The Trinity Review 2017

The Trinity Review 2017

The Trinity Review

2017

Table of Contents The Bible and Me I Katherine “Katy” Freeman / Art I am a woman who writes.

Miranda Moyle / Poetry Fall, Stomp, Crunch Casey Deal / Poetry A Sweet Song Heard Late at Night, from a Field Cricket to Myself Derek Hudson / Poetry Cats vs. Dogs Faith Poynor / Poetry Eiffel Tower Quinn Bender / Photography Belle Faith Poynor / Poetry What worlds you contain (To Odysseus) Mary Martha Meyer Hill / Poetry Magic Kara Killinger / Poetry That Which They Believe They Are Allie Butemeyer / Fiction An Apology to His Mother Jennifer Jussel / Poetry Ode to My Mother Derek Hudson / Poetry Cracked Angel Baeza / Photography How to Write Memories Miriam Cone / Poetry Dented not Tarnished Kelly Carroll / Poetry Water Towers on the Horizon Kelly Carroll / Poetry Breath of Life Catalina “Cat” Cura Bullrich / Photography To Winter in Texas Kara Killinger / Poetry Anticipation Natalie Curran / Poetry midnight talks Catalina “Cat” Cura Bullrich / Poetry Heaven?

Tiana Sanchez / Poetry

1 2 3 3 4 4 5 6 7 8 10 11 11 12 13 14 14 15 15 16 17

Paradox Kepler Larkin / Fiction Dormant Catalina “Cat” Cura Bullrich / Photography Song of Snow and Sun Catalina “Cat” Cura Bullrich / Poetry An Afternoon on San Pietro Elizabeth Broussard / Poetry Flatlines Yellow Danielle Trevino / Photography Flatlines Teal Danielle Trevino / Photography The Evergreen Aftermath Miranda Moyle / Poetry Minneapolis Elizabeth Broussard / Poetry Only Dust Fills Deserted Rooms Elizabeth Broussard / Poetry A Problem of Definition Kelly Carroll / Poetry Broken Whispers Catalina “Cat” Cura Bullrich / Poetry Grounding Jennifer Jussel / Poetry Getting to Know Ned Vizzini - Spending the Night with a Dead Man’s Demons Jennifer Jussel / Nonfiction Generations Mary Martha Meyer Hill / Photography I Didn’t Ask Miriam Cone / Poetry A Bedtime Story Miriam Cone / Poetry Bones of the house, and me Mary Martha Meyer Hill / Photography The Word from Aleppo Angel Baeza / Poetry The Space Between the Flowers and the Blades Hannah Susman / Poetry Not Allowed to Give Up Elizabeth Broussard / Poetry Maddie Katherine “Katy” Freeman / Art Merely Moments Ago Elizabeth Broussard / Poetry Anchor Courtney Justus / Nonfiction

18 21 22 24 24 25 25 26 27 28 29 30 32 44 44 45 45 46 47 48 49 50 51

Feminist Resistance Faith Poynor / Poetry Your Sister’s Diary Joy Lazarus / Art Sometime in the Spring Victoria Bahr / Poetry Transplant Translations: Donation Hannah Susman / Poetry Transplant Translations: Stick and Burn, Memorial Hermann Cath Lab Hannah Susman / Poetry Please Knock Sarah Spence / Poetry Infinity Joy Lazarus / Art Donut Joy Lazarus / Art Morning Stroll Sarah Spence / Poetry The Wake María Teresa Kamel / Nonfiction Griegos, Gringos Angel Baeza / Poetry Arrival Catalina “Cat” Cura Bullrich / Photography Traffic Catalina “Cat” Cura Bullrich / Poetry Shoulders Miriam Cone / Poetry Blame It on the Ones Who Made Us Hannah Susman / Poetry Precipitate Kelly Carroll / Poetry Untitled (hands) Beverly Morabito / Art

56 57 57 58 59 60 60 61 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69

The Bible and Me I

Katherine “Katy” Freeman 1

I am a woman who writes.

Miranda Moyle

I am the heart of a tainted woman.

1 acquired by words; tainted in the blank pages of spaces between; live here with me.

Pending time, transition over to we.

Foiled city: draw us future ... suture us crevice upon crevice; chemical cough, and people wane.

(Demand it!) (See it!)

Look under the floorboards, seek the dust, the felt.

We are the dampened pages — melted in between now carry, facade y facade, freely; for detail upon detail, lives perish. (people wane, I wane, wane!) carry away what presses on my brain.

Time. That time (was it one rhyme?)

No‌ her prime. No expert am I in my mind.

Above the heads of those that forge their food, blind, you venetian blind, close to girlhood.

I thought there is a rule; if you take, ache; leave, let them all behind; hands, create.

Yes, she the marionette, a mirror in the dark And you, oh you, a man with spark.

You will find us, eating upon the words unsaid and the feelings of the dark.

2

5

10

15

20

Fall, Stomp, Crunch Casey Deal Is it the inevitable fate of the acorn, to fall on our cement and get crushed by our feet? Do they know when they fall they won’t become anything? Do the trees know their efforts to reproduce are futile?

Or does the satisfaction in the heart of the stomper - the joy in the perfect crunch - does it serve a purpose in itself? Is that enough to satisfy the tree and the acorn? Or is it all our fault? Should we walk to avoid the acorns at risk of offending the trees? Should we apologize to each one we step on? Should the mere desire for the beautiful crunch in our ears make us cry? Is it the fault of the cement for being in the way of the dirt? Should we rip the cement off the ground with our bare hands?

Do these acorns belong somewhere else? Have you ever seen the acorns fall? Or are they all just suddenly on the ground?

Do they fall or were they always there?

No, they fall. They fall and you know they fall because if you sit outside, alone, when it’s quiet and warm and the wind is blowing, you can hear them screaming. You can hear their grip on their branches reluctantly fail and with a loud smack they hit the cement. Some roll in the wind and the momentum of the fall, some stay where they land, silently waiting to be crunched by a passerby.

A Swteet Song Heard Late at Night, from a Field Cricket to Myself Derek Hudson

I walked home at night and heard a cricket clicking (or perhaps, cricking) out among the wild oats, and bermuda, and ox-eye daisy.

Is all that green really there?

Or is the color just a shape in my mind, the back of my eyes?

I sought the clicking out, the siren, the bird-woman, the field cricket, and I stomped through imagined green that maybe is-or-isn’t, but the sound remained eternally distant.

Did the cricket, the shape in my ears that wouldn’t shape up to my eyes leave his shape in the grass and in the dark?

And his insoluble click, what shape did it make of me?

How big and how fast and how smart and how loving?

3

Cats vs. Dogs Faith Poynor

Black cat You follow me Because I’m the only person in the world Who wants nothing to do with you You stalk me from a distance Unwilling to admit your interest in me But you hunger For what only I can give you The briefest glance Containing the minimum of curiosity As yellow eyes meet blue A meow of protest You are hungry.

But I have nothing to give And little sympathy left For all of it is focused on A dog who’s never coming back

Eiffel Tower Quinn Bender

4

Belle Faith Poynor

the miracle of an hour of snow in the midst of a hot texas winter at four in the morning snowy paws to match her snowy beard snowflakes rest upon her back white on brown snowy down she catches the snowballs with her teeth crunch we play our little game a one-sided snowball fight one she is happy to lose such energetic play she shares with me and the little one you would never guess the secrets hidden beneath her skin

she is determined to lay by my side no matter what and despite her proclivity for being alone (and despite mine) she stays with me all night i hold on to her purple collar promise, crying into her oily fur, watching her otter tail thumping against the carpet, knowing that this is goodbye our snowflake hearts are thawing into an emerald lake long since evaporated reminding us that beauty never lasts, except in memory her hour is up, the snow has melted on monday she was happy by friday she was dead

later when she climbs the stairs i feel my heart break, fall from my chest, and hit every step on the way down as i watch her body tremble from the exertion a century passes between the first and last step

5

I see the fragmented papyrus, that first testament To Odysseus, And I see a world that fostered it, a world That coaxed out the papery, softly lined innards Of a reed.

I see the world that thought to mark it, Then loved it, touched it, Wore it into oblivion, Then abandoned it.

What worlds you contain (To Odysseus) Mary Martha Meyer Hill

I look at the papyrus and I see The sand that buried it, the sand that preserved it.

How many of those grains that lay upon the fragment Thought only to protect?

And how many, in the end, Could not escape the implications Of that protection, Finding themselves caught In the shallow ridges, Absorbed into a story that now Distinguishes their existence?

And what of those words, Lost, Scrubbed out of the papyrus?

Have they too been Covered, protected, By sand?

Do they still live, Expressing to the unnamed grains that once covered them, Their meaning, The indelibility of their presence on the world?

Or do they no longer exist as words, Ripped from meaning, Broken down only to grains?

Do they remain silent, Removed from that story to which They once contributed?

And the story that was once complete, Where does it live now?

Does it live in museums, in books, In the minds of generations?

Does it still live Everywhere, In a reed, In sand?

6

Magic

Kara Killinger There is always form, structure. Take dance: seems warm and spontaneous, but not in practice.

Straight arms and cold rooms.

Six in the morning brings plaster pink smiles, knees against mouths, a thousand times till perfect and still points off for precision.

There is always pause, practice. Take music: fingers fly across sharp strings only after several stinging hours on carpet, legs crossed, pursed lips, glaring at the chord list.

Take romantic encounters.

Seem unrehearsed, but routine makes fun dates.

Walking in same shoes to same places, Pad Thai again and eight dollar wine, fading blue old new tv screen.

Take a young student’s desk, three in the morning, coffee upon coffee, work upon past planning.

All bricks around her were stacked, all stair steps carved in stone, and a tired classicist lies behind every English word of Homer.

There is always struggle: even the Muses wipe sweat from celestial foreheads.

I plead with them sometimes; they sigh, unwilling to help, exasperated with earlier poets who already asked too much of them.

7

That Which They Believe They Are Allie Butemeyer

“And this is our oldest running collection,” the tour guide proclaimed to the group as he extended his hand with a flourish towards a door. Above it, the words ‘Mythical Creatures’ were displayed in bold, black letters.

An excited murmur rippled through the crowd. Most had come to the museum for this very collection and had waited with anticipation as the museum owner, their tour guide, had led them through various exhibits ranging from thousands of animal mounts to photographs of 19th century murder victims. The very room they now stood in contained a multitude of doll heads, which stared blankly at the group.

Many in the crowd had started when they realized what gazed at them through the gloom only to nervously laugh at their own fear. But one little girl among the crowd had not started. Nor had she given more than a cursory glance to any of the exhibits.

She, herself, looked very much like one of the doll heads with pale skin extending from a black dress. A few in the crowd had given her odd looks, just like the ones they had given their ringmaster tour guide, but, as she was only one of the many peculiar strangers that created the group, none said anything.

She now watched as the tour guide held his pose for a few seconds longer. His cold eyes seemed to sense the rising suspense. When he deemed the crowd ready, he straightened his dark top hat, opened the black door, and disappeared inside. There was a moment’s pause before the group rushed in behind him.

As with every other room in the museum, darkness reigned. The only light that persisted fought from the small glass cages that lined the walls. In front of each cage sat a plaque describing each exotic creature.

The tour guide began with the cage on the left. “In here you can see a Lamia. She was my first catch and the reason this exhibit exists. Note…”

The little girl stared into the cage, gazing at what looked to be the body of a large serpent.

Toward the back of the cage, a woman rested her head on the serpentine body, her black hair splayed over the green scales. Slowly, she opened her eyes and rose, the crowd gaping as their eyes traced her beautiful figure from face to torso, where the scales of her tail began.

“Amazing,” someone in the crowd breathed.

“Yes. She is,” the tour guide said. “Now if you look in here you will see the rare centaur.”

The crowd turned to see two centaurs prancing back and forth in their small enclosure.

“How do you find these creatures?” a voice from the crowd asked.

“With special glass. If you look closely, you will notice that the glass changes color slightly, like bubbles. This is to allow you to see the creatures as they really are. Without it, you would be unable to tell these centaurs from regular horses.”

Audible breaths were heard as the crowd began to wonder just how many creatures they had truly seen in their life.

“However, it is rare to see a centaur even with the special glass. It is highly unlikely that any of the horses you have seen were centaurs.”

8

“How do you know?” a woman asked.

The tour guide stared at the centaurs. “I just do.” He turned. “If you will turn your attention to this cage you will see…”

The crowd followed him as he led them past cages upon cages, introducing each creature as he went. The girl followed slowly, stopping to stare at each cage. She watched as they passed Nymphs and Sirens, Harpies and Minotaurs, Angels and Devils, Drakainas and Fauns. She listened as the tour guide spoke.

“Due to the complexity of having to search, capture, and train each of these exotic species,” the tour guide said, “it takes years to add a new display to this exhibit. However, it is my pleasure to introduce you to the newest member of my collection.”

The crowd pressed forward to view the creature in the last cage. Inside the creature stared back. Only her head and torso resembled that of a woman. Instead of arms, she had golden wings that seemed to be on fire. Instead of legs, her body tapered off into a shining tail, from which flaming feathers protruded in a line along the back. Upon her head sat an iridescent horn. The crowd was staggered by the creature’s beauty.

“Beautiful isn’t she. I have yet to determine what type of creature she is; however, I believe that she is related to the phoenix, although the tail and horn make it hard to be sure.”

The tour guide allowed to crowd to gape a few moments more before he began leading them towards the exit. He watched as each reluctantly left, bidding them to come back another time.

The little girl, however, was not among them. Instead, she had slipped through another dark door and found herself in a narrow hallway which ran next to the cages. She walked slowly, admiring each creature again, this time through regular glass, but as she walked she noticed that the creatures seemed different than when she was in the other room. Those closest to the entrance looked as they had first appeared but as she neared the newest exhibit the creatures began to look less like creatures and more like humans. By the time she reached the last cage, there was only a human standing inside.

“Do you like my collection?”

