The Round, Fall 2019: Issue XIX by The Round

The Round

VOLUME XIX

THE ROUND

Bill Wolak

THE DREAMâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S UNFORGETTABLE PROMISE Digital collage, 11x8 inches

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Simon Perchik [YOU INHALE THE WAY THIS SAND] Susan Tollefson THE WAITRESS Madelyn Camrud I RUN FOR MOTHER Anastasia Rybalchenko SOFT DECADENCE Bruce Bybee THE PHILHARMONIC Christopher Kuhl EPITAPH Ella Rosenblatt MYSTIC PIZZA Ethel Barja THE AUTOMATON’S HOUSE Christopher Kuhl TIME’S SORROW

PAGES

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Bella (Zhuohan) Jiang <ROOM> Marianna Scott GOING UNDER, COMING UP Laura Kenney GHOST OF (OLDER BROTHER) Sofija Podvisocka TWICE Ella Rosenblatt A SCRIPT Gina Caggiano ELEGY Ella Rosenblatt MEMORY COLLAGE 3 Elaina Weakliem STRAWBERRY HAZE Ella Rosenblatt 4:37 PM, HOPE STREET

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David Tomasovich THE SETTLING OF DEBTS Alana Baer FACES Alana Baer BROAD STRIPES AND BRIGHT STARS Judson Ellis TRANSLATIONS OF VICENTE HUIDOBROâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S FATIGA Ella Rosenblatt SNOW HONEY Sarah Morgan PROOF Marth Sutro LOVE SONG Ciprian Buzila BEAUTY

Simon Perchik

[YOU INHALE THE WAY THIS SAND] You inhale the way this sand is filled with saliva half salt half doubling back, forgets the waves no longer have a season â&#x20AC;&#x201C;is forever harvesting the rain, the gusts or boats criss-crossing the same shoreline while your belly drains and the Earth swallowed whole by driftwood and longing â&#x20AC;&#x201C;you return to sand, lie down with these small stones and pollen ripening as if a root so enormous would never again be thirsty would caress your cheeks with grass that has no other home, is thinning out its great rivers and later on.

Susan Tollefson

THE WAITRESS She ate slivers of fat from steaks sweating in the chefâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s kitchen. I stared at her knife sawing, flecks of fat falling. In my dreams: her thievery when Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m hungry and possibility has died. A skinny woman lank hair, pallid face. Laughing, slicing.

Madelyn Camrud

12 I RUN FOR MOTHER One season runs into another— the way it’s always been: work hard, dig up the crop when summer’s over. Roots pulled, carrots and beets wrapped, stored with Mother’s fruit sauces in the cellar. I hurry down for peaches, pears, or apricots, sugared blue Ball jar specimen I run back up for supper and pray at the table, Thank thee, Lord Jesus, Amen in a hurry. Much of it slipped through my fingers— jars dropped; glass broken. Didn’t know my clumsiness until I fed Mother at ninety, her bird-mouth opened for spooned puree. So little difference from days I ran the stairs for her— the down, the up of it all I know, carry whatever I can back to Mother.

Anastasia Rybalchenko

SOFT DECADENCE

13 feed me marinated olives

floral jesus

sedate me

eat it up

Anastasia Rybalchenko

dual catharsis

Anastasia Rybalchenko

emerald cult

Anastasia Rybalchenko

pink faux fur coat

Bruce Bybee

THE PHILHARMONIC I. when instead of your hand in my palm i found an abandoned ticket i wondered who’s floating in your bed tonight who’s bathing in your lavender i love you— who are you begging to become your dog— as i sunk in a steaming shower i had shaved all my hair but the razors told me to go deeper when your drunken 4am keys jangled from behind the tiles like fireworks over the pacific and i sprang— dripping naked newborn to a crawl for your puke kiss i wish you had leashed me before a supermarket to bark at teenagers beerbottling their loneliness and knowing as it started to hail you must return with a hug— instead i barked at the 30-year-old teenager in the mirror who somehow believed that if he’d wait long enough— instead of your hand in my palm i found an abandoned ticket

Bruce Bybee

II. with my coat in your seat I watched the ocean on the conductor’s back— the chaos behind a symphony you thought you were on the other side but we were on a rowboat drenched in salt starving for months and so you devoured my mouth my hands my eyes you were the holy pale statue— the figurehead you know dear— that’s where sailors went to take a shit the wine’s cheap and it’s just the intermission I don’t need the music I am not coming back —i love you

