The Round, Spring 2014 : Issue X

The Round

S p rin g 2014 : Issue X

The Round Spring

2014:

Issue

X

Levitation is Anything Before the Ground, Anna Riley Video Still; video 49s, looped

Tab l e o f Lit e rary Ar t

Thieves by Carl Auerbach .......................................................... 1 A Lament of a Passage by Bruce Bagnell ...................................... 3 La Quemada by Evan Silver ...................................................... 8 Gone by Chloe Hequet ........................................................... 10 Reverse-Evolving Chickens by Jon Simmons .............................. 38 a verse for go by Ursula Raasted and Evan Silver ....................... 41 I Love You, Diphthong by Joe Squance ..................................... 50 Dreamer by Kimmi Pham ....................................................... 52 Grandmother by Yelena Bidé ................................................... 56 The Start of “It” Becoming by Maya Finoh ................................ 63 August, Alaska by Wallace-Ruby Morales ................................. 74 A Marvelous Monster by Lucia Iglesias ..................................... 76 Lizzie Red Bird by Thomas Pescatore ....................................... 87 After 9/11, Search for Breakfast in the City of Lights

by Mary Ann Mayer ............................................................... 88

The Round

Cuba in Tampa by Octavia Akoulitchev ................................... 92 Spilled Milk by Jon Simmons .................................................. 95

Tab le o f Vi sual Art

Lost in Translation by Moke Li ............................................ 5 - 7 Gagarin by Joel Orloff .................................................... 13 - 36 Present by Katie Darby ........................................................... 39 Reflections by Katie Darby ...................................................... 40 Inflated by Jamie Packs ........................................................... 47 Heap by Jamie Packs ....................................................... 48 - 49 Love Grave by Mo Kong ................................................. 54 - 55 Reading Memory Traces and Physical Impressions

by Sarah Renshaw .......................................................... 66 - 73 Documentation of Intrasectum

by Vivian Charlesworth .................................................. 84 - 86 That Which Once Was by Sophia Sobers .......................... 90 - 91

“And the scouring griefs, don’t look at them all or they’ll kill you, you can barely encompass your own; I’m saying I know all about you, whoever you are, it’s spring and it’s starting again, the longing that begins, and begins, and begins.”

—Kim Addonizio, “Onset”

Thieves

Carl Auerbach How are you? Good, too busy, though, and you?

The same. The quick ritual exchange that all we rushed professors must go through when crossing paths in the nervous halls of my strange hyperactive university.

In Africa, they didn’t trample time the way a rhino pushes down a tree.

Time wasn’t money, nor was wasting it a crime, nor failure the result of its misuse.

When I left for classes, the guard at my hotel would greet me Amakuru, how is your news?

And I’d reply ni meza, all is well.

We’d chat, bask in each other’s company.

He’d shake my hand, say my language practice showed, zip up my knapsack while he cautioned me to be careful of the thieves along the road.

I’d sometimes wonder if he wanted more from life than laughing with friends under a tree at lunch. But Americans keep score in things. He was fine without a Ph.D.

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Th i e ve s , C arl Au e rb ach

Now having left Rwanda’s rolling hills for sharp mountains of endless to do lists, pointless meetings, and paperwork, and bills, and dread that my life will always be like this, I wish the guard had warned me of the thief who robbed me of the right to say enough.

2

A Lament of a Passage

Bruce Bagnell she used to hang her memories on the long pole in the closet of her mind, accessible to a quick scan and a yank; she could wear them over and over with little alterations to accommodate the changes that come to a body over time

(Oh! the stories she could tell!) until late in life there was a shortage of hangers, perhaps not enough visits to the cleaner anymore, and she began to fold and stack them, neatly at first, in the cabinets and drawers, but then there was the problem of which compartment, which room, until finally she tried the hallways but the clutter surrounded her until she could hardly move with all those disjointed piles, childhood laying scattered under a layer of grocery shopping and the altercation with the clerk, who clearly couldn’t add, and finally we had to bring in the food to her, she was consumed until the bathroom was as distant as Antarctica 3

A L ame n t , B ru c e B ag ne l l

and finally she lay there, overwhelmed, and gave it all up, her whole life thrown away so when we held her hands we were strangers, fresh, new, comforting every time until she forgot how to breathe.

4

Lost in Translation

Moke Li Self-made Xylophone, Electronic Components, Microphone, Video Projection, Speakers, MaxMSP & Jitter, Arduino

In Lost in Translation, the sound and video of wind blowing through trees was recorded and filtered by software which tuned the sounds to match the pitches of keys on a xylophone.

Images of the trees are presented as a form of visual and virtual simulacrum and are juxtaposed with the abstracted sounds and the physical presence of the xylophone. A microphone without any electronic connection passively faces the virtual image of the trees. Li is interested in the possibilities of data abstraction and transformation that underlie the processes used in this piece in order to create new experiments in data-based media work.

Featured on pages 6 - 7

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Lost in Translation, Moke Li

La Quemada

Evan Silver

Adela’s abuela fired up a story much the same way she did her deep, blistering stew; into the vat of boiling water she would mix the dried meat and chiles, along with papas and tomates and even un poco de vanilla when the familia could afford them, but never twice did her story taste the same.

“Adela, when I was a girl we were so afraid to eat these plants de Alemania,” Abuela would say, indicating the tomates and chiles, “We let ourselves starve while we left the things to rot in el jardín. The neighbors would squint their eyes and we had nada to say, so the plants de Alemania became a spectacle. And to think! The first time I bit into a big juicy tomate.” And then Abuela would laugh her dry, cavernous laugh that shook the skin under her jaws like a soiled sheet of fabric thrown into the ocean’s waves— Adela wrote on sheets of light brown paper with ink and a chicken feather. She wrote of the things Abuela said and los sueños she had of the young man who sailed from el norte down el Gibraltar to find her. Adela waited for him.

