Issue 26, Spring 2021 by The Wellesley Review

TWR Issue 26 | Spring 2021

The Wellesley Review Poetry | Art | Prose

Land Acknowledgement Wellesley College occupies the ancestral, traditional, and contemporary unceded lands of the Massachusett tribe. We recognize that we are on stolen land, and we extend our gratitude to the many Indigenous peoples who have rich histories here, including the Massachusett, Wampanoag, and Nipmuc nations, for their ongoing stewardship of the land. We commit to recognizing, supporting, and advocating for the sovereignty of the Indigenous Nations whose traditional territories are in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, as well as for the many Indigenous people who live, work and study in Wellesley and Massachusetts. While working remotely, our executive board members have occupied the ancestral, traditional, and contemporary unceded lands of Nacotchtank (Anacostan), Monacan and Manahoac, Lenape Haki-nk (Lenni-Lenape), Pawtucket, Coahuiltecan, Abenaki, Peoria and Bodéwadmiké (Potawatomi), Dakota and Ojibwe, and Ohlone peoples. By offering this Land Acknowledgement, we affirm Indigenous sovereignty everywhere and commit to holding Wellesley College more accountable to the needs of the Indigenous peoples. We are grateful for the language behind this land acknowledgement, which was written by the Native American Student Association at Wellesley.

table of contents 1 2 5 6 7 8 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 20 21 22 24 25 26

Starlet Cowboy My Garden self portrait w/ storage unit American Football You Burn Me Alcohol and Assigned Reading Self-Portrait, 2016 Self-Portrait, 2020 2017 Riddles for Insomniacs Completed Sappho fragments 24A & 24C View from a Roof, 3.17.2020 Social Distancing i want to forget everything bad about me Lice ad infinitum Winter Tangerine Limits north field Passing Time 1962

cover art the last time we left the city by Artemisia Luk ’21

Bell Pitkin ’23 Sarah Wendy Burman ’22 Ida Beckett ’24 Fia Zhang ’24 Juliana Barriere ’24 Katherine Rabogliatti ’21 Teran Chapis ’22 Teran Chapis ’22 Regina Gallardo ’23 Georgia Moskiou ’24 Sylvia Sage Holland ’22 Ida Beckett ’24 Pilar Joyce ’89 Tulani Reeves-Miller ’21 Maggie Erwin ’23 B. Malone ’24 Fia Zhang ’24 Georgia Moskiou ’24 Abby Martinage ’24 Grace Ramsdell ’22 Becca Cox ’22

27 28 33 34 35 38 39 40 41 42 44 45 46 48 49 52 53 54

mutualism How To Deal With Cold Feet No Title rabbit mouse poem Pink Shell Familia Yangu The Old House offerings Widny Purpose Objects Central Mountain Range, Taiwan Nature’s Cycles Double Exposure reincarnation by date generator Lakeview Hospital: Metairie, Louisiana Fly Paper meditations on an eggy sticky summer

58 62

Artist Statements Masthead

Meiya Sparks Lin ’22 Lily Wancewicz ’23 Fia Zhang ’24 Aniela Cohig ’24 Jasper Saco ’22 Cheryl Minde ’24 Vân Ah Trinh ’24 Trudi Benford ’91 Eleanor Mallett ‘22 Tayo Oredein ’98 Eva Knaggs ’22 Deborah Jang ’24 Diana Salinas ’24 Grace Ramsdell ’22 Kiki Chen ’23 Arden Eli Hill ’01 Eva Knaggs ’22 Aniela Cohig ’24

Starlet Cowboy Bell Pitkin

My Garden Sarah Wendy Burman These days I spend most of my free hours (which are many) in my garden. It is a small garden—two beds and one big pot—but it is full of life. It is made of roofing nails and boards from an old deck and dirt that I carried up hills in a wheelbarrow and stakes that I drove into the ground with all my weight. There are worms in it. Handfuls of worms. Big ones and small ones and things with little flailing legs that aren’t worms at all. And sometimes there are moths and frogs too. And in it I have planted seeds of every color and texture and shape. Seeds that lie heavy in your palm like small nuggets of gold and seeds so fine they blow away if you don’t hold your breath. Seeds that I planted early in soil that froze my fingers and seeds that I nursed in egg cartons until all the snow had melted away and the nights were mild and full of crickets. People pass by me and my garden on their walks, and they like to stop and inquire after its progress. “How is everything growing?” It works well for both of us—a way for them to ask about me without asking about me. Steering clear of the question no one wants to ask these days. Exchanging the usual niceties without having to fear an answer more worrying than: “Doing fine. How about you?” Afraid, perhaps, of the question being turned back on them, forcing them to consider their own (perhaps less steady than usual) well-being. Afraid that the thin veneer of custom will have grown brittle and cracked from disuse, like the skin of a parched tomato. Afraid that they might let something else slip instead, something more burdensome, something more true. And so they ask about the garden.

And I find myself defensive of my small world, wanting to shield tender leaves from prying questions and invasive eyes. How dare they look. How dare they ask. What if they criticize the beets for wilting in the sun, or find fault with the radishes planted in wiggly rows, or look down upon that one squash that popped up between two rows of kale, or pass judgement on the smaller peas that haven’t quite figured out how to climb their trellis yet? What if they read something etched into the crinkled leaves of the cucumbers? What if the worms give out the secrets I’ve told only to them? They don’t know what the lettuce is whispering, or how much sun the parsley wants, or who the thyme was planted for. An urge arises in me to provide justification for every little imperfection: “The lettuce seeds are from 2016, see, so you can’t really blame them for not all sprouting.” “Those beans were just transplanted yesterday, so they’re still a bit floppy, but they’ll perk up soon.” “It’s okay for the basil to be bunched like that, it likes to grow in clumps.” And I want to shut them out of my garden, of my soul. But I watch them pass by, and I see how their eyes stray towards my small oasis, craning their necks for one glimpse of bright leaves or sturdy, reaching stalks. And I see the hoping, the wanting to gaze upon something that is flourishing, something that is happy. The desire to behold neat orderly rows of happy beings all in their places, content to thrive where they are set, where they are cared for. The need to find some connection somehow, when obvious questions are perhaps too painful to ask.

And so they stop and they peer and they ask: “How is everything growing? And I tell them, as best I can. “The second crop of radishes has just sprouted.” (the other day i saw a horse! it’s been so long since i’ve seen a horse.)

“And the kale is so prolific, I had no idea so many of them would grow.” (i’ve been making so many masks, i don’t seem to know how to stop.)