Christopher Kuhl

22 EPITAPH dead i become only the space iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve left behind a door ajar as night crawls creeps in

Ella Rosenblatt

23 MYSTIC PIZZA

Ethel Barja

THE AUTOMATONS’ HOUSE 1 Scar-city, your beats dream the creature and shape the noise in Morse code. The mind without a vestige of absence wouldn’t do anything. The fingers need to hold the air to reorganize the bones. The oven and its melancholy of clay would bring the fire and the automatons would awake. Operator, you didn’t realize behind each perfect circle remains the stain you cannot remove. For several days I’ve not been able to leave this red room as if I inhabit a powerful question the poem’s desire.

Ethel Barja

2 Small entrance a dollâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s eye sleeps on the mud. The broken wings of the mechanical birds perforate the page. They come thirsty to the well of my breast. To kiss the half that you know is to asphyxiate the trace of the other half. I shape each name, spelling the restless hive. What do they do together? What would they do dismembered?

Ethel Barja

3 Why does matter circulate in pieces and cavities spread all over? Dark knots in the flea market. I still donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t know how to eat with the deadâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s fork. This street is a moving ground where misery melts each minute: one coin, two coins, three shouting coins, your metal feet, the sidewalk concrete, and the abstract? (not yet, the flesh surrounds it, kills it). We walk on the blue back of the spasm, on the vibrating shadows of deafness.

Christopher Kuhl

TIMEâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S SORROW The long blue sorrow of the afternoon expressed in a TVâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s futile flickering. Our reflections immersed in darkness, its one abundance dreams that have grown opaque with age. What does crying mean? That an illiterate God, who knew that once started, time would never end? Souls and their bodies argue endlessly: are we or are we not the eternal gifts of God, or are we luminous bits of imagination, lost one piece at a time? When the scaffolds are full, and bodies forfeit of their souls fill the rivers, use trees.

Bella (Zhuohan) Jiang

<ROOM>

Bella (Zhuohan) Jiang

Marianna Scott GOING UNDER, COMING UP

Before the Bath, I light eight candles and place them around the tub. Tall fingerwhite tapers sticking out of Mom’s good brass candlesticks. I kneel next to the tub as it fills, swirling my fingers round the font, o come thou. I spent last New Year’s in the bath, anointed the water with lavender oil and silver glitter and chanted my intentions into the steam. It’s full now. I loos’d the chain, and down I lay1 into water not too hot just right. Black hair against white tub, black eyes against white skin, it all glows golden in the candlelight. I turn my face side to side, with my eyelashes throw yellow light to the mirror and back. I am Thetis’s daughter, virgin in a white tub. Tirra lirra, tirra lirra.2 I dry my hands on a pink washcloth and pick up The Brothers Karamazov. Last week I bathed with C.S. Lewis, tonight I share my bath with Dostoyevsky. If God does not exist, then everything is permissible.3 Alyosha kisses Ivan’s face. My wet hand wrinkles the page, words flow together. Twenty pages, enough for the night. Put the book back on the counter. Time to wash my hair. I see the waterflower bloom4 and sink beneath the surface. I come up sputtering. Hair tangled in sloppy clumps sticking to my wet back. I forgot to take off my mascara so now it sadly seeps in soggy circles around my eyes. Water is getting cold, candles are burning out so I turn on the overhead light. I can see tiny armies of mildew growing on the tile next to the tub. In the beginning Spirit hovered over the waters. Jesus tiptoed on feet featherlight. Noah built a boat to sail. Jonah sank into the deep. Or In the beginning hyperthermophilic archaea wandered up from deep-sea hydrothermal vents. They kept bumping into each other and things have been bumping ever since. When I tore all the skin off my knee and it was yellow and wet and I asked why is it so wet it’s not bleeding just wet Dad said we escaped from the sea but we can’t ever really leave it. Our cells are like balloons, we have to take the water with us. The difference between floating and sinking is the amount of water on top of you. I almost drowned when I was three years old, in a crowded pool at a church luau. My parents handed me off to 14-year-old Sylvia Magnew who got distracted by the giant ham or the hula dancing or maybe the 300-pound pastor in a grass skirt and didn’t notice when I slipped from the safety of the pink boogie board into the cold blue depths of the Deep End. I remember the sinking from above, see myself in pink and yellow spotted suit slowly devoured by the vast reaches of uncharted space. Dad was watching and jumped in to pull me out. 1 Tennyson, 133. 2 Ibid, 107. 3 Dostoievski, 80. 4 Tennyson, 111.