“Adela, el país is not what it used to be. Mi bisabuela vivió in Córdoba in a time when the people lived en paz, under the rule of Abderramán el tercero. Now—now, we think, creemos que we are rico y fuerte, but no, not anymore. When I cannot worship the one I believe in...” and then Abuela’s voice would trail off, and her eyes would harden into grey pools whose 8

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depths Adela knew she could never dip her hands into.

So Adela dipped her hands into her glassed pool of ink and soiled her light brown sheets with words. Where was el hombre of the river, and why has he waited so long to save Andalucía and her daughter Adela en la ciudad of Hercules? It seemed that la madre of Andalucía was the only one taking care of Adela.

“Adela, when el fuego is too hot, take to the river.”

One day, el hombre del Gibraltar arrived on Adela’s shore.

When she saw him, he touched her hands and she did not resist. She felt him in every part of her body; he was bubbling inside her, boiling a deep ravine in her heart, which he filled with his dark love.

La ciudad de Andalucía did not rejoice for their union, and no one hated el hombre del norte more than Abuela. No matter how they resisted though, la ciudad let him inside.

Words spread like waves, and so did he.

The second day, Adela died in an ocean of blistering waves, but Abuela would not let them burn her. She wrapped Adela’s soiled body in a light brown sheet and gave her to the river that brought el hombre.

The river was now el fuego, and it burned its meat and bled out its tomates for Abuela, who had no reason to make stew.

“Adela, when el fuego is too hot, take to the river,” Abuela would say.

Abuela did not know that even the ocean was susceptible to el fuego.

One day, el hombre del norte arrived on Adela’s shore, and into his grey pools she drowned, glassy eyed.

9

Gone

Chloe Hequet We stood on the edge of a reeling sky on our own lonely planet, aeons of constellations scattered like cosmic pinball.

You were wearing your green raincoat, the one with all the pockets.

I had brought a compass and some twine and lunch in a vacuum sealed steel container.

We were ready.

We had been constructing it for months, with crumpled math notes and halffinished sentences, pulling together posits of a plan and finding the time to work on our vessel between meals and in spare moments. I fixed the time suction cups, you read about music and momentum and tinkered with boxed Christmas lights. When the airflow pipes broke, you were there. When the fusion transistor would only run backwards, I was there.

Between us we constructed our wild imaginings out of bits of pipe and terracotta tiles and Sunday afternoons.

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It was clear that night, not much atmosphere to get in the way. We knew what to do, we had planned each move from here onwards to infinity. The capsule stood up against the sky like an arm outstretched to its creator.

As we approached we were taken into the murmur of gently warped dimensions, the electric hum of time running backwards over itself, creating hissing memory loops all over the glistening chrome surface.

It was imperative that no one saw us now; by the time they noticed we had gone, it would have been almost last Tuesday, and by then it will be much too late.

Our eyes met briefly and then our hands, fingers interlocked through the mesh of our gloves.

We filled our lungs with the last memories of this air, closed our eyes and tipped head first into something else entirely.

A silent map of stars spread out on the ground

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G on e , C h l o e H e q u et

there was nothing unusual at all, only some empty red Solo cups and a little piece of last Tuesday.

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Gagarin

Joel Orloff

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Reverse-Evolving Chickens

Jon Simmons Well, it turned out that you could breed chickens for dinosaurs.

All the skeptics said the scientist faked it, said his micro-velociraptors were just skinnier roosters with sickles for claws.

Did it matter?

They ran around the scientist’s cage, biting the heads off mice.

The Church admonished the scientist for reverse-evolving chickens and denying God. Blogs baptized it The Chickensaurus.

Athiests threw wild, debaucherous parties in the scientist’s name.

They worshipped The Chickensaurus, and the idea of eternal nothingness.

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Present, Katie Darby acrylic and oil on canvas, 30” x 40”

Reflections, Katie Darby acrylic and oil on canvas, 36” x 24”

a verse for go

Ursula Raasted and Evan Silver

i. go wakes up early

( she’s on her bed ) go wakes up early. she stretches. s.s. headache. stars everywhere. low groans. sleepless, poor baby.

ii. go calls the landlord

( late rent makes the landlord angry )

landlord: lady, you need self help. help yourself, lady. go: so sorry, no stamps.

go out of stamps to send checks by. go out of eggs to eat breakfast by. go out of love. go all set to go? no, but go must go out.

three. go weeps on all fours

( once the broken bones have healed ) 41

a ver se for g o, R aas t e d an d S i l v e r

the hours go holds on for love go on. the hours go by, go holds on.

(phone call from father:)

father: do you—

go: negative. (phone hung up.) go stays home and does not go another day.

iv. go home, go leaves from home

( go must go out and go on ) go packs water-packed cups and waffles on plates. go takes them from the counter and eats on the go. go:

(goes alone, stays alone.)

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and (on) go goes

through seedy wastelands

and aweless landscapes

to an abandoned telephone

at the top of foggy peak. go knows ludoman calls every go around. he calls her at three am. but she wonders now,

go (not spoken): do you— god: negative. (phone hung up.) god does not speak on telephones. of course, she speaks to ludoman— he wants money (he never doesn’t): (doorbell.)

ludoman: do you have dough go: no ludoman: do you though go: no ludoman: none go: none ludoman: are you sure?

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a ver se for g o, R aas t e d an d S i l v e r

go: negative (door shut.) ludoman knows go has no dough

(dough’s a no go) but ludoman loves her, so he keeps on. he puts the love on paper: dear go,

don’t go, you hear? need you near.

need you here, you here? need you near.

v. go left ludoman

( court ruling: she shouldn’t have ) where are you? home. why? was asleep. stay there. don’t come over. on my way. don’t come. you don’t know what’s good for you. please stay away.

why grab the that there? ? because because danger. how does he go on the bed? how does he go on the bed? he goes about and re-goes.