“The beans are beginning to flower, and in a couple of weeks they’ll be ready to harvest. They’re going to be purple beans, did you know?” (sometimes i can’t remember what happened just last week, like all the days are bits of wet clay melting together into one heavy gray lump.) “I don’t exactly know where I’m going to plant the rest of the onions, the beets took up more rows than I expected.” (at night i lie awake trying to imagine how wide the sea is, and i just can’t get it to fit in my head. the sea is so much wider than my head.) And they listen eagerly, and perhaps they hear about the garden, and are content. And perhaps they hear something more, about hope and loss and love and waiting and why I planted the garden. And they continue on their walk, and I continue pulling weeds from among the lettuces. And on their way back they will pass by my garden again. And perhaps they will wave. Or, content to see that everything still grows, glance once more in our direction before turning up the road. And the old man in the baseball cap will tell me to watch for beetles. And the mother and daughter walking their dog will call to me as they pass: “We’re going home to plant our tomatoes!” And in all of their eyes I will see the hope and the loss and the waiting and the love that is the garden. And I will smile and go back to watering the peas. 4

self-portrait w/ storage unit Ida Beckett

American Football 6

Fia Zhang

CW: possible relationship violence

you burn me Juliana Barriere you burn me. That’s the phrase, From some broken line of poetry, Something Sappho wrote, shattered by time, corrupted by the fallacy of translation, It’s a skeleton of its former self. Yet still somehow it touches the core of my being. You never cared for my poetry. You ignored my texts when they were overly conceptual. You laughed when I compared your love to a run-on sentence, always trying to slip another clause in. Maybe that improvised edge was just a function of your apathy. You were a boyish lover. You didn’t want to understand the things outside of your grasp. You touched me like you were picking a lock, roughly fumbling, And you stared at me with wide, blue eyes that didn’t know what to make of my body. You never had that look when I was fully clothed. Maybe my poetry isn’t as disarming as I anticipated. You tried to politick my favor, To charm me with apologies and carefully crafted phrases But the bruises on my skin faded, after a couple of days deep purple became the faintest greenish stain, I realized I didn’t have to ache. The geese by the lake were cackling after you left me, Just a few yards away. They craned their long necks to stare at me, Selfish voyeurs. do they burn too? 7

Alcohol and Assigned Reading Katherine Rabogliatti We had spent days, weeks, months stealing glances at one another across the room. It began that day when she wore a bright white ribbon in her hair, so bold against her dark curls. I wanted to say something, but I didn’t. She caught me staring. Our classroom was in one of our school’s oldest buildings. We sat at old wooden desks in chairs that creaked when we moved. So inconvenient because it would inadvertently alert the professor that someone was doing something they shouldn’t. Like shifting in their seat to peer over the edge of their book at the pretty girl across the room, or surreptitiously scribbling love letters that would never be sent. Sometimes, I traced the edges of the words that had been gouged into the desk’s surface by generations of students past. L + E forever one read. Who were “L” and “E”? Did they, too, exchange glances across this very room? I imagined their lives, their courtship. L would pass notes to E who would smile, face lighting up. E would write one back, asking L to meet them after class under the willow next to the lake. More than once, my professor would catch me too obviously staring off into the distance and bring me sharply back down to earth. She would bang on my desk, shout my name, and—one unpleasantly memorable occasion—she hit my arm. None of that stopped me. I daydreamed about “L” and “E,” and I stared at the girl across the room. I could carve our initials into the desk someday.

I was sure we loved each other, even during those first silent months of our acquaintance (if you could even call it that). When we finally spoke, it was to ask a question here or there. It progressed to offers of study help, then to ‘do you want to get something to eat,’ and, finally, to ‘do you want to spend the night.’ That night, we drank and discussed Frankenstein. Alcohol and the assigned book seemed a good combination. Then, I kissed her. A random, impulsive decision. Like something overcame me, caused me to lean forward, press my lips against hers. Her mouth was warm against mine. She must feel the same way I do. But she didn’t kiss back. She recoiled and the air was filled with my frantic apologies. An assumption, an incorrect one. Whatever I did, I couldn’t bear to lose her friendship. She shifted away. We’d been sitting on the sofa in my room, an old thing that my mother had unloaded on me. It creaked like our desk chairs. Silence between us, heavy and tangible. She wouldn’t look at me, the curls of her dark hair hid her face as she kept her eyes fixed on the book in her hands. I just…wanted her to look at me. My muttered ‘sorries’ became like a prayer I repeated to her. Yet she wouldn’t look at me. No more glances across the classroom after that night. No more requests for study help, or to eat together, and certainly no more late-night invitations.

Self-Portrait, 2016 Teran Chapis

Self-Portrait, 2020

Teran Chapis

2017

Regina Gallardo

Riddle for Insomniacs

Georgia Moskiou

Q: What do you get if you let the titles of your books tell you a story? A: The Philosophy of What If Louise Glück decided to Catch and Kill The Gangster We Are All Looking For with her Completed Works, and Hank Green embarked on A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor to Discipline and Punish THE OTHER AMERICANS with Solid Objects while some Math Campers pondered The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Q: What do you get if you figure out what was before Time was? A: A logical impossibility. / A high-five from God. Q: What do you get when you take the audience away from a performer? A: A tree falling and wondering if it made a sound. Q: What do you get with a body that keeps on living and a mind that can’t keep up? A: A therapist, a priest or a boyfriend. Q: What do you get when you cross a mid-youth crisis with loneliness? A: A self-administered haircut. / A borrowed copy of Infinite Jest. Q: What do you get if you want to get out? A: A clue. Q: What do you get for getting out? A: A chance. 13

Completed Sappho Fragments Sylvia Sage Holland [Sylvia] Sappho (fragment 24 A) [today] [not tomorrow] we live [sometimes I feel] [ ] the opposite [of] [ ] daring [moon shines on waves] [and does not ask] [forgiveness]

[Sylvia] Sappho (fragment 24 C) [for you...] [our oaktree love] [and melding gold] [] [] [we send them now] [ink, paper, envelopes] [folding time and space like fresh laundry]

you will remember for we in our youth did these things yes many and beautiful things

View from a Roof, 3.17.2020 Ida Beckett It’s cold enough for me to feel but not enough to go downstairs and don a blanket or a sweater or something comforting. I can stand a couple minutes more. I’ve never waited for the dawn before. What strikes me is the smell that so transcends the city that it transports me to fields in which I have never been and into boughs of blossoming trees I have never dared to climb. The haze slurs buildings, its intoxicating moisture hanging on my arms and clinging to balconies many blocks away, creating the sort of condensation on neighbors’ windows that reminds me of rainy taxi-cab drives which seem so impossible now: following the droplets, writing words backwards, my fingertip ever-so-slightly frozen as its own heat drew lines. Impossible in sweet-smelling fields. This is not New York. The freedom tower is gone again and must be lost every day to this oppressive net of droplets. It is absolutely silent. A fatal stillness settles, and I feel I cannot move.

i want to forget everything bad about me

Tulani Reeves-Miller

The full moon watches outside my window. Subversive. Sleepless restless. Wishing thoughts could comfort me. That’s Michelangelo’s moon and now mine too. The same moon today The same the world over. One moon for every country, the bringer of cramps, the granter of wishes, the master of tides. I dreamt of you today as I slept in my office, my bed, my bed in my office. Pandemic parameters of work and of play. I don’t mean to, but the moon only allows me 3 hours a night. So, I nap—a safe, snuggly passage to another place. Far from Zoom. From this inescapable room. I dreamt you were in Rome. I met you in a restaurant full of life, laughter, movement. You felt like home. Your smile matched mine. Right there. Right then. Just out of reach. Like the perfect pastry under glass. A moment defined by gratefulness and isolation. Improbable. I wanted to share all the unasked questions— “Just my hand?” Or Does your loneliness match mine? Is this in any Way Shape or Form familiar to you?

Social Distancing Pilar Joyce ’89

I think about perfect blue button-downs and 501s And god’s cheap trick Of faith or delusion. Sentimental self-talk, convinced there is a truth worth fighting for. A luxury I can’t afford. I dreamt that you smelled like soap and felt like a perfect fall night. Elgar’s serenade of strings, and so many other things. You felt like home, but I couldn’t reach you.

