Tuesday Magazine
Volume 8,VIssue o l u 2m e 8 , I s s u e 1
“THE BEST-LOOKING
PUBLICATION AT HARVARD,
PRINTED ON HEAVY PAPER AND SET IN GORGEOUS, CLEAR TYPE
… A POPULIST ALTERNATIVE TO THE OBSCURE THAT WELCOMES THE GENERAL PUBLIC.”
- The Harvard Crimson’s Fifteen Minutes ________________________________________________________________________________________________
APPLY TODAY TO JOIN TUESDAY ART
BUSINESS DESIGN EDITORAL STAFF WRITERS
TUESDAYMAGAZINE.ORG/JOIN
________________________________________________________________________________________________
TUESDAYMAGAZINE.ORG/SUBMIT FICTION, ART, POETRY, NONFICTION
Table of Contents | Volume 9, Issue 1 5
Wall Art
23
Confession
6
Where You Are
24
Floor/Chair
7
Hippo and Dragon
25
Double
7
Prehistoric Love Affair
26
The Human Wall
8
The No Good Tourist
29
Unicycles
13 Shelley on 3rd Street
30
Untitled
14 Of the Nights We Fall in Love
32
Winter Wonderland
15 A Trigger Down
33
Necrophilia
16 Untitled
34
Sea Spider to the Tufted Marshalia
.
Whitney Shaw Charcoal on Paper
.
Kathryn Reed Fiction
.
Joanie Kim Painting
.
Amy Robinson Poetry
.
Matthew Wozny From the Notebooks
.
Justin Wymer Poetry
.
Se-Ho Kim Fiction
.
Dominic Viti Fiction
.
Marisa Beckley Photography
18 Snakes of Hawaii
.
Max Elias Schulman Critisism
21 Steppes
.
Devi Lockwood Poetry
22 Still From Tongue Follows Grave
.
Kayla Escobedo 50 second animation using cutouts
Cover image by Gordon Bae
Devi Lockwood
.
Poetry
.
Scott Roben Painting
.
Scott Roben Painting
.
Amy Robinson Fiction
.
Joanie Kim Painting
.
Joe Poirier Photography
.
Maura Church Poetry
.
Louis Evans Fiction
Stephanie Wang
.
Poetry
35
Flint’s Field
36
Enumerated Heart Sutra
38
Glistening
.
Whitney Donaldson Photography
.
Ingrid Pierre Digital Image
.
Rebecca Maddalo Poetry
Table of Contents | Tuesday Magazine | 3
www.tuesdaymagazine.org
Louis Evans, President Max Schulman, President
Editorial Board Lauren DiNicola, Editor-in-Chief Matthew Wozny, Editor-in-Chief Max Schulman Design Board Xinrui Zhang, Director Jennifer Hatfield Sarah Ngo Samantha Wesner
Doreen Xu, Managing Editor Xinrui Zhang, Managing Editor
Staff Writers Katherine Xue, Director Emily Marie Boggs Xanni Brown Sakura Huang Simone Kovacs Devi Lockwood Rebecca Maddalo Nikita Marchev Amy Robinson William Ryan Leah Schecter Melanie Wang Jeremy Ying
Art Board Marisa Beckley, Director Sarah Ngo Jihyun Ro Business Board Doreen Xu, Director Sakura Huang With Special Thanks To: Josh Wang The Office for the Arts at Harvard The Undergraduate Council
Tuesday Magazine is a general interest publication that engages in and furthers Harvard’s intellectual and artistic dialogue by publishing art and writing, with an emphasis on student and non-professional work. Staff applications are accepted at the beginning of each semester, and submissions are accepted on our website throughout the year. Visit tuesdaymagazine.org for more information. Copyright Š 2011 by Tuesday Magazine. All rights reserved. Reproduction without permission is prohibited.Tuesday Magazine is a publication of a Harvard College student-run organization. Harvard name and/or VERITAS shield are trademarks of the President and Fellows of Harvard College and are used by permission of Harvard University.
4 | Staff and Contributors | Tuesday Magazine
Wall A rt Wh itn ey S h aw
charcoal on paper 2010
Wall Art | Whitney Shaw | Tuesday Magazine | 5
Where You Are FICTION | KATHRYN REED I. It’s 23:02 in Detroit and 3:02 in Berlin, places where I imagine you might be, though I know where you are not. Greece is too dirty, Africa is too black, Florida, you say, is where people and culture go to die. The former you are not ready for, and the latter you never had. Though perhaps I am being cruel. Perhaps, too, my initial guesses were incorrect. Might I have had the time zones correct? The location, I suppose, is superfluous—I hold on to the knowledge of where you are not. And you are not here. The light is leaving these dusty streets, as it tends to do when you are on my mind. Admittedly, it might be the other way around. Admittedly, correlation has always seemed to have more to say. Men hurry home, paying even less attention than I to the causation of things. Their shoes kick up the path and burnt red particles glisten before rising up to be eaten by the air. The sky reflects its consumption in muted hues. In my pocket are words, chosen carefully by someone in Crockett, Kentucky to convince those like me of the significance of our souls. Almost catching a plane, someone says, is like almost finding God. Maybe that someone is you. But you always hated the heat of the south, didn’t you? Though, in recalling, I remember you found comfort in the insincerity of their smiles. I have never taken a plane and decide not to extend the metaphor further. I blame my father, who never did much to steer us on our way toward salvation. “Praying like a devote Catholic is just a surefire way to ruin a good pair of trousers,” he would say. The same, said my mother, was true of
prostitution. She never was terribly wellinformed and knew little in the way of the attire of hookers. II. It is now 21:47 here, where you are not, and I have finished contemplating planes and the heat of Kentucky. The sun has set and I am walking by the light of other stars, considering instead the perfect silence with which they are able to depart—the lingering allusion they leave of their presence, years after they have truly stopped giving. And I, content as I am to correlate and to connect, continue to walk by whatever illumination, unquestioning of the source I somehow need to believe is still true. III. Us comes back to me as a dream remembered hours after waking, slowly, with the uncertainty with which I have come to regard my thoughts. Perhaps I hold onto only that which I find salvageable, embellishing the adjectives and softening the nouns, blurring the context and mottling the scene. It is all so out of focus anyway, I disregard the rest. We lie in bed and I search for the conversation I have come to desire more than your touch. Words I must ascribe more to authors and poets than to your lips as they trace the outlines of my thighs. But I have learned to associate them with you. I am enamored by the words of dead romantics, and you have been asleep for hours. I take a moment to study the things other than love that are said to be blind—bends in some roads, my childhood cat (partially), the Texas Salamander—before turning over in an attempt to rouse you from your sleep. I begin to count the stars for righteousness, or out of boredom.