The girl looked back the way she had come and saw the tour guide in his top hat.

“They are indeed intriguing. As is your mysterious glass. It allows people to see what they believe they are seeing, does it not?”

“It does not.”

The girl frowned and the tour guide turned his attention to the cage in front of them.

“No. Instead, it allows people to see what the creature in the cage believes it is.”

“That is why it takes so long to create an exhibit,” the girl said. “Because you have to train them to believe.”

“Yes. This is my newest creature. Unlike the others, I let her pick what she is. She may be the best in my collection because of that.”

“But then why do the oldest creatures look the same through this glass as they do through the special glass. It couldn’t be that they are real?”

“Yes and no,” the tour guide stated. “No, these mythical creatures have never been real.

They are all merely humans I have trained to believe they are creatures. However, those who have been in my care the longest have come to believe their lie so much so that they have become that which they believe they are. So in a sense, yes, they are real.”

The girl blinked and thought for a moment before turning her head back towards the cage.

Inside sat a hornless woman, stretching her imaginary wings.

9

An Apology to His Mother Jennifer Jussel

I can see you teaching him to walk.

How his little feet stuttered How his fingers—unbelievably tiny— reached eagerly for yours, with your nails that shined like Christmas.

Maybe it is Christmas.

Maybe you’re taking pictures and laughing and beaming at him as he tears at the paper around the scooter he always wanted.

I can see you loving him holding him through the first broken heart lifting him up when he was rubbing at his eyes I can see you cheering him on or telling him he needs to cut that damn hair or yelling at him about cleaning his room and then feeling a little bad about it, and being thankful that he still loves you.

I can see you loving him, loving him, loving him, crying at his graduation, reminding him to wear his jacket when he goes out trying to keep him safe.

I can see you tying his tie today, wiping the dog’s fur from his black suit jacket, oiling back his hair and then your own from the same jar.

I can see you steadying his hand telling him to be honest, that justice will prevail, and you believe every word of it—yours and his.

I can see why you hate me for hurting him, for even having the audacity to suggest that he would betray you so utterly and completely.

I can see you now, across the room, dressed all in black.

I can see you ignoring me, with the imprints of your sons fingers stamped in black on my skin, and my legs forever shifting to avoid the tear he made between them.

And I don’t blame you.

Because if I were you I would never believe it.

I would never, never believe it.

10

Ode to My Mother Derek Hudson

The dust on Mars is Red and that’s because of its high iron content. A long time ago, when Mars wasn’t dry yet, the iron reacted with water and it rusted and now the dust on Mars is red. And then still a long time ago (after Mars was dry but before there were people on Earth) the dust blew all the way from Mars and settled into the cracks of Oklahoma.

The red dust grows up into the grasses of the plains, substitutes itself for cellulose, replaces cell walls and fibers until grass forgets how to stand and be strong without it. Then my Grandaddy’s red cow eats the grass from the red earth and the red dust is in her too.

She welcomes it into the flatness of her tongue, into her pink gums, into the spaces between her big molars. Like guinea worms it burrows into her, to her cavernous womb, to the ears of her sleeping baby girl.

The dust whispers about the still creeks where one day she will swim to find buried buffalo bones, about wide pastures of red blossoms like paintbrushes where one day she will run and kick and laugh with her cousins, about the wide golden air where one day she will flit back and forth with a dragonfly’s wings. Then one day she comes rushing forward to the world like a flash flood through the red walls of an ancient Martian riverbed to be born, and birth is red too.

Cracked

Angel Baeza 11

How to Write Memories Miriam Cone

A Response to The Interviewer Acknowledges Shame by Tarfia Faizullah

Begin with the blue ink on yellow scorched paper and write in the unfamiliar third person, telling me anything you see, anything at all of the lives that speak in hushed tones.

Fast-forward to the unfamiliar third person – his naked body camera heavy and fame broken – the alive spoke of him in mournfully hushed tones but cried to their mirrors about their drowsy grief.

Pause the fame heavy, almost body-broken camera and in that pixelated twilight, find home by its grieved cries and drowsy fields of mirrors marked by the blinks of green metal and petunias.

Rewind from the twilight, the pixelated home, back to her clothesline and hotel room filled with metallic petunias and blinking green lights until you remember her travel face and dark silk eyes.

Stop in the hotel room, clothesline far away, and wish for the familiar sweet tea of arched shuddering caused by her dark face and travel eyes, remember her dust webbed dawn and teenager hopeful touch.

Resume with the tea-sweet, arching wish, familiar when the windows open to the daylight touch the hopeful dawn, the teenaged dust on the spools of pink orchid blossoms.

Frame the open daylight with windows, own those blue paper and yellow ink writings and spooling blossoms around the orchid pink coffin, telling me anything, anything at all within a line.

12

Dented not Tarnished Kelly Carroll

Most people look at the old ’75 Bronco in the back of our yard and see rust on every panel, tires long since flat, brake lines chewed clear through by the family dog.

They see rat nests and dog fur and rust and faith holding it together, and they see my dad with a hundred other projects bowing his back like a bent frame.

Dad almost flipped this same Bronco on a windy day, trailer flapping on the hitch, cab bouncing back and forth on two wheels.

When he miraculously got the trailer back under control, he let loose a wild whoop and smelled burnt rubber. He looked back and two semi trucks behind him – waiting for the inevitable wreck – had screeched to a halt.

Mom cussed him out at midnight, because they’d barely sputtered into a gas station way out in the wilds of Montana – they weren’t even running on fumes by then – but he knew he had time.

Car alarms blared as my dad cruised by, V8 engine and glasspack muffler rumbling like summer thunder, leaving the air vibrating like a Missouri earthquake.

He laughed every single time, Lennon-round glasses glinting as he threw his head back and patted the dash in pride.

Dad’s face is as cracked with wrinkles as the seats now, His body dinged up and dented in from a working life, just as much as his Bronco.

So much of their life histories are intertwined, Honeymoons and near-disasters held in every blemish, every scar.

I know for a fact, straight from his mouth, that my dad will never let his girl, his old ’75 Bronco, leave him, never allow her to crumble to so much rust and dust, unless he leaves her first.

13

Water Towers on the Horizon Kelly Carroll

Does the water in that tower miss the air?

More than the air, it misses The ground, that quiet pure haven Where it sank And bubbled And flowed without a care.

The galvanized steel of the tower rots its core And the water wishes it could flow in the air once again And let its rot Settle Out. Does the prisoner Miss the sky?

Breath of Life

Catalina “Cat� Cura Bullrich

14

To Winter in Texas Kara Killinger

How do you know you’re about to die when the fruit is ripe on the orange trees?

The sun is where it should be, not behind clouds, green grow the leaves as usual, and nothing has stopped growing.

How do you know the cold’s coming when weather forecasts say seventy five and sunny?

Sure, there’s rain sometimes, but if you watch it from your window with a cup of lemonade, fanning your neck with your notebook, is summer even over?

When gold grass snaps beneath you. when water flows warm through rivers and you dip in your toes, when orange groves leap with life and insects, how do you know you’re fragile?

How do you know if the roads get icy, or a snowflake first falls on your nose, you’ll know who you are, what it means to wear a coat, and how to drive a car?

Anticipation Natalie Curran

Pop. My words, contained in a small blue bubble, Float up to you.

You hold my heart in your hands: Cold metal and glass that throbs and pulses, Unable to capture the span of my longing or the depth of my sincerity, (Bigger and more senseless than the internet).

It’s been two hours.

All I want to see is that gray bubble with the blinking dots Like eyes winking thunderously at me, Daring me to go insane with waiting.

Your words Traveling across the ether.

That’s all this screen can bring me.

15

midnight talks Catalina “Cat” Cura Bullrich

I

III

chin up, smile on, you say don’t let them see your upside-down smile don’t let them notice the tears in your eyes don’t let them in don’t let them catch a glimpse of the tides that swell in your mind the same tides that pull you down like an undertow deeper into the abyss of your fears anxiety rises and falls matching your breath inhale, exhale untouchable underneath paper skin

everything aches, you say you are pulled every which way in the current that is life it doesn’t stop for anyone but you still can’t resist fighting it clawing at water which slips through frail fingers grasping at colors fading under harsh lights the river fills your throat, the glare blinds you your soul is on fire your body is the phoenix in the ashes And, brave heart, you will not fly away you will soar gliding on wings of starlight and embers and rainbows like a being of legend long may you reign

II

don’t let them get close, you say but, I ask you, how close is close enough? where is the line between drowning and dehydration you say you are condemned to loneliness but our species is wired to be together every neuron, every fiber craves company closeness can hurt when you know only fire and glass and blades cutting, burning, scorching as you grit your teeth against the pain cover your scars with sleeves pretend your soul is as icy as your eyes but, dear, there is no shame in sadness it is not a burden if others are willing to help you carry it

16

IV we are flickering candles faltering and fleeting our sparks rising to the endless sky insignificant, you say we are mere specks in the night gasping breaths as the ages crawl on yes, love, we are all wavering we flare and fade and fall even infinity must end somewhere but, please, do not fear the rattling of the stars join them, add your voice to the cosmos celebrate the stardust and metals in your veins make the chaos count, your messes matter, and when the world asks why, you just give it a smile you tell it, here I come

Heaven?

Tiana Sanchez Hey Mama, when we goin’ to Heaven, ‘cause I hear it’s a real long way?

How long is the ride, ‘cause I really don’t wanna stay?

I asked my teacher how it looks there, and do you know what she told me?

She said, “You’ll never find another place as bright and homey.”

I asked Daddy why everyone says Heaven’s so great He said, “Baby Girl, it’s the only place not full of hate.”

Grandma told me Grandpa stays there now.

That’s where he went when they put him in the ground.

How do you get to Heaven? What kind of trip is it?

Does Grandpa like it there? When can we go visit?

Can I see a picture ‘cause I’m not sure I wanna go?

Is it pretty on the trip? Can we stop along the road?

Hey Momma, when the angels sing, do I have to sing too?

If I really gotta sing, can I sing with you?

What does God look like? Is God a woman or a man?

When we finally make it there, will God shake my hand?

Momma, when I make the trip to Heaven, am I really going home?

Momma, please, go with me, I’m scared to go alone.

Momma, I told the preacher, “I don’t know the way.”

He said, “Darling, don’t worry ‘bout how to get there. You’ll make it someday.

Don’t worry about the road ahead, when the step in front of you is clear.

Don’t worry ‘bout going alone, when all your loved ones are near.”

Hey Momma, when are we goin’ to Heaven?

I heard it’s a real long way.

Can we take the long way around, ‘cause I know we gotta stay?

Momma I don’t know a lot about Heaven, but I think I’ll be just fine.

Daddy says Heaven’s everyone’s home, so that also makes it mine.

God’s gonna hold my hand and make himself known, so Momma when I make the trip to Heaven I know I won’t be alone.

17

Paradox

Kepler Larkin

Limbo I am an error in the source code of the universe. I shouldn’t exist, because I was never born. That was my fault. That’s why I’m still anywhere at all. Remove me from the equation, and I’m still part of it. Keep me, and I’m not. Paradox.

So far as I can tell, the universe has decided that I’m someone else’s problem. The problem with that is that, it being the universe, by definition there’s no one else. So I’m stuck in some sort of temporal-spatial limbo. That’s my theory, anyway.

There is nothing here. I keep my eyes closed because if I looked out to too long on that infinite lack of anything I think I’d go mad. I may have gone mad already, of course. Behind my eyelids all I can see is my mother falling, one arm instinctively wrapping around her unborn child as the other stretches out hopelessly. My father is screaming, desperately reaching for her as she is sucked out into empty space. The other passengers look on in horror as I fade away. And now I’m here. Alone.

I can still feel the hole in my chest, right above my heart. The burst of energized plasma went straight through me and into the viewport of the starliner. The viewport shattered and my mother fell. And now I can’t even die, because how can you die when you were never born?

I should never have said yes to the man in the gray suit who asked me if I wanted to save the world. But I was young and foolish. And I stopped a woman who wanted to twist history to fit her own warped ideals, and I spared her life, because I wanted to be the good guy. She was given a full trial and locked up. But she broke out, and went after me before I was born.

She didn’t care about the paradoxes that would cause—she was no temporal physicist. Not like me.

Maybe if I hadn’t gone after her, she would be the paradox right now. I would just have never existed. But I wanted to save my family, and so I followed her through time. I killed her before she could blow the ship up. But as she died, her gun went off. It didn’t kill me. I might have survived if I’d gotten immediate medical attention. But I was in front of a viewport.

Someone grabbed me and kept me from being sucked out. The crew arrived to seal the breach almost instantly. But not before three people fell. And so Rho Amser was never born.

She never fought with her parents, never fell in love and had her heart broken. Never graduated from college at the top of her class, never got her PhD. Never saved the world. Maybe someone else said yes to the gray-suited man. Someone else was thrown through time to stop a madwoman. I’ll never know.

Sometimes, though, I wonder: what would have happened if things had gone a little differently?

18

Catch Rho Amser gasped in pain and shock as the plasma burst went through her and hit the viewport. Someone grabbed her as the escaping air started to suck people towards vacuum.

Dimly, she saw her mother start to fall towards the window. “No!” she screamed, reaching out for her mother’s hand. As her mother fell past, she caught her, feeling a wrenching pain in her heart at the exertion.

A young man in a crewman’s uniform arrived and sprayed sealant over the window. Her father helped the crewman carry her to the ship’s medical bay, but she knew it was too late. The effort of catching her mother and her unborn self had led to too much blood loss. The ship’s doctor tried to make her comfortable, and then moved on to the patients who could be saved.

Her father walked over to her bed and sat. “Thank you. You—” his voice shook. “You saved my wife and my daughter. I thought… the least I could do was…”

“It’s okay,” she said, crying. “It’s okay.” She was so cold…

“Who are you?” he asked softly. “That other woman was trying to destroy the ship… And then you just appeared…”

“My name’s Rho. I’m scared! I’m so scared…”

He was crying now. “Rho… That’s what we decided to name our child, you know that? Oh god, I’m so sorry!”