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fuck. --- (FUCK) - - - go away

doesn’t mean he doesn’t love her only means he doesn’t love to keep her safe. doesn’t mean he doesn’t love her only means he doesn’t love to keep her.

vi. go alone

( go gone )

hers are marrowless bones and never heal, runes and glyphs engraved on her sunken bed

s even. go goes to sleep

( lullaby usurps the sheep ) (sung:) hand to hold and heart to beat golden tangle, soursweet averse forgone a verse for one one loves: a good place to start to o

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a ver se for g o, R aas t e d an d S i l v e r

out of l go on, then v e e be never but not d e one v sheep two four three l v e

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INFLATED, Jamie Packs oil on board, 24” x 36”

Heap, Jamie Packs oil on board, 20” x 10”

I Love You, Diphthong

Joe Squance I love you, diphthong, and it is a single thing. It is a fixed point on a flat plane.

Do you recall, diphthong, the day we drove to the gorge and tossed rocks into the void? We took my father’s car but you paid for the gas. You insisted. Diphthong, do you remember the way the clouds turned green, that sickly shade of nausea as a storm came in? It turned the whole sky off. But it passed. It passed like nausea does, usually, and the sky turned back on, and you hefted my pack, diphthong, and you slipped the straps over my shoulders, diphthong, and you gave me a drink from your Camelback and smiled with all your teeth and we hiked back down to my father’s car and then the rain did come but we were already safe inside and you made my tongue move and it slid around vowels and the sounds were like love, the sounds were like eye and low and cow.

Do you remember, diphthong, standing in your kitchen, which always smelled of Pam, that wonderful, bready smell of Pam? Everything was covered in it: the floor, the top of the refrigerator. Dust would settle and stick until everything was fuzzy like a carpet, like a soft, worn carpet. Diphthong, do you remember how the air tasted like rust and left delicious crystals of grit between our teeth and in the pockets of our eyes? But the oven was on fire, diphthong, and there was powdered sugar in your eyelashes, diphthong, and you held a bag of ice to the side of my face and cupped my ear and you squeezed until phonemes 50

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dripped from between my lips in ones and twos and dribbled down my chin to the floor that was fuzzy like a carpet and through broken teeth I said lure lure lure.

I forget now, diphthong, where it all fell apart, where one thing became another. Were you ascending or descending? Even now, I can’t really tell the difference. I can only feel you, diphthong, feel you in the dent of my palate, the bones of my gums. In the nest of my tongue is a divot, rubbed smooth as jelly, where my breath trickles through like a freezing brook. I feel you there, diphthong, feel your phantom there, diphthong, but I know you well enough to understand that by the time I’ve felt you, you have already become something else entirely.

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Dreamer

Kimmi Pham Each morning, you’d slice a pomegranate in quarters, flex each wedge so that the fleshy insides would blossom, reveal a bouquet of juicy seeds Then strummed the fruit like an enchanted lyre and the seeds would tumble into our bowls Half to me, half to you I’d hear you sip your herbal tea, hot like an elixir You’d read aloud your work, engrossed by your battalion of words Every syllable, every consonant would ring like the clang of metal shields And a work about war never sounded so wonderful On our daily lunchtime walk you’d talk about an emperor, fated opera, crazy eunuch, a cursed quilt, a silent promise Just more of your daydreaming out loud

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You did the same with bedtime stories Scenes I saw before I shut my eyes: the tap dancing prince in Turkey the western saloon where you met Mama the royal feuds in Ireland then, a few feuds in our family How we all came together how it was we fell apart Why it was just you and me All fiction, I now know.

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Love Grave, Mo Kong laser cut cardboard, fishing line, paper, and Ink

Grandmother

Yelena BidĂŠ

I discover it on a nondescript Friday morning, wedged

between our encyclopedia set and a yoga book. black rings.

A dusty stack of faded papers, bound by small

It is my Grandmother

in memoir form.

She is scattered across the

pages in disjointed paragraphs of

black ink.

her words are

Penned over the course of a year,

fragmented,

dominated by sudden turns of narrative.

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Pennsylvania, 1915. Margaret Harrison is born into Poplar House, a three-story home whose sturdy walls hold years of history that escape slowly through wide windows. A house of heavy silences broken only by the whispers of family portraits clustered along the walls. Margaret’s childhood is French and music lessons, horse riding, and a bell sounding at 7:45 to signal that dinner is served.

It is dull gossip, no-running-in-the-house, and sweeping dresses that whisper of wealth and indifference. This is Privilege, she learns, and it makes her uneasy. Time passes in solitary hours spent walking along the sprawling property, her thoughts reverberating against the expansive silence. She reads extensively, and by age twelve has discovered the Outside World. It fascinates her. She hides in the pantry to read The Philadelphia Inquirer and learns of mayhem, poverty, unemployment—of lives that do not resemble her own.

By sixteen, Margaret is desperate to leave home. She feels claustrophobic, trapped by Poplar House’s walls. Only travel provides a brief respite, especially when undertaken alone.

With a single suitcase, she roams the hills of Scotland, the cities of Germany, and the relics of Egypt. She returns from these adventures with sunburnt skin, fatigued, and utterly exhilarated. She begins to plan a more permanent escape. Sees an advertisement seeking volunteers for an expedition to South America. Answers it. Her father finds out and is enraged. They argue. His will prevails, but Poplar House becomes transient, a place to pause between travel and ideas. Even when Margaret is home, her mind is not. It escapes the continent’s boundaries to walk along the Nile and revisit the Pharaohs’ tombs in the

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Gran dmot h e r , Y e l e n a Bi d ĂŠ

glorious Valley of the Kings. She falls in love with the Middle East.

England, 1936. Margaret enrolls at Oxford to study Arabic. She loves the fiery beauty of autumn and the serene English winter.

She slips easily into existing in this university town where life feels static and History hangs tangibly in the air. Her days are spent between Arabic tutorials, some geology classes, and a variety of free lectures. She considers, fleetingly, becoming a scientist. Geology fascinates her but, then again, so does almost any academic pursuit.

Her hours are spent on walks through farmlands or curled around books in ancient libraries. She laughs inwardly at how similar this is to her existence in America, yet how wholly different.

It is 1939. The end of the annual family vacation looms, and Margaret soaks up the final summer days reading in the English moors. On September 1, the Second World War is declared.

