The Wellesley Review, Issue 8, Spring 2012 by The Wellesley Review

the

WELLESLEY REVIEW

the

WELLESLEY REVIEW

NUMBER EIGHT SPRING 2012

/ CONTENTS 5 REDEYE

Gabriella Fee

6 CEDAR-OAK

S.J. Gray

8 COLORBLIND

Abigail Murdy

9 ORAL

Lena Smoot

LONE WOLF

Claire Whitman

CATULLUS 85

STOPPED

Esther Kim

DISTANCE

Saya Yada

THE BOWERBIRDS

Emilie Menzel

LACRIMAE RERUM

Myles Dunigan

FIRESIDE CHAT, 1976

Alison Lanier

UNTITLED

Lucy V. Cleland

RESPONSE TO A POSTCARD Zsofia Schweger FROM SOUTH AFRICA

Liza White

LA CUBANA (for Silvia)

Diamond Sharp ’11

BLANK

Lucy V. Cleland

TRANSUBSTANTIATION

Sophie Johnson

SHE WEIGHTED FOR ME

Xena Vronay

Gabriella Fee

CUMBERLAND GAP

HUNGARY HAS NO BEACHES

Zsofia Schweger

REDEYE Gabriella Fee

The tambourine, the chorister, the rain Against the urgent palms of leaves; the swell Of something coming to a boil; the train That splits the ancient town; the living smell Of circumstance and soil, of cardamom Arranging in your curls – I cannot slow This continental drift. I have no sun To make our days align, no moon to tow. Evening closes cleanly as a yawn And sets all gears in spin for those who sleep. What clever net will gather in the dawn And make the open morning glories speak? The bruise left by the absence of your hand Is wide as ocean separating land.

CEDAR-OAK S.J. Gray

The tongue twists words into phrases that leak meaning, A thick toxant like black tar residual from too many cigarettes Or too many apologies for wielding the axe they placed in your hand the day you were born and told you “Cut her down. She will resist, but then she’ll scream crimson and fall hard,” Like a drunk man’s pride in a bar fight he was born to lose. The timberman passes sleepless nights, haunted by oak’s last song.

Colors too fast, too soon. Then falling dry, withered Like so many stalks of wheat to the sickle who sees Only ahead and whistles on relentlessly into golden, Grain who has bartered by bending to the will of winds. The ripe ear ruptures upon threshing, the brittle rachis Split to reveal unborn fruits hastily cast aside with the chaff. When you eat her home-baked bread, do you mourn the barren field?

You toppled, a fallen cedar lovestricken, when her oak branches, Swept up in the gale of the 64’ carnival honkytonk, Came down on you in a torrent of banjo strings and mandolin. You smiled, backside damp and grass-stained palms Mementos. You wouldn’t wash those denims for weeks. But they knew you would cut her down, her leaves changing

And so too the smoke from her chimney rises corporeal To mingle with mountainbreath and birdsong you no longer hear, As short-lived as the bread and the wheat and the tree And the gale of ’64. They told you to build your fence of cedar, “the color of the earth, to resist decay,” but didn’t tell you the earth ends In fire. With nightdark, oranges and yellows and reds of her lifespark, Like autumn oak, reclaim your cedar pillage, matchsticks to ash. She watches, a child gazing into the mirror for the first time.

/ D

ORAL Lena Smoot

Colorblind / Abigail Murdy

uring that school year when her mother was heavily pregnant with the twins and couldn’t muster up the energy to look after her fourteen-year-old daughter, let alone leave the house, Susie was sent two doors down to stay with her Grandma Bess. Her mother told her that it was only until the babies were born or until her father returned from his latest employment-seeking venture, whichever miraculous event came first. Susie didn’t really mind, though. She and her grandmother got along in the way that people separated by a large generation gap always do: they sat in separate rooms listening to the TV at different volumes. Grandma Bess was her father’s mother, a steely-eyed, bluehaired woman who stood almost six feet tall and had various types of guns hidden around her house. “In case of an emergency,” she’d responded when asked why a .22 caliber pistol was hidden in the back of the silverware drawer. “With all these foreigners coming over, you can never be too careful.” She’d tightly clench her lips around the thin stub of her cigarette. Susie admired the way her grandmother smoked cigarettes, sucking all the fiery life out of one as fast as she could. Susie often stole some of her grandmother’s cigarettes, never lighting them, just putting them between her lips and sucking, pulling them in more and more until they were completely engulfed.