She suddenly pulled him into a hug. “Dad… I love you. I love you and Mom so much. Remember that.” He looked at her in shock.

As Rho Amser died, she suddenly understood why her father had always seemed so sad.

Stay Rho Amser watched her enemy disappear into the past. Then she ceased to exist.

Somewhere, somewhen a woman screamed powerlessly at the universe, cursing the limbo she was trapped in.

19

Failure Rho Amser was tied to a chair, able to do nothing but watch as the woman fired one shot.

She knew she’d failed to save the world. The woman grinned savagely at her as they both faded away.

Captain Rho Amser of the Her Majesty’s Imperial Guard was pointing her gun at the man in the gray suit, the leader of the resistance. “Wait! Rho, don’t do this!” he cried just before she fired.

“How do you know my name?” she demanded coldly.

“This isn’t the way things are supposed to be! You were trying to stop this! I asked you to save the world and you said yes, remember? You have to remember!” She stared at him emotionlessly.

“Under orders of Her Majesty, Empress of Humanity, I sentence you to death.” She fired.

Captain Rho Amser had always been different. Occasionally, she’d get flashes of memories that both were and were not hers. After the death of the gray-suited man, the flashes got worse. They found a note by her body reading, “The world is wrong. I can’t take it anymore. Long live the Empress.”

No “Rho Amser, would you like to save the world?” The man in the gray suit had waved her over as she was leaving the university for lunch.

She thought about it. “No.” “What?”

“I’m sorry, but I don’t think I can. Goodbye.” She walked away.

The gray-suited man stared after her, stunned. Then he sighed and went to go find his second choice.

Somewhere, somewhen a man who had saved the world was trapped in nothingness. He wondered what would have happened if he’d said no.

Rho Amser lived a long and fulfilling life, but she always wondered what would have happened if she’d said yes.

Saved Rho Amser watched helplessly as her mother fell. Suddenly, the man in the gray suit appeared inside the starliner. He hooked one arm around a railing and sprayed sealant at the broken viewport with the other. Her father helped up her mother, who’d lost her balance.

The gray-suited man grabbed her and the body of the woman and pulled them back through time. He left her in the hospital three blocks from her apartment. She later discovered that all her bills had been paid anonymously.

Rho never saw the man in the gray suit again, and she never found out who he was.

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Dormant

Catalina “Cat” Cura Bullrich

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Song of Snow and Sun Catalina “Cat” Cura Bullrich She lived on the fringes, or so they say.

Alabaster skin, chestnut eyes, hair as dark as night.

And scars that trailed like spiderwebs.

Daughter of winter, child of sorrow, girl of snow and scars.

Abandoned, reviled, feared, she meant no harm- no harm at all, yet man always fears that which they do not know.

Until, a girl with autumn-red hair and spring-blue eyes and summer-kissed skin coaxed her into the light.

Daughter of the sun, they called her.

Regal like Hera, stunning like Aphrodite, and, like the free Artemis, she could not be tamed.

Curiosity drew her into those beckoning forests, driven by a siren’s call, an angel’s whisper.

And a tugging at her heart.

Some cultures speak of the red string of fate that ties a pair together, no matter the distance.

Others of soulmates, unbreakable bonds that were destined to be from the very start.

Others believe in nothing at all, claiming that it is mere chance not fate or destiny that brings people to each other.

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Regardless of the forces that were at play, she walked out with a girl who was more spirit than human.

Yet their time together was swift, fleeting, like the swallows that flit through the air.

After all, the candle that burns the brightest burns the quickest.

Much like a flame the girl of white was soon extinguished She vanished like smoke in the air mist in the morning a songbird with clipped wings.

Even her closest friend could not detect a trace.

From here, the story is uncertain.

Some say that they never met again, that summer’s child fell into a deep sadness her blush paled, her eyes dulled her heart all but broken.

She exchanged the sun for an eternal night.

Others add a more hopeful twist to this tale.

At night, when the sky is sprinkled with stars and no moon, the redheaded girl will take to the forest and wait for a girl with mist in her hair and stars in her eyes.

She never returns before morning.

Even so, no matter the ending, One thing rings true-Strange, is it not?

How all it takes to save a life can be something as simple as offering your hand to a stranger.

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An Afternoon on San Pieto Elizabeth Broussard Inspired by Tarfia Faizullah’s “Interviewer’s Note, i”

You walk past a young woman crouched alone on a jute mat selling bangles. Past emaciated Wanted posters buoyed by the wind. Past yourself as you soar above your body to survey.

Innocent: (adjective), free from moral wrong; pure. Past a man facing a brick wall, hiding behind his phone as his voice breaks to shards.

Innocent: Not causing physical or moral injury; harmless.

Was it through this same phone words of accusation whipped lashes to lasses? Innocent: uninformed or unaware; ignorant. Past the rusted windmill, aging blades grinding working dutifully, unceasingly. Past the frantic balloon seller at the corner his arms stretched high as his merchandise abandons him for the sky.

Past shadows collected within the dome of Saint Peter’s church, cloaks of shelter from the light of scrutiny.

Flatlines Yellow Danielle Trevino

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Flatlines Teal Danielle Trevino

The Evergreen Aftermath Miranda Moyle For the first time in years, he hadn’t bothered With admiring that expiring tree; For the needles, too brown and stale, would prick His feet—like he was growing branches once again from his bones.

The smell, the odor of nature, decorated by those emblematic fuels of the decayed; It sits in the corner, pedestaled by a ring of light, A light so dear, a light bright—beginning to pierce His eyes for a new memory to rise.

In a matter of seconds: he fell terribly, and In the same way, that holiday tree fell.

For the branches of the season fall to remind us of its existence Within every carpet fiber, and every empty placemat.

Here’s to the natural: surround his nose and Urge him to admire!

Admire the new presence in your solitary room of mind.

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Minneapolis Elizabeth Broussard My expression was cold, distant I ignored the smell of rotting sewage paid no mind to the trash.

But you saw me, saw the pride I pulled on, a designer shirt, saw the naivety of my distant stare.

You stood before me, demanded answers, demanded me to look at the knots in your hair and the oil on your face.

As I continued to stare ahead you asked, “Am I making you uncomfortable?”

You bared your crooked teeth and spit on me.

Your saliva carried the frustration of abandonment, of being ignored and swept away like newspaper, and like a man born blind, my eyes were opened.

Hair hung heavy at the crown of my head as snaked tendrils fell into my face.

Bones of white tissue pushed at the taught skin of my arms trying to escape.

I doubled over as fire tore the depths of my stomach raging animals clawing for food.

“Stupid bitch,” you slapped across my cheeks and let the words burn through my foundation.

For once you rose above me, omniscient, exposing the wicked realities of life behind clouds of worldly addictions.

But the world was not ready for truth.

Officers and families would not understand this moment’s retelling would evoke fatigue, a frustration over change in normalcy.

And so you took flight, disappearing through steam rising from sewer grates.

My fingers, shaking, brushed exposed skin as a dormant part of my mind stretched awake.

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Only Dust Fills Deserted Rooms Elizabeth Broussard “Love loves to love love.” –James Joyce, Ulysses Love me as a dancer loves to strike with lightning as she pounds across the stage and arcs through the air Strikes of lightning sever leaves from tree branches leaflets arc through the air twisting and contorting as they dive Postcards severed from tree branches dwell on memories of before, contorting as they dive through tear stains tears divide the words Dwelling on memories, dusty record players leave grooves upon disks tears divide the words of lyrics into frail pallid slivers Coffee cups leave grooves upon tables the crusted dark ring within a frail pallid sliver of the full cup prior Dark rings round the base of her eyes as she slumbers a fraction of the full cup prior she turns in her sleep But her eyes dart as she slumbers vivid dreams dilute memories she turns in her sleep, murmurs “Love me as a dancer.”

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A Problem of Definition Kelly Carroll

Zig across explanations and ruminations and realize: I am Yggdrasil, the World Tree, xylem and phloem woven through. I don’t know whether man or woman or both or maybe... It’s very difficult to grasp.

Understand the maelstrom of my mind.

This is me?

Stop trying to Rationalize the multitude of screaming Questions echoing around my sense of self, like: Please, can you tell me: what is love?

Open your mind and reveal to me what you know not how to articulate. You see, many know love as an elusive abstraction, whose decryption key I will always lack.

Jumping off a building is difficult, more so than having to define yourself.

Go through years and years of annotated memories, Find that one time that I knew for good: Everyone believes in a binary that I never can fit.

Dogma cannot be verified by belief in myself.

Am I who I know I am?

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Broken Whispers

Catalina “Cat” Cura Bullrich

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Grounding

Jennifer Jussel

Response to Dhaka Aubade by Tarfia Faizullah “How can people hurt each other, go on living? Today, I don’t want anything to touch me.”

Today, I don’t want anything to touch me.

I could swear the trees are inching closer, trying to absorb me into the numb-tongued creep.

Breathe, breathe I say.

Count ten things, ten real things.

They call it “grounding,” this technique.

But I don’t want any closer to the ground.

The ground pushes back.

The ground threatens to throw me down.

The ground is where he held me the ground is what holds me.

How can people hurt each other, go on living?

What do I have to count, how slowly do I have to breathe to lift off from this ground, to unravel from my skin to step into a world where my feet are light, where the trees don’t beckon but swish air in their fingers, where nothing will touch me unless I say so?

I’ll say it so!

I want to be a flying tiger, free and poised always to kill whatever might reach for me in this dark.

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I want a ground like no ground a ground that is my friend a ground that will crack and lift from the Earth with a giggle and a moaning sigh because you have no idea how painful it is to stand in one place for so long.

I want soft pockets of air to walk before me always ready to catch me and fold me out of sight in a dark billow that always smells like mom’s perfume and the burn of cold enveloping my frosty nose.

I want a quiet world where the sound of two car hoods scraping together is a chorus of friends shouting “I love you we love you we all love you I love you and yes you deserve it!” and people cry when they hear music.

I want rain that is the orange soap from preschool and snow that’s only shaving cream so occasionally I’ll slip and slide right into that stranger I feel like I’ve held close before.

I want a deadly, omniscient love a ground that springs me into flight trees that offer their hands as homes— I want to be hurt, go on living.

I want the ground to unfurl from inside my bones to show me a new and better world to be more than a technique and a place to be to apologize to me and everyone and to respire shyly beneath my prowling feet and until then I want nothing to do with it.

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Getting to Know Ned Vizzini Spending the Night with a Dead Man’s Demons Jennifer Jussel

Just a few years before his death, Ned Vizzini wrote about “The Driver.” Capital title. The Driver was never happy, he said. It was always curious, always asking, “what next?” Vizzini liked to respond with big ideas- with memoirs, novels, and workshops that propelled his career and his life forward a little every day. He published his first book, a group of memoirs about high school called “Teenage Angst?

Nah…” when he was 19 years old, just starting out in college in Brooklyn, New York. For the next several years he moved forward, never running out of answers for The Driver, always prepared before it could even ask the question: “What next?”

The first time he ran out of answers was the first time he considered suicide. He stopped eating, claiming he’d “forgotten how.” He felt the pressure of a three-book deal buckling down on him, words swelling inside of his chest that couldn’t quite reach his brain, his mouth, or his fingers. The anxiety filled him more than any hunger could. He sat in his apartment in his boxer shorts with the lights off, speaking only in “broken monosyllables” and staring at some indeterminable point in the distancemaybe looking for what was next- maybe terrified that he couldn’t see it.

He couldn’t stand to be still. He couldn’t stand not having a direction to go. So, in the summer of 2006, at the age of 22, around three in the morning, Vizzini stood at the top of the Brooklyn Bridge, looking down into the crashing water below. In the wind, perhaps, he could hear The Driver still relentlessly whispering “what next?” Maybe there was nothing next. Maybe next came the final chapter.

But he didn’t jump. He turned around, took his ten-speed bike back to his mother’s apartment, and quietly called a suicide hotline. He drove himself to the hospital to be admitted, because he didn’t want to wake his mother with an ambulance.

The following five days showed him what came next. Isolated in a psychiatric ward with nothing to do but eat, converse with other patients, or draw, the wave of anxiety, distracting expectations, and cellphone screen glow parted in front of him, revealing the next step that had been waiting for him all along. He finished his book, “It’s Kind of A Funny Story,” within the next month. He wrote from what he knew- a brilliant, angsty high schooler trying to prove himself as worthy of something, crippled by depression and the fear of The Driver. The high-schooler, Craig Gilner, goes into a mental hospital in Brooklyn, New York for five days. He comes out on the other side inspired, once again able to follow his passions and clearly understand what he wants from the life ahead of him.

In 2014, I met Craig Gilner for myself. I followed his story with a hesitant curiosity- I was growing to love him, to relate to him in ways I’d never related to characters before. I was able to name The Driver for myself, and to watch Craig struggle to write, to belong, and to force himself through the void between one success and the next. In between the lines, of course, I met Ned Vizzini as well. I loved Craig Gilner. I respected Ned Vizzini. I wanted to read more, to find out what really was next for Vizzinibut I also began to fear for Craig. Mostly, I began to fear for myself. I saw too much of myself in him. If he couldn’t drag himself up from the void, I doubted I ever would either.

I stopped reading the book midway through twice in a row. I restarted the book twice in a row. I finished it somewhere near the end of 2014. Craig survived. I was encouraged. Several times, I opened up Google on my phone, beginning to type in the name- V-I-Z-Z-I, and then changed my mind. I decided I didn’t want to know how Vizzini had fared after the book- at least not yet. I had my own problems to handle.

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I’d been seeing a therapist since 2011, my freshman year of high school. For me it was not so much a slow descent into depression like Craig’s as it was a sudden drop- it made me violently sick, slamming my head against my wooden dresser late at night and holding medication just out of reach of my trembling fingertips, just waiting for my mind to give my body permission to turn everything off.