Worried whispers traverse the globe, but people placate their fears by reassuring each other that it will be over soon. Women parrot their husbands and say, with the authority of experts, eighteen months at the most. Suitcases are packed to return to America immediately. But the night before the Harrison’s departure, Margaret says, I want to stay here and help. Her mother stares aghast and her father shakes his head in disbelief, but they do not try to convince her otherwise because, although Margaret’s words are said softly, they hold the force of a final decision.

Eighteen months stretch into seventy-two. Perhaps surprisingly, perhaps not at all, Margaret thrives. She volunteers with the Red Cross and drives an ambulance across Finland, delivering relief

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supplies to civilian victims. She learns what war is: bombed towns, drawn faces, ambulances abandoned in the snow, wounded soldiers, bitter cold, and a peculiar silence. She becomes Petrol Peggy, the quiet, tall, American woman who pays for her ambulance’s gasoline. She sometimes thinks of her sister and parents, ensconced in the warmth of wealth, untouched by war.

Mostly, she does not think of home at all. The war provides a New Beginning, a rootless existence as unsettling as it is liberating.

Post-war Poland, 1946. Peggy spends her days doing relief work in cities that hold reminders of lost lives. Here she meets John Robbins, a quiet Republican from Indiana. He is a mechanic and his fingernails tell stories of greasy motors. They sit side-by-side and talk, their histories unfurling into the tiny space between their shoulders. He is enamored by her intellect and generosity, and tells her so over mugs of steaming coffee poured from an old thermos. Her skin burns crimson; he blurts out words that resemble a proposal. Yes, yes, of course, she hears herself say.

It is 1948. Peggy returns home with a fiancÊ and memories she cannot begin to articulate. Her claustrophobia soon resurfaces; she cannot bear Poplar House’s isolated silence. It is even worse than before and her days pass in fluttering frustration. She reads as avidly as ever and one evening, as she is flipping through The Economist, finds an advertisement for free land in Alberta, Canada. It is the Door she has been looking for. Peggy and John pack their bags, are married before a Justice of the Peace, and cross the border as landed immigrants.

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Gran dmot h e r , Y e l e n a Bi d ĂŠ

They move to Inglewood, a neighborhood of houses arranged in neat lines and park benches whose paint peels in the humidity of summer. The neighbors are immigrants, teachers, and nurses.

They have houses full of children and, soon, so do Peggy and John—six of them. Life becomes cooking, bedtime stories, and one bathroom shared between eight people. Whispers, laughter, and summer afternoons in the vegetable patch behind their house.

A peaceful existence, Peggy reminds herself when she wakes in the middle of the night with unspeakable images pressing themselves against her eyelids.

When her youngest child turns twelve, Peggy trades in cream pies and music rehearsals for volunteer work with the Indian and Eskimo Association. She rediscovers the joy of working in the service of others, the vibrant energy that comes from committing herself to a cause. Still, it is taxing work. She learns of injustice and contained anger, listens to stories of mistreatment and hopelessness. She supports, encourages, and is often asked for advice. Write, she says, if you are angry, write out your thoughts, write about your life and it will calm you.

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Is this why you write, Grandmother?

Do you recall your own advice as you

finally sit to gather your histories into loose sheets of paper?

Does writing provide a sense

of calm, of coherence, of meaning?

Time passes.

Dissolves into

unnoticed acts of generosity.

unrecorded conversations and

Grandmother.

You write without knowing who will read your words. You leave out stories and your memories escape you.

Children grow up.

There are grandchildren now.

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Time passes.

Gran dmot h e r , Y e l e n a Bi d ĂŠ

Grandmother.

Perhaps you do not imagine me reading your

words but, many years later, I do.

I inhale your history along with mine and then I write you.

Shackled by the fear of misrepresentation, I write you.

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The Start of “It” Becoming

Maya Finoh “there was no name for it yet. it: the bundle wrapped up carefully on the warm Friday, laid in the arms that have seen more ache than the world thought she could bear. … so what of a name? the name must be something strong: something sturdy enough so that it can go farther in this unforgiving world than she ever could. the name must be something fluid like water: soft enough to evoke that old sense of femininity but quick enough to make it demand its full birthright its birthright that started when she crossed that long body of dark water weighed down by the moans of stolen children. forgotten by most, but not all. not those like her left behind.

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Th e Start of “ It ” Be c omi n g, M aya F i n oh

the name must be something wise: wise as the old woman who she saw on the old TV screen: the woman who declared in front of millions on a morning that she is ‘the hope and the dream of the slave’ the bundle, it, sleeping now, must be our hope. our stake in this dream that’s all we have left. all we have left, when our home has become a hell a hell the rest of the world is too embarrassed to admit they got those exotic, blood-covered diamonds from. (wipe the stain off, ignore the machetes) …she can’t, they can’t.

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it must have a name filled with the determination the burden the love of all us.�

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Reading Memory Traces and Physical Impressions

Sarah Renshaw Remapping Texts to the Paths of Accumulating and Corroding Memories

The work presented is an investigation into the process of reading surfaces and a poetic exploration of materials that can be used for both writing and reading. The act of writing itself is examined through experimentations of translations into new symbolic forms of varying degrees of legibility and abstraction.

Writing is widely used to aid in recollection, but Reading Memory Traces questions whether the structure of writing serves to most accurately reflect through its form the structure of thought and recollection. Renshaw has researched and developed new methods through which information can be stored and read in forms other than the linear structure of the sentence.

The temporal characteristics of text are at the center of Renshaw’s research—both in terms of the linear nature of text, as well as the function of writing to carry immaterial ideas through time in materialized form. Renshaw has constructed an alphabet with characters designed to represent forms of time passage—the cracking formations that appear as surfaces corrode. Using the alphabet, she has produced a method of translation that creates intricate cracking patterns out of texts that relate to memory.