12 But Susie had always found her own mouth fascinating—the teeth and taste buds and tonsils and spit and skin, all hidden behind her two lips. And she loved the feeling of putting objects inside— rolling them around with her tongue, feeling them come into contact with her teeth and sucking out all the flavor. It was compulsive and fleeting, coming upon her at the oddest and most inopportune times: at soccer practice, in the shower, during science tests and doctor’s appointments. Susie would always find something to suck or chew without anyone noticing. Still, it was something that she knew was bad or at least wrong, so she tried to keep it to herself. Other girls gossiped about boys or rode their shiny pink bicycles in circles around the cul-de-sac after school; Susie locked herself in her room and sucked on the various things she could find on the carpet of her bedroom floor: hair pins, empty soda bottles, pieces of discarded jewelry, the loops of scissors. Sometimes, just on special occasions, Susie would pick parts of her body to suck, leaving harsh red marks on her thumbs and inner arm. “What are you doing in there?” her mother or grandmother called. “Nothing,” Susie replied with her mouth full. She’d been able to keep her secret to herself until that school year. To her teachers at Montgomery Junior High, all of her fingernail biting and pencil chewing was due to nerves. Considering her life at home, it was only natural that she’d be a little jumpy. But it was one Friday at the end of May when Mrs. Farber’s eighth grade American history class was especially rowdy that Susie was found out. It had been the first truly warm day, and the kids were anxious to get outside. Mrs. Farber, a relatively young teacher, was finding it difficult to make the American Revolution seem more interesting than baseball or swimming in the lake. The loudest of

13 the class was a small, dark eyed girl named Rebecca, who was openly discussing her weekend plans with a classmate. Finally, Mrs. Farber barked, “Rebecca, please take your things and move next to Susie and try to remain quiet. The next person who speaks is going to get detention.” Rebecca did as she was told, grabbing her books and her shiny black purse and walking as slowly as she could to the back of the room, making loud stomps along the way. She plunged down into the seat next to Susie and immediately dumped the contents of her purse onto the small desk. Pen caps, gum wrappers, used tissues, paper clips, coins and various types of makeup landed in a heap in front of her. Susie stared longingly. She tried to focus on George Washington crossing the Delaware, but Rebecca’s constant movements and shifts were distracting, so she stuck the end of her pencil in her mouth and gnawed ferociously. “That’s disgusting,” Rebecca whispered fiercely to Susie, as she plucked a tube of lip gloss from the pile on her desk. “You’ll get lead poisoning if you keep that up.” Susie was about to tell her classmate that it was impossible to get lead poisoning from a pencil, but then she noticed the lip gloss Rebecca was now applying. It was light pink and smelled of strawberries. Rebecca confidently applied coat after coat of the gloss, only stopping once to wipe away an errant streak from the corner of her mouth with her French-tipped nails. Susie began to wonder about other people’s mouths, other people’s tongues, their teeth. Could they possibly be as wondrous as her own? Rebecca’s might be, she thought. Rebecca’s strawberry tinted, wet looking lips which held perfect, brace-less teeth. “Did you hear me?” Rebecca asked in the same hushed tone as