6 | Where You Are | Kathryn Reed | Tuesday Magazine
IV. It is midnight in this neglected city where I am, and I am tired of the unyielding regularity of military time. Your presence had left these walls, this bed, long before you, long before now, by way of pictures never taken and mornings never shared. I live my nights in moments I felt and you attended, I spend my days everywhere you never were. In exclamation points and bolded letters, the mail proclaims I could soon be on my way to the Bahamas, if only I answer 5 questions (simple! easy!). My name stares resolutely back at me through a plastic window lain amidst a sparkling sea. The deafening resonance of you not calling reverberates throughout an apartment that was in no way truly ours. The Bahamas, I conclude, are out. Maybe Athens in the spring—unless you have changed your stance. V. The moon is high in the late, late hours of this not-hot night, patiently according itself with the position of the Sun. There is little romance in their state, I think as I, again, number the stars. Our lives do not revolve around others so that we may be near, our lives revolve around others so that our paths never intersect—I want to scream, or at least speak out loud. A shared sky certainly does nothing to necessitate passion. I fall out of insomnia and into the dreams I will create upon waking. And it is 2 a.m., here, in this godforsaken city where you are not.
H i p p o a n d D ra g o n J o a n i e Kim acrylic paint 32� X 9.5� 2009
Prehistoric Love Affair POETRY | AMY ROBINSON Your life is defined by pre and post me. I am your dinosaurs. I am your ice age, baby. I am your prehistoric love affair.
Existing in seashells in dirt wells in a not-quite-hell but close to it where we disintegrate
I am your primal passion where mankind learned to crawl walk hunt.
debilitate become bicarbonate degenerate into black, oily pools of the past.
Together, we solidified. We fossilized. No longer breathing, living, evolving yetstill existing.
Hippo and Dragon| Joanie Kiim | Prehistoric Love Affair | Amy Robinson | Tuesday Magazine | 7
The No Good Tourist FROM THE NOTEBOOKS | MATTHEW WOZNY
In the beginning, Genoa did not exist. How could it?—you had not even heard its name. It was a black dot on your world map, sure, but then black holes are black dots in space. Then one day you packed your bags and packed into a crowded Ligurian train. You passed by piked vineyards, slippery, serpentine rivers, and still-blue lakes, paying no attention to the Nintendo DS you had tamped into your wheeled suitcase in case of emergency. No such emergency, you now knew, would take place. Your jaw dropped as the train maneuvered around the green and silver mountains rich with chalk-colored goats and sheep. You closed your eyes, pictured a modern port, imagined countless houses on a hill, and dreamed of modern skyscrapers brushing shoulders with Renaissance churches and medieval walls. The train stopped and you opened your eyes. What you envisioned had been created. Genoa was born.
Santa Maria dell'Annunziata
8 | The No Good Tourist | Matthew Wozny | Tuesday Magazine
You trot down the white marble steps of Santa Maria dell’Annunziata as you flip through your photos. You smile. They came out well. Your smile is clear, the subtle lighting was captured, and the golden ceiling really complemented your eyes. Good investment. That 10 megapixel camera was a good investment. Don’t stop to admire those pictures now, though; keep going. Avoid historic Via Balbi. You already visited the majestic Palazzo Reale, home of the Savoia Family. You’ve already eaten lunch. Chris, or Kristie (not like it matters: either way you have your ribs): descend down to the sea. Great pictures to take down at the sea. *** You stop at a massive tower and snap a picture. The sky is a metallic white and cloudless blue. You have never seen such a perfect day in your home country.
\
Here is your picture.
The No Good Tourist | Matthew Wozny | Tuesday Magazine | 9
Via del Campo
You think, Wow. These walls look old. And in fact they are. The tower, called Porta dei Vacca,was constructed swiftly between 1155 and 1159. A little, faithful Romanesque church, San Fede sheltered itself right alongside these walls. You wouldn’t know it now, but the tower was once Porta di San Fede, and as the church crumbled so, too, did the tower’s name. You approach the tower because you want to touch it. That, or you don’t believe me. But look: it’s there. Beaten into the bolted bronze plaque, it—the date, the church, the name, the name change—is all there. The tower is inspiring and looks messy, but keep going. (Heaven forbid you should smell the lathered mud and smeared human feces. Why should you have to find out about Holy Roman Emperor Barbarossa—the original Red Beard—whose ravenous power hunger terrorized Northern Italy and prompted the swift and sloppy construction of these castling walls? Why should you learn of the backs broken by perched boulders? Why hear of war? No, no: think instead that it was a Paradise—and an Eden—with a tower, where no one came in and no one wanted out. It’s better that way.) *** Left foot, right foot; left foot, right foot. Your low heels are clinking against the cobblestoned pavement right as you walk past the fruit shops and vegetable markets. The fruits all look bright and yellow and, well, the same. You are not interested, so you walk past them. Good: you don’t notice that these are the same foods that were on sale three weeks ago. No one bought them then, and no one should buy them now.