Featured on pages 67 - 73 66

Translations on memory from authors Virgina Woolf, Edmond JabĂŠs, Robert Frost, Marcel Proust, and Vladimir Nabokov

Reading Memory Traces and Physical Impressions, Sarah Renshaw Laser cut plaster and mixed media

August, Alaska

Wallace-Ruby Morales Winter’s chill fingers the far horizon That thief in the wick gutters the daylight The marsh grasses rise green The berries tip the bucket full The mornings come cool and new As sunrise and sunset separate Not autumn, the flaming pyre of summer When the sun flies high, long, lazy circles of blue sky Made by eagles when the salmon run the waters black Here, the arrogant chariot of the sun will be chained to the mountains To circle low and weak, eaten continuously by the jagged peaks Only the stubble will remain of day Here Apollo, first son of Olympus, fails against Demeter’s grief As the shades and the dusk, slender and awkward at first, Become deeper and thicker until darkness clenches its fist Just as the shadows grow longer and linger At day’s end The unmistakable chill of December Reaches back into the morning of August Baked off by the afternoon galloping its length 74

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Like ants, we scurry Like grasshoppers, sing

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A Marvelous Monster

Lucia Iglesias We first met when I prodded my belly and you prodded back, three bony nubs biting into my fingertip through the taut drum of my abdomen. You reminded me of the baby teeth I used to collect in the enameled matchbox (is Mama still saving them for me?), pearls with chiseled crowns that I would sift from hand to hand. A galloping rush flooded my ears, my vision tunneled, and the world narrowed to you and me. I walked my fingers across my stomach, exploring the new osseous landmarks on the once supple terrain, structures erected as if overnight—evidence of an alien invasion. Ever since the accident, I had watched the mutative games it played with the genes of the other quarantinees in the manor compound and waited for my turn. But I never expected anything like you. Born from germ cells colonized by ionizing radiation, you grew into three perfect cuspids, encapsulated near my pelvic wall.

I lay on my side in the cupola greenhouse, encircled by a fortress of pots cobweb-shrouded, untouched by all but spiders since the days of the Victorian zoologist who built the manor.

Prodding you and feeling you prod back. Sleet trickled through my limbs, ice-spiked chill seeping bone deep. It did not come from the drifts of burnished white powder piling up to the eaves; I was safe from those draughts, curled up in the nest of blankets I had filched from the ever-accumulating pile of extras in the linen closet. This new cold was the breath of death, penetrating every 76

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woolen layer to condense in clammy dew on the back of my neck. + + + They prodded you, too, their white-gloved hands mining my soft cavity for clues while I shivered on the examination table.

The long needle, matchstick-thick, plunged into my stomach. I clutched the table’s cold steel rim, absorbing through my fingertips vibrations trapped for centuries in the metal, the throbbing terror of specimens vivisected there by the zoologist. When the needle was extracted, silver spire ruby glistening, I sat up, crossing my legs beneath the filmy paper gown to face them. Snow’s lucent aura diffusing through the window lent a glow to the doctors’ white Tychem coveralls, the gleaming armor that shielded them from the poison slipping through my skin. Their silver-brushed visors like one-way mirrors in an interrogation room. When they spoke, the words emanated from my own thin reflection.

We’ve identified the growth as a Teratoma, said the doctor in a voice mechanical, all the affective frequencies of humanity stripped away by layers of protective filters. Ordinarily, these tumors tend to be harmless, but your circumstances are far from ordinary…we’ll know in a couple of days. + + + I found you in the library, at the end of the crumbling 10th volume of the 1911 Oxford English Dictionary, between teratology and teratoscopy. Page corners flaked away as I leafed through them.

Stained as used teabags, the fluttering pages fanned up a bergamot

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A M ar ve lous Mon s t e r , Lu c ia I g l e si a s

cloud, Earl Grey-redolent (like the acrid dust that would waft out when I opened Mama’s tin of Twining’s to fix her birthday breakfast in bed. Who pampers her on her birthday now? I cannot even send a card; nothing I touch can leave the compound except as incinerator ashes). I wondered what you smelled like. Did you exhale sweet milky baby’s breath through those infantile teeth?

The dictionary told me your origin story. Your Greek ancestor τέρας means monster, and your kin have inherited the family predilection for a motley potpourri of features: hair, eyes, fingers, and of course, teeth. But τέρας also means marvel. I touched you again, not prodding now, stroking you, my little monster marvel, a miracle of gene expression, an unexpected guest snuggled against the arc of my ilium. A fourth nob had joined your toothy trio, and it didn’t feel dentine. A flexible cylinder with one flattened edge: a pygmy toe perhaps, complete with a minute nail.

The flitter of turned pages whispered from the other side of the bookshelves. I slid the crack-spined dictionary back into its nook, and tiptoed from shadow to shadow through the bookwalled labyrinth, left at the shelves of anatomical sketches, right at the dissection diagrams, to the catwalk ladder. The walkway clung to the upper shelves like ivy to brick, and from its wrought iron safety I peered down at the page-riffler. I had no wish to meet her; danger tainted intimacy with the other quarantinees, for tomorrow she might be a greasy tail of smoke winging from the flue of the incinerator, leaving the snapped tendril of our budding friendship stinging in my chest. But watching was safe.

Watching nudged remembering, a time before the accident, a world beyond the compound. Memory knew the spiky yellow stamens sprouting from the whorl of her bun. Perhaps she had

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stood with her back to me at an adjacent assembly line. As she flicked through the pages, I glimpsed the distal efficiency of a line worker. But when she angled to catch a dust-gagged ray of light on her page, I choked on my breath. A grey crust, like scaly lichen, swarmed the right side of her face. Her cheekbone had collapsed, the gaping hollow overshadowed by a bulb protruding from her temple. I scrambled down the ladder and pelted from the library, not caring if she heard my footsteps. + + + By the window on the forgotten servants’ stair landing, through a fur of dust on the oval pane, we watched the Evening Star ascend ponderously her arc. Star bright—Star light—First star I see to-night—I wish I may—I wish I might—Have the wish—I wish to-night. I tapped the syllables to you with my fingertips, inventing a marvelous monstrous Morse code for us, a tactile lexicon of your first words. This wasn’t how Mama taught me the verse, though perhaps at that moment she glanced up from the dishes in the sink to gaze at the very same star; she is so far away from me that it is the stars, light-years distant, that bridge us. But you were right there beneath my fingertips, one touch and I was not alone. + + + They wheeled the frozen body through the waiting room’s cramped maze of wingback chairs, velvet ottomans, and parlor tables, so close I could have reached out and brushed the crystals