Lice

Maggie Erwin

Man, I hate lice. I really detest them. Pediculus humanus capitis. Roughly two or three millimeters long, about the size of the seeds atop an everything bagel. Preferred hosts humans. Vile organisms. Wicked even. About six to 12 million people are treated for lice in the United States per year. And every year I encounter about ten of those unfortunate victims: my fourthgrade students. Every September it’s the same. The lice just can’t wait to bury themselves in human hair. And every year their bloodthirst befalls a handful of particularly unrestricted nine-year olds. I know almost immediately. By now, I have the trained eye of an expert. The nurse is called. I stay late with the janitor to vacuum compromised hairs from the carpet. My answering machine fills up with calls from concerned parents. “Yes, we’re doing everything we can.” Or, “No, they’re not life-threatening.” They want to know who is responsible, as if they can assuage disgust with blame.

Soon enough, I am in aisle five of the grocery store, staring up at a shelf of Skippy peanut butter. When I arrive home, I set the peanut butter on the table. I scoop it out of the jar with two fingers, dropping dollops on my head. Strands of hair clump together like a failed interpretation of 1990s Gwen Stefani. Peanut butter feels a lot like conditioner. However, it smells like, well, peanut butter. I apply gingerly, making sure to cover the entirety of my scalp. In previous years I tried chemical treatments, only to end up losing half my hair or nursing an allergic reaction. For days I reek of a child’s lunchbox. I stay home on weekends. I cancel dates. “I’m sick. No, it’s not serious. No—yeah, it’s just a bug.” One year I went so far as to shave my head, the only true cure. By now, I’ve invested in a good lice comb. I’m convinced the wretched nymphs that crawl along my scalp know how much I despise them. Because every year they come back with malicious intent. When the next PTA meeting comes, disgruntled parents pack the small auditorium. They exchange pleasantries like generals, shaking hands before battle. Then the questions come, the demands. They look around, ready to strike on unassuming staff. When I am asked how this can be prevented next year, I think about retiring. I’m 27.

ad infinitum B. Malone

after “The End of Poetry” by Ada Limón enough of this, enough of that, enough of not enough of love, enough of lying, of the coffee clinging slick to your teeth, enough of the cigarette-drenched air blown in my direction, enough of the holes you dig in our backyard, big enough for the dog to fall in, enough of the crescent moons of your fingernails in my arm, enough of smoke, of candle wax, of crying, enough of not crying, enough of my ragged morning voice, of slammed doors, of breaking glass, enough of the holes in the toes of my socks, enough of the wan blue computer light, of the lavender you backed over in your car last night, enough of rattling, enough of silence, enough noise, i am digging my fingers into the dirt and i am asking if this can be enough.

Winter Tangerine Fia Zhang

—to eat winter tangerines. To press an unclipped nail to the oily rind, pierce soft white pith that grazes and laces the flesh. Here, slowly peel the dancing skin to corkscrews in the humming meters of Wallace Stevens. Here the orange skins feel waxy and alive, the small ridges of its fat palm the leaves of zest closely clinging Here the orange slides along the neck of a table, a rising sun diving shyly into the mountains Sleeping…a glass of light in the valley of its throat Here: to pick apart the shades of Joni Mitchell, to tip-toe around the details of a locked-in memory—how it felt to be bitten by a spider in the arroyos boiling underneath the orange sun, fretting on a bad ankle, dancing like an animal, head tossed back in abandon, my voice carrying itself away—

limits

Georgia Moskiou

A. i. ii. iii. iv. v. vi. vii. viii.

Let there be an x axis. Let there be point A and point B anywhere on the x axis. Let me be point A and I’ll let you be point B. Find the absolute value of our difference to calculate the space between us. Divide your result by 2 and meet me in the middle. Nevermind, I changed my mind. Divide by 2 again. And again. Come closer. You keep approaching me, each time halving the distance you travel ad infinitum. You’re always closer, but never close enough. Why? Make the infinite sum of the finite distances you travelled not equal infinity. Prove Zeno wrong.

B. i. ii. iii. iv. v. vi. vii. viii.

Let there be a Cartesian coordinate system with axes x and y perpendicular to each other. Let there be point A anywhere on the x axis and point B anywhere on the y axis. Let me be point A and I’ll let you be point B. Look how far I’ve come. Look how far you’ve come. Add our squared journeys together and you’ll get another square. Find its root. That is now our distance. I divide the result by 2 and I meet you in the middle. Nevermind, hope you don’t mind. I’ll divide by 2 again. And again. I’m now closer. Our distance though negligible is still existent. You’re mine to see, but never to hold. Why? Make the infinite sum of the finite distances I’ll travel not equal infinity. Prove Zeno wrong.

C. i. ii. iii. iv. iv.

I’ve searched for you far and wide. But I’ll look deeper. Let there be a Cartesian coordinate system with axes x, y, and z. It’s getting pretty deep and my math is pretty rusty. So, let there be light. Shine that light towards me. Calculate how long it takes to reach me. Assume the speed of light is 3x10^8 m/s to approximate our distance. Do what you must. Find me bathed in your light. Prove Zeno wrong.

north field Abby Martinage tomorrow we’ll have different weather patterns and it’ll be my turn for sunshine, yours for high winds. i’ll wrap things in paper and cross my fingers that they don’t go bad. i’ll try to remember how the flags on mailboxes are meant to work or work up the courage to talk to the woman at the post office. i’ll be too slow and things will spend the weekend in processing. but tonight the sky is the same color here as it is there. and they mentioned your favorite poet in this chapter of my book.

Passing Time

Grace Ramsdell

1962

Becca Cox

mutualism Meiya Sparks Lin

my father splits open a fig: heavenly cavity pink underbelly of clouds he tells me about his great-grandfather’s funeral how the the pallbearers kicked the coffin stands, one at a time how the bones, unheard, wept when they hit ground the fig falls, quartered, and my father, more allegory than man, says in every fig, there is a dead wasp: the fig calls it symbiosis; the wasp (dead) does not call it anything with sticky fingers, i dig for a corpse, but here there is only soft flesh reanimated sugar

CW: blood, minor body horror, brief reference to assault

How to Deal with Cold Feet Lily Wancewicz On Saturday morning it rains and Nora sleeps through three alarms and the first thirty minutes of her advanced ballet technique class. It’s almost mid-morning when she finally begins to stir. The old, matted Siamese is perched on the end of her bed, and it occasionally lets out a screechy meow, a complaint about its forgotten breakfast. Nora wakes slowly, rubbing the sleep from her eyes, yawning, nudging the cat off the side of the duvet with her toes. She can hear the rain breaking against the window, can hear the cat start taking its frustration out on the bedpost, but besides that the house is quiet. Her room is a mess, strewn with all kinds of knick-knacks: a failed trigonometry quiz, crumpled copies of Dancer’s Elite magazine, dozens of pairs of pale pink tights, coiled up like snakes. The entire floor has a thin coating of cat hair. When Nora sits up in bed, her top sheet and duvet slip off of her upper body, and dressed in only her thin pajamas, she suddenly notices how cold it is. Nora slides out of bed, intent on grabbing a sweatshirt from her laundry heap, but she’s distracted by the pain that shoots up her feet when they collide with the hardwood. Nora’s feet look exceptionally bad this morning. They are a light purpley blue and a little splotchy, but most noticeably, the white, gauzy material that’s wrapped around both of her big toes is stained with dried blood. Most of her toenails are a little lopsided and some have chunks missing, and the toenail on her left pinky toe is completely gone. It had been dangly and digging into Nora’s skin for nearly a week before she finally built up the courage to yank off what remained of it during a break at the dance studio. The pain had been so intense that tears welled up in her eyes. There was so much blood that by the time she managed to wrap the exposed toe in a makeshift bandage of toilet paper, shove her pointe shoe back on, and hurry back to ballet class, the tip of her pink shoe was saturated with blood. The rest of the girls had politely ignored the red streaks that smeared across the floor as she moved through the dance. The cold less unsettling than the pain in her feet, Nora sits on the floor and begins pulling off the bandage from her right big toe, wincing as her skin is tugged along with it.