Marianna Scott

What if you could drown from the inside out? I dreamed last week that there was a strange cat sitting on the kitchen table. It wasn’t a normal cat. It was entirely orange. Its body was covered with large pouches of orange, gelatinous liquid. Its eyes were soggy pouches with black slits down the middle. I got closer. Its pouches began to rupture, spraying orange liquid all over the kitchen table. Mom rushed in with a broom, screaming. I woke up. Lake Tahoe is a freshwater lake in California’s Sierra Nevadas. Its water is a stunning blue-green, so clear that you can see straight down for twenty, thirty feet. Early one morning last summer, rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself into the lake.1 I waded to the end of the channel of round, gray rocks that bordered the cove on either side and lay on my back, floating at the perimeter of gated harbor and open bay. Then I swam back. The bath is cold. I pull the plug on the drain and stand up. Dizzy. I wrap myself in a pink towel and put my wet feet on the dry floor.

Works Cited Dostoievski, Fedor Mikhailovich. The Brothers Karamazov. Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1990. Proust, Marcel, et al. In Search of Lost Time. The Captive. Modern Library, 2003. Joyce, James. Ulysses. Mannix, C. and Whitman, W. (2011). When I Heard the Learned Astronomer. Columbus, OH: Ice Weasel Press.

1 Whitman, 8.

Laura Kenney

GHOST OF (OLDER BROTHER) when you are busted lip laying on the too-plush cot of the icu breathing through the tube they forced down your esophagus, i am eating a molten chocolate lava cake at some shitty chili’s with my high school boyfriend. you are dead in the brain, the cake is dry and underwhelming. my boyfriend wears a straw wrapper as a mustache to try and earn a laugh, something. distraction. only hours after you stop breathing do i receive the phone call from my mother, am i told that you stopped breathing. i stay the night at my boyfriend’s apartment instead of coming home, coming to see you. we leave two spoons bloodied on the plate and a few dollars tip. i’ll take antacids for the reflux, later.

Sofija Podvisocka

TWICE Petulantâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; demanding (floral tribute and). Crossed arms, pursed lips, (gritted teeth) and saltwater taffy crocodile tears. (in a public bathroom) Make the world feel pity, (cleaning your own vomit,) angel touch stroking (tied back hair). , firm.

Ella Rosenblatt

A SCRIPT “I WANT YOU TO BE HONEST LIKE NO ONE EVER WAS.” SHE SAID THAT TO ME THE DAY WE DROVE EAST TO BROADSTREET PARK AND ATE ICE CREAM ON A CHERRY-RED SWING SET. IT SHOCKED ME AT FIRST. WE HAD BEEN JOKING ABOUT THE NEARBY LAKE, IMAGINING IT AS THE BACKDROP OF AN OLD MOVIE. IF ONLY YOU COULD ALWAYS PAINT IN THE SCENERY YOU WISHED WERE THERE. “I THINK I’D LIKE TO DRIVE BACK,” I SAID. THE SKIN ON THE TOPS OF MY FEET FELT HOT, AND MY HEAD FELT SWOLLEN AND HEAVY. THE DISCOMFORT WAS SUDDENLY URGENT, UNBEARABLE. HEART RACING, I PLANTED MY FEET AND LEFT THE CHAINED SWING AWKWARDLY JUMPING IN THE WIND. CARINA FOLLOWED. I ONLY THOUGHT HER SILENCE ODD WHEN LOOKING BACK ON THE EXCHANGE YEARS LATER. IN THE MOMENT, I COULD ONLY THINK AWAY, AWAY, AS IF DISPLACEMENT WERE A PANACEA. I WALKED AS IF PUNISHING THE GROUND, THE EARTH FOR THIS HEAT. AS IF IT WEREN’T A NORMAL SIDE EFFECT OF SUMMER. CARINA’S LONG SHADOW BRUSHING AND MERGING WITH MINE TOLD ME THAT SHE WAS TRAILING JUST BEHIND. I NEVER GLANCED BACK.

