Issue 29, Fall 2022

Cover Art Landscape

by Laila Brustin ’25

Land Acknowledgement

We acknowledge that Wellesley College is built on ancestral and traditional land of the Massachusett people. We also recognize that the United States’ removal, termination, and assimilation policies and practices resulted in the forced settlement of Indigenous lands and the attempted erasure of Indigenous cultures and languages. We further acknowledge the oppression, injustices, and discrimination that Indigenous people have endured and that there is much work to be done on the important journey to reconciliation. We commit to strengthen our understanding of the history and contemporary lives of Indigenous peoples and to steward this land.

We further recognize the many Indigenous people living here today—including the Massachusett, Wampanoag, and Nipmuc nations—who have rich ancestral histories in Wellesley and its surrounding communities. Today, their descendants remind us that they are still here, where they maintain a vital and visible presence. We honor and respect the enduring relationship between these peoples and this land, as well as the strength of Indigenous culture and knowledge, the continued existence of tribal sovereignty, and the principle of tribal self-determination.

However, Starr thought the real magic was the millions of tiny unpoppable bubbles within the grease. She could remember her mother parting her hair as gently as the thick coils would allow. Then, untwisting the white top of the large container and dipping the tips of her fingers into the jar, and finally, spreading it on the parted hair again and again while braiding it into the style for that

from the heat, scared to be burned. It almost felt like a form of torture. Now, she’d give anything to go back to those moments and spend some time with her mother.

Starr glanced around the store, at all the options from the oils to the deep conditioners. Her mother may be gone but the memories they share live in the beauty supply store as her own slice of heaven.

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CW: Death

Opposites in Path

by Emily Levine ’24

noon.

You steal away to your room because you don’t go a day without wondering why God gave you this. What’s nostalgia if the memories get it wrong? Turn on the television. Lie down and remember that this isn’t your life. Turn over like that five dollar rotisserie chicken your mother bought at the supermarket. Most won’t understand the inner workings of hunger or feast. They thrift, but they don’t thrift for the same reasons. They want your struggles because struggle looks good for the season. Maybe if you gave them some they would get it. They would eat your chicken and stop pretending they too are hardened.

These kinder things will hold out for you. The setting sun will beckon the moon. The blanket will embrace you. The bed will lay you down at night. By daybreak, the sun will rise again on the Atlantic Ocean to remind me and you and all the rest that even the darkest parts of this life can be forgiven, so long as we let them.

Pinks: Dreaming

by Laila Brustin ’25

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by Kiki Chen

’23

[Dall·E is a powerful machine learning model developed by OpenAI that generates images from natural language inputs. When you first join, you have 50 free credits (inputs) to use in a month, and 15 every month after.]

Anything you can imagine, and everything you can’t...

> Capybara riding yellow stripe surfboard on 16mm film

> Olympic sprinter racing meteor in Times Square

> Tech billionaire with lobster eyebrows oil painting

> Instagram influencer in Wisconsin suburb kitchen

> Photo of 24 ballerinas in an aquarium

Dall·E, please show me a shrimp drinking a cocktail of your choice

> Cannonball jump off of the Ship of Theseus drawing

> The perfect water bottle impressionism style

> The Apollo Theater full of monkeys from the pov of monkey in seat A46

> Pulp fiction book cover of a grapefruit in the shape of a couch

Dall·E, show me an image of my mother’s love

> Movie poster of a cowboy ninja on a mountain eating broccoli

> Squirrel doing math in old wooden library pixel art

> Renaissance portrait of a giraffe in a leather jacket green background

> The 6th stage of grief on Shiba Inu face digital art

Dall·E, please-

Think of all the images you have just imagined. Isn’t your mind better than any machine? No! You couldn’t really “see” them. You need technology to show you what your mind can only approach.

Dall E, please show me something real. Please show me something real. Please show me something-

CW: assimilation and depictions of subtle racism, internalized cisheteronormativity, hopsitalization

her a doll that opened in half to swallow the small one she had been given. The new doll was painted in clean colors. Round rosy cheeks. Neat black braids. Warm eyes. The girl wore the face of her new doll to their relatives’ Chinese New Year party. The aunties and uncles went around and around her, complimenting her manners, giving her hongbao, and asking her mother for parenting advice. Her mother smiled graciously to the side, subtly pushing the girl forward to

middle school, she tweaked and brushed up her face, adding a ponytail there, a touch of glitter there, and ear piercings as soon as she was old enough. She made sure that her face was one that all the girls in the grade wanted to copy.