She tries to replace the bandages only twice a day, before dance class and after dance class, but sometimes, if she steps funny or snags the bandage against something, she has to change it an extra time. As she tugs at the bandage, she entertains the idea of going to ballet class, but almost as soon as she considers it, she knows that she won’t actually go. She can picture herself stumbling in during the middle of the class, mumbling an awkward apology to the teacher, anxiously searching for an open place to stand at the barre. She wouldn’t know whether to wait for a break in the instruction to shuffle into the room or to enter as soon as she arrives, trying to carefully weave through the other dancers, but inevitably stepping on someone’s pointe shoe or knocking into someone’s outstretched arms. It would be infinitely more safe to stay home and produce some feeble excuse on Monday for skipping. Once Nora removes the first dirty bandage and tosses it aside, she reaches for her dance bag to pull out a replacement. But as she begins to unravel the long strip of white fabric, Nora is interrupted by the ring of the doorbell. She stands slowly, keeping her weight off of her toes, but she doesn’t make any move to go downstairs and check who’s at the door. Nora listens closely, waiting for the visitor’s footsteps to retreat back down the driveway, but they never do. Instead, the doorbell rings again and someone yells, “If anyone’s there, I need a signature for this package.” Nora still doesn’t move. She doesn’t want to go open the door—she’s still only wearing her pajamas, and she’s just begun the long process of changing her bandages. But it seems silly to send the delivery man away just because he’s come at an inconvenient time. When she opens the front door downstairs, the delivery man is standing on the porch. He’s dressed in brown pants and a brown logoed top, and Nora places him somewhere in his late twenties. He holds a package, about the size of a shoebox, under his right arm, and in his left hand he holds a clipboard that’s wet, as if he used it to shield himself from the rain on the walk to her front door. “I’m just gonna need a quick signature from you,” he says, extending the clipboard and a pen with the same logo as his button up. Nora scans the clipboard and scribbles her signature on the appropriate line, but when she glances up to hand the items back to the delivery man, his eyes are on her feet. She looks down at them too. She knows that they look distinctly ugly when they’re not all bandaged up. In the presence of the delivery man, Nora feels embarrassed, but it’s an unfamiliar embarrassment, a kind that she never feels at the dance studio, where the rest of the girls almost seem to flaunt their battered feet, displaying their misshapen toenails and bloody blisters like they’re something to be proud of. Nora suddenly feels the need to apologize, to assure him that she’s fine, that her feet don’t really hurt too badly. She almost starts to, but when she raises her eyes from her feet, she sees that the delivery man has also looked away.

He takes the clipboard and pen back from Nora, but before he hands her the package his eyes flick down to her feet again. This time he points at them and asks, “Hey, do you want me to take a look at those for you?” “Oh. No, no,” she stammers, “I can take care of them. It’s not as bad as it looks.” “Listen,” he says, “I volunteered at the athletic trainer’s office in college, so I know all kinds of techniques. I promise, if you let me take care of them for you, they’ll be as good as new.” It would be easier for Nora to just accept his offer, but she’s skeptical of his assurances. She’s been bandaging her feet up for years and none of the techniques she’s tried have worked any miracles. Besides, the whole situation reminds Nora of a news article she once read about a woman who had invited a chatty delivery man in for coffee. According to the newspaper, they had enjoyed their drinks, conversed pleasantly, and then the delivery man had taken a rubber mallet to the woman’s head. “Okay,” she concedes. Nora steps aside, effectively welcoming this stranger into the foyer. “Wait here while I grab my stuff.” When Nora comes back down the stairs, she is cradling an armful of medical supplies: ACE bandages, prewrap, second skin squares. The delivery man has taken a seat at the bench across from the stairs. He seems to be looking through a small pile of mail spread out on the coffee table at his side, an action that Nora finds mildly off-putting. It’s not that she really minds him reading her family’s mail (it’s probably only bills and advertisements anyway), but she knows that if she had been the one invited into someone’s home like this, she probably never would have sat down unless prompted, let alone helped herself to a stranger’s mail, at least not so overtly. Nora sits down on the side of the bench that the delivery man isn’t occupying and deposits her stash between them. She prepares her feet for fresh dressings by rubbing off any residual stickiness from her last bandages as the delivery man combs over the pile, occasionally picking up a tube of ointment or a canister of cream and turning it over in his hand, running his fingertip along the label. “Wow, you’ve got some seriously heavy duty stuff here,” he says as he flips over a package of blister pads to take a look at the instructions. “Most of this stuff is medical grade.” Although Nora had to use both hands to carry the supplies downstairs, the various packages, wraps, and creams on the bench are only a fraction of her collection. Between the contents of her dance bag, her locker at the studio, and the medicine cabinet in the upstairs bathroom, Nora has so much medical paraphernalia that some of the girls at the studio like to joke that she could open her own clinic.

“Let’s start with the left one,” the delivery man says, gesturing for Nora to bring her left foot to him. Nora extends her leg in his direction with a practiced gracefulness, and he picks up her small foot in both of his hands. Nora notices for the first time that he’s wearing a pair of black fingerless gloves, like the ones robbers wear in the movies. She wants to mention this to him, but she isn’t sure if it’s a funny thing to say or a weird thing to say. He turns her foot over in his hands, surveying the damage. “What happened to make them look so…” He trails off and gestures towards her toes, where the damage is the worst. “Gross?” Nora suggests. “I was going to say painful.” Nora smiles lightly. “I’m a ballerina.” “A dancer? This? From dancing?” He shakes his head a little, clearly surprised. “That’s right.” This time, when he looks up to meet her eyes, Nora thinks that he looked a little impressed. “And here I was thinking that ballet was all tutus and tiaras.” Nora is pleased with how gently he handles her feet, turning each one over in his big hands, smoothing down the pre-wrap with his thumbs, flexing and pointing her toes to make sure that the tape won’t wrinkle with movement. His supposedly miracle-working techniques turn out to be nothing special, but it’s nice to have someone else do the work for once, and as he finishes wrapping her second foot and turns to face her, Nora feels glad that she pushed past her initial apprehension about welcoming him inside. “Well, I’ve taken care of your feet for you. I think it’s fair that I ask for a little something in return.” Nora’s heart begins to race. She could have kicked herself with her own freshly bandaged feet. Of course he would want something in return. How could she have been so naive? She can see it now, his brown pants in a heap near her laundry, her knees pressed into the cat hair on the floor of her bedroom, sucking off the delivery man. “Well, I, uh,” Nora starts. “A performance.” “A performance?” Nora squeaks back. “Show me these amazing ballet skills of yours.” Another time, Nora might have protested, said that the hardwood was bound to be terrible for her bare feet or that she hadn’t warmed up or that she was still in her pajamas, but her relief that he doesn’t want any sexual favors is so strong, and it makes her compliant. 31

