THE WELLESLEY REVIEW Poetry | Art | Prose
MASTHEAD Editors-in-Chief Elle Friedberg ’17 Emily Frisella ’16 Rachel Pak ’18 Poetry Editors Jay Fickes ’18 Laura Mayron ’16 Poetry Board Lara Brennan ’18 Katie Hoeflinger ’19 Sydney Hopper ’19 Sarah Hucklebridge ’17 Angela Kim ’18 Mahnoor Mirza ’18 Melanie Passaretti ’18 Hannah Schmidt ’18 Prose Editors Elizabeth Engel ’18 Lori Rash ’16 Prose Board Kele Alfred-Igbokwe ’19 Emma Bilbrey ’18 Lara Brennan ’18 Lucy Cranston ’19 Shannon Dennehy ’19 Angela Kim ’18 Hope Kim ’18 Laura Maclay ’18 Radhika Menon ’19 Mahnoor Mirza ’18 Noor Pirani ’19 Roz Rea ’19 Krithika Sivaramakrishnan ’18 Ruby Smith ’16 Carly Sprague ’19 Victoria Uren ’17 Jane Vaughan ’18 Sarah White ’19 Alyssa Woodruff ’19
Art Editors Rachael Hwang ’19 Emily Liao ’19 Layout Editor Noor Pirani ’19 Assistant Layout Editor Sabrina Holland ’18 Social Media & Events Chair Audrey Fok ’18 Treasurer Emma Bilbrey ’18 Founding Editor Sumitra Chakraborty ’08 Cover Design Samantha English ’19
Please send submissions to thewellesleyreview@gmail. com. Art must be submitted as a high-quality photograph. Poetry, fiction, and nonfiction submissions should be sent as Word documents. All works are selected though an anonymous submission process. Submissions during the 2015-2016 publication cycle are open to Wellesley students, alums, and affiliates. For more information, visit us at www.thewellesleyreview.org
Contents Raspberry Preserves
9
For S.E.
10
Abbie Burrus ’19
A Moment in Time
12
Anna Hudelson ’19
Footsteps from Below
13
Elle Friedberg ’17
The Hill
14
Emma Bilbrey ’18
Gannet Peak, WY 13,809’
17
Samantha Brown ’16
Magic Card Guy
18
Violet Kozloff ’17
El Sur
24
Laura Mayron ’16
Voyage
25
Megan Stormberg ’18
Sete Dias com Maria
26
Maria Cristina Fernandes ’16
A Day in the Life
28
Alison Savage ’17
Twenty Pesos
29
Wenbo Bai ’16
Look to the Waters
34
Nadine Franklin ’18
Opia
35
Caroline Arnold ’16
A Color Study
36
Victoria Yan Uren ’17
Chinatown Chandelier
38
Elle Friedberg ’17
Voyage
39
Megan Stormberg ’18
Figures
40
Lucy Cranston ’19
Caroline Arnold ’16
Little Lies
43
Izzy King ’18
Sirens
45
Emma Bilbrey ’18
Three Soundscapes
46
Hanna Day-Tenerowicz ’16
Asclepias & Untitled
48
Isaac Zerkle ’18
Boston, Fourth of July
49
Megan O’Keefe ’16
Lamplight
50
AP ’14
Breakfast
52
Caroline Grassi ’18
Rules for Living in My Mother’s House
53
Kate Bussert ’16
Paper Forest
55
Caroline Arnold ’16
Jerusalem
56
Emily Neel ’18
“Blazing Summer, Cold Coffee/ Baby’s Gone, Do you Love Me?”
57
Anna Cauthorn ’19
Gallagh Man
59
Camille Bond ’17
Machine
61
Megan Stormberg ’18
Street Vendor in Maputo
62
Erika Haines ’10
My Mother, the Interpreter
63
Alessandra Saluti ’16
Fluid Series
64
Sarah Michelson ’18
White Elephant in the Room
67
Emily Moore ’18
Extended Deadline Night Before it’s Due
68
Aggie Rieger ’17
Raspberry Preserves
Caroline Arnold ’16
There are parts of me you will never see. They sit inside a glass jar like raspberry preserves, packed away where no one can reach.
9 Arnold
When you left, I picked up everything you ruined and placed it along my spine— the public library with the cracked roads the smell of incense MaryJanes Harold Maude Even after all this time, my tailbone still aches.
Poetry
I can be selfish because I know that people stain. If you share a song a story a book people will leave their fingerprints.
For S.E.
Abbie Burrus ’19 you will know her by the taste of typewriter ribbons in your mouth whenever her skirt brushes her knees just so (she is woman, but does not know it yet)
Poetry 10
her hands are small birds and mine are telephone lines and i wonder when she will land
Burrus
she is inked palm too‐heavy bookbag that looks like every place she dreams of being she is darkroom and i am trying to be red light i want to tuck letters in her windowsill to remind her: every sound her throat shudders out is a precious airwave she doesn’t know how to dance but she walks across the street like it’s the ocean,
the spine of her favorite book, something she forgot to put on her dresser
11 Burrus
i hope my crooked letters can hold that certain breath and curving lens of her as dearly as she deserves
Poetry
and i never remember how to say “please drink your tea bitter and keep telling stories of all the little voices�
Hudelson
A Moment in Time Anna Hudelson ’19 Reduction Relief Print Art
12
Friedberg
Art
Footsteps from Below Elle Friedberg ’17 Film Photography 13
The Hill
Emma Bilbrey ’18
Prose 14 Bilbrey
The hill in the backyard is steep. It slopes through the neighborhood, forming valleys. Past a cluster of oak trees on Franklin St., there is a row of duplexes. This is where the Jahanis, a large family of refugees, live. The eldest Jahani daughter is sixteen, and she remembers more than the others: not of the distant country where she was born, but of their childhood in Texas where her father’s lungs had withered away from cancer. Their house there was two hours away from the hospital where Mr. Jahani had received his treatments, and the backyard was flat. When they moved three states away to suburbia after the funeral, she was nine, already too old to experience the hill in the same way as her siblings. There are many things children can do on a steep hill. They can roll down the slope and race back up, or try to launch balls from the bottom to the top (always unsuccessful). The eldest daughter watches them from the porch, where she does her homework. Occasionally, she’s persuaded to join a game of tag, but more often is used only as a referee. The most terrifying thing a child can do is ride their bike down the hill. Everyone knows this, and the parents have implemented a strict rule that bikes can only be used in the front yards. She is sixteen. She is the oldest. She knows better. One good thing about being the oldest is that there’s no one who will stop her if she wants to. *** The hill in the backyard is steep. Mr. Hagey is divorced, and he works nights, so his next door neighbors, the Jahanis, often watch his two children. Money is tight one year when the fall sets in, so he walks door to door offering to mow lawns for five dollars an hour. The jobs he bags on the side of the street opposite his house are easy, so he often pockets only three or four dollars. The side of the street that lines the hill is a different story. It is almost impossible, despite his vitality, to mow the lawn of the hill. It is a precise job, moving from side to side, always fighting to keep
The hill in the backyard is steep. Mr. Stanley owns the duplexes here. His daughter, a twenty something addict with a kid and three dalmatians, lives in the unit where the hill peaks. One summer, Mr. Stanley buys his granddaughter an inflatable pool, and the men of the neighborhood set it up under the deck, a few feet from the top of the hill. The children are tentative at first. One of the Jahani children voices a valid concern—they’d been rolling up and down the grassy hill all afternoon, and grassy skin itches when it gets wet—but one by one they egg each other on into the lukewarm water, dirt sinking off their bodies to coat the white plastic bottom and blades of grass floating to the top. It happens so fast that no one fully pieces together what happened until hours later. A band-aid, the remnant of a finger prick at the doctor’s office the morning before, comes loose and floats to the surface of the pool, creating chaos as the kids splash it towards each other, screeching. Someone falls against the fragile plastic wall of the pool, already pulled taut by the weight of the water. The Hagey boy, perched precariously atop an inflatable ring from the dollar store that was too small for anyone, is suddenly swept away, carried by a gush of water as the wall momentarily buckles.