By the first day of high school, the girl had mastered her old face and knew she was in a perfect position to reinvent herself with a new one. She spent an entire day making a Pinterest board of Instagram

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models and dresses from fashion magazines. She spent another entire day meticulously painting the individual strands of blonde hair and the shine of her pink lip gloss. She completed the look with an effortless crewneck. But high school wasn’t like middle school, and the girl found herself straddling two worlds. She wanted to be popular, the type of adventurousness that drew white boys and girls to her. In those dizzying moments when she danced in the club they snuck into, she felt loose and free—that she could be wild haired and boyish like the cartoon characters that tumbled across her childhood screen. In the emptiness of the club bathroom, the girl’s hands trembled when she redid her makeup, struggling to reign back that longing to be a boy, that synonymy of bodily freedom that she had buried for so long in her little nested heart. That antonym of her.

The girl wanted to be popular, but her mother expected her to be perfect—perfect grades, perfect achievements, perfect college admissions. The girl wanted those things too, and her mother’s happiness had always been contagious in their single-parent household. She spent months and months and months adding to the perfect face to present on her college applications. The girl learned to shuffle faces between the different commitments she balanced, one for home and one for school, one for her white friends and one for her friends of color, one for her classmates and one for admission officers. She switched

between her faces so relentlessly that she never looked in the mirror anymore. It was easier to cover up one tear-ruined face with another face than to spend the precious breathless time redoing it. All the girl wanted was her future. Away. Free. A faraway white light that would awash her whole. A white light, glaring instead of gently, did awash her when she woke up in the hospital. She heard, rather than saw, her mother crying. Her mother had not cried once, not even when her father loomed over them. Her mother, who was tightlipped and striking in her silence, gasped like a dying fish on the chair beside her hospital bed. The girl was reminded of the breaths she had swallowed in her childhood and still held. She turned away—she could not face her mother. On the table beside her was her nesting doll, all the faces cracked beyond repair. For the first time in years, the girl glimpsed the unpainted wood beneath it all. She reached out. Unsteadily she picked up that neglected heart and cradled it to her chest. She nested around herself, and around her, the girl felt her mother give her the first hug she remembered.

Following page, CW: Arachnophobia, Entomophobia

Human Crimes

by Li Yin ’26

In the corner, the Parisian rocking horse my dad gave me still creaked with the breeze, an indelible glint in its emerald eye

I sleep talked to myself and we both agreed

Non-life converted to mind, how comforting we were then and now

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by Hunter Dodrill ’23

And when I look back at the photo that is supposed to be the best memory of our young lives, all I see is my own shadow scattered among the broken mirror I call family.

Can the ghost see itself? Can shadow illuminate the blackest night? Can my nightmares be outrun in an endless maze of my own reflection?

In these years of this thing we try to call life, I have been desperate to hold myself but — there is something inside me. like ticking time bomb. like broken glass. like minefield. like war. war. war.

How can I hold myself without touching my chest, without feeling the very body I have depended on for every breath? I am allergic to my own skin and the doctors send me away to find my own answers in the bottom of bottles and in the glassy stares of people who cannot even seem to spit up my own name.

Pain only becomes unbearable when the end is in sight and you realize that the distance from a self to call home is infinitely further than you could have ever imagined. So long the light doesn’t reach. So long the screams don’t echo. So long they’ll never find you here. So long they’ll forget who you are and go looking for the wrong person. once. was. were.

In the last moment of our time together, I hug you tighter to remember the semblance of love. When I pull back, or you pull away, or maybe both or neither or maybe it was the wind — your eyes are closed, and now I know what I always knew — you have never really seen me at all.

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Courage

by Bell Beecher Pitkin ’23

by Madison Courtney ’25

ginning to cling to skin and fill lungs with its warm, wet air. As she ran, sweat cooled her sprinting form as wind rushed over her skin. The mud caked on her legs, once dry and cracked, began running down in rivulets onto starch white socks rolled below the ankle.

The run home had given her time to plan an excuse for her mother.