“Oh, okay. Well, uh, what kind of things, or uh skills, did you have in mind?” “Well, I don’t really know any of the names.” He seems to think for a moment. “Wait, what about those spins you guys do?” “Pirouettes,” Nora corrects. She gingerly stands up, carefully shifting her weight onto her tender feet. She walks towards the middle of the foyer. As Nora pushes into her turns, the delivery man shifts to the middle of the bench, positioning himself so that he can best watch her as she spins and spins. If this were dance class, Nora would stop at seven clean turns. But now she continues on to eight, and then nine, even though she starts to lose her momentum. Her tenth turn is even sloppier, her alignment is out of whack and her knees wobble, but she pushes through until she completes her eleventh revolution. When Nora stops, she looks eagerly to the delivery man for his reaction, but he’s no longer watching her, instead focusing his attention back to the pile of medical supplies on the bench beside him. Nora waits for him to look back up at her, to do something to acknowledge her performance, but when he stands he only says, “I really should get going. I have the rest of the route to complete.” She was worried that he might do something embarrassing, like give her a standing ovation or request that she teach him how to do a pirouette of his own, but when he says nothing, she feels sad. As the delivery man walks past Nora on the way out the door, he finally hands her the package. Nora stays standing in the middle of the foyer, holding it, watching through the door as the delivery man opens and then closes the door of his truck. Once she sees him pull away from the curb, Nora looks down at the package in her hands, curious to see if it’s for her. She doesn’t recognize the intended recipient’s name, and on the address line, the house number is one digit off from Nora’s. She begins walking towards the open door, intent on dropping the package off on her neighbor’s porch, but for the second time that morning, Nora is distracted by the pain in her feet. When she looks down, she sees that the new white bandages are streaked with dirt and that the material has frayed where it snagged on the seams in the hardwood flooring. Two of the blisters on her right foot have opened and are oozing liquid. Even the Band-Aid, which had been so carefully wrapped around her right pinky toe, is lopsided. Everything will have to be redone.

No Title Fia Zhang

CW: animal death

rabbit mouse poem Aniela Cohig

and the newt i caught in the creek that ran into the hudson river from your yard, swimming in your pool, the one that was yellow and purple with algae because you couldn’t be bothered with pool cleaner. i remember once you found a slurry of greyish field mice next to a bed of hydrangea (blue because the soil was acidic) and took them to the vet in some misguided attempt to save them but their mother then abandoned them because you had touched them. 3 quivering eggs of fur left to die in your sister’s pink sock (its mate had been lost in the dryer). you gave them names (i don’t remember the names), and for a week we sat in your wood panelled bedroom coloring printer paper with cheap oil pastels while the mice writhed miserably on your bedside table. on the day the last one died we buried the limp bodies in the little rectangle of space between the lawn and the brick foundation. i think about their skeletons there, blue and cracking in the overhydrated earth, years after you moved out of the cramped wood panelled house, years after i stopped remembering what you look like really; i am miles away from that house but i make a necklace (in my mind) out of the bones, thread them through my ears like pale ribbons, pin them to my eyeballs with imaginary glue i am waiting to remember maybe.

Pink Shell

Jasper Saco

When I was seven, or maybe eight, we visited Ft. Myers in West Florida, and we went to the Pink Shell. The Pink Shell has this waterfall flowing Into the pool, rush of water pouring down onto me On my dad’s shoulders. The screech of children’s laughter, it was music to his ears pride is not the word I’m looking for. I have the worst memory I know of side note of depression but I remembered this. The waterfall sounded like you could imagine:

so loud. so quiet. Coming out sounded like you could imagine:

so loud. so quiet.

There was a beach behind the resort. I remember I had a cut on my foot and my dad taught me: saltwater heals all wounds. I was so scared to stick my foot in the water; I watched my dad stand shin deep, sunset on the horizon. I think about this so many years later because the Pink Shell was the beginning of the end. It was the last time we were happy. When I was thirteen going on fourteen, we ventured to Santiago de Cuba. The Motherland. We visit the beach where my parents left on a boat, Fleeing whoever was after them. I see the vastness of the ocean. I am scared. The beaches of Cuba are as you imagine:

so loud, so quiet.

There are no people, they are in their homes, tucked away, quiet, away from freedom. I wonder what it’s like. The ocean spray stings my contact-covered eyes. The sunglasses do nothing to protect me. I look down. The yellow tint of the glasses distorts my vision, but I see it: a pink shell. I pick it up. I turn it over in my hand as sand spills off the crevices. The soft curves of the shell draw me in, in and out, I’m in deep. I clutch it in my hands, tuck it in my shorts for later. I watch my dad dive into the ocean, fearless. We’ve barely spoken this trip. I don’t worry: saltwater heals all wounds. I walk into the water.

Familia Yangu Cheryl Minde

The Old House Vân An Trịnh I was five, once, excessively rude for my age, peeling off the crispy edges of a sticky rice cake when no one was looking. (or so I thought.) Winters were cold, back then, before the baby in my house could tell me otherwise, dolled-up in her coat and scarves, her tiny shoes, her head left bare. The lake downtown still tastes like home on the tongue, its water still and teal-green, its wind a crisp chill, softly cracking my cheek cells open for air to spill (an ache that no balm or oil could cure), I remember a dinner table, well-loved, chipped of wood and stained with oil. adorned in red (paper/packets/dresses and pants), we filled our bellies like glasses of wine, sat underneath the floor where dust bloomed with time, sent prayers & hope to our next selves down the line. I left before the lights went out, before the water turned cold, before Home turned from a place, to a memory, to a feeling I can no longer quite hold.

offerings

Trudi Benford ’91

once I give you a glass vase crackled with hand-painted gold, burgundy colors pulled from your living room rug you promptly return it, saying “I’m impossible to buy for, anyway” some weeks I try a bulky loaf of that misshapen bread you love tiny bags of sour tomatoes from my garden bunched wildflowers held with string you take them all with a Mona Lisa smile then I bring a striated cutting board costly, made of some endangered wood I thought you’d use it for serving but instead you quickly scar it with a long serrated knife

Widny

Eleanor Mallett

Purpose Tayo Oredein ’98

Who I️ am has largely been a function of who I️ am NOT in this country I’m Black. Before anything else I’m Black before I️ am woman Hell, I️ was Black before I️ was even myself And I’m awesome at it. But if I️ didn’t live in a society where being Black Didn’t mean that I’m not white— Were it not so rife With struggles and oppressions If marginalization weren’t so inextricably linked to this melanated situation… If society hadn’t insisted on who I️ can’t be because of what I’m not, would I️ be who I️ am today? Would I️ hold my Blackness so dear? Would I️ cling to it as much as it clings to me?