Prose
***
15 Bilbrey
the mower from toppling down. His daughter, excited to see him in his waking hours, hovers near the top of the hill when he finally mows their own lawn. She dotes on a skinny tree sent home from school two years ago to plant for Earth Day. For the first time this year, the tree has flowered, and now brown helicopter seed pods litter the grass all the way down the hill. She picks one up, thinking of the drawings in her science textbook at school that show how a small seed lays down roots and becomes a big tree. He is halfway down the hill when it happens, too quickly for him to react: brown curls darting in front of the mower, quick movement as she bends down to scoop up a lonely seed pod, just barely missing the cut of the blade as she moves back out the way. He yanks the power cord and the mower falls to the side, overbalanced. He whirls around, furious, to grab his startled daughter by the shoulder. “I’m s-sorry,” she stammers, surprised as he is by her own recklessness. “I was trying to save the seed.”
The adults, watching from the deck, shoot up from their seats, but it is too late to do anything. Half the children miss it, still screeching about the band aid. The boy shoots down the hill like a bullet, carried smoothly all the way down, dropping out of sight from the deck when he finally reaches the bottom. The adults beat the kids to him, bolting down the hill at a dangerous pace, calves burning as they work to keep traction, but before they even reach the bottom of the hill it is clear that their fears were misplaced. The boy is at the base of the hill, laid out on his back. He is stunned, but also clearly laughing, giddy from the adrenaline. ***
Prose 16 Bilbrey
By the time the next summer rolls around, the Hageys will move across town to be closer to the children’s mother. The daughter will remember her old neighborhood fondly, and many years later she will journey back again to check on her tree and visit her old neighbors. Many years later after that, once everyone, even Mr. Stanley, has moved away, the seed pods from the tree will have generated a small crop of trees, rendering the hill unplayable. The new families that live there drive their kids to the park instead. Unlike his sister, the Hagey son will be too young to remember much, but sometimes he will dream of his trip down the hill, headfirst, perched atop a flimsy inner tube, racing toward the bottom at a breakneck pace.
Art Brown
17
Gannet Peak, WY 13,809’ Samantha Brown ’16 Wood
Magic Card Guy Violet Kozloff ’17
Prose 18 Kozloff
Every Sunday morning, Davey and his father went for donuts. Donut Sundays were the only time Davey spent with his father alone, away from his mother and three older brothers. They’d done it every Sunday for the past two years, since Davey was twelve. While his mother taught private acting lessons in the living room, the two of them sought refuge in coffee and a Sunday morning donut. Between Davey and his father was an expansive, synthetic beige bench seat of his father’s sales van. Davey watched the iridescence on the upholstery quiver with Midwestern morning light as the car lolled over the speed bumps. The suburban sun slid through the side of the dashboard, lazily illuminating the cracks in the plastic. Sometimes the shine would shift in the same instant that Steve Miller slipped in from the radio static, and Davey’s lips would let out a sigh. What his father didn’t know was that Davey had smoked a joint before they got into the van today, as he had been doing every week for the past five Sundays. His father also didn’t know that Davey had been doing it to get over his Saturday night hangovers. He spent Saturday nights staying out long enough to sneak back through the window just before dawn. The weed helped settle his stomach and work up an appetite for the donuts. No matter how wrecked he was the night before, Davey never missed a Donut Sunday. It was on this particular Donut Sunday that his father taught him the Magic Card Guy trick. They pulled up into the donut shop parking lot, and Davey’s stomach could feel the van lurch as it bumped against the wheel stops. His father came around to Davey’s door and gave him a smug little grin through the still half-unrolled window, waiting there until Davey joined him. Leaning against a payphone, his father pulled out a shiny deck of new cards and spread them between his hands. “I’m going to have you pick a card, Davey. Any plain old card,” he said with a grand flourish. Careful to keep his hand steady, Davey pulled out the eight of spades. His head spun a little. “Now you show it to me,” his father grinned. “I’m about to show you the greatest trick of all time,” he declared. “I’m introducing you to the Magic Card Guy. He’s a buddy of mine who can tell what card you’re holding from over the phone.” Davey had
Prose 19 Kozloff
grown taller than his father last year, but the upward tilt of his father’s chin still allowed him to look quite tall. He tapped the side of his nose with one index finger. “You know how I don’t like to brag. But this time I’ve really outdone myself.” Davey’s father dialed a number and held the receiver in close with his chin. The crisp polyester lines of his suit jacket disappeared into loose folds of skin at his neck. He glanced up at Davey and gave a knowing wink. “Hi, is the Magic Card Guy there? Sure thing, I can wait.” After a short pause, he chuckled, “Oh, just tell him it’s Walter here.” When the Magic Card Guy came on the line, his father passed the phone to Davey. “Tell my son Davey here what his card is.” Davey couldn’t quite place the voice of the old man who answered from the other end, “Eight of spades.” In the donut shop, Davey’s father was still glowing. They sat faceto-face in their usual booth. “Impressive, isn’t it, son? And I’m letting you in on it. I’ve never taught this trick to anyone in the world, but now I’m showing it to you.” He brushed a crumb from his moustache and leaned in. “It’s an inside job, that’s the trick of it.” Davey blinked to keep his vision focused. “Now, my father taught me this trick and I’m teaching it to you, Davey, so listen up. That was him, you know, Pop. Over the phone. Good, isn’t he? He disguises his voice. I don’t like to brag, but we got this one plain figured out.” Davey let out a slow laugh as he recognized his grandfather as the voice from the payphone. “When Pop picks up, you say, ‘Is the Magic Card Guy there?’” Davey’s father lifted his hand to his ear and tilted his head, an imaginary telephone. “That’s what starts the trick. When he hears that, he drops whatever he’s doing. I don’t care if he’s running the lawnmower or on the john. He hears those cue words and he starts saying the card numbers in order, real slow. ‘Ace, two, three,’ like that.” Davey’s father cut the blade of his hand through the air as he came to each card number. “And your job,” he stopped to point at Davey, “is to cut him off talking when he gets to your number, so he knows he got it.” He kept pointing. “The key is to cut him off with the cue words, ‘Sure, I’ll wait,’ so your audience thinks some secretary is going to put the Magic Card Guy on the line. But really, it’s a signal to Pop that he’s landed on your number. When he got to eight out there, I cut him off like that because your card was the eight of spades. You understand?” Davey nodded. “Then he starts calling out ‘clubs, hearts, diamonds, spades.’ One at
Prose 20
a time, you see, and you cut him off when he gets your suit. The cue word is, ‘Just tell him it’s Davey here.’ That’s Pop’s signal so he knows he got to your suit. He hears that, he repeats the card to you to be sure he’s got it, and you give the phone to your friend.” His father was speaking again into the imaginary phone of his hand and passed the receiver to Davey. Davey nodded. “Your friend doesn’t need to know a thing about what’s happening on the other end of the line. He just hears, ‘yeah, I’ll wait,’ ‘tell him it’s Davey here,’ ‘tell my friend his card,’ and he hears his card.” The coffee had kicked in, and Davey could follow just how excellent this was. Seriously excellent. He could feel himself smiling. His father pushed himself back from the table and settled into the vinyl of the booth. “Now, I call Pop because he’s the one who taught me. But you call me, Davey. I’m your Magic Card Guy.” Davey watched his father breathing, portly, with two buttons unbuttoned. The moustache moved a little when he exhaled. “I’m making you a deal here, son. I’m telling you, no matter what I’m doing, I hear ‘Is the Magic Card Guy there’ and I go straight ahead into the trick. Like I say, I don’t even care if I’m on the john. I’ll plain out always do it because I’m your Magic Card Guy.” And he tapped the side of his nose.