Gina Caggiano

ELEGY Blossoms turn brown off my lips. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s the air of this world, ripe with oxygen like a hard white light where fragile half-truths fry â&#x20AC;&#x201C; My only wings, wasting from infancy, struggling in sterile cloud current over some uninhabitable place where I have strewn white seeds, small droppings off the stems thronged in my throat, they ferry me blind over hillsides and perish. I have seen many tenderheart words expire in last glances over my white shoulder, of silent valleys grey with the film of feathers rotting and saplings starved. What mineral it is that feeds fantasy I have never found here on this passive rock still, I am the sorry one for my soul is sometimes a milk-eyed magnolia and my bones its branches, a mouth too full with flowers to speak, lest the petals spasm, lost in the cold throes of this atmosphere. And so, I am again a flightless bird battered in driving winds, bitter, shedding feathers to wrap a wound with promises, let them turn with time to gangrene and crusted realizations.

Ella Rosenblatt

46 MEMORY COLLAGE 3

Elaina Weakliem

47 STRAWBERRY HAZE Last night I dreamed you crawled into bed with me, your body shivering, and smaller than I remember. You were wet, and you soaked my sheets with salt water. We were in the bath. It was hot outside and the fan was broken and so we stripped down to bathing suits and turned the cold tap on as far as it would go. You looked at our folded legs, too long to share such a small space. You wouldn’t look me in the eye when I asked you when your dad was going to get home. We were fourteen, and June had passed in a sticky strawberry haze. We were on the grass in my backyard when you told me about the boy you loved and I wondered if he remembered the flavor of your chapstick, or if the smell of cheap beer had overpowered the taste of cherry. From then on, the summers were never the same. I still slept in your bed, but the hours of the night were marked not by the clock on your table, but by the string of confessions you’d let loose in the room as your hands worked their way under my shirt. I would lay very still and hope that if I didn’t move, time would press us flat like flowers between two and three in the morning. The last time I saw you, there was an ocean in your stomach and oceans under your eyes and you were in your underwear, curled up in the bathtub of your grandmother’s house. I sat on the rim of the tub and asked you why you didn’t bother to undress all the way. You said it reminded you of the way we used to swim together, back when we could still imagine the bath water was an ocean that you couldn’t drown in. You said it was idealistic to imagine that you were ever safe from drowning— that you were drowning now, in three inches of lukewarm water. This morning, I expected to find you next to me when I woke up. But the bed was empty, and I tried to pinpoint the fading scent of salt water before I remembered that I had left the ocean behind years ago. Seven hundred miles from the coast, and isn’t it funny how I can still taste the sea whenever I think of you?

Ella Rosenblatt

48 4:37 PM, HOPE STREET there are moments that are pulled into nonexistence as they come to be, non-moments, the space between nodes of awareness. the street is painted with marks of time, water frozen and melting, stains like grease on cloth, piles of snow with brown edges, as if they decay before melting, melting is rebirth. death is an ascension, a rising, a residue of human salt. the sidewalk unfolds to me like a roll of film. i remember each block as if it were a face i saw a long time ago. once i see the next i forget. everything is eventually pulled into a tower bedroom i imagined when i was five, shadows shoot out from pebbles, west to east, low sun. sometimes the blue grey of shadows makes everything else yellow. how many moments have i spent saying nothing? the sounds of cars shout existence, air fighting metal, road on rubber. how does a molecule of water see another? the ones soaked into the concrete, burrowing into regimented sand, and the frozen, who tower into jagged, gathered. they long to be tall. do they look like the mountains, if i were to fly above? and would these stains on cement like carpet look like seas, if i could only… i imagine the shadows alternatively as a net—like those plastic ones that get lost in the ocean and hold mandarin oranges—, or a painted grid. temporary structure pulls, holds together. i look up to the sky, a comfort— always blue.

David Tomasovich

49 THE SETTLING OF DEBTS Return stale bread to the priests and cherry pits to the lovers. Give scandal its soft wool. Put out small lights and set adrift the children of Mosesâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; dead stars upon the sea. The root of my evil is tapped. I am done kissing carpets. Gravitas no longer clings to the apple falling from my eye.