It’s crazy, But at one point, my eyes Believed the lies I️ was fed That whiteness was the standard by which excellence is measured That I️ could not hold a candle to those with pale skin not realizing it was they who paled in comparison That my Black is beautiful… Because the coils in my hair Were placed there By my ancestors with precision and care My lips need to be thick Full enough so they can hold The boundless love and wisdom That spills forth from them… To bless our girls And lift up our men That my skin is infused with melanin— The official color of resilience Being Black is my strength. I️ dance in my Blackness I️ revel in it It sings in my soul I️ am extra Black wherever I️ go. I’m Black and loud I’m Black and proud I’m Black in earnest I’m Black by design. I️’m Black. On mutha fuckin purpose. 43

Objects

Eva Knaggs

Central Mountain Range, Taiwan Deborah Jang

These mountains are green even in winter, a bare dusting of snow settles perhaps once or twice in a decade. Every so often, there is a mass exodus from cities up into the mountains, and for the moment, the hills are alive with the chatter of tour groups and the plastic bottles and paper bento boxes they leave behind. They leave, they inevitably leave, whether at the end of a weekend, a week, or longer. And the mountains are left to rest in peaceful silence. What troubles the mountains are the people who don’t leave, those who built ironsheet huts to hawk betel nut or boba or steaming bowls of noodles and soup, who bulldoze their slopes and shape them into flat ledges to pave with asphalt and fumes that invite metal contraptions which race too quickly for a mountain to follow. Elaborate buildings spring up, shaped like a Viennese manor, or a Swiss cottage, or an American log cabin that fill to bursting during vacations but increasingly attract swarms during the off-season as well. Most of all, the mountains are now ravaged by enormous swaths of betel nut trees, whose stems are too shallow to keep the soil in its place, who create much profit for their human owners but much anguish for the mountains. When the torrential rains come, the trees wash away without a second thought, leaving the mountain bare-headed and desolate. The mountains have no recourse; they do not stoop to the human methods of conducting affairs. They know from long experience that humans come and go like the wind that ruffles their trees. Still, there is a worrying trend, making itself clearer at terrifying speeds. The mountains would not mind the people, if they came and let the mountains be as they always have been, but they simply must object to the destruction of their slopes. They have heard rumors of a place far in the north where their fellow mountains have become nothing more than cities on an incline, where the slopes are overwhelmed not occasionally but every day, where those transportation vessels the humans call cars pile up on their narrow, snaking paths and do not subside until long into the night. There are whispers, too, of their brethren in the west, where the humans not only desecrated the slopes but stabbed fine sharp prongs again and again into the mountainside until half of it was gone, carted off to who knows where, leaving its dusty red heart ripped bare to the howling, lonely wind. For many years, as long as the mountains have encountered humans, they have tolerated, even enjoyed, their presence. But they are finite; they are being used up. A consensus grows at these high altitudes: this cannot last. Either the humans must extend their hand in gestures of reconciliation, or the mountains must give way completely. And when they are lost, the mountains will not be the only ones to suffer.

CW: minor body horror

Nature’s Cycles Diana Salinas I envy my body. This body of mine that never fails to continue its natural cycle, undisturbed and beautiful in purpose. And turning. Turning. Turning. Its gears clunk together to deliver on time; fine machinery that stays solid so long as I routinely maintain it—cleaning and oiling, cleaning and oiling. I envy such machinery for being everflowing and unconscious in its performance. I envy how it doesn’t question its role it was given, its cycle it completes, and its birth. Quite the opposite, my body’s machinery is eager to complete its seasons. Unlike me, who in fleeting moments, desires to disturb that simple system in hopes that, by ceasing its play, it would grant me a sex-less body. One that does not need to turn. One that does not need to be routinely maintained by having to reach in-between its folds and press on pliable skin to clean and oil. One that, if I were to reach down, there’ll be nothing there. Only the smooth curves like those of a Barbie or Ken doll. And empty. And hollow. There’d be no organs to dictate, no unconscious performance, no bleeding-out—simply and wonderfully hollow. But still, I hear it turning. Turning. Turning. And humiliating.

This body of mine that I sometimes have violent thoughts with. To use the kitchen knife I use to cut pomegranates and forcibly mold it to my liking. Cutting even slices into the heavy fruit and as its crimson juices stick to the gums and roof of my mouth, I’m inspired by flashes of blood and pieces my mind supplies—to cut out the machinery that has its task. It reminds me of a beautiful dream I had about waking up with no sexual organs. The filtering sun bathed my body and I awoke with such tender content it aroused soft tears to drip onto my pillow from knowing my body was no longer caught in the gears of its cycle. But still, I hear it turning. Turning. Turning. And shameful. I watched a tree dance in spring. How its arms gently swayed and rejoiced in its new leaves; recovering from the harsh winter that took its body away. Embracing the joyful sunlight and welcoming the evening birds, all while relishing in its fertile nature to renew and grow. I watched the tree be still in winter. How the harsh winds and snows tumbled and shook without remorse—breaking its growth apart until it became bare. I found its bareness far more beautiful than its fullness in spring and wished spring would reverse for me. But still, I hear it turning. Turning. Turning.

Double Exposure Grace Ramsdell

reincarnation by date generator Kiki Chen i. output 294 imagine: it’s 2005. you’re prepubescent. you’re meandering around amazing grace children’s daycare in akron, ohio. you see me, an infant, in the hallways. i don’t recognize you. why would i? you’re prepubescent. it’s not 2005 anymore. what a stupid year. i meet you in bates dining hall. we walk downstairs into founders 221. we’re not holding hands because my hands are always sweating. we take a zipcar to the washington monument. i do not have a driver’s license. you pretend to be a security guard while i steal the british crown jewels and replace them with rock candy. it’s just like national treasure except neither of us are nic cage. it’s just like spiderman: far from home and i am spiderman, obviously. we jog 2 blocks west to brooklyn. you buy me boba and i swallow the whole thing in 5 gulps, no chewing. i do a kickflip in front of the supreme store and the e-boy on shift lets me into the back where i grab every shirt i see and you replace them with souvenir tees from dc. we walk upstairs to founders 331. i hand you a plane ticket. we sprint through LAX to catch our flight to moscow, idaho. we make it back to bates. interpol is waiting for us, demanding the crown jewels. it ends in a shootout with laser tag guns that shoot real lasers. i jump in front of a green blast aimed at you before my buddy (a pilot) lifts us away in his chopper. you’re crying. why couldn’t i just give them the jewels. truth is, i sold them in brooklyn and gave the money to the samaritans of boston. truth is, i’m in a time loop and it’s gonna reset in 7 minutes. before i die i whisper “treating your bumble date right that’s gangsta.” when you go back to your room there’s a usb drive on your desk with an imovie of our adventures. now: it’s 3005. no longer prepubescent, we are phosphorescently

ii. output 592394 we get our first jobs in 1962: you, a waitress in a building without ashtrays. me, a painter specializing in kitchen ceilings. us, a crack team of card counters who cheat at casinos up and down the west coast but stay out of las vegas on principle. by now we know this isn’t our first time around. in the morning we’re shrugging on socks on the porch while frank ocean plays in the kitchen. i propose in hawaii and you throw the ring in my piña colada before telling me to try again next time with a scheme that’s not tackier than the toothpick umbrella in my drink. we scream at each other over a brunch of chicken tacos and root beer. when i reach to wipe your face you knock the tissue out of my hand. we don’t talk again until we watch the moon landing through a window on the street and you squeeze my hand when armstrong takes the first step. i think i broke your heart in a philadelphia printers shop two weeks before the boston tea party. 2023: i sign a professional contract with a hockey team in germany and the first thing i buy is a train ticket to kansas city where you’re a professor of art history at a community college. every day one of my hairs turns silver. i show up to your office hours with a pair of matching cleveland cavs bucket hats and the ring from hawaii. you have a framed picture of us in the alps on your desk, even though we never went to the alps. we take a weekend off to visit the smithsonian air and space museum and i squeeze your hand when we walk past the Apollo 11 exhibit. for breakfast we have vegan hotdogs from a food truck in portland. i read you my vows off of all the postcards i always meant to send.