Kozloff
The year that Davey was fifteen, his mother left them for Hollywood. Five months later, Davey’s father met a young widow in a grocery store. Her name was Abigail, she was a doctor’s receptionist, and, he told his sons, she was going to be moving in with them. She had three daughters with the same red curls and heart-shaped freckled faces. The youngest, twins, moved into Davey’s room. The same week, Davey’s father waited to take his seat at the head of the kitchen table. He had pushed three mismatched chairs on the left for Abigail’s girls. The boys squeezed in on the right side of the table, tangling their chair legs and kicking at each other’s feet. Abigail scooted in closer to the table at the far end on what used to be their mother’s stool. Davey was going to be leaving, his father announced. He had been climbing out of the window after bedtime and wandering back in the morning whenever he felt like it, drunk as all get-out. He had been stealing his father’s money for drugs that, for anyone who did not know, he was using in their very yard. This would never be allowed,
Prose
“I don’t know what to do with you,” his mother cried when he moved into her two-room apartment. She threw herself across her new velour sofa and stared at the stucco ceiling. She was wrapped in a bright pink towel with one forearm dramatically draped across her brow. “You’ve changed so much. You just sit around, but I can tell you’re smoking marijuana with those friends of yours. I used to think you were such a good boy, my favorite, my baby. You were always my favorite, did you know that? It was always you who I knew would look after me, you were the one who kept me alive!” Stricken, she sat up with a start, her expression a stark mask. “But now I know that you were just lying to my face. You were doing those disgraceful drugs and hiding them from me, your own mother. You think I don’t know, Davey? Don’t you think for a minute that I haven’t heard all about it. Your father told me that much, at least. That filth. Oh, my own son!” Davey sat a little straighter in the chair across from her but didn’t say anything in response. While his mother continued to despair, he allowed his gaze to wander the bare walls. The paintings she’d taken from his father’s living room still lay stacked by her new furnace. “I just need someone to help out around here, Davey. Don’t you see it’s already hard enough for me in this place? Don’t you see how hard it is to find work around here? There are actors all over this horrible city
21 Kozloff
Davey’s father explained as he gripped the tablecloth, the checkered oilcloth twisting between his fists. Davey must not realize just what kind of family he was dealing with. This family did not have space for someone who did not respect the rules of the house. Abigail’s twins poked their forks in and out of their macaroni. The older girl sat with her brows drawn, shifting her gaze between Abigail and Davey’s father. The brother on the far right was rhythmically kicking the table leg that now pressed into his shins. Davey had never shown one ounce of respect for anyone in his life, his father continued before Davey could say a word. Not even for himself, the irresponsible fool that he was. No house of his father’s would ever—and he slammed both palms down, spreading the gingham out beneath them—have space for that kind of plain-out joker. This was how Davey came to live with his mother in Los Angeles. The day that Davey left the house, his father did not drive him to the airport. Abigail did that.
trying to find a job. I have nothing.” She started to sob into the towel. Davey waited quietly for his mother to finish repeating her sorrows. Three or four weeks after he came to live with his mother, Davey left her. He found a pet snake. He became a vegetarian and started eating whole avocados, several at a time. Donuts, he gave up completely. He started calling himself Harlequin and, with his snake, moved into a cardboard box on Venice Beach. It was warm enough to sleep like that, in California’s Indian summer, and the beach was calm. He would listen to the waves lapping up against the pier, drifting away.
Prose 22 Kozloff
The first time that he called his father after leaving home, it was almost dark out, and Harlequin was with his friend Skinny Pete. They worked at the same deli. Skinny Pete had told him that they didn’t ask for your age, your papers, or, most importantly, your proof of address. Already high, the boys were waiting for tabs of acid to kick in. Skinny Pete wasn’t feeling it yet, but he kept running his wrist over clumps of greasy blond ponytail and tapping his foot against the side of the phone booth. “Look, man, my foot. I can’t stop moving my foot.” He grinned and tapped. Between his fingers, he was flexing a single card back and forth. Harlequin took a final drag of his cigarette and listened to the even tones of the ringing line, wondering if his father would answer. He wondered if his father knew that he had moved out on his own, that he had found a job on his own, that he bought his own food and bought his own weed. That he took care of his own snake. Harlequin wished he were tripping already when he said, “Is the Magic Card Guy there?” If his father was astonished to hear from his youngest son, his voice did not betray him. On the other end, he began to count: “Ace, two, three, four…” Between each word, Harlequin could hear the clinking of glass and running water. That must be Abigail, he realized, clearing up from dinner. His father was sitting at the kitchen table. When his father reached the end of the list, king, Harlequin said nothing. After several moments, his father began again from ace. He recited all of the cards in order a second time, pausing once more when he reached the word “king.” “King,” his father repeated, his voice rising. “King? Davey, is it the
Prose 23 Kozloff
king?” Harlequin remained silent. “When I got your card, you say, ‘yeah, I can wait,’ Davey. Those are the cue words that make the Magic Card Guy trick the greatest trick of all time. That’s the deal. You know that’s the cue word and you just plain have to respect it.” Harlequin still didn’t respond. Skinny Pete’s whole leg was shaking now from his tapping foot. His eyes were too wide as he waited for a prophecy, his card divined from electrical ethers. “Davey, you say ‘I can wait,’ I said. You say, ‘I can wait’ when I get to the number, and then, ‘just tell him it’s Davey here,’ when I get to the suit. Are you even listening to me? Davey? Son, I’m telling you—” “Thing is, I can’t wait any more, man,” Harlequin interrupted. “You just keep repeating yourself, but you never got to my card, okay?” He was shouting, spinning, shaking, stoned. The mouthpiece pressed too hard into his chin. “You thought you knew all the choices, but I got the one card you’ll never guess. This one’s never coming up between your ace and king, this one’s never fit in. Because it’s not you dealing this time, it’s me.” He grabbed the card from Pete’s hand and jammed it up against the receiver. The letters in the corners of the card were crisper than usual, pulsing. The red was very red and the white, very white. The letters seemed to be staring at him. “Are you even listening to me? You tell them there’s no Davey here, it’s Harlequin now. Your trick isn’t magic, it’s just a joke, man. And your Magic Card Guy?” Davey crushed the card into a blurring red and white ball. “The only thing I see here is a plain-out joker.”
El Sur
Laura Mayron ’16 I went to cry by the river, rubbing my skin with rose water in May. I saw a man wearing your face, as old as you were when I last saw you, and I wanted to stare at him forever to watch you live again.
