Thoroughfare
Johns Hopkins University Spring 2019
Thoroughfare Johns Hopkins University Literary Arts Magazine Spring 2019
Sheep Herding
by Grace Lee
Contents Cover Art: National Treasure Grace Lee Sheep Herding Grace Lee Tourist Grace Lee The Sikh Grace Lee A Booming Voice Jaeyoung Lee The Feeding Grace Lee Mad Cow Dancing Zephora Bisson Premeditated Loneliness Elizabeth Redmond Trailer Grace Lee Father and Son Grace Lee Lyrical Laundromat Keelin Reilly Zebrafish Grace Lee The Milton S. Eisenhower Library Charlotte Kwok Chimney Swifts Grace Lee Resting Place Grace Lee Time Travel Keelin Reilly Royalty Gun Kang Outdoor Chore(s) Keelin Reilly Double-dip Glaire Gourdeau Underwater Fight Grace Lee 12 Apostles at Sunset Grace Lee The Overnight Train from Beijing to Xi’an Carmen Jung Blooming Grace Lee
Tourist Sheep Herding by Grace Lee
by Grace Lee
The Sikh
by Grace Lee
A Booming Voice A Booming Voice by Jaeyoung Lee Dodgy eyes that sacrifice urban quiet, Rapid lips whose blasphemies usher street lamps, Flighty hearts of sinfulness baked with culture (scattering brainwaves)– All these bubble up and away like Pan Am, Fall and die like Pan Am, which slunk morosely. Angels speaking different tongues, the bright, young Graduates flying Off and back and forth, then to hell and heaven Back to hell because of an offer made by Demons: “Bow before me, for I will pay off All your outstanding Loans.” They settled down and arranged their houses. Feathers floated softly on happy carpet. Chaos has no family here: the fences Lineate goodness. Life is as it should be, or maybe could be. Milk and honey- pasteurized, filtered, promisedWill be bought, sold (not resold), bartered, wasted, Squandered and relished.
The Feeding
by Grace Lee
Mad Cow Dancing by Zephorah Bisson
Don’t dance in the carnival like when you were young; follow the
beat of the tassa drum, don’t get distracted by the steel ones; don’t do the Mad Cow Dance unless you are dancing with a child; beat your clothes against the rocks of the Essequibo river, careful not to rip them; choose soft but firm mangoes with a quietly sweet smell; always have both pepper sauce and achar in your house at all times, it’s improper to have one without the other, and disrespectful to have neither; chop the neck of the chicken with one swift chop, or you will stand there forever; don’t be an auntie-man; don’t bring in any more strays; don’t play with crapos; sing the hymns in church but don’t stand out; don’t make egg curry for guests, always use duck or goat; bathe yourself in coconut oil when you go outside; hoist the rice sack on your back and drive strength from your legs; drive slowly on the dirt road so they can see you from miles away if you ever get rich enough to get a car – oh, also be careful of the children; learn how to make dhalpouri in case your wife can’t make it very well but don’t be the auntie-man I thought you were going to be; impress that Chinese gyal from the capital and if she isn’t
impressed, move on to her sister; choose a woman that loves you more than you could love her; marry a woman that can dance soca, indian, and chutney at parties and dutty wine at home, but not too vulgar -- a woman like that will only cause headache; find a dulahin that can balay the roti, chunkay the dahl, cook the curry, if she can’t do any one of those, she will never be a daughter-in-law; in exchange for these services, know how to please her patacake; don’t climb the coconut tree like a monkey, climb with intention; only eat the shrimp raw when in front of family; sell your best crops at Parika Market once every month, don’t go more often than that or you’ll miss your children’s first steps; never let your children back chat; follow the Good Book and cut tail; did you talk to the Chinese gyal by the river? I heard she’s staying with the Auntie down the road; never let anyone call you cunumunu, even if it means you have to lick em’ down; use the boat only to go to Hagaii Island and Parika, gasoline is hard to come by; don’t relieve yourself in the trenches unless it’s dark; don’t walk across the graveyard; run if you hear the torment of the Baku’s voice; walk backwards into your house if you are coming in after midnight to keep out Jumbees; plant cassava year round; spend the rest of your afternoons in the rum shop addressing every man as “banna” – they’ll soon become as close as your buddy; but I don’t like alcohol; keep a cutlass in your house at all times and one more in the shed for good measure; be an angry drunk like me; beat your wife and kids when you get home so they know you’re a man; please yourself first and wife second until you have children, they will come first; hope you have one bai, but if you have a gyal, don’t be upset, she’ll eventually marry; and after all this, maybe one day you will become a freshwater yankee and exchange Mad Cow Dance for Ballroom Dance.
Premeditated Loneliness by Elizabeth Redmond
What use is a songbird with a broken neck except for inspiration, or practice?