The girl didn’t like to lie. She hardly ever thought to do so of her own volition, but sometimes she had to change what happened enough to keep Mama from thinking she told lies. She couldn’t stand it when Mama would call her a liar,

wasn’t her crick anymore.

The girl had never had felt the weight of being somewhere unknown. Ev erywhere she went was somewhere she’d already been. Here the tall grass obscuring her from the road wasn’t hers as it had been earlier up the bank. The trees here weren’t hers either.

The girl carefully considered her feet sinking into the mud.

Here the water was stagnant and black. The mosquitoes swarmed thick. She must have wandered too far.

The girl tried to take in the scen ery again; things tended to look different at

dusk.Things didn’t grow legs and disappear. Her trees had to be here still, her grass too. She clambered up out of the crick once she could convince herself these gnarled roots were the same ones she’d held to get out of the crick before, and the tree-framed path to Main Street well–worn from her feet.

Her mother’s strict curfew seemed more benevolent as she traveled the familiar road with the weight settled in

The tall stalks had swayed in the wind as long as she’d remembered walking alongside them. Her older brothers worked them each summer harvesting field peas. They got nickels on the dime, but she was always impressed with her older brothers’ measly earnings. Once, she had followed her brothers onto the vast stretch of field

To be fair, Mama had whooped her more than once every week this year for coming home in the dark. Even though Mama would employ a switch with gusto, the girl never saw her mother’s face all twisted up. No, her voice stayed sugar sweet, reminding her how much she loved her sweet girl and couldn’t stand what she was doing.

Neither of them would waver. The girl would play, and Mama would sit and wait for her to come home.

Going home she could see their porch light from halfway down Main, but the kitchen’s glow was only evident when standing seconds from clearing the door. There would be just enough light to see the tilt in Mama’s lips when the girl came home, just enough for them to regard each other. Mama always looked like she was planning what to do about her, a child so free in a world so closed off to her.

“Baby, I don’t want to see you over that way ever again,” her voice was tender, but her eyes were dark. Nevertheless, whenever the girl bounded up the steps, she would open the backdoor to Mama sitting there, awake, watching the clock above the kitchen sink with her face illuminated by kitchen light. Lips tilted.

As she ran her steps echoed, sounding more like a wild chase than a mad dash to the safety of the porch. Accompanied by the sound of her own fast pants filling the night. She slowed her steps until she came to a complete stop. The bugs she’d been dutifully warding away were gone. She didn’t remember when running became more important than flailing her arms, but the constant itch on her skin evaded her. Not even a subtle breeze in the trees. She put her ear to the night and heard nothing. The pervasive roar of cicadas, constant music of crickets, and the swish of wind through fall the wellesley review

the trees had evaporated. The loss of sight and sound glued her to where she stood. The night had died.

In its place sat a silence so deep it settled like a weight on her chest. Protecting the quiet from even her bated breath. She stared into the darkness feeling only her feet on the ground until she felt the exhale of a whisper, gossamer soft.

“When the stillness comes,”

With a loud exhale she dropped to her knees. Then she heard it again, so quiet she almost mistook it for her catching breaths. A voice that trailed off into oblivion no matter how much she strained her ear. She stood and spun slowly to search for the source of the voice, still unsure it wasn’t her imagination. Sounds of the night slowly returned, and it called to her again, this time melding with the crickets hum and the cicadas’ chirp.

“When stillness comes, we,”

She made out the direction of the voice, and when she turned her body towards the faint sound The Fields were before her. Even in the dark, she could

here,”

Its timbre was indulgent. A low, rumbling call that placed her mother’s warnings out of mind. The white flowers on the field pea plant began to cut through the dark, and she waded through the constellation that their petals formed, mesmerized by the night’s sudden turn to whimsy. She didn’t see the stars in the sky blink away. Taking tentative steps, she followed the petals’ glow while reaching down to run her fingers through the brush. The leaves and vines cascaded over her fingertips like running water, and soon she stood in the middle of a vast sea in bloom, turning in a slow circle to take in the expanse. When she came to a stop, a warm, familiar hand was on her neck; her mother’s hand. It had the same calluses and divots from years of housework, the same metal ring that Daddy wore, warm from her body temperature.