Poetry 24
The air was hot and still at four in the afternoon in the hushed and sleeping south. I came down here, to El Sur to find you again in the stories you told me to read, my eyes stinging with the smell of orange blossoms.
Mayron
I wish you were here with me to watch the Sevillanas dancers on the bridge at midnight, candles flickering around your face among the walls of music floating into the dark. Instead I’ll think of you under a breathless sky, on the banks of the Guadalquivir, with a thousand stories that I would go to the ends of the earth to bring you.
Stormberg
Art
Voyage Megan Stormberg ’18 Digital Photography 25
from Sete Dias com Maria Maria Cristina Fernandes ’16
from the manuscript sete dias com maria 4.
Poetry
há sóis que beijam a solidão da gente beijos assim que o amor tem pressa e a luz que faísca no fundo dele é infantil fosca tímida imprecisa grafia
26 Fernandes
there are suns that kiss the loneliness of us kisses such as these that love has rush and the light that sparks in its background is childish fosca tímida imprecise grafia
5. Seus pés na areia não são só seus por saberem demais do mar eles são líquidos por saberem demais das ondas eles são saltos por saberem demais dos ventos eles são voos seus pés, Maria?
Your feet in the sand are not only yours for knowing too much about the ocean they are liquid for knowing too much about the waves they are leaps for knowing too much about the wind they are flights your feet, Maria?
27 Fernandes
are dreams
Poetry
são sonhos
Rio de Janeiro poemas escritos entre 15 e 21 de julho de 2015 Newton/Wellesley Poems translated between October and November, 2015
Art 28 Savage
A Day in the Life Alison Savage ’17 Digital Photography
Twenty Pesos
29 Bai
I spent one of my last weekends in the Philippines in Banaue, a town in the northern Ifugao province known for its sprawling rice terraces. Exhausted from two days in the clamorous and anxious rush of the city that is Manila, I found myself looking forward to the overnight bus ride to Banaue, even though the bus swerved and rattled as it chugged up the mountain roads. The bus was filled with people from everywhere—Filipinos, Europeans, Americans. The buzz of different languages floated around the cabin, and it was so pitch black outside, I had the strange feeling that I was both everywhere and nowhere at the same time. We could have been in South Asia, Scandinavia, the United States. Anywhere. Just a bus full of worldly people, purposefully nationless for the weekend. Eight hours later, I stepped foot into cool mountain air, excited and very awake. There were a variety of options for tours, and I decided on a twoday trip. Each group of hikers was assigned a local tour guide, and my appointed guide was a short, mischievously grinning Ifugaoan named Julius. As per local custom, I called him kuya Julius, “kuya” being the Tagalog title of “brother.” As we started out, our conversation was formal, with me asking basic questions about the terraces—all organic farming, the cultivated rice only traded within the town. But over the course of our three-hour hike to our first rest stop, our discussions became less stilted, more informal. Kuya Julius wove stories about the history of the region, from Ifugao’s pride in successfully warding off the Spanish efforts to colonize northwards to magical-realism stories of how rice was discovered. As much as I was interested in learning about the terraces, I soon realized that kuya Julius was equally as fascinating. He introduced himself as a two-year civil engineering dropout who had been in the tour guide business since he was fourteen. But he was also a self-proclaimed survivor trekker, seafood hunter, cook, furniture maker, guitar player, learner of French, and budding entrepreneur whose idea to buy an ATM machine for Banaue was foiled by a thief in Manila who stole his money—all twelve thousand pesos of it—while he was eating at a restaurant. He had an absurdly calm attitude about his misfortunes, however, and only shrugged when he saw the dismay on my face.
Prose
Wenbo Bai ’16
Prose 30 Bai
“In Manila, there are the very rich, but there are so many who are very poor,” kuya Julius said. “Even though Ifugao is the second-poorest province in the Philippines, no one here ever goes hungry.” He then proceeded to take out a ridiculously small red Nokia phone, tiny in his palm, each key no bigger than a baby’s tooth. He grinned, turned on the radio, and tucked the phone in his headband. We trekked uphill to “The Power of Love” and “Living on a Prayer” blasting from the back of his head as he swung his machete to hack a clear path, occasionally sticking the point in the dirt and showing me the medicinal properties of plants lining the way. As we hiked through the flora and across the terraces, I was impressed by kuya Julius’ tireless knowledge and casual irreverence, both of which flowed into the other seamlessly, and the frankness with which he spoke. My college education meant nothing. After all, I couldn’t speak five languages. I didn’t know what plants were edible and how to cook them. I didn’t know how to alleviate snake bites. I didn’t even know how rice was planted. I was both humbled and slightly ashamed. There was only one instance that kuya Julius was impressed by me. “Here,” he said on the morning of the second day, stopping me in the middle of walking up a particularly difficult steep path from the Batad waterfall. It was raining lightly and through my exhaustion I couldn’t discern between the water and sweat on my shirt. He tore off a handful of large almond-shaped leaves from a plant on the side of the road and handed them to me. “Smell.” I cupped them in my hands and breathed in a familiar, sweet citrusy scent. “Pomelo?” He looked surprised and gave me a thumbs up. “Yes! I’m impressed.” We were silent for a while, listening to the waterfall. “You know,” he said suddenly, “I think I underestimated you.” “What?” “When I first met you and we started this hike, I didn’t think you’d be a good hiker.” I laughed. “What made you think that?” “I admired your enthusiasm but thought you were overeager,” he said. “But,” he continued, “I suppose I was wrong.” He squinted down at the dizzying number of steps we had just hiked up. “You’re doing quite well.” It was one of the best compliments I’d received, and I’m sure it
Prose 31 Bai
was those words that got me through the rest of that uphill trail. By the time we looped back into town, I was fighting the deep tiredness that was starting to grip my body. I was painfully aware that my bus was leaving soon, and I could almost feel the air pressing on me as we neared the main part of town. “Would you want to see the viewpoints?” kuya Julius asked when we had reached the building where we had initially met. A cloudy dusk was fast approaching, and there was a lingering tinge of wet cold in the air. “I would just need twenty pesos. For gas money,” he added quickly, sounding almost apologetic. I looked at my watch; my bus back to Manila would be leaving in an hour. He caught me glancing at my wrist and earnestly promised we would be back in fifteen minutes, so I agreed. He owned a trike—a small side compartment welded onto a motorbike—and I clambered in. He revved the engine and we were suddenly vaulting up the bumpy mountain road. I was a bit afraid for my life—in a dramatized way, really, I realized later—as we skidded around a sharp turn. I was more concerned about the motorbike than I was for my own safety: the engine roared and sputtered more urgently as the slope steepened, my glasses vibrating on my nose, the twenty peso bill clenched in my hand. After a while, we slowed, and kuya Julius parked at a swath of highway open to a vast greenness below. Knowing that this was the last time I would see these terraces for a very, very long time, I jumped out of the trike with giddy anticipation and the last of my strength, heading towards the railing boundary. The wind was quite strong on the open viewing platform, and the unexpected drafts pulled on my hair and whipped through my shirt and sent chills down my shoulders. But the view! When I looked out my breath caught in my lungs. We were so high up, I could see the foggy clouds, grey-white, rolling lazily among the hill peaks, which were dark green and lush from the rain. Below, terraces tumbled out from the sides of the hills, hundreds of them in neat lines, looking as natural as the landscape itself. I wanted to open my eyes wider and wider, to let the landscape consume my vision, extending past my eyes and into my brain. I stood there, shivering from both the cold and the sheer beauty, eyes as big as I could open them, only vaguely aware of my own breathing— “Do you have the twenty pesos?” Kuya Julius’ voice snapped my