Alana Baer

50 FACES

Alana Baer

51 BROAD STRIPES AND BRIGHT STARS

Judson Ellis

TRANSLATIONS OF VICENTE HUIDOBRO’S FATIGA

52 Fatiga Marcho día y noche como un parque desolado. Marcho día y noche entre esfinges caídas de mis ojos; miro el cielo y su hierba que aprende a cantar; miro el campo herido a grandes gritos, y el sol en medio del viento. Acaricio mi sombrero lleno de luz especial; paso la mano sobre el lomo del viento; los vientos, que pasan como las semanas; los vientos y las luces con gestos de fruta y sed de sangre; las luces, que pasan como los meses; cuando la noche se apoya sobre las casas, y el perfume de los claveles gira en torno de su eje. Tomo asiento, como el canto de los pájaros; es la fatiga lejana y la neblina; caigo como el viento sobre la luz. Caigo sobre mi alma. He ahí el pájaro de los milagros; he ahí los tatuajes de mi castillo; he ahí mis plumas sobre el mar, que grita adiós. Caigo de mi alma. Y me rompo en pedazos de alma sobre el invierno; caigo del viento sobre la luz; caigo de la paloma sobre el viento.

Judson Ellis

53 Fatigue I march day and night like an empty park. I march day and night between sphinxes fallen from my eyes; I see the sky and its grass that learns to sing; I see the countryside damaged by great shouts, and the sun between the wind. I caress my hat full of special light; I run my hand along the back of the wind; winds, which pass like weeks; winds and lights with visions of fruit and thirst of blood; lights, which pass like months; when night hangs over houses, and the scent of carnations spirals around its axis. I take a seat, like the bird song; itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s the far-off fatigue and the fog; I fall like the wind upon light. I fall upon my soul. Behold the miracle bird; behold the tattoos of my castle; behold my feathers over the sea, roaring its goodbye. I fall from my soul. And I break into pieces of soul upon winter; I fall from the wind upon light; I fall from the dove upon wind.

Judson Ellis

Huidobro is Tired of Creating Huidobro writes poems all day all night. He is made desolate by this walking. He writes poems all day all night all questions for the world questions he has invented questions that come from within him in worlds that have come from within him. He looks up he is looking up where God is. He sees heavenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s greenery blooming. He hears it learning to sing. He sees things he hears things that do not exist in our world and he wants to show them to us. He sees the countryside the fields leveled by the noise of what he hears that we cannot hear. Inside his head is special light is beauty is wonderful things he takes from this world and he gives to the next. He is attuned. He is attuned to the movement of the world. He places that movement before us. He can feel it. Stop it. He can stop time. He can move time how he likes. He can make nature do what he likes. He can make it thirst for blood. He can thirst for blood from nature. He can create time. He can move time how he likes. There is darkness, a void supported above, and he thinks about it falling. He thinks what will happen if it falls and he is no longer creating. He smells the lovely floral scents. They are always moving. They go nowhere. He sits. He is tired now, like the song of a bird that wilts at its climax. He sees the future. He cannot see it clearly. He sees himself tire of his creation. He cannot see it clearly, but he knows. It is time to fall, to rest, to fall like the wind. To fall like time. To fall into his creation.

Judson Ellis

To fall into his creation. Look at this world he is creating. Look at the image of God he is. Look at the bird he has sent us to show us things grow here, in this new world where sin is void. Look at the images he has etched into the old world. He has flown too close to the sun. He will fall now into the sea. The sea will greet him, then. The sea he created will greet him in its arms. The sea celebrates. To fall out of his creation. Huidobro breaks himself up in the twilight of life in the twilight of creation in the winter of his world when the trees have lost their leaves. He falls asleep now. Tired of creation. He falls from movement to radiance. He falls from peace into change. Change perhaps to start again in a dream. The wind wipes away his world.

Fatigue Tiredness Energy Moving Forward Forward-Moving Where Do We Go From Here I am marching not driving not in the car moving forward I am walking I do this day and night like a machine moving I am moving day and night I am not a plant I am not a tree I am not a vine growing up a tree I do not depend on the sun The sun that turns the parks green so I am a park free of grass I am covered in metal spines instead of with dirt. My eyes have questions for everything trying to determine the answers to the riddles in the day in the night in the sun-bathed questioning cats the ancient world it had so many questions for us today not so much today we can go anywhere In the sky will the grasses grow will they sing out loud will they make noise noise like a birdâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s song noise like a planeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s engine? Will that noise blow the grass down will it burn it down? The sun is coming down here coming coming down between the rapid winds the winds turning so wildly wildly like cars like planes sonically bursting forward with metal reflecting like the sun like the sun in the middle of bursting wind.