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dewing on the woman’s blue eyelid, but I reached for you instead, seeking the serrated pressure of your little love bite. Sound hung suspended in midair, frozen by the corpse’s frigid halo on its passage through the parlor. In the silence, we the waiting, we the watchers, contemplated again giving our bodies to winter to destroy, before they destroy themselves. The compound needed no security but the climate; the misanthropic zoologist’s love of the far north ensured it would take a compound escapee many days on foot to find sign of human civilization, and winter always found the escapee first. The woman looked like a mannequin, hardened skin impermeable as polymer resin, long ashen hair clumped in brittle locks—a model death.

A rasping shredded the silence as the first chair was pushed back and the first watcher stood, sparking an avalanche of scrapes and groans. I knew her, murmured the woman beside me, heaving herself from the lap of her wheeled chair to balance on a single bloated leg. She inspected our line every other Friday, gave me a warning once for failure to adhere to code.

They were going to put her under the knife again, that’s why she ran, said the man on my other side, whose eyes spun in their sockets with the frenetic asynchronicity of whirligig beetles. Three operations in as many months. It made her sick, sicker than whatever it is that’s killing us all anyway.

I rose to my feet, holding you tight, standing with the others until the double doors snicked shut behind the gurney. The woman beside me folded back into her wheeled chair and her left hand began to float towards me, coming within inches of my shoulder before she shook herself and reeled the hand back into her lap. There is no touching here. Needles jab, knives cut, white-

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gloved hands prod, but no one touches. No one except you. + + + A white-suited doctor monotoned the news through my reflected face. The results were inconclusive. However, the other factors of your condition increase the risk of the Teratoma spreading if left undisturbed, so an operation has been scheduled for tomorrow morning.

Then you were under my fingers. One, two, three teeth, one tiny toe. One, two, three teeth, one tiny toe. Our counting game, the rhythm that punctuated our every moment together. Without the perpetual pressure of you against my skin, I would have no anchor in time and space. Edges blurring, I would drift through hallways among the other wraiths, some living, some dead, all lost. If I lost you, I would lose touch.

That night I slipped from my cot, tiptoed past the sleepers waiting for their eternal sleep, down the dark-paneled passageways with their framed lithographs of specimen cross-sections, and returned to the place where we first met, my blanket nest in the greenhouse. A restless draught rattled the vacant flowerpots in their saucers as I knelt in the hollow of rumpled wool. Don’t be afraid, marvelous monster, I tapped to you, they will never lay their knives on you.

Swathed in my new wooly bulk, I descended the warped servants’ stairs, tottering when my toes skated over an irregular upsurge of step. Through the library’s forest of shelves, I wended my way to the side door, a long forgotten panel between entomology and arctic ecology. You provided the rhythm for

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my shoulder thrusts, one, two, three teeth, one tiny toe, and under our onslaught, a lightening bolt forked through the wood, our splintery cleft to freedom.

Cold opened its arms to embrace me, icicle fingers shearing my cheeks as I stepped from under the eaves. I clutched the blankets tighter in my left hand, my right cupped protectively over you. We swam through a swirling sea, darkness asparkle with the scales of snowflakes, flashing by in nebulous schools. The tide crested my woolen shroud in white spume. Flakes pirouetting in the crosscurrents spun me into the flow of their dizzying dance.

A spotlight brushed over the dancers, catching me tight in its grasp. Two dark shapes loomed beyond the reach of the beam’s fingers.

What the hell is that?

Just incinerator meat; keep away.

How the hell did it get out?

I don’t know. I’m calling the white-coats. Be careful, I think there’s something wrong with this one, look how it’s holding its stomach.

I turned and ran. They could not have you, you were mine, my marvelous monster. We would run away and be monsters together. The tide surged against my tack, waves of spume crashing over me, drenching me in cold. Muscles began to seize, my frame turning to stiff wire. Hands numb, I could no longer feel your contours beneath my fingers.

From out of the whiteness, white forms swelled, solids congealing in the swirl. Hands on my shoulders on my arms on my neck. A hand on you, my hand. Hands tearing away layer upon woolen layer. Air’s ice-tipped teeth raked bare flesh. Then the prick—chilled metallic stabbing shooting, limbs freezing

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solid.

Where do you suppose she found all these blankets?

Don’t know. The extras must be piling up somewhere. Lucky the groundsmen spotted her. Wrapped up like this she might have actually made it. + + + Awareness crept up on me out of the miasma. Commands to fingers and toes fizzled, lethargic digits dragging as if embedded in clay. A prickle on the back of my hand and I levered eyelids open to see a needle snaking under the indigo-veined skin. My free hand leapt to you, seeking your sharp solidity as my own face undulated before my eyes. But where you should have been there was only gauzy softness.

The surgery was a success, purred the filtered voice above me.

We were able to excise the entire growth. In a few days you’ll be on your feet again and no supplemental treatment will be necessary.

You’ll be pleased to know that with further testing, we conclusively determined the Teratoma to be entirely benign.

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Documentation of Intrasectum, Vivian Charlesworth

Documentation of Intrasectum: an Immersive Installation

Vivian Charlesworth Intrasectum is an immersive installation set in an indecipherable time period. The work explores an alternative hydrotherapy in which insects are intravenously injected into a patient. The piece aims to evoke an atmosphere of peaceful discomfort by the use of jarring colors and a soundtrack of echoing drips. While immersed within the work, the viewers are challenged to create a narrative for themselves, since there is no overt storyline to be found.

The use of a live actress, playing the patient, is instrumental in creating a feeling of an alternate reality and asserting that the space is supposed to be used. As the patient sits in the tub, nude, she watches an abstract “informational video� that is meant to describe her experience. Nevertheless, the video and the message are abstract, lending an air of mystery to the procedure and to the overall artwork.