Prose 32 Bai
reverie like two sticks of wood smacking together. “Yes,” I replied shortly. I felt a jolting rush of annoyance, almost disappointment, that he had interrupted my moment to request something as trivial as gas money. I turned and mutely extended my arm to pass the bill to him. But he wasn’t reaching for the money. His eyes were looking down toward the terraces, his hand pointing at the clouds. “Look.” I looked at the bright orange bill, turned it over, and then I understood immediately. Every bill featured hallmark Filipino landscapes, and the back of the twenty-peso bill featured a landscape of the Banaue rice terraces, a view from— “The exact spot where we are now,” kuya Julius was saying. I looked at him, then at the landscape beneath us, and then back to the bill again. It was an exact match, down to the curves at the top of the hills. I suddenly felt a strange sensation of being locked in a static capsule that only contained us, the twenty pesos, and the terraces, an ephemeral slice of time that only existed in this place, unmoved for hundreds of years. “Wow,” I managed. “Very cool.” How did you know this was here? was what I really wanted to ask, but when I looked at him he had donned his mischievous grin again, and the question evaporated from my lips. We were running late now, so I had to tear myself from the view— sharply, a clean break—and I was very conscious that it was all behind me now. As I got back into the trike, it felt like the mountains were watching me leave with calm, peaceful eyes on my back, the way they had seen so many others walk away before. “Kuya?” He was turned from me, standing quite still to the side, and for a moment I was deeply touched by his silent, immobile respect towards the terraces before realizing that he was urinating into the bushes. I turned away, slightly embarrassed—for both myself and for him—but he bounded back to the trike, and I was again left feeling slightly impressed by his flippancy. I held out the pesos to him—“Gas money for the trike, kuya”—but he simply waved his hand away. We vaulted back down the hill in silence. “Goodbye, my friend,” he said to me solemnly as I stood in front of the bus that would take me back to Manila. It was dark now, and it
Prose
had started to rain again. “Goodbye,” I replied. “And thank you.” Out loud, the words sounded childlike and simple. I tried again to hand him the twenty pesos, but he just shook his head and raised his hand in a final farewell. “When you return to Banaue,” kuya Julius said, “just remember, you won’t ever find a tour guide like me.” I spent the hours on the overnight bus knowing that Banaue in its entirety, and kuya Julius, were slipping further and further away. Months later, when I returned to Boston, I noticed with more clarity the amplified drawls of the Duck Tour drivers droning as their vehicles rolled by, the couples and families peering out curiously at the city of glass and concrete. I thought of kuya Julius, his parting words, and the orange bill folded in my wallet, and I knew that he was right.
Bai
33
View from the lookout in Banaue
Art 34 Franklin
Look to the Waters Nadine Franklin ’18 Acryla Gouache
Opia
Caroline Arnold ’16
When I was younger, I thought that people could read my mind if I let them look me in the eye. I’m still not certain, but I have learned to be careful when I look at you. I move from freckles to nose to eyebrows— I never let myself rest on your eyes. They are the places I go toward when I’m three drinks into a conversation or behind the smoke lines of a cigarette.
35 Arnold
The man on the F train would not look at me, at least not when I looked at him. His pupils shifted from floor to ceiling so our eyes wouldn’t connect. I looked around in the subway car and saw a woman staring out the window. Her eyes were glazed over like fog on glass.
Poetry
“the ambiguous intensity of looking someone in the eye, which can feel simultaneously invasive and vulnerable—”
A Color Study Victoria Yan Uren ’17
Prose 36
After you leave me I buy a new dress. It is a pelt. Brand new. I slide into it like a snake in reverse. The dress is red. I rub the sleeve against my chin. I am naked in the fitting room, before I am red. From neck to thigh, it covers me. I look like a blooming carnation, or a wound. It is a short dress, I have long legs. Picture me. I trade the dress for money. After rubbing the sleeve on my chin. That was before I owned it. I had already put her on me, violated her, perhaps; I wonder how many else. Sometimes the white garments carry tan eclipses, traces, brown curvature—another woman’s armor, camouflage, “rubbed off on me,” the dress or the t-shirt says, to me, when I pull her down over my torso, or up, past my knees. This dress is red, it carries no memory. I take her home on my body, I carry the bag slung over my shoulder: I feel like a caveman, I feel like a man coming home to his woman—I feel like I carry to her a beautiful carcass.
Yan Uren
In the dream I see a blue scar. Or—the bruise is blue. This scar is yellow. Carmine water washing the blue into brown, viscous pool forcing in and out; and the tide withdraws, the skin is blank; the red has washed me off of you. Next to my bed. I put on that dress, I am leaving for a party, I look in the mirror, see red, see legs, see her, this girl. Wonder if she is an animal. I cross the bridge at 5 pm. The red is meaningless. The red is one slot in the sunset. If pixels, they could be counted. I know how to count. Which number is each red. How many spots. I take a picture on my phone. What is orange, then? When does it turn from red into you? I sit on the floor. Someone hands me a glass, another spills wine on my dress, it doesn’t matter, it blends in. He sees from the corner that everyone has reached across me to clean it up. I touch my cellphone to check, as one checks on a child at the playground or, as in clichés, for “sanity.” I study neurology, so I know. It’s not an object that can be misplaced. He comes towards me. I am drunk; I forget. He follows me home. The
forgetfulness—that, too, is temporary. A red dress on my white bed.
Is it just a color, if also it is the color of bruise in my mind? If I have kissed the stranger distracted by redness, or have been the stranger misled by the color of a rash—the uncertain hue between sun, and the sunset.
37 Yan Uren
I consider: sleeping, and, sleeping after sleeping apart. First I wanted, and then hated, not being able to dream of you. But I saw it in a movie, in the theatre, I was alone, the man next to me coughing—even a mother could forget her dead child’s face. Here, death of the synapse which thought of you. If I am allowed metaphor: the brain’s neglected circuitry has collapsed, etc. This man at the party wanted to be with me, he was hungry and I was there, that redness. I would rather not be red. “Rash” is sexier. More, and more which is elusive. This morning I am glad to be free of any rashes, and at the same time to be the possessor of a certain rashness. Red is an attempt to learn loss, with language. I have awoken with the blood in the crook in the bedsheet, just as once I had awoken with your nose in the crook of my eye. I rub the red dress on my chin.
Prose
In our room. You touch me, the impression lasts. One sheet of neurons in thunder, they take a shape—this is “the impression”. My arms and legs take the shape of what they wrap around. I ask him to hold me down. I say move. Here. I sit in class, hating “neuron,” because it is a sexless word. The mind is its feelings, perhaps.
Friedberg
Chinatown Chandelier Elle Friedberg ’17 Film Photography Art
38
Stormberg
Art
Voyage Megan Stormberg ’18 Digital Print 39
Figures
Lucy Cranston ’19 Your Parents You have them, you suppose.