Judson Ellis

This light is special this light between winds coming down to us coming to me filling my hat I touch my hat I feel that light I have the light of the sun in my hands I have the magic of the sun in my hands I have the magic of light on my fingertips like they are leaves my hat is a bush atop my head. To feel the sun I stretch my hand out I feel the spine of the wind the meat of the wind infused with sunlight the back of the wind rising the wind rises the sun rises the city rises. Wind passes like weeks time is moving like wind or is wind moving like time or is the sound of the alarm clock every morning the vibration of wind that is blowing away in time we will hear it in a week’s time where the wind takes it put your hand out the window and feel the wind blowing you back as you move forward, west as you move east. The winds the lights they show me their gestures their visions they are vines pushing fruit into my open mouth they are vines digging into my veins they want to sip my blood like I want to sip the sun like I want to feel the wind in my mouth; Light passes like a month light shoots out further than the wind and that which is created today is not truly seen until the future that which the Cubist sees he sees rippling months and months from now the train the plane compacts light from next month into this month we can sort through that light like calendar pages on one leaf we see ourselves in Paris on the other page in Chile on the other page in a Russian train as the wind pushes our hair backward and the moon reflects the light. Day and night don’t think I’ve forgotten; it takes minutes for light from the sun to reach us it took years for them to understand Mallarmé, they did not see the die he cast the words falling in freedom they had not rippled with their light across the months until after the shadow was dismissed; it takes a month for the sunlight to wrap fully around the moon; The night is held up over the houses with the threat of falling it is supported flimsily by darkness our light will drown it unless it falls on us first; can we keep it above us forever? Like the light around the moon the smell of carnations turns around its axis carried by a wind a wind going nowhere. A cycle, a sweet return. How sweet it is, that smell, that feeling of standing in place.

Judson Ellis

I take a seat like the bird songs have sat below the loud winds of our airplanes they have sat below the screams that flatten the grasses that flatten too your feathers you can see them rise up beside the airplane; You can hear instead the sound of my beleaguered breathing come in from the wind so I know in seven daysâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; time I will be exhausted the vapor in my breath resting against the earth you can see that too a month from now you can see the light will blur in that fog; I will fall like the wind of my breath like the wind falls over the sun like the fog falls over the streetlamps movement over light. I fall over my soul my soul is here too and I fall over it like the wind falls over the sun. There is the miracle bird the one that showed us the land the one that came down from the sun the one that held an olive branch in its mouth to show us what grew in the sun There are my castleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s tattoos those black things imprinted on the walls one is in the shape of a cross behold your son There are my feathers my wet lain down feathers lain down on the sea there are devilfish in the water the sea yells to God the sea says God be with you goodbye is it that shout that flattens my feathers or the moisture. Where is the soul is it in the sun or the wind or the light or the dovetail. I fall from all of these things. I break apart in this place there is no place for my wholeness and my pieces are strewn about so many snowflakes strewn there to reflect light or be dragged along by blizzards you will see me covering your homes like nighttime you will see my soul in so many things where am I going I am going into the snow piles I am going into death I am passing this way like missiles you will not stop me from going this way whether you are blowing wind or you are peace or you are God. There is no going

Judson Ellis

Forward

Judson Ellis

Forward walking like a machine free of grass. sun-bathed questioning, noise like an airplane engine. noise blows, metal reflects the sun. my fingertips are leaves. I stretch my hand wind vibration sip the sun wrap around the moon. light will drown a wind going nowhere screams flatten feathers. vapor in my breath, my soul is here too. olive branch, behold your son: my feathers or the moisture where is the soul? no place for my wholeness you will see my soul in so many things.

fog falls over the streetlamps

Ella Rosenblatt

SNOW HONEY snow honey, love i starved myself and pinched my waist until it split like dough halves, two loaves of bread syrup candy that, gem brown gulps of water all sorts of pangs in winter, all the skinny branches, twigs austere brown exposure, white crystals, love angel imprints and bodies not left behind.

on white melting hunger

Sarah Morgan

PROOF My mother used to take a piece of muslin cloth and lay it over a mixing bowl When the dough would rise she would lift it and lay it on the counter with a sprinkle of flour beneath, folding the dough in on itself over and over until it formed into a ball This is how it felt when your life began like something had risen and started folding in like a sprinkle of stardust, Being compressed like something inside began holding its breath

Martha Sutro

64 LOVE SONG In the end, the ocean came to her islands with ice-bound marshes, green birds, an ice-choked ship and an inlet, clutched with ice. What she held were the murmuring bushes of ocean. The mast and the rust that sought a tilted wave, the bound-down and afloat the thousand hoods and the claws and the wet twist of a squall. The ocean, its limbs, its figmentary ways its heat in the distant north. The ocean, its organs its bloom and incapacity, its tumbling year-to-year silence. It advanced on her. Its reaching and leaving were known to her. She took its grain, its gleam, its lone listening. She was farther and inland. How many nights, picking through treetops, was the ocean severing her dream? The ocean approached, yet never came near. A murmur, a tone of swell and despond. A part of water lifted from the ocean drew her to the ocean. She considered some days. She considered the ocean. She took its few sips, its rainy shell. She spoke it.