10 | The No Good Tourist | Matthew Wozny | Tuesday Magazine
You are on Via del Campo, a pleasant little street. You do notice that the sea is right next to you. You hear the gulls and the ships, the waves and the wheezing winds, and you imagine yourself to be one of the queens in Queens. Your own relaxing theme music wonderfully even chimes in your head. Suddenly you remember that the street even has its own name song, Via del Campo,composed by Fabrizio de André. You hadn’t heard the name back home (why should you have?), but your guide book tells you he’s very famous—and Genovese. You play the song on your I-Pod. You don’t understand the lyrics (good), but the mellifluous melody floats in your ears. You are thirsty. You need to drink, so drink. You stop by a little fountain where two lions’ heads are the water’s ejaculation openings. You sip your sparkling water and notice that the fountain paint is peeling and the fountain is dry. No doubt those little lions are thirsty, you think, sprinkling your remaining droplets into their jaws. You look around. Beige walls and stores. You even spy some graffiti. Snap!
Sacred graffiti of one of De Andre’’s songs. Here, starting in 2004. Not removed--nor probably touched--since.
De André again. And a few meters later—look at you, adopting the metric system already—a plaque. It’s De André—again! Snap! Snap! This is great, you think. This street was made for me.
The No Good Tourist | Matthew Wozny | Tuesday Magazine | 11
–What? Don’t stand there. Move to the side—you’re blocking the afternoon traffic. Or better yet, keep going or turn back. You’ve already seen Via Garibaldi, so you’ve seen the old centroof Genoa. Time to see the beauty of its sea. You don’t listen, or you don’t listen fast enough. You glance to your right and spot a café. “La Cattiva Strada,” it reads. You don’t know Italian, but even I can’t hide from you its meaning:The Bad Street.
“From diamonds nothing is born / from manure flowers rise.” De Andre’’s most famous--and most beautiful (don’t you think?)--lyrics. The bad street? But why the ‘bad’ street? you wonder. I thought this street is playful—and good. Something smells fishy, you think. And it’s not the fish from the Ligurian Sea right next door. Don’t investigate. It’s for your own good—don’t investigate. Go down to the sea, and you’ll see palm trees, and a playground, and statues of Gandhi. And you’ll have a great opportunity for desktop-worthy pictures. Just do it. You don’t listen. Why did I think you, a camera-eager tourist on Day 3 of 4 in Genoa, would? You are a baby in this new world, and you want to know everything. You take out your Smartphone and begin to type, type, type away. You point at lyrics and ask in slow, loud English, “Excuse me, but what does that mean?” You don’t listen to me. Because of your curiosity, you— Chris or Kristie—simply do not listen. And that curiosity, essential to human nature, dooms you like it did Adam and Eve, and even poor Pandora. You learn about the rat carcasses swimming in the street’s underbelly. You learn about the prostitutes—for which the street is famous—that pollute and crowd and obfuscate the separating salitas. You learn about the impoverished Senegalese children who eat those inedible fruits and vegetables as their parents sit at the shops’ entrances, waiting for customers who will never come. You learn the truth, the evil, brutta verità of Via del Campo. You learn you’re not the only person here, in Genoa. Other humans endure in the world, and have lasted far longer than you. You discover my loving lies: you are not the first. And Genoa—the true Genoa—has always existed. — Matthew Wozny is a member of staff writers.
12 | The No Good Tourist | Matthew Wozny | Tuesday Magazine
Shelley on 3rd Street POETRY | JUSTIN WYMER I cannot help but speak— Those who are noble stick pins in their sides— The city’s lit cellwork crosses the chalky light on my throat—chips of neon, inventing a blondeness, updrafts in a dress, and ropings inside the ankles that ache under a gleam— which can only keep changing, a chill in the ground that will only go further—The spit and the wrappers, reflections stippled and trimmed—All trained in the eloquent error of belief. As one learns to love each new debt everything seems a hesitant kindness—drafty, crooning, like a precocious rumor.—Outside now, in the swollen world’s late season the smallbelled widow’s-tears are crisping—while newspapers, tucked into fences, molder then renew—Trees etiolate their cushionings and underneath them children multiply—soft, obsolete, with lemons in their mouths—Between late-day radium and night’s dissolving womb, between the scritch of pulleys, roiling fumes, insects mosaicked into screens—The whining fractals of sirens propagate shrill, coiling round my neck, whipping, reforming— As the last warmth thins, limp tinny breeze— — Justin Wymer is a member of staff writers.
Shelley on 3rd Street | Justin Wymer | Tuesday Magazine | 13
Of the Nights We Fall in Love FICTION | SE-HO KIM We kissed every time we got stoned. We knew it, but we did it anyway, after a concert together she would invite me to her house and I would pretend not to know that her parents wouldn’t be home and that her sister is already in college. So I said yes and she smiled and said see you soon. When I got to her house we sat in her basement with the windows cracked and blew rings, hers rounder and more perfect than mine, and we fell in love again. We only loved when we got stoned, but we played enough concerts together for it to become a routine. When it got late, I would get up to go, but she’d say “you can’t drive like that”, and I’d end up staying for the night. I always thought she got sadder and sadder as the night drew on, but her rings got more careful, until they were drawn by compasses. One night she asked me if I wanted to hear a poem. She was in a daze, I was in my boxers, and I watched her head on my chest as it moved up and down with my breathing. She said it like she wanted me to say no, so I said yes, and then she waited a while before she did anything, like she was thinking about changing her mind. Yes, I said again, although I knew she’d heard me the first time, and she got up to look for her jeans. She found them on the floor by the sofa where she had taken them off and pulled a folded piece of paper from the back pocket. She kissed me quietly, unfolded the paper at the same nervous pace, and started reading. Sometimes, my nose bleeds when I make tea. Is that the title? I asked, and she said no, there is no title. That’s the first line. Sometimes, my nose bleeds when I make tea. It makes red swirls in the cup as I drink, little sips that burn my throat. She paused for so long that I asked her, is that it? and she said, no, there’s more.