It was Mama’s hand — but it rose the bumps on her neck, and she’d dare not

Mixed Media on Canvas (2022)

by Elizabeth Chou ’26

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grieving godless guilted & gutted I scrub myself clean like goodest girls do so that I may be raw enough for love songs and poetry in which I am a being, meaning meandering for meaning, understood as misunderstood, but speaking well, doing fine today, thanks.

someday, there will be no shore to walk to with dead mothers and almost fathers, or anyone else in my great insignificant life. someday, I will melt, and that flood of tears I once knew my explanations & carcasses, will cry into a river all over me, veins ablaze in white heat rapids, feet floundered alive, kicking, swimming, sunk, a cleansed body bubbled aflame.

I will be nothing but matter, Mother, Father— and those things you told me to hold onto in your well meaning miseries and fish bowl fuck-ups have already proved themselves soluable, solved. see, the sea provides to those knowing enough to embrace her, brave enough to trust her, kind enough to love her. in the blood-water thick, I close my eyes. the rain is warm & patient. present, I am here.

by

here we are where heaven meets earth

Bell Beecher Pitkin ’23

by Anna Kraffmiller ’24

CW: mentions of homophobic violence, HIV/AIDS, discussion of death and dead bodies

December 1984

She didn’t know how it had played out: she’d been in the office tabulating expenses, her boss greeting the mourners in the foyer. She just heard shouting and came running; just saw Robert’s short, stocky brother punch a tall, longhaired man; just saw that the man didn’t pick a fight but retreated. And then Sheena told Mr. Arden she was taking a smoke break. Now she was here.

“I’m sorry,” she said, then, “I’m Sheena.”

“Javier,” he replied, a little nasally. “Javier,” she repeated. “Nice to meet you.”

He didn’t hold out his hand to shake. Thank God.

He really didn’t look sick. He looked like a normal man, tall and broad and a little paunchy around the middle, a little older than Sheena, than Robert (she had discovered when formatting his prayer card, they were the same age, twenty-seven.) He looked like he might have a black eye by tomorrow. Sheena didn’t think he looked like a homosexual, but she supposed she wouldn’t

know.

“Is it broken?” Sheena asked. She stuck a hand in the pocket of her skirt, fiddled with two pieces of paper.

“Can’t be.” Removing the hand that was pinching the bridge of his nose, Javier gave a testing wiggle of his head. He took another Kleenex from the pack and discreetly spat into it. Sheena did a bad job pretending not to cringe, and Javier did a bad job pretending not to notice. He lifted his head, squared his shoulders, ran his fingers through his hair. “He punches like he’s from Greenwich, Connecticut,” said Javier, with a clearly-false confidence that Sheena let herself believe anyway. “He wouldn’t have broken my nose.”

Sheena, despite herself, snickered. Javier held out the pack of Kleenex to her. There was a long, dark smear of blood on his sleeve, clinging wetly to his wrist.

“Oh, no,” Sheena said. “You keep it. Like I said, I’ve got a million of those kicking around.”

He nodded slowly, then faster, like he was returning to his body, remembering himself. He muttered a curt “Thanks,” shrugged on his jacket, checked his watch, then let out a long breath between his teeth.

“Train to catch?” Sheena asked, which was a dumb question. She was the one who had followed him to the goddamn train station.

“Not till three-fifty,” he said, digging in his jacket pocket for a hairband, gathering his hair into a ponytail at the nape of his neck. “Fucking local.”

“The off-peak schedule blows,” she commiserated, fishing in her purse for her lighter and her Marlboro Lights. There were only two left. She stuck one between her lips and then offered the pack to Javier, whose hand hovered in hesitation for a moment before he acquiesced and took the last one. Sheena crushed the cardboard in her fist.

She didn’t hand him her lighter. She stepped closer and lit his cigarette for him, holding her breath until the flame took and she retreated again.

Javier turned his head to blow his smoke away from her. The light slanting under the overpass was dishwatery pale, the sun already sinking towards the horizon, carving his drawn, hangdog face in two. He took his first long drag, then a second, then a third, all without breaking the hard set of his jaw. He smoked fast--like he was racing against time. Then he cleared his throat and asked, “You work at the funeral home?”

Sheena nodded.

He glanced at her for one brief moment, then directed his eyes firmly at the street. “I didn’t mean any trouble.”