14 before. “Hello?” Seemingly of their own accord, Susie’s hands flew towards Rebecca’s face and into her O-shaped mouth. The need to explore consumed her entirely as her fingers progressed further into the other girl’s mouth. Susie felt moist gums and the pointy tops of molars, and a wild rush of excitement washed over her. For a few moments, she felt like an explorer, an archaeologist discovering King Tut’s tomb. Then, she felt pain. Rebecca had bitten down on Susie’s hands, and once her mouth was free from foreign digits, she fell backwards out of her seat and began to scream. Susie could only stare at her bloody fingertips. When Susie was inevitably sent to the principal’s office after the nurse bandaged her hands, Mr. Browning asked her what she’d been thinking and said that it was highly inappropriate for young ladies to put their fingers in anyone’s mouth, male or female. Good girls didn’t do things like that. After all, self-control was next to godliness, and we can’t just do what we want. Mr. Browning informed Susie that he’d called her mother (who hadn’t answered the phone), then her grandmother to pick her up so that she could have some time to think about what she’d done. A lot of time, actually, because she was being suspended for the remainder of the year. Grandma Bess burst through the door wearing her best paisley shirt tucked into her high waisted pants, followed timidly by Mr. Browning’s secretary who could only offer looks of apology. “Is she done?” Grandma Bess asked, not waiting for an answer before she took Susie by the shoulders and walked out of the building and right into the car. Once they were safely out of the parking lot, Grandma Bess asked, “Well, are you going to tell me

15 what the hell that was all about?” Susie just looked down at her hands, both completely bandaged in thick white gauze from the base of her fingers to the tips. It looked like she was wearing poorly constructed mittens. “Come on, speak up,” urged her grandmother. “I just...” she began softly, “I wanted to…I like mouths.” “What?” “Mouths. I like them.” “So be a dentist. Don’t try to manually give a girl a tonsillectomy,” said Grandma Bess as she stopped at the traffic light on Main Street. “No, it’s just that sometimes,” Susie sighed heavily, “Sometimes, I just feel like putting things in my mouth. Or other people’s. I can’t help it.” Susie’s grandmother remained silent for the rest of the drive until she dropped Susie off at her house and said, “Go inside and get your things. Don’t upset your mother.” Susie nodded and slid off the leather seat and trudged inside her house. The air conditioning her mother turned on the minute the temperature outside reached sixty degrees blasted at her. Susie’s mother was sleeping soundly on the couch, her skin sticking to the plastic covering. Fearful of risking her mother’s pregnant wrath, Susie went silently to her room, careful to avoid that one creaky step, second from the top. She gathered some clothes and a few book, holding them gingerly because of her bandaged hands. When she made her way outside, her grandmother’s car was parked on the driveway two doors down. Susie entered the house and dumped her things unceremoniously on the kitchen table. “Here,” said her grandmother, returning from the living room.

16 “Take these.” She gave Susie a dusty bag of candy with a picture of a black cat with its back arched being chased by a jack-o-lantern with vines for legs. Inside were large orange and black gumballs. “What are these for?” Susie asked. “When you feel like…well you know…just chew on one of these. Might help.” Susie nodded and shoved her hand into the bag and dug out a bright orange candy. She held it between her thumb and the mass of gauze around the rest of her hand before she popped it into her mouth. By summertime, Susie had taken up chewing bubblegum and wandering—the gum to sate her oral fixation, and the wandering because she liked not knowing where she was headed. That and none of the kids from school would talk to her. And one day, she’d bought a new supply of extra-large gumballs from the drug store and decided to go for a wander around her town. Despite the beautiful summer weather, the streets were empty. Most of her neighbors had gone away on summer vacation, so most of the small businesses on Main Street were dark. But Susie preferred the grim emptiness of the town over the jokes and whispers. She meandered slowly, bag of gumballs in hand, past the deli and the liquor store, past the library and the elementary school and the pool. She chewed, putting gumball after gumball into her mouth and wishing that she could replace each candy with the trash that littered the sidewalk. When she finally looked up from the ground, she realized that she had somehow made it to her school. Susie hadn’t been there since she’d been suspended that warm day in May, and an eerie silence now replaced children’s shouts. She spat out the old gumball in her mouth