I drink it in the morning, when I’m alone again, because it helps me think again. And sometimes, sometimes I catch myself in self-pity but I tell myself it’s regret. It’s regret, pity will get you nowhere, Jessie, nowhere. Is that it? I asked again after a while.
had been thinking, and I didn’t think I loved her. She turned her head towards me and she seemed much happier. We made a T on the floor with our bodies and I loved the view I had of her face. Her small, but defined nose, with freckles. Her neck that started
”It’s regret, pity will get you Jessie, nowhere . ”
nowhere ,
It’s not much of a poem. No, but do you like it? All of a sudden I didn’t want to be there anymore. No, I told her, I don’t like it very much, but it’s a good thought. It really is. She smiled and said, you’re so honest when you smoke. I like you honest. I disagreed and I told her that when we smoke everything turns into a lie, but she just put her head back on my chest and smiled and said, oh, stop being so frank. … She asked me if I loved her and I said I did. We were still laying there, and the only thing that had changed was that her jeans had moved when she had thrown them onto the sofa, and her poem made an uncomfortable paper tent on the table. When she asked me, it caught me by surprise, like when you hear a kid say something that should have come out of an adult’s mouth. Do you love me? She said it quickly, but precisely. The four words fell into my ears, tumbled into my head and turned into four thoughtless words in my mouth. Of course I do, I said, but then I knew that was the wrong answer because she didn’t say anything for a while after that. So I told her, actually, I
14 | Of the Nights We Fall in Love | Se-ho Kim | Tuesday Magazine
somewhere in a mess of blonde curls and turned into shoulders. When she opened her eyes, I could see the blue, the same, precious blue I saw as she told me to love her, to kiss her, to hate her. I don’t love you, she continued, everything is much nicer that way, isn’t it? I asked her why she thinks so and she said I don’t know, but I don’t think we could do this if we really loved each other. Don’t you think? Yes, I lied, and we only fall in love when we get stoned. That’s why we kiss. She agreed and I felt a little sick, but then she kissed me and her blue eyes made me feel much better. I knew it was futile, that in the morning we wouldn’t love each other at all until the next time I found a stray strand of her hair interlocked in the fabric of my clothes. But in the blasé routine of pretending, I feigned heartache. Until our lives turn real again.
A Trigger Down FICTION | DOMINIC VITI
When the plane crashed, the veteran sat in his small Savannah home, on Montgomery Street, above Flight 263’s burning fuselage in his backyard, in bed, alone, at 2300 hours, diapered, stooped on a stiff mattress in the corner of his dim lit room, deaf, beneath the projection of a blaring TV, crying, his thick thighs chafed and rife with broken blue veins, his gelid eyes leaden and weary, 5’10”, 235 lbs, too heavy and weak to stand or call for help, his wrinkled pallor transparent and rife with broken cold blue veins, also bald except for the thin strands of white matted from ear to ear at the bottom of his pasty scalp, his bushy brows beaded with sweat, the hair on his hunched back white and curling out of wan red scales of psoriasis, his small wrinkled penis soaked inside a moist diaper, the joints of his arthritic fingers bent and inflamed, his left hand shaking and clutching a Colt, his right hand also trembling and loading the chamber, a box of bullets strewn between his heavy legs, his sore shins aching, his bare toes curled in angst against the time worn carpet—a pilot who was among the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, a recipient of the Distinguished Service Cross, the Flying Cross, the Air Medal, the Asiatic-Pacific Campaign Medal, the WWII Victory Medal and the Medal of Honor—now eightynine, deaf, crying into the quiet, the flames of the fuselage eating away at his home, swallowing his bedroom the way the body keeps the soul, the prickly heats exciting his skin to bubble, the arms of billowing smoke reaching into his throat seizing his last breaths, constricting—an American war hero decorated with the Bronze Star, the Silver Star and the Purple Heart—now fallen to his knees, hysterical, mumbling “Gloria Patri,” and occasionally inserting the cold barrel of the Colt into his mouth beneath the blaring TV before the cracked window in his burning bedroom, alone, choking on the ashes of reveries, as they were in the beginning, are now, and ever shall be, in a world without end; he, himself: A trigger down in the lean, desperate hours.
A Trigger Down | Dominic Viti | Tuesday Magazine | 15
U n title d Maris a B ec k le y photographs 2 pieces 4� x 6�
16 | Untitled | Marisa Beckley | Tuesday Magazine
Untitled | Marisa Beckley | Tuesday Magazine | 17
Snakes of Hawaii CRITICISM | MAX ELIAS SCHULMAN
Most artists are either too embarrassed to talk intelligently about their work or embarrassingly bad at it when they try. We don’t expect more than high-functioning illiteracy from actors and musicians, but a writer’s handiness with a turn of phrase makes us forget the deep rift between criticism and creation. Just because a novel’s characters or a few lines of pentameter can touch your soul doesn’t mean their inventor can. In 1981, the science fiction legend Philip Kindred Dick put it to a curious interviewer that “some people can analyze and some people can synthesize. I can’t analyze… If people ask me what one of my novels is about I can’t tell them a thing.” This humble sentiment is particularly striking coming from Dick, a writer who made a career out of his lifelong attempts
times” and notoriously ran with a radical crowd in early-70s Berkeley, but amphetamines were his drug of choice, allowing him to read vast amounts on every subject to interest him and write a purported 68 pages per day. It’s even more striking that Dick made this statement in 1981, a year before his death and seven years after he arguably went insane. In February of 1974, under the influence of sodium pentothal for a “badly hemorrhaging” wisdom tooth, Dick had the first of several visionary experiences—he preferred the term anamnesis, or remembrance, rather than revelation (or psychosis). Through a medium of “pink light,” a divine force known as Zebra or the Vast Active Living Intelligence System communicated to Dick certain deep
ful… We are in a crisis situation of the like this planet has never seen before.” It’s possible that Dick’s denial of analytical ability was entirely tongue-incheek. Elsewhere, he seems to have had no qualms about analyzing his own work, and others’, at great length and with charming self-awareness. This summer I discovered a letter to his friend and colleague John Betancourt, an editor of the sf magazine Amazing Stories, in which Dick distills the essence of their art into a few wellreasoned sentences. Dick explains, contra Doris Lessing and other “literary” critics, that science fiction is defined not by laser guns and space adventure but by the precise transformation of our world into another:
”...a writer’s handiness with a turn of phrase makes us the between criticism and creation.”
