshini Venkatachalam is a senior at Brown University studying visual art and computer science. She is from the deserts of Tempe, Arizona. Her prints, which feature fish in various states of languidness and chaos, are inspired by absurdist literature and her experiences as a somewhat lethargic college student.

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Lola Simon is a junior at Brown studying visual art and history. She is from Brooklyn, NY.

Livia Weiner is a junior at Brown University studying Visual Art and Environmental Studies. She has recently discovered a love for oil painting.

Clementine Williams is a multimedia artist from Brooklyn, New York. To her, creating is a process of play in which time, material, energy, and desire interact to birth non-fungible artifacts of personal experience. Her work refects the collage-like elements of thought, remembering, forgetting, coping, and feeling. She loves oil paint, comics, and cats.

Raphael Williams (he/they) is a junior at NYU studying physics and creative writing. Their writing can be found in The Stardust Review, Prometheus Dreaming, and The Journal Magazine.

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COLOPHON

The Round is a literary and visual arts magazine based at Brown University.

Our name is adopted from the musical “round,” a composition in which multiple voices form an overlapping conversation. It is our mission to extend and enrich the dialogue surrounding literary and visual arts at Brown by creating a community of artists across the country and around the globe. We are excited to work on a magazine which brings together contributors with a wide variety of backgrounds, ages, and places they call home.

We welcome submissions in any genre or medium and publish both students and professionals. Send your work, comments, or questions to theroundmagazine@gmail.com.

View submission guidelines and learn more about us by visiting http://students.brown.edu/ theroundmagazine. Check out past issues at https:// issuu.com/theroundmagazine.

Sincerely, Eleanor,

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