Ciprian Buzila

65 BEAUTY

ALANA BAER

Alana Baer is a first-year planning on double concentrating in Visual Arts and English. She grew up in San Francisco but loves living here in Providence. She has long been interested in visual arts of many different mediums, although most of her artistic experience is with sewing and garment construction. ETHEL BARJA Ethel Barja was born in Peru in 1988. Her poetry collections are Trofeo imaginado entre dientes (2011), Gravitaciones (2013, bilingüal edition in English, 2017), and Insomnio vocal (2016). Her writing appeared in Voces al norte de la cordillera: Antología de voces andinas en los Estados Unidos (2016), and in literary magazines in Peru, the USA, and Germany. She holds a BA in Literature from Pontifical Catholic University of Peru and an MA in Hispanic Studies by University of Illinois at Chicago. She is a current doctoral student in Hispanic Studies at Brown University. CIPRIAN BUZILA Ciprian Buzila is a Rhode Island-based interior designer, educator, and artist originally from Romania. His current work is dedicated to the discovery of the self and the surrounding world(s) through self-portraits. He employs acrylic on paper and photography as mediums.

CONTRIBUTORS

BRUCE BYBEE born: Prague, 1999 // Czech-American // sophomore, Brown University // likely major: POLS-ECON // interest: film, swimming, theater, beer, celery, sauna GINA CAGGIANO Gina Caggiano is a Brown student studying English. She is from Massachusetts, struggles to read maps, and still doesn’t know how to drive.

MADELYN E. CAMRUD Born and raised in North Dakota, Madelyn Camrud is a graduate of the University of North Dakota with degrees in visual arts and English. She’s had three full collections published: This House Is Filled With Cracks and Oddly Beautiful (New Rivers Press, 2013); and Songs of Horses and Lovers (NDSU Regional Studies Press, 2013). Her poems have appeared in Painted Bride Quarterly, Soundings East, and Water~Stone Review, among others. She has attended these workshops/conferences: Ossabaw Island Writers’ Retreat; Split Rock Conference; North Woods (Bemidji) Writers Conference; and forty years of University of North Dakota Writers Conferences. She was named an Associate Poet Laureate of North Dakota in 2005. JUDSON ELLIS Judson Ellis is a senior at Brown studying Biology. BELLA (ZHUOHAN) JIANG Bella (Zhuohan) Jiang, MA ‘19, Public Humanities, Brown University. LAURA KENNEY Laura Kenney writes poetry, nonfiction, and experimental texts. She is also a film and digital photographer; and a conceptual artist. Her work is primarily concerned with notions of gender, embodiment, and the fallibility of memory. She is a student of Literary Arts (Cross-Disciplinary, Honors) at Brown University. Her favorite book is currently Ventrakl by Christian Hawkey, and her favorite fruit is the mango.

CHRISTOPHER KUHL

Christopher Kuhl is the author of the book of poetry Night Travels, among others. His work has been published in Prairie Schooner, Alabama Literary Review, and Inscape Magazine, among others. His short story “Wade” was nominated for the 2017 Pushcart Prize, as well as being named the Annual Editor’s Choice of Best Work in Fiction by Inscape Magazine for 2016. His most recent book of poetry, Blood and Bone, River and Stone: Memoirs of Lewis County, has been published by Stratton Press. He earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and one in music composition, as well as two masters of music degrees and a PhD in Interdisciplinary Arts. His other interests include studying higher mathematics and classical Greek and Hebrew, as well as drawing and painting with acrylics. He is never bored. SARAH MARTINEZ Sarah is a current sophomore studying Geology-Biology with a weakness for all things bread. She loves the outdoors, and cares deeply about climate justice and equitable land and resource management. She has previously contributed to the campus Latinx literary art journal SOMOS, and works on the graphics team for The Brown Daily Herald. SARAH MORGAN A screenwriter and entrepreneur living in Austin, Texas, Sarah Morgan has written and performed sketch comedy at the Fallout Theater, and is currently developing an app for Android and IOS. She received a BA in Interdisciplinary Studies: Writing for Television with a minor in Creative Writing from the University of North Florida. You can also find her on the Barton Creek Greenbelt, camera in hand, exploring the macro world of snails. SIMON PERCHIK Simon Perchik is an attorney whose poems have appeared in Partisan Review, Forge, Poetry, Osiris, The New Yorker and elsewhere. His most recent collection is The Gibson Poems (Cholla Needles, 2019). For more information including free e-books and his essay “Magic, Illusion and Other Realities” please visit his website at www.simonperchik.com.