forget
to make sense of modern life from a bewildering variety of approaches. After the success of his conventional early work, Dick’s talent and fame flowered with 1963’s Hugo Award-winning alternate history The Man In The High Castle. The novel was plotted with the help of the I Ching, and like the more hallucinatory work of Dick’s late-60s period, is replete with a fantastic panoply of reference and allusion to Eastern mysticism, anti-fascist politics, and pre-Socratic philosophy. Dick tried acid “two or three
deep rift
and hidden truths about reality, ethics, and God. This and other visions over the next two months culminated in his quasiGnostic Christian beliefs, held until his death and delineated in an 8,000-word “Exegesis,” that, roughly: “Time is not real.” “Time is speeding up.” “It is not 1978 but A.D. 50… and Satan has spun a counterfeit reality to wither our faith in the return of Christ.” “I was receiving from a hidden (occult) brotherhood, represented by armed knights.” “The Lord of Darkness is very power-
18 | Snakes of Hawaii | Max Elias Schulman | Tuesday Magazine
We have a fictitious world; that is the first step: it is a society that does not in fact exist, but is predicated on our known society… It is our world dislocated by some kind of mental effort on the part of the author, our world transformed into that which is not or not yet. This world must differ from the given in at least one way, and this one way must be sufficient to give rise to events that could not occur in our society--or in any known society present or past. There must be a coherent idea involved in this dislocation; that is, the dislocation must be a conceptual one, not merely a trivial or bizarre one-this is the essence of science fiction, the conceptual dislocation within the
society so that as a result a new society is generated in the author’s mind, transferred to paper, and from paper it occurs as a convulsive shock in the reader’s mind, the shock of dysrecognition. I have felt this shock many times as a reader of science fiction. Dick’s pithy
fiction involves that which general opinion regards as possible under the right circumstances. This is in essence a judgment-call, since what is possible and what is not possible is not objectively known but is, rather, a subjective belief on the part of the author and of the reader.
But Dick’s definition is a gross misfiling of fantasy as a sickly conjoined twin to sf, when it is at least an ugly stepsibling. In the godlike creation by fiat of an entirely new world, the fantasist takes an approach utterly at odds to the surgical tweaking of reality practiced by the sf writer. Where is the shock of recognition in The Lord of the Rings? In Earthsea? These are stories not necessarily about more than themselves, or predicated on our world in any meaningful way. Tolkien deliberately drew on mythological sources to make his Middle-earth, and George R. R. Martin points to the War of the Roses as inspiration for the politics of Game of Thrones, but this is a “basis” in reality altogether different from the careful alterations of fact undertaken by Dick and his ilk.
“ Fantasy involves that which gen-
eral opinion regards as impossible; science fiction involves that which general opinion regards as possible under the right
circumstances. .”
phrase recalls the chill in the reader first encountering Brave New World’s “orgyporgy,” the stomach-turning paradoxes in Heinlein’s By His Bootstraps, or the affection of the occupying Japanese for kitschy Americana in The Man in the High Castle. Dick’s definition also has the attractive effect of cleaving across traditional genre lines. He was self-consciously exclusive of space opera—what he dismissed as “westerns set in the future”—arguing that for no serious art form should we accept definition by the trivialities of setting. If Dick’s categorization obviously incorporates Neuromancer and A Canticle for Leibowitz, it also serves to help us identify the essential sf-ness of Borges, Pynchon, and Kafka. It neatly ties speculative utopian fiction from More and Swift onward into the artistic pedigree of modern sf. For all his claims to an inability for analysis, Dick here articulates out a deeper and more useful definition of science fiction than any conventional concept of the term. Dick goes too far, though, in venturing further to comment on an art not his own. In the same letter to Betancourt, he attempts to extend this definition to fantasy by a sophist’s distinction:
I think I understand the aesthetic attraction this neatly subjectivist solution would have held for Dick. As often as Dick’s style veered toward pulp and populism, he fancied himself a serious writer with big things to say on what he called “my grand theme,” the question of humanity in an age of non- and quasi-human intelligences. Dick struggled through his career to get a conventional literary novel past his editors; of 13 “mainstream” manuscripts he lived to see only one published, 1958’s Confessions of a Crap Artist. Even in his drug -culture and religious phases, Dick remained steadfastly engaged with modern society and politics. He saw his own work as part of an essential struggle between the moral individual and “the real enemy… the paradigm of evil, [which] is the totalitarian state.” For a lifelong agoraphobe who suffered intermittently from anxiety and panic attacks, Dick’s prodigious literary output represents a substantial portion of his interactions with the outer world. He could perhaps not conceive of a literary mind not thoroughly grounded in social reality even while engaged in the production of the opposite.