iii. output 78326 i take you home to palo alto and drive the whole way back to vancouver with the windows down. i buy us burgers in milan and you wipe the pacific ocean off my cheek. we do not share a bed. it is march. what a stupid month. we’re older now. you hold my wrist when we run through dublin. i tell you if i could have any superpower it would be to make every day sunday. you tell me to stop looking back but it seems like that’s all i ever do. i bury mint leaves in every garden we pass. we fuck all over the midwest. none of your middle school lacrosse teammates would recognize you now. we go live for 15 minutes on instagram every tuesday so our mothers don’t worry. you leave the toothpaste uncapped in every motel bathroom. in a tel aviv museum we learn frankincense and myrrh were traditionally embalming fluids. i fingerpaint a portrait of you on a raft in lake waban while you antagonize the swans with a nerf gun. the interpol officer assigned to our case is trying to hunt us through our dreams. you call me an asshole in bangkok and i think about it for months. in pittsburgh you get a call that your grandfather has passed and we sit on a bench overlooking the rivers while you cry. we con david dobrik out of a tesla with a sob story involving the stock market and mimes and zip it down the autobahn until our stash of aa batteries runs out. we’re older now. i grab your elbow and pull you away from the bonfire. we tumble down the dunes all the way to the pendleton west woodshop. march again. always march. my chest fizzes when i wake up before you. i think about how jesus lived his life knowing He was born to die.

Lakeview Hospital: Metairie, Louisiana Arden Eli Hill ’01

Thirty years before Katrina and some minutes after midnight I emerged from the womb into brightness and white gloves. The month was mild. The lake, a milk-hungry kitten, lapped the shore. There were incubated hours before the lawyers called my parents. Nurses cooed. Janitors smiled at me through the glass. ii. When I am young, my parents and I drive past the hospital sometimes on our way elsewhere. I look up at its windows watch the Lakeview sign grow smaller. I get home, find the place on a map, and count the blocks between buildings and Lake Pontchartrain with its almost endless bridge. iii Between water and city there is grass and the levee: so much is growing. So much is going to break.

Fly Paper

Eva Knaggs

CW: eating disorder, suicidal ideation

meditations on an eggy sticky summer Aniela Cohig

1. On the third-to-last day of summer camp in an uncomfortable bed, I dream I turn into a rooster and I wake up on the scuffed wooden floor covered in grass and acrylic paint. 2. There is too much color in the 8:56 p.m. sky and it hurts my eyes and I am spinning so fast that the colors blur into brown and so my eyes calm down and my brain fills with water. I drink eight cups of unsweetened iced tea. My legs are patterned with green and red and I am so happy but the summer hovers delicately like a poached egg in simmering water, the yolk about to freeze inside the white. I want to live inside the watery yolk, but I know it has to be temporary. Only boiled eggs keep for longer than a few moments and I would rather die than eat one. 3. While stoned, I look at my reflection in the bathroom mirror (though I had tried to avoid it) and notice my irises wobbling like sunny side up eggs, stained green like the ones in Dr. Seuss books. I wonder if I always look this afraid. 4. I buy a $12 yellow shirt with a chicken on it from an overpriced thrift store in a town I’ve never been to and I try to relearn how to love my family, but I don’t think it works. I eat eggs Benedict but I cannot stomach it so it ends up at a rest stop in southwestern Vermont. 5. I text you and then power my phone off for 14.35 hours. If I do not open the text the answer hovers, wispy and nonexistent (Schrödinger’s cat). In the meantime, I climb a mountain with my sister and the languishing blue landscape is bluer around the edges. I lie on a rock, and the blue swallows me but (ironically) the sun turns me orange. A jackrabbit, lanky and pinkish with ragged fur, darts across the trail once and I stand still, hoping it will come toward me, but it flashes into nothing before I even sneeze. Afterwards, we buy food from a Republican-filled diner in New Hampshire and the poached eggs make me vomit scarlet in the bathroom so I wonder if, and almost hope, I am dying. 54

6. In an egg carton we bought, we find a single fucked up egg. When it cracks into the off-white ramekin, instead of a uniform orange oval, there is a quivering mass of blue and red veins, the wispy beginnings of a beak and eyes collected at one corner of the yolk. My sister is repulsed and runs to the sink as if to wash the sight off her hands. 7. I wonder if the mother hen loved the fucked up egg and I wonder if she felt a twinge of sadness when the farmers took it away from under her rusty red haunches. Do chickens feel sadness? Do they feel love? I think about this in bed at 3:46 a.m and then I bleed through my sheets and think that if I were a chicken, an egg would appear underneath me instead. Would I love it? 8. The air is sticky and smeary and quiet and I try to read books but the pages are smudged into a homogenous heap of paper and ink and so I just sit, submerged in an odd slurry of caffeine and melatonin. The moon is glowering outside the car, bald and pockmarked and bluishly fragile. I want to hold it between two fingers, pull off the shell to reveal the trembling yellow yoke. Or maybe it would be a green yolk; after all, the moon is made of green cheese. 9. We drive to Northampton but it isn’t the same without you (it doesn’t glow with yellow and orange fireworks) so I stop loving it. My “loved list” dwindles daily. I decide eggs are my new thing to love, though eating too many of them always makes me sick. I order egg salad at a restaurant just to push it around with my fork in oblong swirls of meaninglessness. I’ve always found it disgusting. 10. In May, my former best friend told me that the East and West Eggs in The Great Gatsby were like a coconut and a grape, respectively. The first being hard to get into but easy to get to the center of, once you’re inside. The second being easy to get into but hard to get to the center. Now it is mid-July, and I wonder if people can be categorized in this way as well. I wonder what box I fall into and I wonder what box you do and I wonder if they are different.

11. Thinking of this, I write poems in my head but by the time I write them down in my notes app, they don’t make sense. In the Berkshires, we pass a pen of dusty lavender donkeys framed by a stand advertising fresh eggs. “I wonder if donkeys like eggs,” someone says. I don’t know who. In the backseat, I send photos of my faded pink hair to people to annoy them. Later, I regret it. 12. According to Google, there are 71 calories in a poached egg.. I step on a rusty scale at a horse farm in New Hampshire (no chickens) and I lost five pounds and I feel happy but then I feel sad that I feel happy. 13. My summer fades from forest green to light blue. I try to fall in love with New York for the 17th time but find myself scuffling through Times Square again and again, hating the lights and the bustle. I eat scrambled eggs and Earl Grey tea for lunch everyday and I try to ignore the light pollution. 14. I contemplate double piercing my ear with a sewing needle from CVS, but realize I do not have the willpower. My sister buys earrings at a flea market that are shaped like eggs and I want to steal them but I do not. 15. I sit on my trampoline that smells like a department store and think of how my hometown feels like a cardboard gingerbread exhibit at Christmas. I turn on my cellular data for 5 seconds. You text me but I do not reply. 16. Sweating at 1:18 a.m, I write drafts of what to text you but I get bored, so I poach eggs in the kitchen and eat them one after another, swathed in pepper and salt, until my arms sag with proteins and lipids. Then I vomit into the sink and I want to cry but my body is too dehydrated for tears. 17. I decide, once again, that I have never been in love.

artist statements Artemisia Luk ’21

Cover: the last time we left the city (2021, digital photograph) My name is Artemisia Luk, and I am a Media Arts & Sciences major and Psychology minor. As someone who has often felt invisible, both through my struggles with mental health and my experiences as an Asian-American woman, I use photography to find vitality in the mundane, the overlooked, and the everyday. I enjoy finding power in small, quiet moments, transforming the invisible into the visible.