Prose 40 Cranston
Full-face Walrus Moustache He smiles warmly at you from across his scrutinously organized desk, chin atop his folded hands. His eyes crinkle at the edges as he drops yet another irrelevant piece of advice onto your continuously growing pile. He means well, you remind yourself and your peers. He wants you to succeed, and he gives pretty good hugs. He means quite well. The other ones, the ones who haven’t had to deal with his jolly, daft demeanor for quite as long as you have, are intimidated by him. He’s old, you know, and respected even though he is terrible at what he does, and sometimes he’s kind of stern over things that really don’t matter. They fear him, and you tell them not to. He means well. He just doesn’t quite get it. A Face Like an Accordion As you approach, she croons your name in a voice as sweet and smooth as her skin is wrinkled and wizened. After all these years, you can’t believe she recognizes you; you grin like it’s a reflex and yield yourself into her open arms. She’s so small, now. When you pull back, she gifts you the smile that has always felt like home. She rests her hands on each of your cheeks, and you feel how cool and soft they are, just the way you remember. She calls you by the name she coined for you, so long ago: “Oh, my Bluebird. My little Bluebird of Happiness.” Rhinestone-studded Glasses Pew. Ploosh. Kablam. She points the handle of her frog-catching net at little clumps of poison ivy and shoots, adding sound effects with her mouth. You know that later, when you reach the pond, she’ll use that same net for its in-
The One Who Listens You haven’t finished reading it out to him yet, but you glance up at him anyway. He’s nodding along, his brow furrowed in concerned affection, and you give him a little smile and a sniffle and he seems to assume that means you’ve reached the end. “Thank you for sharing that with me,” he says, and continues, “I can see why that piece means so much to you.” You nod. It’s your turn to talk now. “I wrote one about you,” you say in a hoarse, quiet voice. He doesn’t ask you to read it; he knows it all without having to hear it. He puts his hand over his heart and opens his mouth a little. You think to yourself that his eyes look dewy. “Thank you,” he says, “I’m flattered.” And later on, when you part ways, he hugs you tighter than usual and whispers, “I love you, kid.” You giggle, just a little, and cry and say, “Me, too.”
41 Cranston
The Smallest Man You Know “Go to college,” he tells you, a sad little smile on his face. “You’ll find your family there, sweetheart.” You begin to cry. “But I’ve already found it,” you want to say. “There you are. Here I am. I could never leave you.” But you know that he’s right and that you’re being dramatic, so you just sob and let him hold you.
Prose
tended purpose, and you know that she’ll succeed and come marching back to you with her lips set in a gloating smirk and her little wrinkled hands clutching a distressed critter and her beady black eyes sparkling with mischief. “Terrible stuff, poison ivy,” she informs you. “Can’t even burn it, the fumes’ll rot your guts out.” You smile and nod, and she looks over at you. She peers into you and makes a little tutting noise with her tongue. She sees that you’re still troubled, so she stops and clutches your shoulders so that you have no choice but to look at her. “I can give you all the advice in the world,” she tells you firmly, “But I think it’s time you asked yourself what you wanna do about it.”
You
When someone laughs and teases you and calls you “Mom,� it means more than they can ever know.
Prose 42 Cranston
Little Lies
43 King
He could smell his mistake even before he opened the toaster oven door. The stench of burnt toast wafted toward his nose along with a wave of heat that fogged his glasses. The top side of the bread was dark brown, almost black, against the red glow of the heating rods. The crust looked crisp and flaky like the peeling bark of the maple trees that grew in the front yard. He sighed, then reached for the bread drawer. His hand hit plastic packaging, but nothing else. He looked down to see only a single heel inside the clear plastic, no hotdog buns or English muffins either. He stood there for a moment, one hand still grasping the handle of the toaster oven and the other resting on the bag. He wished she hadn’t left. He coaxed the burnt toast out of the oven with a clean butter knife and added them to the two plates he had taken from the cupboard. The toast shed little bits of char from their corners when they made contact, leaving dusty black spots on the otherwise clean white plates. He spooned a glob of sloppy joe onto each and was about to top them with a slice of cheese before he remembered that Jamie didn’t like cheese, so he slid the second piece back into the package. Even the dark red and brown of the sloppy joe looked lighter than the blackened toast. This would have to do. “Girls,” he called out the open window over the sink. “Supper is ready.” He could see the two of them digging in the dirt beneath the treehouse he had built for them from an old wooden deer stand. They glanced up at the house, their little arms in the small hole they had made, dirt up to their elbows. Then they looked briefly at each other before abandoning the hole and running to the house, Annie leading the race with her long legs and Jamie right behind her. They disappeared from his view for a moment when they reached the back door. He set the plates on the table with two glasses of milk while they washed their hands. Soon they joined him at the table, each sitting in the same chairs they always did, Jamie on the left and Annie on the right. He could see that they hadn’t washed past their wrists, leaving the dust that coated their arms and clothes. Jamie looked down at her plate. “It’s black,” she said as if she had never seen a piece of burnt toast
Prose
Izzy King ’18
Prose 44 King
before; perhaps she hadn’t. “It’s burnt,” Annie corrected, lifting a corner of the bread. He held his breath, praying they would just eat the stuff and move on, but instead two pairs of little eyes—just like hers—were staring at him. “It’s okay if it’s burnt,” he tried. “Why?” Jamie asked, her little face turned up to his. “Because the burnt part helps your singing voice,” he said, surprising himself. Where had that come from? Annie narrowed her eyes suspiciously. “How?” she asked. “The charred bits work out your vocal cords so that they get stronger.” Annie looked down at the toast, considering it as if it were something new and foreign to her. He could see the gears turning in her head, measuring his words against what she knew or thought she knew about the world. Eventually she looked up at him, seeming at last to find logic in his nonsense. Maybe she was still young enough to believe he had all the answers. She took the top piece of toast and smashed it onto the melted cheese and filling. Taking her cue from Annie, Jamie followed suit. Later that night he heard them singing a song that their mother used to sing to them before they went to sleep. Their voices were lovely, just like hers.
Sirens
45 Bilbrey
“Your mother’s voice is ridiculous,” your father says. You’re not supposed to answer. You glance into the kitchen, where she is cooking with the other women. Their voices are sharp-pitched and their laughs are cutting. You see the scene split, like the day you spent at the pool with your bright green goggles on, holding your head at that perfect balance between underwater and humid chlorine air. The world in two halves, with you in the middle. World one: your father’s world. He sees the wine sloshing around their glasses, threatening to spill over onto the tiled floor. The shrill sounds of your mother’s story about the neighborhood association president grate against his ears. He is embarrassed. The rest of the party is turning to look towards the racket in the kitchen. He shakes his head and raises a palm to his neck. World two: your mother’s world. She laughs. Her wrinkled fingers brush against her friend’s shoulder, reaching out with a feather light touch, pretending to steady herself. The other women laugh, too, and as she stares at their faces you pretend that she can see in the folds around their eyes which of them actually find her funny. She is still leaning towards her friend, but her back is straight. You are not like your father, you decide. You are not embarrassed. Your mother’s voice dips up and down as she draws out the punchline, and to you she sounds powerful. (It’s a song. You will learn it one day. Your brother will laugh at you for growing up fake like your mother. You will try to tell him it’s just a different kind of language. He will not understand.) (Your voice will pitch upwards when you speak to a cashier. It will go uncharacteristically soft when you say thank you. When you greet extended family, you will use a voice you’ve never heard from yourself before, and you won’t know where it comes from. One day you will say “bless her heart” with the ire your great aunt once mustered. Your children will complain as you once did when five more minutes talking with an old friend at the grocery story really means thirty. You will learn to hear the sincerity underneath, to know when a laugh is really cutting or if it has been cut. Profanity will tumble from your lips when you and your mother share drinks on Thursday afternoons but you will still call her ma’am.)