Jorge Luis Borges has a marvelous story, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, in which the discovery of a fictive encyclopedia volume leads to the unearthing of a massive, multigenerational conspiracy of fantastic creation. The characters stumble upon a concerted attempt by a mysterious collective to write a whole world, Tlön, into existence, volume by volume, down to the last detail of linguistics and ethnography. In a spuriously dated postscript, the narrator relates the awful fate of his world, completely under Tlön’s spell. The people of earth are so enchanted by the elegant fictions of this exhaustively described world that they have forgotten their own language and history and chosen to appropriate Tlön’s instead. This is a story about fantasy. It’s a world not so different from our own, in which escapist literature gives every individual the
Fantasy involves that which general opinion regards as impossible; science Snakes of Hawaii | Max Elias Schulman | Tuesday Magazine | 19
opportunity to abandon their own reality and history in favor of countless others. George Orwell and C. S. Lewis, sf writers par excellence, were intimately engaged in the politics and ethics of this world and showed it in constructing their own allegorical works. But Tolkien, his friendship with Lewis notwithstanding, violently rejected attempts to read social commentary into his work or to see the Ring as allegory for the atom bomb. “An author cannot of course remain wholly unaffected by his experience,” he wrote, “but the ways in which a story-germ uses the soil of experience are extremely complex and attempts to define the process are at best guesses from evidence that is inadequate and ambiguous.” For all the world-building ambition of Tolkien’s work, there remains a pointed absence of moral and erotic depth to the world of The Lord of the Rings, in which racial makeup predetermines morality and all loves remain chaste. Here is an anti-Dick, a writer of similar imagination and a graphomaniac’s output who holds an altogether hostile attitude toward complex reality and its study. What we can learn from readers who choose to dwell in Tlön or Middle-earth, as opposed to Huxley’s World State or Dick’s Co-Prosperity Pacific Alliance, is that fantasy fulfills very different needs and drives from those animating sf. The escapist urge in fantasy—and in much science fiction, at least under the vernacular space-andlasers definition—is to create or discover a world spectacularly, vulgarly new. This is a motivation not at all shared by Dick, with his insistence on the “conceptual coherence” of any authorial manipulation of reality. One cannot look seriously at the obsessively imagined details of The Silmarillion or the Codex Seraphinianus and see only sf but for the grace of impossibility. There is in these works a spirit of fantasy fundamentally separate from, and even inimical to, the reality-oriented dislocation Dick identified at the heart of science fiction. What can it mean that sf’s finest should have so badly misunderstood fantasy? Dick’s amphetamine-fueled writing regimen was matched by his insatiable reading habits, and we know from his letters that he was an avid reader of both Tolkien
and Borges. He tells us that he originally wished to write fantasy, but abandoned the venture for a lack of a market in the United States and of talent in himself. Had Dick reread these works, or been a better fantasist, he should have recognized the essentially distinct escapism of the separate genre. In a 1981 interview, Dick expressed regret for his own abortive career as a fantasist, but admitted that “I no longer understand fantasy. I’ve lost the knowledge.” Dick was fond of speaking of his life as a forking series of possibilities that foreclosed not only courses of action but also of knowledge, and used his multifocused narrative style as a technique to investigate his “interest in plural realities.” Perhaps Dick would simply say that any individual’s reality is necessary incomplete, and that all of us share in the mishmash of lucid insight and massive category errors entertained by this myopic genius. One of Dick’s most famous analytical works is a 1978 speech entitled “How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later.” Amid a discursive commentary on science fiction and socially constructed reality, Dick told an enigmatic story on falsity and literature: “A friend of mine once published a book called Snakes of Hawaii. A number of libraries wrote him ordering copies. Well, there are no snakes in Hawaii. All the pages of his book were blank.” Bearing in mind that this statement was made in Dick’s post-1974 Gnostic period—and that in the same Speech he claimed to have personally experienced events from the Book of Acts—I will venture an interpretation of the Hawaiian snake-book. Dick’s “friend” is the archetypical analytical critic Dick claimed not to understand and even to despise;
20 | Snakes of Hawaii | Max Elias Schulman | Tuesday Magazine
for such a mind there is no truth but the objective facts of the matter as rationally understood. A fantasist would never have confined himself to the constraints of real geography and zoography in the first place; what is the “factual” number of dragons in Middle-earth? But Dick would suggest another option. An sf writer would indeed write the book, fill it with nonexistent snakes, and claim with all sincerity that its contents were true. Dick’s deepest interest was in the “plural realities” he saw as constituting this fundamentally strange universe. For a writer in Dick’s mold, the error and inadequacy of individual perspective must doom all analysis to incompleteness. When Dick professed an inability to analyze, he was really speaking about the problems of modernity and his view that only creative synthesis presents a solution. In this sense, he may have considered the fantasist’s approach—narcissistic escapism into a deliberately false reality—so contemptible as to be beneath his attention, like the future-westerns of space opera. It was announced last year that a heavily edited version of Dick’s Exegesis will finally be published in two volumes. Most of Dick’s two million-word revelation remains unseen by the public, and apparently will continue in this state for the foreseeable future. The 976-page first volume hits bookstores on November 7, 2011. If this is indeed a work of nonfiction, as Dick insisted, perhaps all the pages will be blank.
— Max Elias Schulman is a member of staff writers.
steppes POETRY | DEVI LOCKWOOD grasses grace my calves tightening and I breathe and I breathe the peaks all around, eucalyptus leaves, and the scent of some pine needle I don’t recognize, like breathing the perfect cup of tea a roaming aroma there’s an orange tree and an orange sky and two women I pass by tell me to go slowly slowly, pole pole... words in swahili must be said twice. we pause to share the day’s news (hint: it is always good). then I follow the trail of power lines back to city center, along well-worn footpaths where women chop and carry logs balanced on their heads down the hillside. each is their own horizon.
— Devi Lockwood is a member of staff writers.
Steppes | Devi Lockwood | Tuesday Magazine | 21
S t i l l f ro m Tongue Follows Grave K a y l a Es co b e d o 50 second animation using cutouts 2011
22 | Still from Tongue Follows Grave | Kayla Escobedo | Tuesday Magazine
Confession POETRY | DEVI LOCKWOOD
I have yet to learn how to drive an ocean to part like pleated hair, french braids, or seaweed. still, I know how to swim, climb rigging up a mast moored offshore. I love feeling like a mermaid, knowing there are people on board who can’t see me under the caramel walls of their ship. today I watched a man paint a black wall white. he shook his brush, three greys on the spectrum of undecided. all the time the sun was a juicy cross-section of mango he tossed up there to drip orange into blue. none of this is gray. the garden wall was almost underwater, city-center submerged in little puddles of color. flash me your raccoon smile and put five handprints in the sand. I’ll walk down the steps of the great wall of the sea like I always do by dark -- feel my way to the eastern arc of your spine. always there is much to explore.
— Devi Lockwood is a member of staff writers.