Bell Pitkin ’23

Page 1: Starlet Cowboy (2020, cyanotype on watercolor paper) This piece is a cyanotype created during the fall ’20 semester for Photo II with Kathya Landeros. The photo was taken digitally and then turned into a digital negative in order to create the cyanotype print. As a self-portrait, this piece reminds me of melodrama and old Hollywood glamor.

Ida Beckett ’24

Page 5: self-portrait w/ storage unit (2021, watercolor on paper) I painted “self-portrait w/ storage unit” as part of a self-portrait series that dealt with reflection and obfuscation. When I walked around New York City, I kept seeing myself reflected in surfaces—on the train, in storefronts, in car windows. Much like with a shadow, your reflection is a distortion that follows you wherever you look for it. I was surprised to see it wavering in the vividly green metal door of a storage unit. I found myself, looked, and left.

Fia Zhang ’24

Pages 6 & 33: American Football (2018, silver gelatin print), No Title (2019, digital photograph) I enjoy photographing things I love, walking, and working in the darkroom. Both works come from fond observation.

Teran Chapis ’22

Pages 10 & 11: Self-Portrait, 2016 (collage from magazines), Self-Portrait, 2020 (collage from magazines) My favorite mediums are cardboard or clay sculptures and magazine collages. These two self-portraits are made of old magazines. I made the 2016 one for an assignment when I was in high school. I was sad and very sick and waking up at 5:00 a.m. every day. I have changed a lot since coming to Wellesley and realized the self-portrait needed an update. I spent my summer in quarantine working on a 2020 version.

Regina Gallardo ’23

Page 12: 2017 (acrylic on cardboard) I created this self-portrait a couple of years ago—a couple of years after I immigrated from Mexico to the United States. The self-portrait was a reflection of pain caused by immigrant isolation. When I made this piece, I was going through a difficult time in my life and did not love the piece. This prompted me to distance myself from my art for a long time. As I reflect back on my initial three years of living in the United States, now in this pandemic period, I know that art was an outlet to express myself through difficult times. Even if I hated everything I created. Although being creative was hard for me at the time when I made “2017,” this painting allowed me to express and process the emotions I was feeling.

Tulani Reeves-Miller ’21

Page 16: i want to forget everything bad about me (2019, digital art) I create soft art about love, connection, and loneliness. “i want to forget everything bad about me” features a character named Muhsana, who appears in a lot of my work, in a contemplative, melancholy state.

Grace Ramsdell ’22

Pages 25 & 48: Passing Time (2021, silver gelatin print), Double Exposure (2021, 35mm film) I am a photographer and a creative nonfiction writer, and most simply put, I care about making things and sharing stories. Ever since arriving back on campus for the first time in 11 months, I have found myself photographing the same scenes day after day. I am continually struck by my surroundings at Wellesley—and by the fact that with each day that goes by, I still get to be here, watching the light shifting and the time passing.

Becca Cox ’22

Page 26: 1962 (2018, woodcut on paper) I’ve been making art since I was a child, and the practice has become a way for me to connect with the people who are in or were previously in my life. I gain a deeper understanding of these individuals as I bring them to life myself, my formulation of their physical appearances allowing me to appreciate how their features fit together and how they occupy space. Through portraits and figure studies, I have become closer to the people I depict, and therefore closer to the people I love.

Cheryl Minde ’24

Page 38: Familia Yangu (2018, digital photograph) I am a first-generation Tanzanian-American and Black woman from the midwest. To explore and feel more connected to my culture, I took a series of photos of my family in East African clothing. The photo “Familia Yangu” emulates a traditional portrait with our culture at the center. The bright colors and patterns capture how I feel about both my ancestry and my family. I feel warmth and I feel joy.

Eleanor Mallett ’22

Page 41: Widny (2020, acrylic on paper) My journey with painting began a year ago when we all got sent home from school. Attempting to find peace in a dark and unstable time, I spent many hours in my bedroom trying to recreate beautiful women with my childhood paint set. A year later, I have begun to understand shade, depth, and reflection simply from staring long enough at people’s faces. I don’t know where my art will go next, but I know that I will never get tired of giving back some of the beauty that I see!

Eva Knaggs ’23

Pages 44 & 53: Objects (2021, graphite and colored pencil on paper), Fly Paper (2020, graphite on paper) Drawing is part of my ongoing attempt to create a personal archive—to preserve what is small and fleeting and most likely to slip away. “Objects” is a reflection on reflection while “Fly Paper” is an ode to the ghosts of fungus gnats that have inhabited my plants.

masthead editors-in-chief Alyssa Robins ’22 Sara Lucas ’22

treasurers Anastasia Kondrashin ’23 Lucy Liversidge ’24

community chairs community outreach chair Gabby Garcia ’22 events manager Brynne Ruark ’23 publicity chair Kelsey Dunn ’21 social media chair Claire Cheek ’21 web chair Anna Lieb ’24

layout editors Elisha Ham ’24 Audrey Lin ’22 Blythe Terry ’23 layout consultant Tiffany Chu ’22

poetry editors Abby Martinage ’24 Cheryl Minde ’24

art editors Isa Orozco ’24 Grace Ramsdell ’22

prose editors Alex Ewing DS ’22 Diana Daniela Padrón ’24

senator Diana Salinas ’24

poetry Katherine Dalton ’24 Taylor Doke ’22 Jacqueline Galison ’23 Gabriella Garcia ’22 Kate Habich ’22 Lucy Liversidge ’24 Georgia Moskiou ’24 Julianna Poupard ’21 Grace Ramsdell ’22 Yuling Sun ’24 Isabella Tjan ’24 Emilie Zhang ’24 Ann Zhao ’24

art Gabriella Garcia ’22 Michela Gerardin ’21 Kara Lloyd Jenkins ’24 Joy Li ’23 Lucy Liversidge ’24 Abby Martinage ’24 Roxie Miles ’23 Cheryl Minde ’24 Georgia Moskiou ’24 Julianna Poupard ’22 Brynne Ruark ’23 Jules Spector ’23 Blythe Terry ’23

prose Juliana Barriere ’24 Lorelei Blau ’24 Katherine Dalton ’24 Fia Zhang ’24 Jacqueline Galison ’23 Lydia Gramstad ’21 Kara Lloyd Jenkins ’24 Abby Martinage ’24 Georgia Moskiou ’24 Grace Ramsdell ’22 Yuling Sun ’24 Blythe Terry ’23 Van An Trinh ’24 Ann Zhao ’24

editorial boards 63

With special thanks to Wellesley College Printing Services & the Wellesley College English Department Please send submissions to thewellesleyreview_wcso@wellesley.edu All works are selected through an anonymous submissions process. Submissions are open to Wellesley students, faculty, and alumnx. For more information, please visit www.thewellesleyreview.org