Trailer
by Grace Lee
Father and Son by Grace Lee
Lyrical Laundromat by Keelin Reilly I sniff the stain on a sock seldom worn yet nonetheless tattered and torn, malformed, mismatched, and somewhat mended. Perhaps, it was once intended for another life, nicer than this one for certain. It can be like pulling back a curtain, looking at socks, contemplating their histories, earnestly wondering at the mysteries of who wore them before and what’s more, wondering if this sock’s owner is the bore who, like a weekly moon, appears each Tuesday to throw his clothes into the cleaning fray. A man who seldom succeeds in dressing impressively, except when it comes to new heights of depressively drab, dreary, dark and grey tones like this gosh-darned sock, now left on its own. It was dried in a hurry then forgot like the mop, no good for a sweep hanging in the back of the laundry I keep. Hell, this is a sock the dryer can keep! I’m knee deep in the oddities and ends left behind. Every day, I can rummage for a new find from socks sad as these to neon-pink lycra. But to get these things back? No one comes in to fight. Ya know what might make my store better for people coming through with t-shirts and sweaters, and the monochromatic types, all clad in sweats? To make things brighter, I could get some pets. Perhaps a small fish tank to mirror the machines that gyrate about in a wash of blues and greens. But I’ve barely the inclination for such niceties so I’ll keep rummaging to see what I find for free, then wander the rows to catch an eye glancing up from a phone (I rarely succeed). Something in their indifference cuts to the bone and makes me a stranger in what should be home.
Zebrafish by Grace Lee
The Milton S. Eisenhower Library by Charlotte Kwok
In MSE, the students sit in hell: a palpable pit of pimple-inducing stress. The students, hunched, their fingers tapping keys, inhabit floors beneath the ground; above, the others vociferously voice their grief, complaints that fall on apathetic friends. Sometimes library antics earn our friends a place in Dante’s 2nd circle of hell. That D-level Challenge brings unending grief to the cubicle population: their place to stress, is polluted by those whose intercourse ranks above the students studying midterm backtest keys. Those who want real power have the keys –and rights– to Brody study rooms. Their friends come flocking during finals. Up above, the fights befit the 5th circle of hell. A backpack, perched, to save a seat will stress a student to the point of tearful grief. The cafe capitalizes on this grief, constantly swiping j-cards, swinging from keys. Sitting at the entrance, it answers stress with costly coffee refills. Pray for friends who order Jitter Machines, a merge of hell –espresso shots– and chocolate from heaven above. But pre-meds on M-level, are the ones, above all others, sharing –comparing– their limitless grief. Though they know the 8th, the 9th circle of hell is home. Treachery and smiling lies are keys to gaining (and manipulating) friends, when trading camouflaged advice for stress.
Chimney Swifts by Grace Lee
It is the library’s only truth: the stress. No prayer is answered from any gods above. No solace is found in C-level cubicle friends. Instead, there festers a collective mass of grief, to accompany the students who earn their keys to descend the circles of their personal hell. But fixing stress and grief is easily done. Stuck above this hell, a life awaits. The major key: just leave the MSE.
Resting Place by Grace Lee
Train Travel by Keelin Reilly
Once on a train I sat and slept andall thewhile a child near wept. Through half closed eyes and near gone ears I caught her shrieks and cries and tears and thought “Why must this take place here?�
This train (like most that roll on tracks) bumpedon the steel this way and that. I hoped that through the to and fro the child would let her bad mood go. If rocked and held she might relax
and make this dark night trek on tracks a quiet affair for us as well and not this loud mobile train hell. Alas my hopes would be for naught; this poor young girl (being a tot)
cared not for us resting around. Like us, she longed to be on ground. Lacking restraint, she turned her wish to sound.
Royalty
by Gun Kang | Kanatography
Outdoor Chore(s) by Keelin Reilly Should I snip down the lily’s barren stalks, I would displace the spider from her web. Should I pull the weeds sprouting amongst the grass, I would deprive the bees bumbling about the flowered heads. Should I lop off the limbs of the linden tree, I would damage the chickadee’s darling nest. Should I cage the hydrangeas by the path, I would deny the deer a treat they love best. But should I fail to clean up this garden, I will face my mother’s wrath—something I dread and detest.
Double-dip by Claire Goudreau And we sat there alone — your hands on me like a sweat, fingers digging and searching for something that I may not have ever had — when I reached for a chip and you told me not to double-dip. I laughed at you, absurd and keen, “That? With my tongue between your teeth?” but you did not laugh back.
Underwater Fight
by Grace Lee
12 Apostles at Sunset by Jaeyoung Lee
by Grace Lee
The Overnight Train from Beijing to Xi’an How does it feel to be back in the motherland? As though I’ve been here before. I think about it again as the train winds through the night, and our little American group settles in. 1300 miles from where my great-grandparents are buried, but I guess it should feel the same. From above, my roommate rolls over and the top bunk creaks, adding to the symphony: the clattering tracks, a distant whistle, whispers fluttering through the walls like spirits masked by fog. Invoking the ancestors is not possible for my tongue can’t raise the language, the voice of the family tree long fallen over, did anyone hear it? This branch sheared off at the base. I’m a daughter but sometimes a changeling, see, even my folklore is Western. The food, street signs, and people: recognizable but like the cities of my grandparents (Guangzhou with its bustling; Hong Kong with her skyscrapers and history), out of my touch and this train is taking us away, taking us home? The ocean feels wider and I try to remember the characters in water, in nighttime, the swoops and tails and to-go boxes, but it’s a shipwrecked memory.
Tomorrow we see disarmed warriors, risen from clay, once buried for centuries as farmers planted above them. But right now, on this train drenched in moonlight, watching the city recede: here is the closest to connection. The passage in-between has always felt more like a place I’ve been before.
by Carmen Jung
Masthead Editor-in-Chief Saena Sadiq Prose Editor Alex Houck Poetry Editor Katie Chen Layout Chair Omolara Uthman Art Editor Victoria Yeh Treasurer Lucas Bednarek Marketing Chair Emery Buckner-Wolfson
Special thanks to the members of our poetry, prose, and art committees!
Spring 2019