Confession | Devi Lockwood | Tuesday Magazine | 23
Floor Scot t Roben Oil on canvas 16” X 18”
Chair Scot t Roben Oil on canvas 25” X 25”
24 | Floor/Chair | Scott Roben | Tuesday Magazine
D o u b le S c o tt R o b en Oil on canvas 25” X 25”
Artist’s Note: Rubbings are two-dimensional images that result from an encounter between two three-dimensional objects. These paintings investigate rubbing as excerption but also as a means of picture-making. Double | Scott Roben | Tuesday Magazine | 25
The Human Wall FICTION | AMY ROBINSON You don’t know the Prophet. You don’t know what the Prophet looks like, the Prophet’s age, gender, eye color, religion. You really know nothing. It’s better that way. You tend to make presumptions. The Prophet is just an entity, comprised of bones, blood, thoughts. Then the Prophet becomes amorphous, our projections, our wants molding the Prophet. The Prophet’s head leans into the aisle as the plane begins to taxi. The eyes imagine all the faces, pale and bluish and sagging as the skin washed off cheeks and cartilage, dissolving, leaving behind sallow, empty outlines of faces, caverns even, that reside beneath our smiles. The eyes close. “Flight attendants, please prepare for take-off,” a smooth, Louisiana accent drawls over the speakers. Pilots have Southern accents to comfort passengers because they sound solid and real and we want solid, real men in charge of lives. The Prophet sucks in all the air possible, gulping it down, drowning in it as the plane forever loses contact with ground. And the plane’s nose shoots up, pressing the back against the seat cushion as the atmosphere’s pressure weighs down every inch of the body, like the sensation of submersion. The Prophet’s hands reach across the lady sitting next to the window and pull up the shade with a snap, slide it down with equal momentum. She steals sideways glances at the Prophet as she politely engrosses in her newspaper article on the Cold War while the Prophet wonders whether the shade should be up or down for the crash. Would you want to see water consuming the plane and light filtering slower and slower as it becomes darker and darker until the pressure cracks the windows and gulps your head and your thoughts in one easy swallow? The hands slam the window shut.
We like to hide from what we don’t want. The Prophet looks down the aisle once more. The woman in 24E has a leopard print shawl wrapped around her shoulders and her index finger and thumb prop her head and hide in her champagne colored curls. She might be a grandmother, at the very least a mother. She has that look about her, the way her legs cross like they have bounced toddlers.
be a crash. The Prophet became sure of it. And the Prophet became sure that it must be prevented. The images of shattering of crushing of the devouring, indigo ocean filled with preying ocean creatures, waiting to feast on the trapped passengers stained the Prophet’s eyes until that was all the eyes could see. And so the Prophet walked into the airport, bought a ticket, and became the Prophet with the sole purpose to be the savior.
The Prophet thinks back to that same morning, before the Prophet became the Prophet. The Prophet’s mother’s legs had crossed in the same manner. Her words drowned in her own saliva. The Prophet had looked past her, not able to look into her mist eyes. “Don’t worry. Something will happen,” the Prophet had said. “Baby,” the mother said drawing out the long A, gargled with the sound of drool. “Ba-aby.” The mother’s crumpled hand held a pen to her lips and the black ink soaked into the crevices of her slack jaw. “Something must happen,” the Prophet said while leaving, the wet sound following far beyond the door, as she washed away in it. The Prophet waited on the street for a cab. “Airport,” the Prophet barked at the cab driver. The back of the cab had velvety seats so smooth they almost felt greasy. “I will make it happen. Something must happen,” the Prophet murmured as the fingers clasped together. “A crash. What if there were a crash…? What if I saved everybody…?” The Prophet pictured the possibility of inky waves engulfing people, imagined the caverns of faces, and envisioned the depths of the sea. The Prophet visualized the debris and the waves so clearly, so thoroughly that vision became reality, dreaming morphed into anticipation. There would
The eyes look back at the woman in 24E, look at her champagne colored hair once more, hair that will have blood seeping through the tight curls and tinting the water around. A girl swings her legs in 23A and tucks them under her chin as she reads the newest Archie comics, Archie comics that will become nothing more than a wad of paper as she clenches them to keep from screaming as the plane falls as if plucked from the sky. The eyes can’t look at anything without imagining the fate. The hands reach across and slide the shade up once more and the eyes look out the window. Eels whirl in the sea of the sky, flurries of black motion. Orbs of jellyfish soar next to the wing as electric clouds, sizzling as they come in contact with the air. The eyes see through the crackling, sputtering translucent mass and past the slinking eels. The eels would’ve looked like smoky lightning streaks and the jelly fish like illuminated thunder heads to people like us below. The Prophet sees the swimming omens, sees them following the plane, preying, waiting. Thousands of black eel eyes cling on to the Prophet’s gaze so that the Prophet can’t look away. The eyes are even eyes. They are dark holes, engulfing the light around. The fingers grip the legs, fingernails digging into the crisp slacks. Electricity shoots down the spine and through each of the limbs, making them numb. The limbs feel cold as the Prophet imagines the sensation of freez-
26 | The Human Wall | Amy Robinson | Tuesday Magazine
ing water creeping across them. The eyes peer out timidly again, looking straight to the ground, avoiding the hoards of sea creatures. A stingray skims beneath the plane. Its razor thin body casts a shadow across the ground, covering the trees and hills and rivers and people like us in darkness. The eyes look past the flying black body. Still over land. Still over land. The hands reach over, slide the shade down once more, and unbuckles the seat belt. The feet march up the aisle and the beehive stewardess approaches. “May I help you? The seat belt sign is on.” The hands push her aside. She says something as she topples onto the lap of a man who looks like he could be a cowboy, but the ears do not hear. His ten-gallon hat will get lost in the waves. The feet pound against the modeled grey and blue carpet as they continued walking. The people stare at the body, continuing forward in its solitary procession. Nobody understands. We wouldn’t have understood the Prophet’s mission either. We would have just sat and watched. The hand reaches for the handle to the cockpit as sweat droplets creep down the neck. The latch clicks open.