“Oh,” said Sheena, “oh, I wasn’t—

that’s not—” Did he think she chased him down for—what, an apology? “I just wanted to make sure you were all right.”

His brow furrowed and he looked like he was maybe about to say something, but at that moment the express train trundled through overhead, drowning out any hope of conversation. Sheena looked across the street, at one the tree still stubbornly hanging on to its red, red leaves, to have anywhere to look but directly at Javier.

“So did you . . . ” His voice was tight. He cleared his throat. Sheena returned her gaze to him as he stuck his cigarette in his mouth then appeared to think better of it.

“Did you see him?”

“Robert?” Sheena asked and immediately felt stupid for asking. “I did. I, uh, you know. Worked on him.”

The half an inch of ash hanging from Javier’s cigarette trembled. The only part of him that was uncontrolled.

He hadn’t made it into the viewing room, she realized. He hadn’t seen Robert.

There was silence that Sheena felt like she should fill: “He . . .” But then she found she didn’t have anything to say, not that she could say to Javier. “He looks peaceful,” she said, as honestly as she could.

Sheena didn’t normally assist with embalming. Mr. Arden usually enlisted John or Raymond, his nephews, to join him in the sterile room. But Sheena had gone to mortuary school, same as John and Raymond, so, last week, when both of them refused to touch Robert’s body—the AIDS body,

something,tight. it.uh,

as they so tactfully called him—Mr. Arden turned to her in desperation.

She’d taken a cigarette break with Raymond at one point and he’d said, rather sheepishly, that really, the family should have just agreed to cremate him. “I mean,” he said, “it’s pretty selfish of them, isn’t it? To make us embalm him, and then have a viewing, when we don’t even know … No one knows, you know?”

Sheena had nodded along. Raymond was inelegant, but he was right. Sheena didn’t know if it was safe to touch him; Mr. Arden didn’t know; surely not even the CDC knew. She considered telling Mr. Arden she wouldn’t do it; that she was sorry, but she couldn’t risk it. But then, maybe because she did not remember Mr. Arden ever being as adamant about anything as he was about ensuring Robert was embalmed—or maybe because she simply wanted to use the degree she’d paid for against all her parents’ objections—she went through with it. Donned all the protective gear. Entered the sterile room.

On the embalming table, Robert looked so small. Pale as a ghost, jaundiced around the eyes, skeletally thin, and pockmarked from head to toe with scaly purplish lesions like a leper. He must have been small in life—his frame was short and slight to begin with—but, in illness, he had wasted away to nothing.

“I’m sorry,” Sheena found herself saying. “That you didn’t get to see him again.”

Javier gave a curt nod. He was

smoking fast and watching the empty road blankly, clenching his jaw very tight. It was a posture Sheena had recognized; had seen many times before: that of a man who didn’t want to cry.

“Were you, uh—” She stumbled on the phrasing. “Were you and Robert, uh, together? For a long time?”

Javier didn’t respond for a few breaths, and Sheena didn’t breathe at all, horrified she’d misstepped, or somehow misread. He tapped his cigarette with one finger, letting off a tiny orange spark that floated in the dry air like a sprite for the briefest of moments before blinking out.

“Six years,” he finally said. “Give or take.”

“Oh,” Sheena said. She had been the one to send the obituary Robert’s family drafted to the papers—the Stamford Advocate, Greenwich Time—and it had not escaped her that although Robert died at twenty-seven, the most recent event mentioned was his graduation from Vassar in ’79. No job or career was mentioned, no hobbies, and certainly no Javier.

“I’m sorry,” said Sheena. Javier kept smoking and said nothing.

Six years wasn’t a very long time, Sheena supposed, not in the grand scheme of things. In her line of work, she saw seventy-, eighty-, even ninety-year-olds, who left behind marriages that had lasted the better part of a century. But Sheena herself

had never been with anyone for six years. Her longest relationship had lasted six months, and that was when she waited tables and went out with a line cook. She was sure she wouldn’t cry at his wake.

“We met at Vassar,” volunteered Javier. “I was a senior when he was a freshman. We didn’t start dating then, but…” A wry little smirk twisted his features, a memory resurfacing, as he sheepishly said, “We copy edited for the school paper together.”

Sheena snickered. “Cute.”

Javier’s smile widened despite himself. “Listen,” he said. “Listen.”