It was much more like Vizzini’s form of depression: One day you’re alive, one day you can eat- the next you can’t hold anything down, and, as far as living… who knows.

Of course there was a reason for my sudden descent: something that set it all off. Maybe Vizzini had a reason too. What I respect about Vizzini is that the catalyst never seemed to matter to him- only what happened afterwards. It was always about what came next. But then again, it was that exact inability to look back that got him into trouble. The same could be said for his character, Craig. The three of us had that issue in common. We all believed we’d hit our peak before we’d even gotten to college.

The three of us had spent our entire high school careers being told how great we were- having the most wonderful, loving friends, a supportive family, and gratifying success in whatever we wantedwriting, especially. Then people started asking us what we were doing with our lives. Each of us panicked. We had the same answer: we were already doing what we wanted with our lives. Why couldn’t we keep doing it?

Over time, we each came up with different, more acceptable answers. Ned Vizzini was going to Hunter College in NYC for Computer Science. Craig Gilner was applying to the Ivy Leagues for… well, maybe law school? Something high-paying. And I was going to a private liberal arts university to study the extremely non-liberal or artsy subject of neuroscience. Vizzini stuck through it, graduating with a B.A. in Computer Science. Craig and I would eventually give up and become English majors, which is what we’d always wanted to do in the first place.

The three of us kept writing. Vizzini used to end his every lecture or writer’s panel by reminding viewers that it was not weak to seek out help when feeling depressed or suicidal. He kept Craig in his mind as a past success, as his past self sitting quietly in the back of his brain, smiling at Vizzini’s progress, his determination to spread awareness and make other angsty teens reconsider their nihilistic views of the world. Craig kept readers like me in mind as he told his story again and again, talking with me anytime I needed a reminder as to why I bothered to try in the first place. I kept Craig in mind to propel myself forwards- to say that it was okay to feel depressed sometimes, as long as I came out of it with something new to say about it- a story to write, a poem, a song. I kept Vizzini in mind, carefully stored somewhere where I could see his writing and his words without wondering about his personal life.

And then, slowly, things changed for each of us. My life changed. I’d just graduated high school, and realized just how much of my life I’d left behind- just how unimportant many of my successes really were. I thought the friends I had were never going to forget about me. I thought my boyfriend, who had been gradually getting sicker and sicker, was going to get better and that everything would be alright. I thought that all I’d needed was to get published in poetry anthologies and to lead our marching band’s percussion section to a victory in the state competition, and that the rest of my life would fall into place just the same.

As school started, and I settled into my new home in a new city- an hour-and-a-half drive away from my friends, my boyfriend, and my old school- I began to realize all the lies I had been telling myself. My stories no longer wrote themselves. I had too much life going on- or really, I had lost too much of the life I’d had. My friends, for the most part, were still in high school. They were with each other each and every day, still being just as close as ever. I couldn’t compete with that familiarity. I was no longer part of that family at all.

In addition, my boyfriend’s sickness progressed further. He deteriorated mentally day after day, losing himself and all of the people he knew to his growing neuroticism. The mental illnesses that had once pulled us together were now tearing us apart. We could no longer relate to one another. Soon enough, we barely recognized each other.

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We were over before Christmas, two happy years and many youthful promises disintegrated by schizophrenic and depressive turmoil. I remember the last time I saw him with painful clarity. My eyes were sunken in and swollen from all of my crying, my hands trembling convulsively as I hugged him one last time. It was one of his better days. He knew me, at least somewhat. His eyes were this sky blue that used to speak endless possibilities to me. Now they were strangely empty. His smile was hollow. His hair was sticking out at all angles from his head. It was a mixture of burning bleach color and a baby pink, suffering from several washes.

He played with the ends of my hair, which were also bleached into straw, with blue green streaks through it. We had dyed our hair together a month before, desperate for a change- thinking something drastic might hold us together better. As he spun his fingers in and out of my hair, I saw gleaming chunks of pink nail polish on some of his dirty, overgrown fingernails. He had stolen my favorite nail polish on his last visit to me, wearing it on just one hand. He said it brought him closer to me. He said that- just a few minutes before he walked out of my front door, got into his gray Honda civic, and drove away for the last time. He didn’t give the polish back.

As I watched the car pull out of my driveway and disappear down the street, I silently resolved that I was never coming home again- no matter how much I might need it.

In 2013 in Brooklyn, New York, Ned Vizzini was panicking. He had a two-year-old son, Felix, and a wife he loved with true sincerity. He had strayed away from book-writing, which he admitted wasn’t paying him nearly enough anymore, and was now dabbling in screenwriting, landing a place as a guest screenwriter on the popular TV show “Teen Wolf” in 2011. He also began screenwriting his own show, “Last Resort,” on ABC. The commute from New York to Los Angeles was tedious and expensive. He was needed down at the studio more and more. Eventually, he decided to buy a home in Los Angeles, to move there with his family. The mortgage on the home, Ned claimed, would take nearly three decades to pay off completely.

Just after buying the home, ABC canceled “Last Resort.” In a mad scramble to find more work, Vizzini landed a place on the NBC show “Believe.” It was canceled two months later. He attempted to publish another novel series, House of Secrets, but it wasn’t anywhere near lucrative enough to pay for his living expenses, much less the debt he was beginning to collect on his home. The industry that had once paid for 40% of its writers to make a living off of now was only doing so for a lucky 11.5%, and those writers had to keep publishing best-selling novel after best-selling novel to keep up.

Vizzini began to crack under the pressure. He couldn’t support his family. He couldn’t afford his own home. As it turned out, he’d never had any reason to displace himself from New York, his true home, in the first place. The Driver began to demand an answer. Vizzini had none. In an article for the New York Times after his time in the mental hospital, Vizzini wrote that “the Driver just telescoped out, refining itself, grabbing at better and better targets. The world exploded for me,” he said, “but the Driver was curious: What next?” Vizzini was certain that, this time, he was really out of answers.

And so each of us forgot the other. The memory of Craig’s struggles and the way that he overcame them was swallowed by our own pain, and Vizzini and I could think of no way out. Anything, we thought, had to better than the life we were living now.

In January of 2016, I was lying in the middle of my dorm room, a wreathe of pill bottles around my head. I had been stockpiling them for some time. I hadn’t been taking any of my medications for a month or so. An empty syringe sat open next to my thigh, a small patch of dried blood on my skin and some glittering condensation in the syringe the only evidence of what I’d done. My laptop screen was the only light in the room, reaching out dimly through the darkness to make my eyes ache. It was taunting me; on the screen was nothing but a clean, white Google document, only a black, blinking cursor marring it. I couldn’t even find the words to write my note.

The Driver was whispering in my ear now, gleefully reminding me of how often I’d been here over the past few months- just staring at a blank screen, waiting for words that weren’t coming. I called myself a writer, and yet I hadn’t written a word since I’d gotten to school, aside from essays for class. I’d 34

been trying to publish a novel since I was eleven years old- had a literary agent when I was fourteen, lost her at fifteen because I was taking too long to finish the project I’d promised her- and I’d been taking my time ever since. There was a time in my life when I truly believed that if I hadn’t published a novel by the time I was going to college, I wouldn’t be anybody worthwhile at all. Although I wouldn’t admit it to myself, I hadn’t really stopped believing that was true when I actually got to college. The Driver fed off of that belief, making it more pervasive with each passing day that I looked at my half-finished stories through bleary eyes and said “tomorrow, for sure.”

That day in my room, the Driver whispered, “When? What next?” My eyes traveled back to the computer screen, squinting in the white light.

The next details were filled in for me by others later. My roommate came home earlier than expected. Panicking, she called our RM, who drove me to the hospital himself. I was apparently able to stumble to his car and lie down in the back seat- coherent enough to insist that EMS wasn’t called and that we should drive to the hospital instead. I didn’t want to worry my parents, after all. Before long, I was purged of my medications, had sugar-water given on drip to me through an IV, and was back to my usual self- or at least some semblance of it. I was transported to the psychiatric hospital from there.

In the waiting room, I remembered Craig Gilner for the first time in over a year. I wondered how he handled this situation. I wondered how Ned Vizzini handled it. I wondered how they sat in the uncomfortable plastic chair- whether they smiled at the nurses or chose to wallow inside of themselves- whether they accepted the first, gelatinous meal that was offered to them or couldn’t bear to eat because they were already full off of sadness.

I decided the Craig Gilner approach to the situation wasn’t bad. I followed his example as best as I could, being slightly skeptical of the nurses and hospital staff and as open-minded as possible towards the other patients. Maybe I’d meet a friend in this place, just like Craig. Maybe I’d find somebody to share all of the pain I had inside of me, who would understand, like Craig had, what it felt like to suddenly be empty and full inside, all at once.

I lost hope as quickly as it had come, sliding quietly from a disinterest in life to a disinterest in the world at large. There was a large, white bulletin nailed to the wall across from me, encased in plexiglass. In big, headache-inducing red letters at the top it read, “PATIENT RIGHTS.” It went on to list, in tiny, black print, the rights I supposedly had as a patient in the hospital. I remember reading them over and over again, the first inkling of realization trickling into my head. Maybe it was all of the cop shows I’d watched, or maybe it was my coworker back at my diner job who told me the summer before that he’d gotten out of a perfectly well-deserved drug charge just by knowing his rights, but I thought, dimly, that I might need to use those tiny bullet points to my advantage. Then I told myself I was paranoid.

Nothing of the sort had happened for Craig or Vizzini.

But my experience was not Craig Gilner’s. My experience was not Ned Vizzini’s, either. To begin with, I wasn’t there willingly. Sure, I had signed the papers- but my other options weren’t very enticing either. I could refuse, drop out of school, and face the disappointment on the faces of my friends, my family, and my peers- or I could kill myself. Or… or I could sign the papers.

There is a singular review of the psychiatric ward I ended up in, the Methodist Speciality and Transplant Hospital. An anonymous Google user writes, “The hospital needs better psychiatrist[sic] who care about patients.” While I couldn’t agree more with Anonymous Google User, there was much more to be said about my four-day stay than that- most of it negative.

Thanks to Craig, I wasn’t surprised by the fact that I had a roommate- one that preferred sleeping all day to socializing or trying to get better. Nor was I surprised about the state of the room itself.

There were two cots lined up next to each other with a single white sheet on each of them, two empty bookcases standing against the wall across from them. There was a cracked open door leading to a dingy bathroom with nothing in it but a grimy mirror above a porcelain sink, a toilet, and a small shower in the corner covered with a white curtain. Even while I was first coming in, the tile looked strangely wet.

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I wasn’t surprised by the fact that the other patients were human too- that they had their own problems and their own stories and that, inevitably, my life was a happier one than the majority of theirs.

I wasn’t surprised that some of the staff were genial and kind, and that others just wanted us to take our pills and leave them alone.

But I was surprised by just about everything else. The group therapies, for one. They consisted almost entirely of drawing, singing along to pop songs with a young psychology grad student on a guitar, or passing around a ball and talking about the things we wanted when we got out of there. I was surprised, too, when nobody showed me the ropes of the place. In Vizzini’s book, Craig has everything neatly laid out for him by a friendly nurse: just how long he’ll be there, what’s expected of him, and the best way to get better. I was left to my own devices as soon as I was shown to my room. The nurse walked me over, showed me the bed, the shower, the toilet, and then walked away down the hall without another word.

The staff seemed perfectly content to let me stay in bed all day, wiping tears and snot from my face with my thin white bedsheet.

But most of all, I was surprised that there was no counselor. In Vizzini’s book, Craig has a wonderful counselor in the hospital who shows him how to live again- how to cope with his own personal Driver and go back confidently into the real world. He sees her every day, and every day he improves a little more. He begins to draw detailed maps of the brains of the other patients in the ward- to write about them in their entirety and share it with them, quickly becoming the favorite of the ward. Five days later, he’s released with a new lease on life, ready to go home and begin his own next chapter.

I did not have a counselor. I had a psychiatrist, whom I met with once. He was old and wrinkled, his hair speckled with grey spots and his expression like that of somebody who doesn’t want to be bothered on a public bus. He told me in his thick Russian accent that I had depression, which I already knew. He asked me how I tried to kill myself. He nodded and scribbled my answer down on a clipboard as I spoke, and then stared at me with hard eyes, made darker by the deep shadows beneath them.

“Yes, that would kill you,” he said. I got the distinct feeling that something about me was bothering him. I thought maybe he just didn’t appreciate privileged white girls wasting space in his hospital. He certainly didn’t plan on wasting any more time than he had to on me.

“Are you going to try to kill yourself again?” He asked me bluntly.

“Um, no Sir.” I said carefully. It didn’t feel like the truth, but it didn’t feel like a lie either. It just felt like the words I needed to say.

“Are you sure?” He didn’t look up, just scribbling away on his clipboard.

“Yes,” I said, more confidently this time.

“Alright, well, if that’s all-” “When can I go home?” I asked quickly, afraid he was going to leave and forget about me until maybe a nurse reminded him a week later that I was still there.

“Generally you have to stay at least five days.” He said. “Is that all of your questions?”

That was the only time I saw him. He didn’t come in on Fridays, or on weekends. He took Thursday off as a vacation day.

So I found therapy, truly, in another way that Craig did. I talked to the other patients. It wasn’t just the process of realizing how much worse other people had it than I did. It was seeing how far you could go into a pit, and still somehow find a way to drag yourself back out.

My favorite of everyone there was Tommy. I didn’t really know anything about his backgroundwhether or not he was homeless, or where he’d come from before this. He was fidgety and quiet, his blue eyes darting around the room as other people talked, but he smiled constantly. One of the women in the group was wheelchair bound- a sweet, pudgy, middle-aged woman who always smiled with her mouth closed. Tommy pushed her chair to and from every meal. When any of the older men in the ward got too close to me, Tommy stood between us and scowled at the man. When I cried, which was more often than I’d like to admit, Tommy looked at me in this conciliatory way that made me feel as if, in the very least, somebody was looking out for me. Somebody cared.