SOFIJA PODVISOCKA Sofija’s an avid proponent of the avant-garde and obscure. In other words (and as Hyde from That 70’s Show would say), she’s floating along on a conveyor belt of conformity. ELLA ROSENBLATT Ella Rosenblatt is a sophomore studying Science, Technology, and Society and Art History at Brown. ANASTASIA RYBALCHENKO Anastasia is a student based in Prague, Czech Republic. She has a year and something left of high school before she (hopefully) moves out of there and on onto her university education (whatever and wherever that might be). MARIANNA SCOTT Marianna Scott is a sophomore at Brown studying English and other things. She likes Russian military history and the color yellow. MARTHA SUTRO Martha Sutro’s poetry has appeared in Çedilla & Co., and her creative nonfiction piece “Cashing Out on the Bering Sea” was featured in Out on the Deep Blue (St. Martin’s Press, 2001). She has an MA in English Literature from the Bread Loaf School of English at Middlebury College and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Montana. Martha has attended the Squaw Valley Writer’s Conference and the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference. She has worked as a middle and high school English teacher and as an undergraduate English professor. Currently, she is a freelance writer and editor and enjoys hiking, canoeing, and skiing.

SUSAN TOLLEFSON

Susan Tollefson has a BA in Mass Communications from Purdue University and an MFA in creative writing from Vermont College. Now retired, she has worked as a reporter, photographer, writer, editor, and publications director. Her poetry placed as runner-up in a statewide poetry competition, and she has studied with Gordon Mennenga and Laurel Yourke. Besides writing, she loves visual art. She is an urban sketcher and a landscape painter. DAVID TOMASOVITCH David Tomasovitch’s poetry has been published in Folio, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and The Listening Eye, among others. He is an English instructor at Henry Ford College, where he has taught for twenty-two years. He has a bachelor’s degree in literature and philosophy and a master’s degree in English and creative writing. He was a newspaper reporter for two years and a tech writer and web developer for ten. He owns a recording studio, where he writes, performs, records, and produces his own songs. He enjoys films and traveling. ELAINA WEAKLIEM Elaina Weakliem is a high school junior currently living in Colorado. She loves to explore the city on her bike and to read anything she can get her hands on. BILL WOLAK Bill Wolak just published his fifteenth book of poetry entitled The Nakedness Defense with Ekstasis Editions. His collages have appeared recently in Naked in New Hope (2018), Seattle Erotic Art Festival (2019), Poetic Illusion, Riverside Gallery (Hackensack, NJ), Dirty Show (Detroit, 2019), Rochester Erotic Arts Festival (2018), and Montreal Erotic Art Festival (2018).

MANAGING EDITORS ISABELLE DOYLE GRACE JOHNSON MARGARET SHEA ASSOCIATE EDITORS AVA HOLL CAMILA PAVON DESIGN EDITOR ELLA ROSENBLATT STAFF EDITORS SHIRA ABRAMOVICH BRUCE BYBEE SIENA CAPONE HANNAH FINAMORE-ROSSLER JANE FREIMAN CHRISTINE HUNYH BLAISE REBMAN MAIA ROSENFELD STINA TROLLBÃ&#x201E;CK

COLOPHON

THE ROUND is a literary and visual arts magazine based at Brown University. Our name is adopted from the musical â&#x20AC;&#x153;round,â&#x20AC;? 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. In addition to creating a biannual magazine, THE ROUND also hosts events in the Providence, RI area including readings and literary salons. We welcome submissions in any genre or medium and publish both students and professionals. Send your work, comments, or questions to theroundmagazine@gmail.com. Check out past issues of the magazine, view submission guidelines, and learn more about us by visiting http://students.brown.edu/theroundmagazine. Sincerely, The Editors