17 onto the browning grass and brought a light pink gumball to her mouth. She walked around the side of the school, running her hand along the warm brick and smiling as it softly scratched her still tender fingertips. Susie continued around the side of the building towards the small forest that bordered the side of the junior high school. During the school year, she had often spent her lunchtimes alone in the woods, eating her peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, sitting on a tree stump. Unlike the other girls in her class, the twigs, bugs, and dirt never bothered Susie. Sometimes she would purposefully drop a carrot stick on the ground and let it collect granules of soil before picking it up and eating it. Other times, she would chew on small woodchips and wash them down with her Sunny D. The urge to go into the woods, that one safe space, propelled her forward, and she ran into the forest. Grass crunched beneath her feet, and branches smacked and scratched her face. The gumballs in her bag cracked against each other, making little lines in the candy shells. She looked up at the sky, at the little patches of blue poking through the thick canopy of leaves. For the first time in what felt like a very long time, she was happy. That feeling, however, was short-lived. Distracted by her surroundings and yet unaware of them, Susie’s foot caught on a hollowed log, and she fell to the ground face first. When she staggered to her feet, she realized that the partially chewed, irregularly shaped strawberry-flavored gumball was lodged in her throat. She clawed at her own throat, willing the gum to fall out as she stumbled back and forth. She stared up at the sky again and saw the sun peeking through the trees. She came to the conclusion that this

wasnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t the way she wanted to die. But she was going to die, right here, in the little forest behind the junior high school. She dropped to her hands and knees and dug her fingernails into the cool, hard ground. She could feel her heartbeat in the back of her eyes, so she closed them. Susie balled up her right hand into a fist and punched herself once squarely in the abdomen. And finally, after an eternity, the gum was dislodged and flew out. It was almost beautiful, the way it sailed through the air accompanied by droplets of her spit and bits of dirt. It landed in a bush four feet in front of her, brushing the leaves as it landed. Susie took several deep, shaky breaths that hurt her throat on the way down, and she ran her tongue along the insides of her mouth, enjoying the empty feeling that remained. For a few moments, she let herself lie on the ground pathetically. The plastic bag of gumballs still sat by the log sheâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d tripped over. A few had spilled out onto the ground, their bright colors decorating the grass like hidden Easter eggs. Susie collected them and put them back into their container except the last one, bright green with specks of dirt on it. She held it between her thumb and forefinger and examined it for several seconds. And then popped it in her mouth and chewed. //

Lone Wolf / Claire Whitman

CATULLUS 85

Thirteen translations from Prof. Young’s LAT307 class

Odi et amo. Quare id faciam, fortasse requiris. Nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior. 1. I hate and I love. Why should I do this, you might ask. I do not know, but I feel that it is happening, and I am tortured. 2. I hate and I love. Why do I do this, you ask? I wish I knew, for I feel it being done to me, and I am tormented. 3. I hate and I love. Why would I do this, you might ask? I don’t know, but I feel it happening and I suffer. 4. I hate and I love. Why do I do this, perhaps you ask? I don’t know. But I feel it happening and I am crucified. 5. I hate and I love. Why, you might be asking, would I do a thing like this? I don’t know, but I feel it happening and it’s killing me. 6. I hate and I love. Why do I endure this, perhaps you ask? I do not know, but I feel it and thus I suffer.

7. I hate and I love. Perhaps you wonder why do I do this? I do not know. It is done and I suffer. 8. I hate and love. I know not why, so do not ask. I merely sense it and am pained. 9. I love’n’hate. You might ask why I would, but I cannot say, only knowing that I feel it and it scourges me. 10. I hate and I love. How does this keep happening to me? I hate and I love. I know that I feel it and I am tortured. 11. I hate and I love. Sentient, but I do not know why--agonized--I hang in this crux. 12. I hate and I love. Why do I do this, perhaps you require? I do not know, but I feel that it will cause my expire. 13. Hate and Love working indiscriminately, Taking turns mangling the lover’s blind guts.

1. Jane Domino 2. Tya Logan 3. Carolyn Tobin 4. Emma Maynard 5. Julia Burns 6. Julia Cohen 7. Jefferson Lee 8. Julia Martin 9. Elizabeth Haynes 10. Rebecca Straley 11. Anna Maria Coronata 12. Jessie Haladyna 13. Emma Mrkonic

DISTANCE Saya Yada

I see my father sitting in my dorm, Reading a newspaper in English. He is right by a window through which Glorious sunlight, too beautiful for March Filters in, lighting up my room. Spring Break is over. I’m unpacking my things, and Also my thoughts: what we’re going to do today. My plans for the summer, the work I have to do. What he should visit on campus, where we should dine. He doesn’t say anything. I don’t need to look his way to see his smile, Know that he is nodding, listening, His head of dark hair bent over The Sunday Times.