Featured on previous pages (84 - 85)

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Lizzie Red Bird

Thomas Pescatore On this date Friday, December 12, 1919 Lizzie Red Bird froze to death in the darkening winter night on the South Dakota plain, a prisoner of the Rosebud Reservation in the Imperial United States, she ran away from boarding school with Annie Coarse Voice, who lost her feet to the cold & amputation frost bite survivor long enough to face the 4-H, the tea party set, cut your hair take your seat obedience, Poor Lizzie, you only wanted to escape that shapeless, shoe-less fantasy, office of interior design; the snow still falls from Canada up north I hear, lines are thickly drawn; Were you buried, my Lizzie, with the bars facing up or down?

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After 9/11, Search for Breakfast in the City of Lights

Mary Ann Mayer “I hate the light,” the desk clerk growls at six am, jerked awake by the thud of the elevator— dreading we might ask for his help with luggage, to turn on the light, hail a taxi, or worse… say Bonjour.

It had been raining for eight months and Paris in September 2001 had settled into a soothing, gray ennui.

We approach his desk to pay the bill.

He repeats, “I hate the light.”

I flip the light switch ON. He looks stung.

I feel almost sympathetic, for the light is icy, not at all buttery.

There are no croissants, no demitasse cups, no aroma of coffee, no coffee.

He hates the light. I understand. He hates the light.

Why illuminate?

When he is French and not beautiful.

When we are American and not beautiful.

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We are mere disturbances to the field,1 to the search—for the things one really needs.

Particular certainties: Truth.

Liberty.

Beauty.

Breakfast.

Enlightenment.

We yawn, all so tired of each other, overcome by the pallor cast by no sun coffee Bonjour reason to linger thing to love or to butter.

1. A reference to Margaret Gibson’s poem “After Surgery” 89

That Which Once Was, Sophia Sobers giclee on handmade paper, graphite, ink, 8.5” x 6”

Cuba in Tampa

Octavia Akoulitchev They were not prepared for this finale A congregation of women Decaying in fatuous beads and dresses Balance silently by the bar.

They are wearing The long, black gloves that Used to fit, Up to corners of flaccid arms.

They reek of storms of Dust and stain remover Arthritis bunches up the satin In bulbous mounds —Masks are no longer enigmatic, Just stupid.

Rosa is fervent Tonight her tree-bark skin seems bizarre Next to the waiter’s ivory tint.

Regardless, her raiment clings to every pore In abandoned, candid lust.

They are waiting For taut arms to escort them to the Salsa they still need.

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These women never falter with their Lipstick or faithful, terrible patience.

Their mauled necks once Led to ethereal collarbones That felt like milk to hungry lips.

No one is coming.

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Spilled Milk

Jon Simmons

Why spilled milk is in the running for something to cry about beats me. Whoever the poor guy is who saw his glass of milk smash to the floor and started bawling and created the idiom don’t cry over spilled milk is probably crying over all sorts of things.

A wine stain in the sofa, a rotten banana, a returned letter. But maybe that letter was significant. Maybe it was sent to his first kiss, wondering where she was in the world, just to be thwarted by an invalid stamp or shoddy penmanship on the envelope.

Maybe he actually cried because the milk, as it spread across the oak floorboards of his apartment, took the exact shape of a large, white rose petal, and he remembered his high school prom, and his date’s white rose corsage that he had slipped onto her wrist.

Where was she now? Or perhaps he cried because the glass that held the milk was the last of his parents’ that they had given him before college and that he’d kept for all these years. And that glass was now in a dozen pieces, scattered through the pool of milk like icebergs in a polar sea.

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Octavia Akoulitchev has always loved reading and writing poems.

She is seventeen and has started a poetry society at her school in Oxford, England, to provide a space for her classmates to read, write, and discuss poetry. She has also won various competitions, including The Gitting’s Poetry Prize, and has been published in The Poetry Rivals’ Collection 2013, The HMC Magazine and The Cadaverine Online Magazine.

Carl Auerbach lives in New York City, where he has a private psychotherapy practice. Now that his four children are grown, he is pursuing a long-standing interest in poetry. He has had three poems and a short story nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Forge, North American Review, The Texas Review, and more.

Bruce Bagnell received a bachelor’s in English from Fairleigh Dickinson University and earned his master’s from John F. Kennedy University. He has worked as a cook, mechanic, and college professor. Now retired, he focuses wholeheartedly on his writing and has been published in OmniVerse, The Scribbler, and several online magazines. He is a member of the Bay Area Poets Coalition and was awarded honorable mention in its 2013 Maggi H. Meyer Memorial Poetry Contest.

Yelena Bidé grew up in Swaziland, Southern Africa. A junior at Brown University studying International Relations, she is obsessed with all things Latin America and spent the fall semester abroad in Santiago, Chile. Yelena discovered the joys of writing in her Introduction to Creative Nonfiction class.

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Vivian Charlesworth is a video installation artist and photographer. In her work, she aims to create an experience that compels the audience to re-examine its presumptions, and to promote a dialogue about current issues of personal invasion, environmental disintegration, and social responsibility. She is currently pursuing an MFA in Digital + Media at the Rhode Island School of Design.

Katie Darby received her BFA with a concentration in Painting from Auburn University in December 2011. After graduation, she served as an artist in residence for the Caroline Marshall Draughon Center for the Arts and Humanities, the Art Students League of New York, and the Vermont Studio Center. This past fall, she started the Rhode Island School of Design graduate painting program. Her work explores society’s reliance on the automobile and the consequences of this dependency.

Maya Finoh, Brown University Class of ’17, uses a pen to write the words too loud for her to say. Her thoughts usually revolve around war, love, Revlon lipstick, nostalgia, shea butter, oceans, Scandal, Sierra Leone, and Tumblr.

Chloe Hequet is a freshman at Brown university from London, England, who is intending to concentrate in Physics. Aside from writing poetry and prose, she enjoys horse riding, art and music.