Prose
Emma Bilbrey ’18
Three Soundscapes Hanna Day-Tenerowicz ’16 1. his brakes whine hearing of the aches in your legs burning that July in Aguas Calientes squeal at the raw stink of goat woven through the fibers of your American Eagle hoodie Poetry 46
cracked lips trembling rocks and you wouldn’t change a thing
Day-Tenerowicz
your lungs betrayed you declared war and seceded from you, their ribbed cage (the bus groans in protest) the low wails are steady, supportive— the horses left you, he whimpers, but i will cradle you in my green, bug-smeared shell and i will listen. 2. in awe of China her grandiose wonder of Morocco’s kelvin streets and Hawaii’s thick green glottal stops.
sights, sounds, smells vacuumed up by the black night— cold air swallows warm red dust— the stars thirst for more cling desperately to your rosy words and cool our rosy cheeks 3.
hiding in your closet illuminated by the sinister glow of Netflix no searing belt can find your unruly skin we crush acorns with our feet, the lock snaps, ancient door creaks open voices echo through your memories of hopping fences with shit on your shoe
47 Day-Tenerowicz
weathered warrior, you run from the house out into winter’s bite (accompanied by our cheery fall footsteps) your voice paints darkness through your hummingbird giggles
Poetry
you are chaos crunching leaves hanger swordfights
Above: Asclepias Below: Untitled Isaac Zerkle ’18 Silver Gelatin Print
Art 48 Zerkle
Boston, Fourth of July
49 O’Keefe
Silent southbound T-train halts soft at Kendall Square look up: sky an opaque plane, firework-less. Storm’s coming. Air above electric humming, we three look, blue-slickered, in time for the first pre-flickers on this hurricane no fire national night, for the first sodden, liquored flight (lines and lines of white red blue) platform wet and bright and new.
Poetry
Megan O’Keefe ’16
Lamplight AP ’14
For my sister ’19 and all our new siblings It was 50 degrees when you woke up this morning which is why you’re wearing a beanie now, at 66. Yes, this is cold for you. Where you’re from it doesn’t get cold, Poetry 50
at least not like this. Autumn, and what is expected of you seems clear,
AP
the path, not so much. By now you thought a more focused picture would have arisen, perhaps you’d feel older. Yet every lecture and Friday night you seem to come to terms with greenness. Adorning the stretch between the lake and your path home, yellow
leaves. Lakeside, you get the sense something hides in plain sight – the familiar feeling you’ve been made a fool of, again… There’s no telling how much you will love and lose here, and worst of all, who.
What there is -- in the stretch before you, between Waban and you,
51
Waban and Claflin, Claf and the killer steps of the Quad, the Quad to Munger Lawn, and even, the ville’s gravel road to McAfee -- is stillness. Your new home’s quiet voice invites you to risk all that you are for the chance to excavate, as an archeologist does, what you always and never expected.
AP
for the moon’s stellar shine.
Poetry
How many times you’ll mistake the path’s lamplight
Grassi
Breakfast Caroline Grassi ’18 Digital Photography Art
52
Bussert
Poetry
1. It is never dark. Kitchen, bathroom, and a living room light are always on. 2. It is never quiet. The radio has been playing NPR for months without pause. 3. The bed is not for sleeping in. The couch by the window is for sleeping in, where you can see the birds. 4. Bedtime is either 5pm or 1am. When you’re sixty-four and live alone, nobody cares when you go to bed. How freeing. 5. Afternoons between noon and 4pm, and all day Saturdays, are reserved for sitting outside, silently thinking or watching the birds or the grass. Don’t move. 6. After nine months of Sunday-afternoon phone calls, we sit silently, waiting for the phone to ring in the other room. On the phone, we would begin: “Hi mom!” “Hi Kate-Kate, it’s mom!” “Yes, hi, mom.” “Hi honey.” 7. The books I’ve mentioned on the phone are on the coffee table, unread so I can explain them to her first. 8. Every chair has four inches of phone books sitting on it. Women in our family are too short to sit unassisted: we can’t even see over the steering wheel. 9. It is always too cold.
Kate Bussert ’16
Rules for living in my mother’s house
53
Bussert
10. Wine goes in the freezer until it explodes. Except the bottle from the Nun-Bus-Wine-Theft of ‘76, which is kept for sentimentality. That one may well explode from the pressures of old age. Don’t touch it. 11. Tuna fish goes on the counter until it turns. But since we only cook three meals in rotation, there’s another can of sauce in the cupboard. 12. An offer met with “no” is ignored, then explained with a “you can throw it out if you don’t want it.” 13. When the cat speaks, you listen, and reply with honesty and integrity. His feelings are easily hurt. 14. The best years of our lives were from 1994-2012 (well, really 2009). She will only say it once.
Poetry
54
Paper Forest Caroline Arnold ’16 I used to think my love for you was like a forest, always growing scattering seeds of thought; the idea of you was bigger than either of us could hold.
55 Arnold
Now, I think my love for you was not love at all. You were just paper cut into the shape of trees.
Poetry
My mother has always said I have a vivid imagination, I like to make up stories.
Art 56 Neel
Jerusalem Emily Neel ’18 Watercolor
“Blazing Summer, Cold Coffee/ Baby’s Gone, Do You Love Me?”
57 Cauthorn
The bowls are red, yellow, green, yellow, blue. The spoon is cold when it reaches my lips. I have small, soft hands. Grandma wears her jeans and white sneakers. The spoon is cold when it reaches my lips. When I was seven, I thought I liked coffee. While I considered myself to be very mature for appreciating this markedly adult drink, the only reason I believed I had a taste for it was because of the homemade coffee ice cream my siblings and I made with Grandma. We used to gather around the dining room table after dinner, the mountain air of New Mexico whistling through the screens. Grandma had an ice cream maker and Cal, Becca, and I took turns cranking the handle until the liquid ingredients inside magically became a soft, creamy solid. I would sit on my knees, leaning forward onto the table, reaching out eagerly with my pale hands, wanting to prove to my older siblings that I, too, could do it. The house in Ruidoso had a bit of a stale smell due to its being occupied only five months out of every year, those beautiful summer months that held the promise of elk sightings, dips in the freezing streams, and powerful afternoon storms that left a layer of hail on the porch. The sheets and blankets there were the same ones that my father and uncles used when they came to Ruidoso as boys. Parked out in front, the old Jeep with wooden panels and no seatbelts witnessed our comings and goings. Here, Cal, Becca, and I spent a week every summer. When I recall these weeks, I view them through a hazy veil of nostalgia that distorts my memory and brings random things to the surface. These flotsam and jetsam of my memory have come to represent those faraway weeks that saw me sob from homesickness and beg to call Mommy and Daddy, that saw me share a twin bed with my sister because I was afraid to sleep alone, that saw me slurp down grape juice, that saw me roast hot dogs over a campfire, that saw me fall in love with my grandparents. I remember the squishing sound as I padded across the soggy green carpeting on my way to the very chlorinated pool. I remember
Prose
Anna Cauthorn ’19
Prose 58
hiding in the tent, listening to the strong mountain wind buffet its thin nylon walls. I remember the feeling of Jess the Australian shepherd’s tongue as she licked my face and I laughed and tried to cover my face with my hands. I remember the sharp pain I felt on my wrist when I burned myself making grilled cheese with Grandma. I remember how cold the spoon was when it reached my lips. It slides around on my tongue until it settles into a dip and melts, releasing its sweet, milky flavor. I swallow the melted ice cream and it cools my throat. And suddenly I am there, in that house in Ruidoso and Papa is alive and I am a child and I know nothing of death, or boys, or the scissors that will whisper to me at night, tempting me. No, I am a giggly, mischievous little girl and I like reading chapter books, rescuing my dolls from various illnesses and afflictions, and cuddling with Daddy. And Cal is my brother who wears very big tshirts and watches History Channel. And Becca is my sister who plays soccer and has braces. And I am eating homemade coffee ice cream with a spoon that is cold when it reaches my lips. Title from “Coffee” by Sylvan Esso
Cauthorn
Gallagh Man Camille Bond ’17
II. It was sort of like the feeling of dialing a stranger’s phone number at random, from a directory, only to find that their service has been discontinued: A dim but sharp shadow, knowing that the line did belong to that someone once and channeled conversations about subway systems, family reunions, grocery lists, but cannot be reached anymore. III. Your skin was thin and leathery peeling
59 Bond
Outside now, I catch myself smiling watching the small figures dash toss water-balloons, hearing them shriek. But if I were to try, couldn’t I picture them, too, under hard light and the eyes of Italian tourists and an informational plaque?