Stopped / Esther Kim

I didn’t wonder why he was reading In a language he didn’t know, Didn’t stop to think That he couldn’t really be there. Seeing him holding his newspaper, I just thought: He must not be able to read a word, The sun is far too bright.

THE BOWERBIRDS Emilie Menzel

There is a steadiness in order. Learn it here— The shiver of forest’s spine when rain Like a cold hand trails its way up The knobs of the forest back, chills The body, raises the hips, twists The head with cold. When the slapped weight of rain against The canopy slicks the tree trunks, Dribbles into ears of sleeping bats and birds Who shake their bodies awake to musty Smells of wet. The beat and beat of rain until spine Shakes and is bent, the long boughs Grow scratches, the scent of sweat On matted fur curdles and now—the forest Back bruises into blues, into greens, Sick rebirth.

We draw a line between this crash Of sense and our own small bodies, Separate ourselves from the forest, separate In that our home is not this home of bent and brush Whose chaos cannot hold comfort. It goes like this—today, a bird With blue tail feathers the size of an arm thrust His body upon a slim fig tree and scratched Her sides in his scramble for the satisfying Dribble of wet fruit on the beak. We are hopping in the forest, tilting our heads, Sifting forest floor for storm broken twigs, shells Of dead beetles, golden leaves tossed Down by the rain. We land Upon the satin blue blade. Blue—a color for the rims Of lakes, for the thin film of an eye Lightly scratched, for cold lips and the edges Of ideas. The color slips into our world, And we pinch it in our beaks. It is light.

We peel the blue back from the skin Of the forest, nip clean the quill, and roll the color through our doorframe, Down the middle path of our twig wigwam. And when Forest knocks, it goes Like thisâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;when entering the home Of the bowerbird, slide off your shoes, Hang your hat on the central post, And, gently, do not shuffle the dust.

Lacrimae Rerum / Myles Dunigan

/ S

FIRESIDE CHAT, 1976 Alison Lanier

he had chosen to be placed in this apartment for its view of the long avenues stretching out like snow angel limbs, but through the windows, she could see nothing natural or living. Sometimes, though, she could see the tanks, crawling along the low pavement boulevard, dull green-gray insects groaning against the street. On the screen of her tiny television was the image of a beautiful woman, the sort of woman whose neck was particularly long and straight from hours of practice holding it that way. The pearls around her neck were grotesquely glossy. The fine bones of her face were traced brightly by studio lights, the wide lipstick-pink smile of her mouth arcing into an upturned bow. She was blanched, powdered into an artificial pallor. She looked like nobody anybody would know. And the woman with her pearls purred, “Today the standard average evaluation of wealth per capita reached a new high for the decade. Citizens now live at a comfort level far superior to any time during the last ten years. National celebrations of these new statistics will take place at fifteen-hundred this afternoon.” In her apartment, she smiled at the tiny television set, sparking in black and white, the poor transmission quality making the image shine as if blurred through gossamer layers. She was grateful to the beauty on the screen. She was grateful because the beautiful woman was the last beautiful thing, and there was an unspeakable, gem-like

happiness that came with seeing beauty like that again. Beauty was enough. She could feel her own face reddening and burning in the heat from her apartment’s furnace, and she knew that beauty was not going to be hers anymore. She was stale, starved by state rations, dry and muscleless and cold at a gray and dragging twenty-two. Beauty hadn’t been hers for a long time. That was the purpose of the face on the screen, the very last beautiful face. She loved the face, the movement of its dimpled cheeks and the pulse beneath the thin skin and expensive powder. She knew that it loved her too, wordlessly, innately, illogically. But she felt that she knew it like she knew that the wind was the movement of air particles and that to stand outside in the pollution would turn her hands and hair several shades darker. That face was all the beauty of the furniture she couldn’t afford, the wallpaper that didn’t cover the apartment’s gray walls. It was all the loveliness of the expensive clothes that were no longer made. Perhaps that was where the government’s authority sparked from: it wasn’t the absolute monopoly on oil, on wheat, on the synthetic meat plants. It was only their monopoly on that one aesthetic trophy. She imagined that the woman was perfumed, that the speaker was somehow educated, sensitive, that the many professionals who applied the layers of cosmetics were all its good friends, that the lavender eyes were not artificial, packaged like most eye colors and sold under the illiterate label Liz Taylor, Charm and Ladiness. She had an obligation to love that beauty. It didn’t matter what society was doing outside in its city of cold metallic angles and edges cutting the low gray-white sky, how fast society crumbled. How many years had passed since the revolution. Beauty survived. There was a knock at the door, sharp and loud.