Lucia Iglesias—nursed by gnomes, weaned by witches, educated by elves, angels, and assassins—has often felt more at home in the fantastical than the real. She writes to rediscover the realms that

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claimed her, and to find paths into new ones. When not writing, she may be found flying (on aerial rope, silk, and trapeze), cooking up potions (of the saccharine kind), and traveling (on her own two feet, or more often, in a book).

Mo Kong is a young digital media artist. He is interested in design based around the influence of technology on the human body and social structures. He is deeply impacted by various political and social events, and tells these stories through multimedia. His work takes a very personal, social, and political direction, and the materials he works with lend themselves to the nature of each subject.

Moke Li is one of a new generation of Chinese artists who works in a variety of mediums, including digital media, painting, sculpture and installation. Li received a BA from China Central Academy of Fine Arts and an MFA in Digital + Media at the Rhode Island School of Design. Her work has been exhibited in galleries and festivals internationally. Li has been focusing on critiquing social and political issues in expansive, non-didactic ways.

Mary Ann Mayer’s second book of poems, Salt & Altitudes, will appear in May 2014 (Finishing Line Press). Her first book, Telephone Man, sets her dad’s trade tales to verse. She has received the Grub Street Poetry Prize and a Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Grant, among other awards. Her work is recently published or forthcoming in Salamander: 20th Year Edition; Myrrh, Mothwing, Smoke: Erotic Poems (Tupelo Press); The Providence Journal and Newport Life. Mary Ann is an

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occupational therapy consultant for persons living with cognitive disabilities. She volunteers with the Ocean State Poets and is a contributing poet to the Origami Poems Project, distributing free books throughout New England.

Wallace-Ruby Morales received her BA in philosophy from Reed College and her JD from Santa Clara University School of Law, during which time she also received certification from the Institute of Human Rights in Strasbourg. Over the past few years, she has attended the Kachemak Bay Writers’ Conference, the Wrangell Mountain Center Poetry Workshop, and Writing Rendezvous.

She has studied with the highly acclaimed Edward Albee and Constance Congdon. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Griffin, Rougarou, and Softblow.

Joel Orloff is a cartoonist and illustrator finishing up a bachelor’s degree in English at Vassar College. More of his comics can be found at joelorloffcomics.tumblr.com, and his drawings at skaweeerureeweeert.tumblr.com.

Jamie Packs, born and raised in Massachusetts, is a freshman studying at Brown University. Although he often engages in the practice of art-making, he is typically hesitant to share his work with others.

Thomas Pescatore grew up outside Philadelphia dreaming of the endless road ahead, carrying the idea of the fabled West in his heart. He maintains a poetry blog: amagicalmistake.blogspot.com.

His work has been published in literary magazines both nationally

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and internationally, but he would rather have them carved on the Walt Whitman Bridge or on the sidewalks of Philadelphia’s old Skid Row. Kimmi Pham is a Baltimore native happily studying English at Cornell University. She spends a significant amount of her time savoring good food, dancing freely, and delighting in poetry and fiction—sometimes simultaneously and sometimes unexpectedly.

Ursula Raasted is from Copenhagen and is currently a senior at Brown University, concentrating in MCM and Writing for Performance. Her favorite color is dark green and she always remembers her dreams.

Sarah Renshaw is an artist and graphic designer with an MFA in Digital + Media from the Rhode Island School of Design. More of her work can be seen at www.textarttech.com.

Anna Riley is a senior in the Glass Department at the Rhode Island School of Design. Her work is a collection of observations on levitation expressed in the elevation of language through sonorous oration, the magic of the beyond-human performance, utopian ideals of precision, the highly technical languages of physics, the affinity for failure, and the agency of determining our own rigorous but gratifying educations.

Evan Silver is a sophomore at Brown University concentrating in Literary Arts and Theatre Arts. He was born and raised in Chicago, Illinois, where he teaches clay, multimedia, film, and

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puppet making to eight-year-olds. He is a board member of the Production Workshop, Brown’s only completely studentrun theater, and has directed a number of productions at Brown including The Snow Queen, Super Secret, Wounded Palms, Metamorphoses, and People Moving.

Jon Simmons is a writer from coastal Maine. He graduated from Emerson College with a BFA in fiction, where he won the Academy of American Poets Prize. He currently works in Boston, Massachusetts at an education management firm. His stories and poems have been published or are forthcoming in Drunken Boat, Digital Americana, Litro, and Snail Mail Review, among other literary magazines. He enjoys ping-pong and nineties hip-hop.

Sophia Sobers is an interdisciplinary artist. She creates sculptures, installations, and environments as an ongoing process of intersecting boundaries between science, nature, and the spiritual.

She earned her MFA in Digital + Media at the Rhode Island School of Design and previously studied Architecture at the New Jersey Institute of Technology.

Joe Squance is an adjunct instructor at Miami University (Ohio), teaching mostly courses in creative writing. His fiction has appeared in magazines such as Pindeldyboz and Prick of the Spindle, and his interviews with writers and editors can be found in back issues of Oxford Magazine. He lives in Oxford with his wife and their young daughter.

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Edit o rial St af f

Managing Editors

Paige Morris Sylvia Tomayko-Peters Associate Editors

Sienna Bates Hanna Kostamaa Staff

Sarah Cooke Ellia Higuchi Sally Hosokawa Lucia Iglesias Naima Msechu Marina Renton

We thank Brown University and Brown Graphic Services for their help and support.

No t e f ro m t h e Edit or s

The Round is a literary and visual arts magazine based at Brown University. This spring we are thrilled to release Issue X, the tenth volume of The Round since its founding.

Our name was chosen to reflect 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, from students and professionals. Send your work, comments, or questions to: TheRoundMagazine@Gmail.com

You can check out past issues of the magazine, view submission guidelines, and learn more about us by visiting: http://students.brown.edu/theroundmagazine

Thank you for picking up a copy of The Round, Issue X. We hope you enjoy!

Sincerely, The Editors