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Over dinner, he informed me that he was a recovering heroine addict, still mourning the loss of his father- the same man that had beat him all his life. My opinion of him remained exactly the same.

Craig found the same safety in the other patients in his ward in New York. There was an unspoken rule, both in his ward and mine, that you couldn’t ask patients why they were hospitalized- but, just like in my ward, most of the patients chose to share anyways. There was very little reason not to. Unless you’d done something really horrible, nobody was judging you- and chances were you’d never see any of these people again anyways.

One of the ladies in our group- we called her Momma Juana. She was a woman with graying hair, her face sagging but kind and soft when she smiled. Her eyes were dark and so strikingly pained that they could make you breathless for a second before you remembered what you were saying. She had a way of looking around at all of us that endeared her to us as a grandmother figure. Craig’s group had a similar father figure: Bobby. He mentors Craig through his experiences, remaining genuine and modest right to the end of the novel- at which point he lands a job interview by borrowing one of Craig’s nice shirts. I was relieved to find that at least some of Craig’s story rang true- the really beautiful, interesting parts- those parts really were true.

A lot of people were saying Mama Juana was likely to age out of the mental health care system and move on to a home for elderly women with dementia soon. Her life was whining quietly to a stop.

I guess I should have expected that even the most beautiful parts of Craig’s stories that I experienced wouldn’t have the same, storybook happy ending in real life that Vizzini had written for them.

Still, I thought about Craig in every interaction I had. I thought about using these people for inspiration, like Craig had- and realized finally that it wasn’t actually using them so much as it was honoring them. Most of these people would be hospitalized for life. Most of them would only ever see the outside world with a large, brick wall around it. Some of them couldn’t go back to where they’d come from because it wasn’t there anymore. Some of them simply preferred life in the hospital. But each and every one of them was happier there in that hospital than I had been at all in my first semester in college.

I couldn’t wrap my mind around that- people would actually choose to be there, in that psych ward. These people would rather be in that dinky little retirement home calling itself a mental hospital, where they couldn’t have shoelaces, small board-game pieces, or overly-sharpened colored pencils.

They would rather be within the confines of a hallway and a lounging area with only one window facing out towards the busy freeway and a door leading into a tall brick cage meant for smoking breaks, where the weather could not be felt and had to be guessed at by the shape of the distant clouds. They would prefer to be in a place where their bra had to evaluated for the possibility of using it as a noose and their boxers could only be made of light enough fabric so that they couldn’t hang themselves from the shower head. Each of them told me that they were happy to be there- that this tiny, grimy world was better than whatever they had waiting for them on the outside.

In Vizzini’s book, Craig tries to understand the inner workings of the patients’ minds by drawing out their thought processes with physical maps. He draws the areas that are enveloped by fire, those that are filled with trinkets and odd things from funny stories they’ve told him, and those that are overrun with something dark and unknowable. He gives them those drawings, at the end of the book, making each of them an encouraging reminder of their uniqueness and their strength.

So I tried to internally draw maps of my peers’ brains, to better understand who they were. When one of the men in the ward gave me a crumpled napkin, bleeding with blue ink in the form of poetry, I took care to read every line. I wish I could remember it in its entirety now. He said his world was on firethat he would be completely hopeless if it weren’t for one thing- there was a woman on the outside that he was desperate to get back to soon. I thought: this is where the fire would be- just small and at the very core. This is where the darkness would be, wrapped around the folds and curves of his brain like pie-crust on tin foil. The rest would have to be blue- lots and lots of shades of blue, like the ink that left word-shaped stains on my palms.

I sat with Shelly, a girl with a pouchy face who never left her room without a blanket wrapped

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around her shoulders, and talked to her about her life outside. She lived with her mother, she said. She wrote children’s books. She had one published, but hadn’t succeeded in finishing another. She bounced ideas off of me. My favorite was about a ladybug that got too fat from being greedy and eating all of the leaves in the garden. I thought: lots of blushing pink on every corner of her brain. And there are the rainclouds, converging inwards on her little fat ladybug, hiding meekly in the very center.

I colored cats and dogs on ripped out coloring pages with a girl a few months younger than me, who was desperate to get out and back to her baby girl. She was depressed, she said, but she was also very happy to be in the ward. She needed the break. She was tired. She was only on day two, and already she’d realized how much she missed her baby. She wanted her back, and was counting the days until she would see her again. Her counselor had promised she would be released only a few days from now. To me, her brain was the color of every crayon she used, vibrant blues, greens, and reds scribbled in a haze over something I couldn’t quite make out- I only knew it looked something like a bruise.

With every interaction, I thought more and more about Craig. But even more so, I thought about Vizzini. I wondered if he’d really, truly had a counselor that helped him through his problems in the hospital. I wondered about all the stories and the laughs he’d shared with the other patients, because, really, it seemed like there were endless stories to share, and everything was laughable in the presence of so many others’ seemingly worse problems, all of us sitting around feeling sorry for ourselves.

There was one, important doubt that I had, rising above all others. In the novel, Craig manages to overcome his crippling depression, appreciating the very feat of nature that is his existence and determined to let everything he can do overcome the weight of everything that he can’t. He even manages to inspire all of his friends within the hospital before he leaves them behind. When Vizzini came out of the hospital, he was endlessly inspired himself; he wrote his novel within a few months, and made it into a bestseller by the end of the year, inspiring and encouraging struggling young adults worldwide.

When I finally got out of the hospital, I tried halfheartedly to say goodbye to everybody- Shelly and Tommy most of all. Tommy was hiding in his room; he was nowhere to be found when I left, even though I peered over my shoulder for him as I walked out the door. I did get to say goodbye to Shelly, at leastbut it wasn’t anything like I’d pictured it would be.

I found her standing by the door leading outside, waiting for me when I got back from lunch. Over the last few days, we’d grown accustomed to sitting outside together during non-smoking hours, sharing little, insignificant details about our personalities- mostly about the music we wished we could hear and the stories we wished we had the courage to write. It had been a visitation hour not long ago, and she was happier than I’d ever seen her. Her eyes weren’t puffed up and squinting, and the skin around her mouth wasn’t stretched taut with her usual, anxious grimace.

I had a massive grin on my face as I was walking towards her. My parents had come to the visitation hours and refused to leave unless it was with me; they’d heard my horror stories about the place and weren’t going to stand for it any longer. The voluntary stay was over. I was anticipating the way that the sun would feel actually hitting my skin, and the way I would walk out the front doors, no security required to shadow every step I took. What I wasn’t anticipating was the shame I would feel in leaving Shelly behind.

She was happier than usual because she’d just been with her own family. I watched them during the dull moments with my parents, not wanting to tear my eyes away from the image. She looked like she was just out to brunch. She and her family looked like they were somewhere nice, far away from the muggy city, where they could sit in fresh, clean air and laugh and share stories and maybe even feel it was okay to complain that the umbrella above their table wasn’t angled quite well enough to block out the worst of the sun. In that moment, I wanted that for her. More than I wanted to leave myself, I wanted her to have at least that happy moment.

And then my parents told me they had signed the document that would get me out of there, and I was too busy hugging them and thanking them and apologizing to them to remember what I’d been wishing for just moments before.

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I remembered when I saw her. She was smiling at me, expecting that now her good day would get even better and we’d go outside and bounce some ideas off of eachother- maybe even do what we’d done the day before and write a children’s story- albeit a bad one- word for word together. My stomach turned over, and my arms prickled coldly as my blood wormed its way shamefully back towards my heart.

I tried my best to be sincere. I became terribly aware of how I had nothing to give her. I wished, as I told her where I was going and hugged her goodbye, that I had a beautiful drawing to give her, with her little ladybug at the center of all her blushing and her rain. Instead, I said the only thing that I could think of: “You’ll get out of here. I believe in you. You’re strong.”

I could tell by the look on her face that the both of us knew that wasn’t good enough. I wasn’t helping anybody. I let my parents wrap me up and walk me out the front door, pretending I believed as genuinely as they did that I was getting away from these lower, troubled people and going back to the proper, clean world in which I so obviously belonged.

I hate to think of Shelly now- or at least the way I saw her last. Not because of anything that was overtly wrong with her- I just hate feeling that same shame well up inside of me again, looking down and seeing my feet walking on something other than bleached hospital tile and wondering where she might be- even though I know the answer almost certainly isn’t a happy one. I wish I’d done what Craig did. I wish I’d had a map to give her- a really beautiful picture.

I wished ever more that I had done what Vizzini did, too, using my awful experience as a springboard into a better future. But I didn’t.

When my parents drove off with me, bought me an Oreo Sonic Blast, and dropped me back off at school with a thousand warnings and professions of love and worry and demands that I would contact them at least twice an hour: I still came back to a blank Google Doc. I still had nothing to fill it with.

I appreciated that I was alive. I appreciated that I could write if I really wanted to, that I could play music, that I could run, breathe, and “live, live, live,” like Vizzini said as his exuberant last words of the novel. But I also knew that nothing grand was going to happen to me because of those experiences. I wasn’t about to sit down and write my magnum opus. I wasn’t about to start touring the country, telling people about my struggles and how I overcame them. I was, however, going to sit in my dorm room, watching Netflix and wishing I had my boyfriend to talk to about everything. I was going to dye my hair as dark a brown as possible to get rid of any remaining evidence of our relationship. I was going to text my mom back every five minutes to assure her that I was, in fact, still alive.

So things did not immediately get better, like they did for Craig and for Vizzini. I still had depression. I was still depressed. I went back on my medication and I started going to classes again and I started meeting people and making friends, but I was still prone to staring at the ceiling when I got home, wondering what the purpose of all of it was. I didn’t realize that I was making any true progress at all. I wouldn’t for a few months. And even then, the bad things in my life weren’t gone. The novel wasn’t over.

There hadn’t been a happy ending. Bad things kept happening, with very few breaks in between.

A few days after I got out of the hospital, I was curled up beneath my covers, scrolling through Facebook on my laptop. Google Docs was still open on the next tab over, this time open to an old story I’d been working on some time over a year ago. I was trying to give myself the impression that I had at least done something worthwhile with my time that day- but I really couldn’t concentrate on anything. I’d just gotten a friend request from somebody I recognized- a girl my ex-boyfriend had talked about often in the recent months after I’d left for college. She was kind of mousy looking, but much smaller than me; she looked better standing next to him, his arm wrapped around her, the both of them smiling like they’d won the love lottery in this new profile picture the two of them shared. I just remember feeling a cold pain prickling in my chest. Of course she’d friend requested me to taunt me- or to look through my old pictures, to compare herself to me- and I felt what little composure I’d regained since my break-up slipping out from under me.

While I was still staring at the computer screen, attempting to process what I was seeing, my cell

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phone rang. I cringed. I’d forgotten to change my ringtone from the one he’d recorded for me, set to the rhythm of Aha’s Take On Me - the song we loved to blast on Friday car rides home from school. I picked up as quickly as possible, my voice small and cracking as I spoke. “Hello?”

“Hey, Jenn-” It was my dad. “Do you have a minute?”

I had more minutes than I knew what to do with.

My dad sighed shakily into the receiver, and it suddenly occurred to me that something was wrong. “It’s about your grandpa.”

He’d had another heart attack, my dad said, and his medicine wasn’t working anymore.

“Can’t he get another surgery?” I asked. “That helped last time, didn’t it?”

It was difficult to make out the words my dad was mumbling on the other side. “His doctors don’t think he can take any more treatment.”

So it was a waiting game, then. The only thing left to do was sit there and wait, waiting for the man I’d looked up to and aspired to be like my whole life to suddenly disappear. He was a writer, too.

He made me want to be a writer from the moment I could understand what that meant. He always had the perfect quote from classical literature for the situation. Everything he said carried weight. Plus, he was the only person that wouldn’t put up with my angsty teenage bullshit when I hit puberty. When my parents would sigh, throw their hands up, and say they’d had enough, my grandfather would come over, tell me to grow up, and demand that I get my dirty feet off the table right this instant. I’d never respected anyone more. My whole life I’d been waiting to go to college, learn all of the things he knew, and make him proud when we could have a lasting conversation about all of the books and authors that I’d never been able to keep up with before. It hadn’t really occurred to me that there wouldn’t be time for that.

For the first time, I trusted my new friends with my problems. I swore that I’d never tell them about the mental hospital, but I told them about my ex and about my grandfather, and all of the misgivings I had about my future. They thought I’d just a hit a small low point in my life. They said everything after this was going to be uphill. I didn’t know how to tell them otherwise- although I appreciated being able to tell them about everything more than they could have known. Personally, I could feel myself bottoming out yet again. I stuffed Vizzini’s book away where I couldn’t look at it, feeling it taunting me with its happy ending. It felt as if somehow I had failed to do what Craig and Vizzini had done. I hadn’t made my life any better. I hadn’t overcome or conquered anything.

My curiosity of the true story, what came after Craig and Vizzini’s victory, grew each day. Finally, although I strongly suspected I wouldn’t like the result, I typed the name into the Google search bar on my computer.

“V-I-Z-Z-I-N-I.” I expected it to make me feel like even more of a failure. I expected to find that he’d published several books since then- that he was now living as a millionaire with his happy family somewhere in New York, sitting on a pile of book deals and movie manuscripts.

I was wrong.

On December 19th, 2013, at the age of 32, on a Thursday morning in Brooklyn, New York while his wife and two-year-old son slept, Ned Vizzini stood at the top of the apartment complex that was his childhood home. He looked out across the city, at the library that was double-winged “like pages of a book” in which he’d first discovered his love of reading. He felt The Driver at his back, pushing him gently, inches and inches closer to the edge of the building. Vizzini searched for his next answer, perhaps ransacking his brain one last time for a solution- for another goal to stump The Driver with- for something to buy himself some more time.

But he was tired. He was tired of trying to outrun The Driver. He was tired of looking for answers to appease it. He couldn’t convince himself that there was anything else left for him. End of story. The Driver was finally winning. It could move on to torture someone else now. Anyone else. He decided to close the book, to type the last words- to write “The End” cleanly across the back cover.