It was the kind of detail you wanted to read in an obituary. Sweet and elucidating. Sheena pictured Javier with a red pencil behind his ear, and Robert—healthy Robert, brown-eyed and apple-cheeked— correcting someone’s spelling or moving a misplaced comma.

Javier dropped his cigarette butt on the pavement, stamping out the last of the flame with his heavy boot. “I should probably—” He gestured vaguely behind him toward the stairs up to the platform.

“Right. Of course.” Sheena copied him, and checked her watch. Robert’s viewing hours would end at four; it was threeforty-five now—if she took her time, she might avoid seeing Robert’s family again altogether. She wasn’t sure she could manage it—being cordial.

“Thank you for . . .”

“Of course.”

They were at an impasse, each lin-

gering, neither willing to be the first to turn around, to head back where they came. Sheena stuck one hand in the pocket of her skirt and realized what it was she had in there. Two prayer cards. One for an old woman, and one, yes—Robert’s. His college senior portrait. His full name, complete with two middles. The dates of his life. On the reverse, Psalm 23. Sheena smoothed out a corner that had folded. Javier had not made it into the viewing room.

“Here.”

Javier stared at the card for a long moment. And then he took it, with two hands, as if it was holy. His Adam’s apple bobbed in his throat, and he opened his mouth as if to speak, but nothing came out.

“The Willowbrook Cemetery,” she found herself saying, without realizing she meant to. “Out in Westport. That’s where he’ll be. Take the New Haven line to Green’s Farms. It’s a fifteen minute walk.”

Javier swallowed. “Okay,” he said hoarsely.

He had tried so desperately not to cry in front of her earlier. And she had nothing more to say. So Sheena murmured a goodbye, turned around, and started back to the funeral home, leaving Javier under the overpass.

The unabridged version of this prose can be found at thewellesleyreview.org

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Plotting Flight

by ZZ ’24

Knife Forest

by ZZ ’24

Feeling Blue

by Emma Sullivan ’24

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Feeling Blue

by Emma Sullivan ’24

by Sarahi Lopez ’25

CW: Blood, gore, needle, knife

Her eyes snapped open. She looked down at herself, examining her body quickly. Only three slashes across her torso, surface scratches on her arms. The blood had long dried, the thin gown stuck to the wounds at odd concave angles. Tentatively, she wriggled her fingers, testing control over her limbs. With some effort, she bent her elbows, hands slowly reaching for her own throat. She touched it tenderly at first, searching for any broken skin. Finding nothing but unnaturally cold flesh, she pressed harder, hands trailing up to her cheeks and down over her chest, hovering right above the first stain. Brushing her fingers over her clothes and pressed down, expecting a jolt of pain to shoot through her. She felt nothing. No pain, that is. Strange. She could feel the jagged ridges of the wound—layers of skin one shouldn’t be acquainted with. Her fingers slipped through the opening, touching bone, likely her first couple ribs. There was a viscous layer of tissue cushioning parts of her exposed skeleton; if she pushed deeper in she would be able to wrap her hands around her desiccated intestines or scratch her nails down her vertebrae. As she withdrew, her

wrists brushed against the rips in her gown that gave way for that knife to go straight through her, and back. Again. And again. She blinked rapidly trying to send away the feelings of intrusion. Sitting up, she finally looked around. She was laying on a bare hard surface. There was nothing else in the room but a closed closet, a mirror, and a door. Surgically clean. Swinging her legs over the side, she looked down at her feet. They were pale, nearly blue. Furrowing her brows, she stood on shaky limbs and braced herself on the slab before striding toward the mirror.

What a mess, she thought. In the mirror, she could see there was a rolling cart sitting right behind her that she hadn't noticed before. Examining the contents of the first drawer, she found a needle and a thread and got to work. She should’ve been revolted at the notion, but it wasn’t like there was any matter in her cavity to spill out of her throat. Twenty three stitches later, she'd found some dark rouge in the next drawer, dabbing it to her shriveled lips. She found pink powder, which she applied with feather-like

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touches across her eyelids, for such dehydrated skin would tear easily. Then, a tube of mascara that seemed familiar. Maybe she had owned some. Fanning her eyes, she turned to the closet, hoping that the last piece of her was in there. Opening the door, her mouth cracked as her lips formed a smile: a red dress with long, delicate sleeves, and in her size. Perfect. The wounds may as well have been invisible and her face had some color now, however artificial. She looked alive. Climbing back on the skeletal bed, she crossed her arms over her chest, and closed her eyes.