30 It was all a matter of course. The door, by law, was unlocked, and the man-shaped shadows moved inside, wrapped in uniforms and the darkness that gulped at the length and width of the apartment’s one room. That was alright, because her friend on the television had told her so many times what to do, how to behave when this happened. In their camouflage and their riot helmets and with their batons heavy in their hands, they were all at once part of the one, the same unit, so close in nature to one another that there was no definition between them. She was bound close in their unit too—all of these isolated people in their identical apartments across the city and the country were part of it, loose and gray in state-issued clothes with the stateissued volume of coal for the furnace. She felt stronger now that the shadows were here, with their faces that weren’t faces and at once, mysteriously, were the face on the television screen. She was dizzy and loose with happiness. She was so un-alone. She was so a part of so many great, other, active things, closer and closer to beauty. The camouflage-gloved hands slipped around her arms, and she felt as if her starved bones were made of crafted glass. They lifted her to her feet, efficient, just as all the efficient pieces of this one, powerful whole would be doing the same in every apartment in every unit in this district of this gray, steam-pressure-and-skyscraper city. “It’s time to attend the statistics celebration, Miss Winters.” The statistics celebration. The increased standard average wealth per head. Per capita. At the statistics celebration, the gathered revelers would lose their capitas. A bloody celebration. A new mass grave. She imagined the working of the enormous guillotine with its smooth, snapping movement down and then the blade’s punch against the metal frame. Increased standard average wealth per capita. In a few months,

31 there would be another celebration. Another increase in standard average wealth. Per head. The statistics would improve, and the news would happily announce the numbers this evening to a reassured populace. Everything was always getting better and better. She could not be angry. She could not be indignant. Any pride had already gone away with her beauty. Her face, burned by the proximity to the fire, was all tight and red in a smile, preserving the expression of joy and love and unity that the beauty on the television had inspired— The television was still buzzing on in flickery black and white, a beacon like the deep hot orange dying in the furnace. But the sound from the television changed. She twisted her chin around, over her shoulder, so that she could see the little screen. The camera was rolling, transmitting the image of the still-smiling face, the priceless aesthetic, its pearls and its teeth deeply bleached like ocean foam or a polished bone. But the face was utterly still, frozen in the frame, and there were people moving, frantic, rushing, shoving in the background, against the solid, shadeless blue, shouting. “Turn it off! For God’s sake, turn it off!” “Stop transmission! Stop transmission! Cut!” The television had never been so frightened before, she thought. The face had never been so still. “My God,” murmured one of the camouflage shadows at her shoulder, its big hand tight on her glass arm. “They’re not going to turn it off!” Somebody knocked into the camera in the faraway studio, an accident, a small catastrophe, and the frame widened as the camera rolled, unguided, away. The face was a decapitated head—no, it was

an android face, lifelike, but with a mess of wires bleeding from below its collarbone. The faultless skin extended palely only that far: below it was all a metallic stand and blinking, automatic lights. She felt a deep cold fill up her body. It was like watching a huge mass of boiling water poured over an ice sculpture, watching all the beautiful crystalline structures break up and vanish in a cloud of scorching, disastrous steam. The shocked fissures went shooting through her mind, and for an instant she was simply cold and numb and pitiful, watching the noisy destruction unfold on screen with nothing moving through her mind but a continuous no no no. And then the instant snapped, and she was furious, burned, standing on thin air with a drop of a thousand feet yawning under her feet. All the beauty in the world, she thought, was dead. Things went all to dust and dry feathers. And she had known that it had to be this: she had had a sense of this betrayal, an ugly precognition, doomed foresight. She had known that all the messages were wicked. Of course she had known that. But she had hoped. Oh she had hoped. Blind, happy hope. The guards’ hands fastened absolutely on her arms, pulling her towards the door, but now, now she was screaming. She heard the shriek like needles, echoing from thousands of other throats across the district, permeating the buildings’ glass and concrete. They had all seen the deception on the constant, adored television sets, altars defiled. But the guards were forceful—they were forceful in every apartment, guiding the revelers towards the statistics celebration. The standard average wealth per capita in New York would increase in very short order. // Untitled / Lucy V. Cleland