He jumped.

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The book did not close.

His family was devastated. His best friends were shocked and wracked with guilt. His son was too young to understand where his father had gone. His wife went to work erasing any way in which people could contact her, or ask questions, or try to comfort her. If you click on the link to nedvizzini.com, you get a message saying that the site can no longer be reached. This was her doing. She wanted no assumptions to be made, no brazen theories or accusations about the nature of his death.

These friends and family continued writing his story in his physical absence. When his brother broke the news to the press, he made a point of explaining that it was depression that had gotten Vizzini to that point on top of the apartment complex- but it was Vizzini himself who chose not to climb down.

Vizzini’s brother begged people to remember that they could always climb down.

Vizzini’s fans, all of the people he saved and the teenagers he convinced to keep living, also continued writing his story. They made their own websites, their own memorials on social media and on a website called legacy.com, where fans from around the world could come and leave notes about what Vizzini meant to them. The main sentiment was that, although Vizzini didn’t manage to save himself from the Driver, he did save thousands of others from meeting the same fate.

I felt numb when I read the news reports for myself. Details were sparse. People talked more about the life he’d lived rather than the circumstances of his death. The Driver was out of a job, it seemed. It had lost. But so too, had everyone who loved Ned Vizzini.

Life, I realized, doesn’t always get better. There is no permanent fix for anything. The only permanent solution to any problem is death, and even that has its faults. The story just starts writing itself, using the previous chapters as inspiration. The supporting characters pick up the plot and run with it.

Suddenly, you are defined both by the places where you manage to be present and the places where you’re absent.

Thinking back on those first few weeks back in school, crying on the shoulder of a new friend about new problems one moment and then laughing with them about new experiences the next, I realize that there is no bottoming out in life. There is no peaking, there is no prime in life to be reached and then reminisced upon for the rest of the meaningless years you have left to you.

Life is just a constant. Life is just a state of being. You’re alive or you’re dead. But you- you yourself- you can be there and not there, all at once. You can be happy and sad, depressed and excited for the future, all at once. You can cry one moment and then laugh the next. You can write poetry, come up with silly ladybug stories, or think about your sweet baby while trapped in a mental hospital. You can exist in life and in death.

It seems to be a matter of interpretation. Every reader finds something different between the lines. Vizzini found inspiration, love, and joy- and then sadness, inadequacy, and most of all, anxiety. He ran out of answers. He didn’t realize the questions were all answering themselves. He didn’t understand that as long as he held the pen in hand and never put it down, The Driver would always be held at bay.

He didn’t see that sometimes the answers aren’t grand. Sometimes the answer is simply that you’re not going to write at all today- that you’re just going to sit and appreciate your wife, or play with your son, or talk to a friend you’ve been out of touch with for a while.

Those things, Vizzini believed, weren’t good enough for The Driver- but The Driver was a part of him from the beginning. The Driver was just as transient as Vizzini’s perspective- it was his motivation and his depression, all at the same time.

The Driver is as good as it is evil- it promotes the furthering of life just as much as it promotes the idolization of death. The Driver is a constant companion, and, much like a friend, there are parts of it we love and parts of it we can’t stand- but we also can’t imagine life without it.

If The Driver is depression, then there is no cure. I have taken the medications, I have been to therapy and counseling and have read all the pamphlets and done all the bogus breathing exercises (because apparently breathing incorrectly can make you really depressed) and I can tell you that, when you stop taking the medications, or when you let your guard down- even just for a moment- when you drop

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your hands from your eyes or peek through your fingers at the horror film world before you- the depression is still there, looking up at you expectantly with its arms held out wide. There is no cure. Vizzini is the best proof of that.

So Vizzini was right- The Driver never goes away. But would we really want it to? Maybe some would, but that Driver is what encourages us to be great. It is what demanded that the three of us- me, Craig, and Vizzini- pursue our dreams and our desire to mean something. And we listened, and we wrote, and we did everything we could to make that true, because that’s what we really, really wanted. And yes, obviously, it was that same demand that made us crack under the pressure; the pressure to do and be something great is inherently terrifying. Nobody has ever defined greatness, after all. We just know we want it more than anything, even if we’ll never actually know when we have it.

By nature, we as writers, we as members of a sentient human race, want to climb higher and higher- and naturally we lose our breath when we look over the precipice and see just how far we have to fall. Every slip can feel like we’re teetering over the edge, seconds from falling into whatever unknown darkness lies below. We create the cliff, and in so doing we create the drop. The Driver is inherent in living- as is our fear of failing it. We will always be afraid of falling. It’s not actually possible to fall peacefully to one’s death- most people die of a heart attack before they ever hit the ground. And it’s neither possible nor wise not to fear slipping at all. We just have to be sure-footed enough to believe in ourselves- or we have to trust that we can catch ourselves when we do fall, because, inevitably, we will.

Vizzini taught me that the only, true way to bottom out is to jump and refuse to save yourself before you get there.

So, when I can’t find the words to say, I think about Vizzini. When I don’t quite understand why I’m trying anymore, I think about Vizzini. I think about Craig, and where he might be now. I like to think Craig is alive. I like to think his life went just about the same as mine or Vizzini’s- maybe a little less troubled, but more or less the same as any life- and that he found a way to use The Driver to his advantage. That he found a way to acknowledge that the depression would always be there, and then found a way to cope with it- to acknowledge that sometimes he would be able to do nothing at all, and that was perfectly okay. I like to think that he still thinks his life is a miracle of nature just like he did at the end of the book, regardless of whether it is easy or hard at that moment in time.

I like to think that sometimes all The Driver really asks of you is that you find the will to stay alive.

I like to think that life is ours to do as we will with- that sometimes the answers to our questions have to be created, as Vizzini believed, but also that sometimes the answers are already there, staring us in the face in the form of our friends, our significant others, or our children. And I genuinely believe, most of all, that life is never entirely wonderful or entirely terrible- but that it’s on us not only to make it better or worse, but to appreciate it for whatever it is.

I wish that I were reading Ned Vizzini’s newest book right now: fiction, memoir, whatever he wants. I wish I were watching a show that he wrote, or seeing a movie based on his novels. It’s tragic that none of those things will ever be created- that no one will ever get to see whatever other creations he had in store for us- that his friends will never be able to call him on the weekends for inspiration, and, most of all, that he will never again kiss his wife or his son goodnight. But I am also grateful that Vizzini has given us the understanding that he didn’t seem to have- that his novel has never truly ended. That death ended nothing more than his present-tense physical self. His demons still exist. The Driver is still there. I am grateful that his family and his fans will keep writing his story for him. I am grateful that they will keep rereading the chapters of the past to better build their own futures.

Now, in a dry patch of grass on campus, I’m lying on the ground with my friends, the sun making our skin tight against our limbs and the breeze brushing against our faces, convincing us we may never need to move again. We’re watching clouds roll across the pastel blue sky above us, squinting through the sunlight to try and make out which cloud is winning in a race against the others from the top of one cedar tree to another. We’re laughing, we’re shit-talking each other. We’re blowing at the sky in vain, pretending that’ll push our cloud to move faster.

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I wrote the first sentence of a new story today. I think the story’s going to be about a girl like me, just trying to find her purpose. It’s going to have what I call a neutral ending- she’ll be both very happy and very sad at the end. Other people might call it bittersweet, even unsatisfying, and I’m happy with that. After all, the whole point is that the ending isn’t really an ending at all. The sentence is sitting patiently on the first page of a pocket-sized, purple journal I just started carrying everywhere with me in my purse. My purse is beneath my head now, tilted so that I can better see the sky above me.

Somewhere, folded in the breeze, a whispering voice makes its way into my ear.

“What next?” It asks me.

I don’t reply. I’m too busy blowing at the sky.

References Beckerman, M. (2014, December 18). A Year Without Ned Vizzini: Brilliant YA Author, ‘Teen Wolf’ Writer, And My Best Friend. MTV News. Retrieved April 4, 2016, from http://www.mtv.com/news/2021698/ ned-vizzini-tribute/ Tribute article made a year after Vizzini’s death by his best friend, Marty Beckerman. The article discusses gives an in-detail view of Vizzini’s life, his talent, and his relationships with others, and well as fact-based speculation on the cause of his suicide.

Ned Vizzini. (2016, February 28). Retrieved April 04, 2016, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ned_ Vizzini Wikipedia article giving an overview of Vizzini’s life and accomplishments.

Patient Stories- Ned Vizzini. (2011). Retrieved April 04, 2016, from http://www.nym.org/For-Patients-and-Visitors/Patient-Stories/Ned-Vizzini.aspx New York Methodist Hospital account of the care and results of Ned Vizzini’s five-day stay in their psychiatric ward. In 2013, it was edited to include their condolences of Vizzini’s passing.

Yardley, W. (2013, December 20). Ned Vizzini, 32, Dies; Wrote Teenage Novels. The New York Times.

Retrieved April 4, 2016, from http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/21/books/ned-vizzini-author-of-teenage-novels-dies-at-32.html?_r=0 New York Times article announcing the death of Ned Vizzini and giving a summary of his career.

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Generations

Mary Martha Meyer Hill

I Didn’t Ask Miriam Cone

I know that my father had an affair.

He told me in different ways: the distance of years in his dull eyes, ignoring the high whine of my brother’s voice.

He told me in the way he fiddled with his metal band, the high whine of the teapot jarring him out of his fantasy.

His fingers twisted that metal band when he told me in our tiny kitchen jarring me, his fantasy in every word emotion and interest in his dark eyes.

In our tiny kitchen, he told me and now I know my father had an affair.

His dark eyes filled with more emotion in that moment than they had in years.

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A Bedtime Story Miriam Cone

The past stays present, dancing on the edges of vision.

Memories of snow blankets, the bed, my mother’s voice, and his words.

Everything covered, even affection and absence, as we wrapped up inside.

The bed crowded with family and bedtime stories.

Every night, a story, and every day, my dad.

When he read his voice trailed off into snores and we laughed.

This life, only ever glimpsed before on weekends.

My sister acted like a connoisseur of literature and my brother seesawed.

We tried to wake the sleeping giant in the cold of winter.

Those two years seem elevated, every night of our family not work divided.

The world seemed gilded and its edges blurred on shaking shoulders.

But Jack never reached the top of the beanstalk.

Bones of the house, and me Mary Martha Meyer Hill

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The Word from Aleppo Angel Baeza

That scratching sensation when A word is just beneath the waves, Refusing to float above the waves or Join the world Feeling for the word when a bubbly Syrian Girl, with blue, Alexander eyes, Laughs about the day a boy Spat into her face at lunchtime Feeling for the word in the Oceanus of The world, in the shield of Church, and Not finding a name for the Syrian Orphans’ Game of War Not finding the word in the ruins they play about Catching a word in war Games, in running children, their language too Young, or too Carved, to be Clear to me What’s the name for this searching, I’d ask, but I know, like My good faith, it can only make sense that it is gone.

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The Space Between the Flowers and the Blades Hannah Susman

In the quiet nothingness of the dirt bits of bomb shells gleam like rose petals, reflecting in the irises of a too-small girl.

Shouts and gunfire whisper to her in lullabies as her naked feet flatten the grass between the flowers and the blades.

The bloody jaws of the sunset watch as her bone-like legs, the skin clinging to them like damp satin, slowly bend as her hand reaches to pluck a single petal from the ground.

The wind wraps around her and she can hear the petal’s soft hum, its liquid buzzing, trembling hiss, exploding, cacophonous, tumultuous symphony of screams.

In shock it is sucked from her grasp by the solemn earth, and buried with its bodies.

The tears trickle like honey from her too-big eyes and the long river runs red in the twilight.

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Not Allowed to Give Up Elizabeth Broussard Work rises over my shoulders potential energy crackling, ready to crash but I remain in the eye sights set on fortifications.

I know one day demands will end but sometimes I like to break out into a sprint push myself until my legs give out; it feels good to find myself at my limits.

It feels good to find deserted forests and howl because sometimes I want to measure the depth of my lungs.

I want to lie on a bare mattress naked, alone and silent tracing symphonies in the runes on my ceiling.

I am a stronghold never weathered, but sometimes I bolt awake in the dead of night with frantic thoughts.

I see a battering ram at the gates of sleep that will not be silenced nor forgotten.

I want to feel the solitude found in freedom, but that is for tomorrow, these desires promised to another time.

For now I am a lighthouse waves crashing at my feet and though dark clouds gather I see the faint pulse of light rounding suppression, a beam of hope from my fortress, and exhale.

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Maddie

Katherine “Katy” Freeman 49

Merely Moments Ago Elizabeth Broussard

I am cursed with the blood of a Sicilian frothing in turmoil and frustration, ignorance a gift from my grandmother who refused to teach me her tongue.

My tongue I inherited from centuries of artic Nova Scotian winters, my ancestors quite adept at fixing pleasant masks as they froze.

Passionate Sicily never froze, and yet its people remain frigid, accepted by Italy only formally their blood runs red with remembrance.

But, stories of remembrance I retell, ones taught by my father, and his father before him a legacy of storytellers harking from the Great North, I trace.

My fingers still trace the grooves of aged fava beans in my pocket, a gift from Nonna she bestowed “for that old Sicilian fortune.�

My body a tune of fortune sings a cobblestone of their memories I clutch ghosts of their traditions to be worthy of their kinship.

50

Anchor

Courtney Justus I ran into my ex-boyfriend Manuel while riding the number 71 bus in Buenos Aires, Argentina in June of 2015. The sky was dark, penetrated by the bright white streetlamps that ran along Paraná avenue.

I had been waiting only ten minutes for the bus when it arrived, which surprised me, considering how I’d often waited around half an hour for it to arrive whenever I took it during high school. After the doors opened with a squeak, I made my way up the old, dusty steps, paid for my fare at a blue and yellow machine, then walked down the narrow aisle, which was cramped with people wearing heavy winter jackets. I squeezed between several people and held onto a pole on the left side of the bus. After a few moments, I took a couple of steps back from the aisle and toward the windows, in the hopes that doing so would decrease my chances of getting pickpocketed. A moment later, the bus stopped abruptly and I saw Manuel take a step up the stairs.