The mortician was late the next morning. He walked into his working room and found the corpse already dressed and ready for the casket. This puzzled him for a moment before realizing he'd seen his assistant's car parked outside. He ought to bring him some coffee next time if he continues to begin working so early. Shaking his head, he moved on to the next cadaver.

nose as he enters through our narrow Scrawled in a cruel, ugly, heartless scribble are Two Words.

CW: racism, blood, slurs

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Emily in Black

by Dan Calderon ’24

shut my eyes tight, those Two Words echo over and over and over in the walls of my head: “Die, Jap!”

Day after day the echoes get louder and stronger. I muster all my strength to contain them, but there’s no use. The echoes have multiplied to the thousands. I stand by helplessly as they tear through the walls of my brain, as they seep through every crack, through every door frame, and overflow our already too-small apartment We keep our windows closed and our blinds shut. “Don’t open the door,” my

One night, a loud banging on our door forces us all awake. Mother scurries to the door, my siblings and I close behind. Father rushes into the closet where the echoes can’t reach him. The two men at the door ransack our home. They throw our rice bowls on the ground and clatter our chopsticks on the floor.

“Where’s the Jap?” The men’s voices echo through our home.

I shut my eyes tight. Maybe if I unread those words I can force the echoes back into my head. But it’s too late. They are already out.

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behind.

The men take Father and as they leave, give one last dirty glance to our neatly lined shoes in the entryway.

”

“Why didn’t they take you too?” I asked my grandmother.

She pursed her lips. “My siblings and I were spared because our mother was American.”

I was confused because I remembered her telling me that her father was a

well-respected professor at the local university.

I was confused because he had lived in the U.S. for 30 years before they took him away.

I was confused because, “well, wasn’t he an ‘American’ too?”

Jacaranda

by Amelia A. Clark ’25

The Garage

by Maya Gurewitz ’26

Ummaya, let’s play hooky so i can keep arms wrapped around your bony shoulders, Ummaya, let’s go back to when you zigzagged our cart through the supermarket

But I can’t. No matter what, when I feel the top of my head it is wet with raindrops. My clothes are drenched. As my pockets fill with water and my feet sink into the wet marsh that is the sole of my shoe, I’m reminded of the weight that reality

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1.

She was found ankles-deep in the river: wet pants bunched up and sticking to her calves, brown eyes wide, a dirt-smeared face cradling a frog. It was dead, mouth gaping open and limp. Her hands raised like a prayer and feet shifting nervously in the snow-water from cold—

I was trying to kiss him, she said. Am I in trouble? she sniffled. I grabbed him too hard an’ all his guts fell out. I didn’t mean to.

She moved her hand. The frog’s corpse flopped to the side like a rubber toy muddy water escaping the mouth and flailing in the air. Can you fix him?

2.

Later in the evening bare feet crept out the back door with Granmama’s cookie-sewing-magic tin and found the grey rock that marked the patch of fresh earth where they’d buried him.

She’d sew him back together, she imagined, giddily victorious with childish glee, and dug out the dirt with a trowel until his small webbed hand waved at her.

She almost couldn’t find the eye of the needle in the dark but eventually with enough fiddling the thread — green-grey, like her little friend — went through. His skin was tougher than it looked and she jabbed twice before it went through on one side and then out the other. Crude stitches forcing his mouth together so the cotton she’d stuffed inside couldn’t

Expectantly she waited for life to return.

But the last of the sunset disappeared.

In desperation she pressed her lips twice against the stitched-up mouth and then once on the top of the head. He tasted like dirt.

Deciding the process needed more fermentation, she stuffed him into the pocket of her overalls and padded back home. In the small cluster of her royal court she gave him the seat of honor in between Mr. Snuggles and Velveteen Rabbit. He looked out of place next to their pristine pink fur but she’d give him a bath tomorrow in the sink or let him use the shower if he asked, politely.

It was then, exhausted, she fell asleep dreaming of her overnight prince.