Liza White

An exclamation, a realization. A dawning comprehension. An orb suspended between consonants makes a word glow. A possibility (that once seemed possible), the mouth you opened to speak the words (that never came). The cracked crater of some other planetâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s moon, or a moan. The apple before that fateful bite, a perfect expression of infinity. A foghorn like whalesong, woeful and slow. oh oh oh. Response To A Postcard From South Africa / Zsofia Scheweger

/ T

LA CUBANA (for Silvia) Diamond Sharp â&#x20AC;&#x2122;11

he woman on the corner sells trinkets. Her name is Maria. Maria Guadalupe Rivera (named for Maria, her great-grandmother, a negrita slave woman who worshipped Oshun or as Oshun is known to Catholics, Santa Maria de la Caridad) The stoops on this block are marked by passages better left unremembered or reimagined. The stoops are filled with many myths of passage from the islands. Maria has always said that it was raining the day she left Cuba, though it was in fact sunny. There was no fogged cloak in which she escaped under. Her journey was marked by the sun. English has no words for that feeling between love and mere attraction. In Spanish, it is simply querer, a love less strong. Whatever that word may be, that is how she felt when she reached Miami, the first stop on her journey to New York. Maria did not struggle to find that word for Jose, her intended. Instead, it was for Juanita, but those things were not talked about then. Maria is also known as Abuela. Abuela who prays the rosary and fasts on holidays. She is a woman who was known to be as fertile as cabao. It was the Taino who named the island before Cristobol Colon. Caobana did not roll off of Spanish tongues like cuba. On the islands, the name for women who cared for each other has

been lost to time. Sometimes, Maria called Juanita mi cielo, my sky. The bus has no marked point of departure (or for that matter, entry). It simply leaves when it decides to and hopefully you are on board. Jose has long passed. Maria, who prays the rosary, is going to Miami. There is no English word for lost love. Or perhaps the word is regret. To love with everything, even through mere, pressed-ink paper, envelopes and stamps, is amar in Spanish. There are decades of letters between Maria (who prays the rosary) and Juanita. Juanita (who pours libations on the altar of Shango) lives near the beach. For Maria, who once mourned midnight dreams, there is a word for love. //

TRANSUBSTANTIATION Sophie Johnson

In Sunday school I learned that God was hidden in the classroom of a man with a too-tight collar and a reverence for bread. Beneath exercises in rye and wheat were homilies of kindness and humility, and lessons in how things came to be.

Blank / Lucy V. Cleland

With the utmost care we wrapped them in a ceremony of paper, gave them communion with twine. Proud protectors of objects of beauty, too sacred to be destroyed in mouths of a God-fearing people on a Thursday night bake-sale. They wouldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t appreciate this body of Christ.

CUMBERLAND GAP Gabriella Fee

You were better off before the mines went strip And the girls started throwing their eyes around. Nobody trusts a neighbor now. He might blow His top and turn you in for letting the baby cry. A flame from high school brings you some anisette, Asks to hear a story from the old days, tells You that. You bring your little whittled dog Out to the porch and she says, “Hey, did you whip That out just now?” and you say “yeah” When really you’ve been working it for years. Mourning dove sings first and the hollow is cool. There was a time when the trees were shade And Shirl was nice-looking. All this green was here, But it didn’t crowd in on you like it does now, Or at least it didn’t pity. Can you frame a jagged Sky while jagged puffs of cloud chug by? Every door Opens out, every IGA sells snuff, every road Is only a road until it’s a path until it’s woods And damn, you’re lost. Carolers out until mid-May. There are some things that haven’t changed. She Weighted For Me / Xena Vronay

The green, green blue never did summer well -Musky as a muff and dense too. Nothing real Down here. You don’t fear death so much As the pride you’d lose in dying. It’s like pissing With the door open, messy, and always a bug To eat your eyes out when you’re gone, always A bug to eat out the bug in you. Red engine snag In the river, dark-hearted sunset, dark-haired Daughters mince laughingly down the bank To wring the working day out of their aprons.