I gripped the pole even more tightly. He didn’t meet my eyes at first. His hair was still long and curly, just like I remembered. He wore old blue jeans, scuffed up espadrilles and a dark jacket which I thought wasn’t enough to keep him warm. I tried to catch his eye, wondering if he would even want to see me after we’d parted over two years before. At first, it seemed like he had seen me, but turned away without saying anything. Then I was suddenly aware that he would have to come my way eventually, so I was only moments away from finding out how he thought of me after all these years.

After a few long moments, our eyes finally met and he smiled the same crooked smile I had nearly forgotten. I nodded back at him nervously, watching him advance in the line of passengers still waiting to pay for their fares. When Manuel had finally paid for his, he reached out his hand, looking me straight in the eye. I grabbed his hand and stepped forward, still smiling.

“How are you? I thought I’d never see you again,” he said as we hugged. “I thought you’d moved there.” He used the Spanish word allá, there, to refer to the United States. It was only slang, but now I think of it as something more.

“Yeah, I did, but I’m visiting family and friends,” I replied.

Manuel nodded. We stood right beside the blue and yellow machine, leaning in close to each other. For a few minutes, I forgot how cold and nervous I’d been before he reached out to me. I searched for a topic of conversation, then decided on one that was usually comfortable for me: writing. He had always been happy to talk to me about books and writing, at least in the past.

“So I just got a job on my school newspaper,” I told him proudly. “And two of my poems are getting published in the near future.”

“Congratulations! That’s great!” Manuel said. I knew that his response was genuine. “You need to show those to me later.”

“Of course,” I replied. Now I was definitely smiling.

“I’ve started playing in a band,” he said, looking out the window. “With a few friends of mine. We’ve got some concerts coming up here in the next few months.”

“That’s awesome!” I exclaimed. Then, I spoke slowly, looking out at the passing streetlights and darkened houses before meeting his eyes again. “So, it’s really funny that I ran into you here, because when I arrived a few days ago, I was thinking of messaging you to see how you were and if you wanted to meet up.”

“Do you want to go get coffee or something?” He sounded hopeful, even enthusiastic. A small smile played on the corners of his mouth.

“Sure,” I said happily.

He looked over his shoulder quickly. “Hey, I get off here, but I’ll see you soon, okay? Message me.”

I nodded, then he hugged me quickly before heading for the glass doors right in front of us, getting 51

off the bus and walking away on the darkened streets. I watched him with a rising warmth in my chest. * * * Manuel and I first met at a party at my friend Camila’s house in February of 2013, a few weeks before school started. None of my close friends were at the party, so I ended up in the backyard talking to a group of girls who were friends with some of my friends. They wore black miniskirts and laughed loudly at me even when I thought I wasn’t being funny. Brownish liquid sloshed around in the bottoms of their plastic red cups as they swayed from side to side, reminding me of how my sobriety set me apart from nearly everyone else at the party.

Around half an hour later, I went with the tipsy girls into the living room, which let out to Camila’s backyard, and sat down on a sleek black couch, my mind blank. All around me, people were talking, laughing and drinking. Loud, repetitive reggaeton music was playing, the continuous thumping hurting my ears.

Then, from out of nowhere, Manuel came and sat down between me and those girls. I had no idea who he was, so his spontaneous decision to sit next to me on the couch was unsettling. He leaned back, seeming almost too relaxed among all the drunk, talkative people around us.

“You look bored here,” he said suddenly. I turned towards him and noticed that he was looking straight at me.

“Um, I’m fine,” I mumbled, wondering if he could hear me over the music. “I’m just hanging out here for a bit. Taking it easy.”

“You’re quiet, tranquila. You don’t make trouble. I like that,” he replied. His eyes were still fixed on me. The drunk girls suddenly laughed loudly. I looked at them, trying to figure out what or who they were laughing at, but the loud music and dim lighting made it hard to tell.

“Do you want to go outside?” Manuel finally asked me. I nodded, grateful and relieved for an excuse to step back outside into the clear night air.

We got off the couch, went outside, and sat just outside the entrance to the living room.

“So what music do you listen to?” He asked. It was a question so many people asked, but somehow it always made me nervous. “The Beatles. And Lifehouse, this alternative band,” I quickly replied. I did like The Beatles, but they weren’t my favorite; I mostly chose them because I thought he would recognize them more than the other artists I listened to.

“Nice,” he replied. “What do you want to do? Like, for a career.”

“I want to be a writer,” I replied in a low voice. I had known I wanted to be a writer for years, but I was used to getting mixed reactions when I told people about my dream.

“Really?” he asked, intrigued.

“Yeah,” I said.

“I write poetry and stories!” He then proceeded to tell me about one particular story he worked on, something involving a man, a dog, a radio and a love triangle. Later on, he would show me some of his poetry, which dealt with relationships and nature. After telling me about the love triangle story, he asked me a rather strange question.

“Can I tell you about something? It’s rather bruto,” he said.

“Go ahead.”

“So I liked this girl once. We dated for a while. And one night, we were listening to music, an old blues, really feeling all these emotions. And we did it, you see?” he said, his voice soft. “Then I needed to stop. And I had this girl breathing heavily on my bed, wanting more, but I just wanted to listen to the blues. I just couldn’t do it anymore.”

I nodded slowly. “That’s a really strong story. I won’t judge you for it,” I told him, unsure what to make of it. I wrapped my arms around my legs, wondering if I could ever properly respond to something like that when I had never even been kissed. But I meant it when I said I wouldn’t judge him.

We sat there in silence for a little while. When I met his eyes, they were sparkling. It was in that moment that I realized he wanted something more.

“Do you want to go someplace quieter?” Manuel asked me.

52

“Yeah,” I replied softly.

We walked over to a small passageway that separated the far wall of Camila’s house from the brick wall surrounding a neighboring house. Vines grew on the walls and soil mixed with cobblestone on the ground. We embraced abruptly. At first, Manuel just held me, kissing my neck softly as I silently panicked.

From where we stood, I could hear “Scream” by Usher leaking through the living room walls. Then I leaned my head back and our lips touched. For a few sweet moments, I thought of absolutely nothing, but felt so many emotions, all at once.

As our lips separated, we held each other even tighter.

“I felt like I was in another world!” he exclaimed.

“Me too,” I replied breathlessly. I leaned my head against his chest. “Can I tell you something? That was my first kiss,” I said softly.

“That’s okay,” he replied softly. “All in good time.”

Manuel and I spent what must have been hours in that passageway. We later sat against the brick wall and held hands, kissed and talked softly. As I wrapped my arms around him, we saw a group of dark figures approach the gate several feet in front of us. It was the police. Cami approached the gate and spoke briefly to them, then they walked away. In those moments with Manuel, my real focus was on the warmth of his body, the softness of his lips and his calm yet firm voice.

When Manuel and I both went back inside, I found a long streak of dirt across my leg. After washing it off, we sat down on the couch again, this time under the dim white lights that Cami had turned on.

“Did you know I have a scar?” I told Manuel, showing him the thin pink line on my foot from my operation back in eighth grade.

“I have a tattoo,” he said. He then showed me the tattoo on his back, a conglomeration of bold, black letters which spelled “SIGO X VOS,” which translates to Sigo por vos, I go on for you. He had gotten it in honor of his best friend, who had died when they were both young, maybe nine or ten years old.

Camila finally invited me, Manuel and a few other friends of hers to stay the night. By then, it was around six thirty in the morning, a pretty normal time for a party in Buenos Aires to end. As Camila started throwing crumpled-up cups into a black plastic bag, dark brown hair hanging in her face, the Sun started rising. I threw a couple of cups into the bag, then went outside and stood by the pool, putting my arms out and closing my eyes as dim sunlight fell across the backyard. * * * It still surprises me that I had the guts to attend that party after what happened to me back in tenth grade. During that time in our lives, my classmates and I would put on tight cotton miniskirts, loose offthe-shoulder tops and thick eyeliner and head to clubs in San Isidro and even downtown, dancing along to reggaeton and cumbia music. The crowds were always thick and somewhat aggressive, jostling those around them to try and find more room to dance. Most of the clubs we went to didn’t sell alcohol, but a lot of people drank heavily at each other’s houses beforehand, then piled into cabs to head to the clubs around eleven thirty or so.

One night, my classmates and I went to a fiesta de egresados, a sort of graduation party, at a nightclub called Sunset. The reggaeton music was ear-achingly loud as we made our way through swarms of people. At one point, I had gotten close to the center of the dance floor, while they had wandered off elsewhere. I watched the graduating seniors dance on a rickety wooden stage in their shiny, red and blue Duffman costumes. Just as I started dancing, the string on my black, over-the-shoulder bag broke, causing it to fall into a sea of women’s high heels and men’s Nike and Vans sneakers. I bent to pick up my purse and, as I started getting up, a large group of guys surrounded me, shouting, pushing me around and swatting at me. One of them decided to take the hem of my black skirt and lift it up. They were yelling indistinguishable words the whole time, their bodies blocking the light. I couldn’t make out any of their faces. As soon as the group dispersed, I pulled my skirt back down quickly, looked around and saw Ignacio, a junior from my high school, watching me with his luminous green eyes from several feet away, not speaking.

No one came up to me afterwards to ask if I was okay. These incidents were fairly typical at clubs all 53

across the city, a fact which I hadn’t fully processed until months after that night. In the hours following this violation of my privacy, I shoved it towards the back of my mind, telling myself that it was no big deal. Yet the words of the bullies at my school were heavy on my shoulders. I was “nerd,” “alien immigrant,” “bitch,” “slut.” No one knew what had really happened that night. Or, if they did, they didn’t say anything about it.

Ignacio was there at the party where Manuel and I first met. As Manuel and I embraced in the small space by Camila’s house, Ignacio and a few of his friends walked by. I pretended that I couldn’t see his bright green eyes staring at me, scrutinizing the way I held onto Manuel. If I could go back in time, I would tell Ignacio that Manuel was my anchor, helping me to hold on to who I really was amidst the clamor around us. * * * The last time I saw Manuel was on Christmas Eve of 2015. I got on the yellow number 203 bus, which went straight down Avenida Maipú, a large avenue that changed names to Santa Fé and then Centenario. The bus passed through the neighborhoods of Olivos, La Lucíla, Martínez, Acassuso and San Isidro, where I got off. These were some of the most privileged neighborhoods in the city, but they eventually gave way to areas like Virreyes and Carupá, which were known for their poverty, dangerous streets, and the sad, heavy presence of young children and emaciated old people that begged for a few spare pesos.

As I walked to and stood by the train tracks, I squinted in the bright, overbearing sunlight, glancing at the boutiques housing overpriced clothing on either side of me, hoping that my turquoise tank top wouldn’t stick to my back. In my hand, I held a bag with four empanadas, a traditional Argentine food consisting of meat and veggies wrapped in a thin outer crust.

After just a few minutes of waiting by the train tracks, I saw Manuel walking toward me from Avenida Centenario. His eyes widened and he waved to me excitedly before crossing the train tracks to where I stood.

“How are you?” he asked in a happy voice as we embraced.

“I’m okay, and you? Did you grow a moustache?”

He started laughing as we made our way to the park where we’d gone the last time we’d seen each other. His crooked smile was still one of the happiest I’d ever seen, and his eyes were just as dark and wise as I remembered. In his backpack he brought a thermos from which we would later drink mate cocido at the plaza in San Isidro, a neighborhood in Buenos Aires that has expensive private schools, snobby uniformed girls carrying twenty peso bills in their shirt pockets, cultivated families bathing in old money, cobblestoned streets that make smaller cars shake all over, and congested avenues lined with trees on either side that made the routes look like tunnels in some enchanted forest: a picturesque backdrop to the foul-smelling buses, bleak shops, and crazy drivers in old Renaults and Toyotas.

We made our way down the street to the San Isidro Plaza, passing booths where middle-aged women sold hand-crafted jewelry, children’s toys, and rustic knickknacks. We soon found a bench placed towards the outer limits of the plaza and sat down. From this spot, I could see a train station to my right and trees scattered around the area. A group of teenagers sat against a large tree in front of us, forming a circle in the grass. I unwrapped the paper holding the empanadas as Manuel opened the thermos. The air had quickly become tense with silence as I grasped for the right words to say. It reminds me of the day we broke up, but a bit sunnier. * * * The day I broke up with Manuel, I woke up just knowing that it would happen. On that cloudy day in March of 2013, the two of us walked to a plaza in Martínez close to my high school and sat down on a wooden bench with a bottle of orange Aquarius between us. I could feel the tension in my stomach and chest.

“I just... don’t feel like this is working,” I told him hesitantly. “It’s not you, really, I promise. You’re a great person.”

“Do you not like it when I kiss you?” he asked.

“There is that, yes,” I said softly.

54

I didn’t know how to tell Manuel that I no longer enjoyed kissing him. At first, I thought that I should stay quiet about it and see if my feelings changed, but they didn’t. For a while, I wondered if maybe I was feeling weird about kissing him because he was the first guy I’d ever dated and I still wasn’t really used to the sensation of kissing someone.

More than anything, I didn’t want to hurt Manuel or make him think that he had done something wrong, because he hadn’t. Looking back, I realize that he did so many things right and I haven’t thanked him enough for them. * * * Manuel once asked me to lend him books in English, so I gave him Firegirl by Tony Abbott. He still hasn’t given it back to me, but I don’t mind. I like to think that it’s a way for him to remember me.