Mama con su Retrato (Futoros Mezclados) ´

by Dan Calderon ’24

Twitter Psychic

by Emma Sullivan ’24

looks into the themes of lineage, mixed

The Garage pg. 49 (oil pastel drawing, 2021) I primarily am a digital photographer, and

the wellesley review

mostly work in digital mediums. However, “The Garage” is an oil pastel recreation of a photo I took and edited while hanging out with friends in one of their garages.

Emily Levine ’24

Opposites in Path (photography, 2022) pg. 10

I spent one of my summer photo excursions on Coney Island, basking in the early morning sun and the late afternoon glow. “Opposites in Path” was taken on site at the 40th annual Mermaid Parade. Needless to say, there were many characters crossing paths.

Bell Beecher Pitkin ’23 here we are where heaven meets earth (wet-plate photography, 2022) pg. 31, Courage (wet-plate photography, 2022) pg. 22

I am a multimedia artist who works primarily in photography. Recently, I have been utilizing process-intensive, wet-plate photographic methods to explore themes of identity, memory, and place.

Emma Sullivan ’24

Twitter Psychic (collage, 2022) pg. 55 “Twitter Psychic” is the vision board for a poem that was later compiled using words from the Terms of Service and advertising from the app Co-Star’s website. My work as a poet and visual artist is in conversation with automation and how it impacts our relationships to our creative brains and our expectations of them.

Feeling Blue (acrylic paintings, 2022) pg. 39, 40

Images are an excerpt from an artist book and series of acrylic paintings: Feeling Blue, a recounting of Wellesley’s summer landscape. For more information and images from the series, please visit emmasophiasullivan.com

Li Yin ’26

Stampede (screen print, 2019) pg. 20

I rode horses in Western and English styles, training, taking care of, or going horse packing with a number of these wonderful animals. I designed this print as a tribute to the five horses that I love interacting with; each of them has a special place in my heart.

Human Crimes (digital art, 2022) pg. 17, 18 This pair of paintings express my reflection that the pandemic is a mirror, revealing kindness and compassion, but selfishness and hatred too. Authorities hide the truth to save face, governments twist facts to support political campaigns, people confront each other with discrimination and violence. The two characters can be interpreted as the human race, the insects as the world we live in. As the people devour their respective bugs, they gradually melt into pandemonium.

ZZ ’24

Plotting Flight (acrylic on paper, 2022) pg. 36, Knife Forest (acrylic on paper, 2022) pg. 37

Paintings allow a coded way to communicate. “Plotting Flight” is to Stella Lee.

Layout Editors

Lorena Horng ’25 Gabriella Olavarría ’25 Sylvie Shaya ’26

Art Editors

Rory Conlin ’25 Jen Doyle ’25

Poetry Editors

Shelby Ferris ’25 Jacqueline Roderick ’23

Prose Editors

Charnell Jones ’23 Riya Sama ’25

Art Board

Davis Anderson ’26

Juno Appel-Riehle ’25 Amelia Clark ’25 Addie Craig ’25 Annabelle Derrick ’25 Quinn Etoll ‘23 Kara Lloyd Jenkins ’24 Margot Maqinge Lang ’26 Emily Levine ’24 Ange Li ’24 Marietta Lochner De Castro ’26 Emma Meyers ’26

Roxie Miles ’23 Treya Pember ’25 Blythe Terry ’23 Clara Tessier ’25 Nimisha Venkataramani ’26 Shreya Venkataramani ’26 Abi Winer ’26 Yutong Wu ’26 Sophia Xin ’26 Nicole Zhu ’26

Poetry Board

Maheen Haq ’24 Dan Lu ’26 Diana Padrón ’24 Ana Paku ’26 Cheryl Wang ’23 Anna Wong ’26 Emilie Zhang ’24

Prose Board

Shelby Ferris ’25 Anastasia Kondrashin ’23 Ali Kyrouz ‘25 Ange Li ’24 Emma McNulty ’26 Diana Padrón ’24 Lillian Phillips ’25 Claudia Quintana ’25 Jacqueline Roderick ’23

With special thanks to Wellesley College Printing Services & the Wellesley College Art and English departments.

Please send submissions to thewellesleyreview@gmail.com All works are selected through an anonymous submission process. Submissions are open to Wellesley students, facutly, and alumnx. For more information, please visit www.thewellesleyreview.org