Poetry
I. Seeing you among the hollowed-tree canoes and the fragments of pottery pieced back together using tweezers, plastic gloves, I felt no intimate connection. Not the sudden hot I know you flash of recognizing that stranger in the produce section as a childhood friend. Not even the spark of interest that might flicker between eyes that meet across traffic.
away from the fingers like paper Still, I’d like to think that, in a way, I was shaking your hand.
Poetry 60 Bond
Art Stormberg
61
Machine Megan Stormberg ’18 Digital Print
Haines
Street Vender in Maputo Erika Haines ’10 Digital Photography Art
62
My mother, the interpreter Alessandra Saluti ’16
“I don’t know why we dream of the dead” this morning, when the scene was still vivid
You turned your head toward my father, working in this strange Adriatic summer no heat, no sweat, no afternoon stillness “trimming the cherry trees?”
63 Saluti
He told me he already knew everything that had changed in three years
Prose
I told you about your brother in a velvet robe handsome I only had the memory of thinning hair and ribs showing
The Fluids Series Sarah Michelson ’18
Prose 64 Michelson
i. water There was a small pond at the end of her street, and every morning she would walk down towards it and feed the vibrant fish that lived within. It was nice to have this reason to get up and feel sunshine and actively do something, and she found these fish to be marvelous companions for when she just needed somebody to listen to her without hesitation or judgment. That evening, she had a horrible fight with her mother. It wasn’t even over a major issue. By the time she was trying to fall asleep, she couldn’t even remember what set it off—and it surprised her, because she’d always believed that she had an incredibly smooth relationship with her mother. She couldn’t even remember that last time they’d had a fight. They had been screaming at each other, both absolutely enraged, both lacking the slightest filter. It was agonizing, the way that you could love somebody so much and cut her so deeply. She cried herself to sleep that night. When she woke up that morning, the tears were still fresh and sticky on her cheeks. She walked to her closet and grabbed the pail of fish food, so desperately looking forward to today’s quiet reverie by the pond. It would be the first moment of peace she’d had in hours. She could even dip her toes in the water and enjoy the fish nibbling on them, like tiny kisses that she needed very badly. But when she arrived, she found that the pond had dried up overnight. The fish that remained alive were only barely so and were gasping in the mud, trying to suck out the last remnants of water from the earth. The rest of the pond was littered with plant detritus and the corpses of aquatic life. Most of them looked like they’d been dead for quite a long time. — ii. sweat He shot awake, heaving and soaked in sweat. The same nightmare kept coming, every single night, without fail. The presence, that horri-
— iii. blood It was her cheeks he first complimented; how wonderful and soft they looked. “Did you use a special blush?” he asked. “No,” she replied, “It’s just my blood.” He paused. “Your blood. That’s interesting. What do you mean, ‘your blood’?” “Oh, just my blood. You know. The way my blood looks. My veins. That sort of thing.” “Ha. So do you usually talk about this sort of thing on dates? Your blood?” he joked. She gave him a blank stare. “What else is there to talk about?” He was quiet. “I mean, hobbies, work, y’know....” He made a vague gesture with his arms. She didn’t respond. He thought he heard the slight sound of his own heartbeat amidst the clinking of glasses and other miscellaneous restaurant chatter, but he dismissed the thought. “You have beautiful cheeks too,” she said after a moment.
Prose 65 Michelson
fying and amorphous presence that followed him, that reached out to him, that made his knees quake and his bones shiver and whispered to him until his skin prickled. He’d seen multiple therapists, but none of them had been able to help. He tried every suggestion, and the result was always the same— terror and a slick of sweat. The nightmares were visceral, to the point where he couldn’t tell where reality ended and dreams began. Every part of it just felt so horrifically real that sweat was the only thing he could use to signal his return to waking world. One morning he shot awake, drenched. The clock at his bedside table glowed 5:32 AM in a cold, menacing red. He was breathing heavily, trying to process what had just happened. That creeping feeling, the watching, the whispering. Something in the corner of his eye that he could never get a good look at, but he knew was there. It had to be. He lay back in his bed, grateful that the nightmare was over—for tonight, at least. As he pulled the covers back over his head to try and get some rest, he thought he saw a haze of something by the window. A cold, clammy finger wiped a drop of sweat from his shaking brow.
Prose 66 Michelson
He smiled. “Thank you.” “Lovely, flushed skin.” She put her palm against her own cheek and sighed. “God, I’m so jealous.” He shuffled his feet uncomfortably. “Thank you?” he said, with a hush in his voice. “You’re welcome,” she replied. He looked around for a few moments, trying to look for something else to talk about. Her eyes rested lazily on his face. The contact was light, but palpable. “Are you alright?” he asked, with a slightly concerned inflection, though he wasn’t sure to whom it was directed. “No, I’m fine. I just can’t get over how wonderful your skin looks. You must have so much blood in there.” He stood up. “Would you like to get a drink?” She smiled. “I would love that.” When they got to the bar, she ordered red wine. She sloshed it around in her glass, looking him dead in the eyes. “I love red wine,” she said. “It has a body.” “I can see that,” he murmured. He ordered a beer. She took a sip of wine. “Wish it was a little thicker, though. A little more viscous. Doesn’t have that sparkle, does it?” she asked. “Guess not,” he said. “Guess not,” she said. They both downed their drinks. The red wine trickled over her lips and down the side of her cheeks, slowly dripping onto her fingers and lap.
Moore
Art
White Elephant in the Room Emily Moore ’18 Digital Drawing 67
Extended Deadline Night before it’s due Aggie Rieger ’17
I. I write these haikus because there’s nothing to lose ... Extended deadline. II. I am no poet. I get bad grades on essays. I have no license. Poetry 68
III. I’m not qualified. Yet, words are for everyone. I wrote these for you.
Rieger
IV. Although you may not, please take me seriously. I have things to say. V. And I have tried hard: I gathered these syllables, counting on my hand. VI. All I want from this: One printed page, one moment. Proof of existence.
VII. The first thing I want to say: I miss my girlfriend dearly, and I feel alone. VIII. While I laugh often, I have been depressed. (It’s awareness month.)
69 Rieger
X. Really, I’m done now. I’m happy to make edits. Please email me back.
Poetry
IX. That is all for now. I should be doing homework. I hope it’s worth it.
Acknowledgements With special thanks to the Wellesley College English Department & El Table