I read Firegirl back in seventh grade, just a few months before moving to Argentina. Though I enjoyed it, I can’t say that it made that much of an impact on me at the time. I struggled to write about it, feeling that every sentence I wrote was petty, childish and insignificant. None of the words I used seemed to be enough. Now, I look back and think of Jessica, the firegirl, isolated from her classmates and who she used to be, hoping for stability and some kind of anchor, and realize that so many of us have been like that. Some of us carry only a few physical traces of the difficulties we’ve experienced. After you get through these challenges, you have this image of who you once were and can see that, after a single defining moment, burning in your memory, you can never be the same person again. * * * When I finally hung out with Manuel that fateful June after our meetup on the bus, we had facturas and mate cocido in the San Isidro Plaza, where our Christmas Eve meetup would also take place. It grew dark early and quickly, leaving us eating and talking under the glowing yellow lights of the adjacent street lamps. Somehow, I didn’t feel cold or unsafe, even though I had experienced both sensations earlier when I was waiting for him to arrive.

“Hey, Court, I’m going with you all the way to your grandmother’s house,” he said as we made our way toward Avenida Centenario at the end of our outing. “I don’t want you to go alone.”

“All the way there? Are you sure?” I asked.

“Yes. Absolutely,” he replied. I was surprised at his offer, thinking that he would only do that for his girlfriend.

“Okay,” I replied. “Which bus stop should we go to?”

“Let’s walk along the back roads. Then, whenever you’re ready, we’ll walk back up to the main avenue and take the bus back to your grandmother’s house.”

We ended up walking for over forty blocks. He went with me all the way to my grandmother’s front gate, as promised.

“Hey, Court, this was really great,” he said shyly as we stood at the front gate.

“Yeah,” I replied timidly. “Thank you. Thank you so much. For everything.” We were both awkwardly smiling by then.

We hugged tightly by a barren tree, which stood limply under the dark winter sky, pierced by a bright, white light from a nearby streetlamp. As Manuel and I embraced, he felt bigger and stronger than I had remembered.

“Let me know when you get back to your house,” I said after we had let go of each other.

“I will,” he replied as he started to walk away. I then turned the key in the gate and went into my grandmother’s house, not looking back as he walked off into the darkness, taking the two buses that would eventually lead him home.

55

Feminist Resistance Faith Poynor

I don’t want to write this.

Thus, According to, Despite, Although, Consequently, What’s the point? I don’t know.

I don’t want to write Don’t use circular arguments, expand your analysis, Why is this significant? It’s not.

I don’t want to Thesis, Evidence, Analysis, Conclusion.

Does this help anyone? If not, then I don’t care.

I don’t want Patriarchy, I don’t like that word, it’s archaic, don’t use it.

Are you the authority on everything? No. I don’t That is a big statement; soften it.

What did Mary Wollstonecraft say? I shall disdain to cull my phrases.

I TAKE IRE OUT OF YOUR SOUND. Why should I? This is my truth.

I need to write this.

56

Your Sister’s Diary Joy Lazarus

Sometime in the Spring Victoria Bahr

The sky was so blue it was Almost offensive: At once infinitely deep And shallow as The gutter stream.

The trees as well were Horridly green: Spring personified Flaunting its brilliance To the common mob.

57

Today your heart beat again while your body slumps on the living room floor among the blood on the carpet and the rocks in your ribs.

Mine sits somewhere on a shelf, but still your air and the ventilator’s heavy puffs fill my lungs You were too sad to want to stay, even for the home in your Mother Mary and a daughter called Heaven.

And I was too scared to remember to miss you, busy looking out my window and fretting over my fate.

I wish I had known the life that you gave to me, the stories in this heart and the man whose family left freckles of tears on the table.

Transplant Translations: Donation Hannah Susman

But you didn’t think of me and I didn’t think of you, so you left and I’m your coffin, You’ll die in me now. But still they love me and they held me and they called me beautiful.

I wish this gift or This curse was something to be shared, or that I could walk without your help, but it’s far too late to split it in two.

Because yesterday they took your heart and put it on ice to bring to me, but I didn’t even know you.

Tomorrow they’ll take mine too and our waiting will be done.

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Here is where the world ends, every time, on the edge of a long plastic table.

A stiff green sheet just freed from its sterile package blocks the white light and your vision, so all you see is the blinking of the IV pole and the curious outline of your ribs bisected by the wire that stitches your sternum together sitting on the screen of the X-ray machine.

From underneath you hear them bustling, laughing and preparing and you fight the urge to rip through the tunnel of sheets.

Nodding eagerly as they promise three shots of the good drugs, you relish the bubbly hiss and cold rush of the sedative hitting your veins until slowly your eyes droop and the EKG beeps ever slower.

But you are still there.

You know his voice when he enters the room and your foggy muscles tense.

A little stick and burn hovers on the edge of consciousness forever, following the catheter straight down to your heart.

Hours and seconds and indistinct moments as a pinch cuts through muted blood and muted synapses.

One sample, two samples, count off on your fingers.

You feel a gentle hand on top of your head and you think you want to thank him and the tiny balloon floating in your heart because here is where the world ends every time.

Transplant Translations: Stick and Burn, Memorial Hermann Cath Lab Hannah Susman

59

Please Knock Sarah Spence

Blonde curls fall haphazardly her world tilts, music slows The dark tune interrupted by an insistent tapping Increasingly desperate Let me in, let me in She can’t understand the words, slurred and broken Flashing lights, unseen tired secrets, unsaid But the tapping continues Let me in, let me in Hold it all together Tear yourself apart Shaking hands dial quickly Haunted rooms with no ghost The door opens, but still Let me in, let me in

60

Infinity

Joy Lazarus

Donut

Joy Lazarus

Morning Stroll Sarah Spence

A frosted sigh shatters the silence that is singing, twisting through the sleepy branches The river softly murmurs an unfinishable story and you are somewhere in it1 Tiptoe quietly, don’t wake the forest It blinks against the light and whispers blearily Shhh…just five minutes more

1

Mary Oliver, “What Can I Say...”

61

The Wake

María Teresa Kamel The funeral was already over. Anything is a good enough excuse for a party, so they laughed and drank and ate, while I sat in a corner and watched as empty Corona bottles took over every surface of my uncle’s house-- first the tables, then the counters, and finally the floor. I understood why my mother never talked about her step-father’s side of the family. Her step-cousin Gerardo held his tiny daughter in one arm, and cackled at his brother Luis’s jokes. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but given their expressions and the amount of alcohol they had consumed, I could guess. Still laughing, Gerardo walked over to me.

“Having fun, Teresa?”

“Yeah…” I sipped at my Sprite and hoped my real aunt would come and tell me it was time to go home.

Gerardo stared at the baby while I picked at my black nail polish.

“You like babies, mija?”

No. “Yes.” He thrust the child in my arms.

“It’s about time she bonds with her cousin anyway.” He laughed once more, and walked away to join his brothers and cousins.

I expected it to cry after such an abrupt exchange into the care of a virtual stranger, but this child seemed so sure of her place in the world, be it in her mother’s arms or those of her estranged seventeen year old cousin. Her pink cotton dress soft against the shabby AC/DC t-shirt, I felt a wave of nostalgia make its way to my throat, as her tiny baby fingers wrapped around a tendril of my hair.

At that point in my life, my main hobbies included listening to angry music and working out the details of a New World Order. Having just discovered Plato, I reasoned that any truly selfless proponent of such an endeavor would have to be celibate, so babies were not on my list of interests. People in general were not on my list of interests.

Of course, this baby didn’t know any that. She smiled at me, the sullen teenager, closed her eyes and adjusted herself to the awkward, clueless arms. I couldn’t remember what to do with infants, so I didn’t do anything. I was afraid to breathe and disturb her perfect dignity, her silent calm. I stared at her tiny rounded fingers and thick, black lashes, the pink bow in her hair. I tried to find something to tell her, a nursery rhyme hidden in the dusty corners of childhood memories.

“So… has your dad introduced you to Guns and Roses yet?”

My uncle Gerardo and his son careened into the living room, laughing very, very loudly. I remembered that a long time ago, my younger brothers were babies too.

My uncle was laughing so loudly, he had to sit on his late mother’s piano stool. I whispered to the baby. My brothers were once small and quiet, and laughed if I made silly faces at them, and listened to the stories I made up.

My uncle was laughing so loudly, he began to cry, very, very softly.

Now I am so careful with my words, I swallow them, and almost never say anything at all.

“Ay, Gerardo.”

All my uncle’s brothers stared at the floor, their hands in their pockets. My uncle’s quiet sobs tore little holes in the the silence. His wife, the baby’s mother, scurried to the piano stool, her patent leather black heels clicking on the marble floor. She sat down next to him and dropped her arm over his shoulder.

She held him as if he were the child I had in my arms, rocking gently as he covered his face with his hands.

The baby stirred, I accidentally knocked over a bottle of Corona as I walked out of the living room.

She began to whimper, so I held her closer. I whispered into her ear, and the words came from a place we both knew. She fell asleep and I cried a little, but no one notices if you cry at a dead person’s party.

62

Griegos, Gringos Angel Baeza

America is bathed in Greek.

A boundless fire boiling our blood Soaked tongues, splitting the corvid’s Open mouth, to make it speak.

Caw, Caw, Barb, Barb. Even a Hiss Cauterizing the wound.

Nation Fathers, Brothers, Anchises. Sing, sing, From your shining hill, of those unvaried carols: Sing of Remus resting under Aventine His tongue robbed and alike in company Sing of Iulus, taking gladly bribery for silence rather Than a fatal discord Sing of wicked Amulius, who reigned for forty years And earns no history Sing not of the Grandsons, but of the Children Of our Great Mother, all below in quiet Hell Sing of the Repatriates who were never heard Again at home, exiled in time Sing of the unlatin Natives, whose broken marriage Of people and promises lie forgotten now Sing of your own false ivories, false teeth, Fathers.

The Gates of Sleep sing the undying American Dream So the Gates of War remain open

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Arrival

Catalina “Cat” Cura Bullrich

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Traffic

Catalina “Cat� Cura Bullrich

Shifting Stumbling Shambling Feet beating a monotone-beat beat beat Under a monochrome morning.

Endless marches On pockmarked pavement; Patched and worn, Like the faces of passerby.

Breath bursts out in silent puffs, Shadowed under a cloud-curtained sky, Reflecting ashen hair And eyes of steel or coal.

Countless whispered heartbeats, Features drawn like shutters, Heads turn in unison towards a sliver of sunlight Searching for answers in a powdered dawn.

65

Shoulders Miriam Cone

You can learn everything about a person just by looking at their shoulders.

(Your first belonged to that man who stalked you home after college one afternoon. His bony jutting, jarring angles – sharp to the eyes, but oh so delicately thin to the caress of fingers made you cry) It’s why they’re enthralling, a gentle trace with your eyes and you can’t get that feeling out of your head and you just want more.

(The second came from the woman who sold you overpriced dogfood; hers were fleshy, malleable even, curving from neck to arm, a little force and they gave: teeth dug into skin and fat and, oh, there was the bone and you trembled)

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But it’s elusive and hard won; flirting and giggling get you in the door, but you need plans and backup plans.

You’ve been chasing this high for years and you just need it to end.

(Most recently were the swimmer’s: they were sculpted from tears and sweat, ripping and tearing until sinuous muscle claimed its place on top of pale white bone and you forgot how to breathe) Sometimes you reach it with a rush of endorphins and blood and salt on your lips but it ends too soon and you can’t stop.

Blame It on the Ones Who Made Us Hannah Susman

There is no self in sickness, it is a self of its own.

It scoops you up and runs away with your heart, and within a blink it has stretched you miles from where you thought you were, until your exhausted muscle and blood-filled lungs won’t hope to keep up.

But there is no self in sickness, and it only does what it knows how.

It lives its life of arresting and failing, for you, oblivious and loyal, devoted to pump it’s beats of pain because you keep asking it to and what choice does it have?

It was made like this without a yes or a no, made to bring you down twice and to knot up your lungs, made to carry you through nineteen years of strong life.

So how can you blame someone who was made like this?

Because there is no self in sickness, it is a self of its own.

67

Precipitate Kelly Carroll

Humidity hung rank over the skyline, tinted by the sunset that leaked around the edges of the skyscrapers and stained the world a deep, fluorescent orange.

Fire alarms from a dorm nearby shrieked over the tops of looming distant thunderclouds, pinked and oranged and yellowed by the slow trickle of sunset light through the dense air.

The flashes of the fire alarms’ lights struck like clockwork lightning, just out of sync with each other and just in sync with the beating hearts of the students as they milled around the doors of their hall.

But one girl – woman, really, just barely eighteen – waited a safe distance away, raising her eyes to the orange-grey sky and the streaks of clouds that scuppered away on the winds before they could be understood.

She stood and stared upward, not minding the senseless cacophony of lights and shrieks and chatter and heat that pressed inward on the group.

Everyone else stared in, watching for the last flash of light, the last shriek, as she looked skyward to the heavy clouds and waited for the rain.

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Untitled (hands) Beverly Morabito

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Staff Co-Editors Miriam Cone Courtney Justus

Design and Proofreading Chair: Faith Poynor Committee: Eleanor Gilbert Angel Lozano Emily Taylor Advertising Chair: Emily Lupo Committee: Jo Suarez Amelia Mundell Beverly Morabito Andrea Oranday Event Planning Chair: Danyal Tahseen Committee: Samantha Ortiz Emily Bourgeois Natalie Carrier

Dear Readers, Every year, The Trinity Review aims to publish work that expands the perspective of those who read and look upon it. We are eternally grateful for all the support we have received in the creation of this year’s magazine.

We would like to thank the English department and staff for their support, in particular: Ruby Contreras, Casey Fuller, Kelly Grey Carlisle, Andrew Porter, Jennifer Browne, Andrew Kraebel, and Claudia Stokes.

Thank you to our magazine staff for helping to plan events that bring the campus community together to appreciate art and writing, while also putting together the magazine. We are extremely grateful for your hard work.

Finally, thank you to everyone who donated to The Trinity Review or supported this organization in some way. Your support means the world to us, and we could not publish this magazine without you.

Sincerely, Co-Editors Courtney Justus and Miriam Cone 2016 - 2017