Five-foot copperhead slung across the road Like electrical wire. Six shots to kill. Don’t turn The curb into a tightrope, Emma Rose; all flesh Is grass and all its glory is like the flower Of the grass. The old psalm is cracked, black As the lungs of brothers who flipped like coins Into slotted earth. It was the combine or the mine, And you never could shake the sky from your boots. Work above ground is a lucky shame, no conscientious Objection on the part of the man you are.

Did you hang the diapers from the porch to dry And did you buy the pop, and did you cash The one check and write the other and will you Come inside the pipes are screaming like they want To bust out; and did you fix the carburetor and did You bury the cat, and did you wipe that nose and that, And did you sand the stoop, and did you fall to fungus Or did you rise from root, and did you tie the dogs up And did you wash your dish and if He asked you One question about your life would that be it?

Cumberland, Cumberland, do you miss something Grand if you choose to drive here and not there On the wet snake road? A bird in the bush Is no bird in the hand. Are you alive and will you be Tomorrow or the next time the river floods And the engine unsticks and careens downstream? You may have fallen in love with this life. No matter, Just cool mornings and the best thing you ever had, Something like a walk with a dog along a dam, The one side of it bearing down on the other.

Who got that life, who got this? Who drives out To Pikesville each day in a logger and who reads O’Connor in a corner café? Who gave your oldest The hash that sent her singing at you like a brick In the gut? Who night-parks in the bowling alley, Who made girls so mean, to whom are the Pentecostals talking, And who does Shirl meet some mornings with the kids Most grown and you kick-starting your machine? Who do the blind see in their dreams, and If He asked you One question about your life, what would it be?

Shirl says she calls it like it is, but it is not. She brushes the little one’s hair until it screams And then she covers its mouth. Emma Rose, Emma Rose, Don’t you turn the curb into a tightrope and don’t you chew Your braids and don’t you see that this will all be yours Someday to love and with your body make anew? A legacy Is yours, a rock-red engine in a stream. Shirl has fifteen Long-necked geese to kill on fifteen Christmas Eves. They move like rain across the lawn as if their wings Were clipped. They never leave or make a sound.

Alone, you are a vulture and a falcon and a sap-eye Cowboy shithead with a flatbed Ford and a red engine Tongue. You drive circles and you are lip and you are here Because you are here. Coal free-falls through the chute. Roads split their seams. Mourning dove sings first And the hollow is cool. Steady-eyed ladies lift their skirts. Radio waves crash against the hills and roll back. News comes from the underground, from the raven’s Mouth, from the foot-thick bed of needles so forest-deep That summer never comes and worms churn loam to life.

There is a song about a man who dies in the mine. There is a song about a man who dies in the field. There is a song about a man who dies eyes open On his way to work, and doesn’t notice. It goes like this, you tell the flame from high school. You put the liquor on the sill where Shirl will see it. You show her how it goes. Her eyes are everywhere At once. She claps along. Her mouth curls. How long You been singing, she asks, all serious. And if He asks you One question about your life, it will be this.

Hungary Has No Beaches / Zsofia Scheweger

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wellesley review

EDITORS-IN-CHIEF Claire Grossman, Julie Daurio POETRY EDITORS Jaya Stenquist, Emilie Menzel, Ava Bramson PROSE EDITORS Faye Bates, Jennifer Lin, Sydney Butler, Alison Lanier, Nicole Tai LAYOUT & PUBLICITY Cicia Lee

COVER ART:

Detail of “Hungary Has No Boundaries” – Zsofia Scheger FOUNDING EDITOR: Sumita Chakraborty

The Wellesley Review is a bi-annual literature and arts magazine that features the work of Wellesley students, faculty, and alumnae. Find us online at thewellesleyreview.org.

ISSUE no. eight SPRING 2012