At first the pilots just stare as the Prophet walked in. They are in their own world, as people like us separate them, classify them as the pilots, people in charge of our lives, and therefore higher, a different level of human. Finally, the copilot speaks. “Uh-the fasten seat belt sign is on.” “I know.” As the Prophet says these words a calm sensation washes over the Prophet, like the Prophet knows, like the Prophet is in power. The copilot has ginger tufts of hair encircling a bald spot and matching ginger eyebrows that are so bushy his translucent eyelashes brush against them. He isn’t used to not being listened to. He is used to handing out bronze wings and
“All thewhile
planes for twenty something years and I’ve never even so much as had a scratch on this here plane. So why don’t you just go and sit back now. It’s gonna be fine. Joyce here can bring you a ginger ale. Look there’s not even a cloud in the sky.” The eyes stare at the controls. They can’t look up at the sky. There are the beasts, waiting, just waiting, foretelling the approaching sea. The Prophet isn’t scared of the sea creatures. The Prophet is scared of them because they are omens. You and I, we would not have even seen them. “Now listen. Look outside. No iota of a cloud.” The ocean glitters in the horizon. It is approaching. It is time. The Prophet
people like us tum-
ble about. But the people do not scream. No, not yet.”
Have you heard of the story Tobias and the Sea? The one where Tobias wants to go swimming but everyone says there are creatures in there, dark, shadowy creatures that will gobble you up and Tobias says I don’t believe you. He says I don’t believe that there are sea creatures waiting. He says I want to go swimming. But the people cry and cry and the whole town stands in front of the shore and dig their heels into the sand and hold hands so Tobias cannot pass and their hands solder together and they become closer and closer until their shoulders solder together until they actually become and exist as a human wall with hundreds of blinking eyes staring from immobile bodies. Have you heard that one? No?
being admired. “So-uh-that probably means you should get back to your seat, ya hear?” “It doesn’t really matter.” “Why doesn’t it matter, now?” the copilot asks now looking amused. “It doesn’t really matter who wears the seat belts in the end, don’t you think? I mean it really doesn’t. I’m saving you. It just so happens that I am the one chosen to unbuckle my seat belt and walk down here and open the door. I was chosen to save you, to save the other people still buckled in. You will know my name tomorrow. So it doesn’t really matter that I’m not wearing my seat belt now does it?” With this, the real pilot looks up. “What’s this? You think we’re gonna crash?” “I know so. But I can save you. Trust me.” “Now listen here. I’ve been flying
has to act now. The Prophet races in between the two cushioned thrones of the pilot and copilot, rams against them in such a way that they swivel in opposite directions. “I’ll be damned. What the hell do you think you’re doing?” The pilot reaches forward to pull the Prophet back but the hands have already grabbed the controls and jerk them to the side. The plane reels. The copilot wraps his arms around the waist and tugs but it does no good. The hands clench, lock onto the controls, and only the feet lifted off the ground. All the while people like us tumble about. But the people do not scream. No, not yet. Because we place utter faith in our almighty pilots, and Joyce the Stewardess meanwhile says we are experiencing some turbulence, folks.
The Human Wall | Amy Robinson | Tuesday Magazine | 27
“I’m saving us. I’m saving us,” the Prophet chants. And the Prophet believes it. “You know I have a mother back home? You know she can’t stand or swallow, a meaningless life really.” The hands continue to lock onto the controls while the pilot and copilot pull at the legs and arms and hair. “You know I’m the only one she’s got?” And while the crash has been a figment of the Prophet’s mind, the Prophet utterly believes it now. “I saw it all. I saw blueblack water. I saw the empty faces of people dying. You didn’t see that. You didn’t see that! I’m going to stop it.” No matter how hard they pull, the Prophet does not move. “I’m saving you. I’m all she’s got. If I do this one thing, if I save you, the next day I’m the hero, right? And that gives some meaning to her life, right? Right? Let me save you!” The Prophet continues to chant as the eyes focus on the glittering, sapphire water getting closer and closer. “I’m saving you. I’m saving you.” The pilot and copilot give one great, united tug but the Prophet still does not let go. Instead, with the combined strength of the three of them, the whole unit of the controls tears from the control board. Wires disconnect and the cockpit goes dark. The pilot and copilot share a silent stare of widened eyes. And the people like us still do not scream. It isn’t until the pilot walks out of the cockpit and starts reciting the crash landing protocol that the people like us become crying, praying people. The ears hear the reverberating screams of the passengers and the crash of the snack and beverage cart as bags of pretzels roll throughout the cabin and carbonated drinks explode their sugary syrup everywhere. It is over. The Prophet has tried and failed and now the Prophet was no longer the Prophet.
He must be male, right? He sees the stingray shoot in front of the glass. Its boneless body swallows all light. The ray’s body is dry and crackles like paper. All is black. But then the stingray begins swelling and coming alive. It becomes slippery and a watery film coats the window as it slides off. It is all over. The plane is nearing water. The plane begins tumbling from the air like a broken bird. He gets on his hands and knees and begins crawling. Remember that story I told you? About Tobias and the Sea? I didn’t mention the end. I didn’t mention that Tobias then tries to climb the human wall. He tries to reach the sea and go swimming but his own skin begins to solder with the skin of the people in the human wall and he becomes absorbed. He becomes absorbed into the human wall, his eyes becoming one of the pairs of eyes staring from an immobile body and he never makes it to the sea. He crawls on hands and knees down the aisle, past the crying and praying people like us who have never before prayed to God. He crawls like a lowly beast. Each knee slides behind the other like snakes overcoming the friction of the carpet, slow and struggling. His neck bends down and hangs loose so that it bobs with the rhythm of his shoulder blades, rising and falling like the undulation of waves. His back caves in like the spine can no longer withstand the pressure of gravity. And like this he crawls. He then reaches his seat and buckles his seat belt. He sits as still as a wall, his back affixed to the chair. The only part of him that moves are his eyes as they stare out
The Prophet is male. You are not surprised. Why? Because we are the people comforted by Louisiana drawls. We are the people who want solid men in charge of our lives. We are the people who believe in the hierarchal roles of the pilot, the stewardess, and the passengers. This Prophet controls lives. This Prophet was at the status of the pilots. 28 | The Human Wall | Amy Robinson | Tuesday Magazine
the window. His eyes then see his left hand gripping the hand of the woman next to him. And then his eyes wander to all of the other people around him holding hands or embracing in anticipation forA thundering sound surges. Blood rushes. Piercing, bloody screams of the woman next to him. Then all silence as the people like us no longer has time to cry or pray. All is dark. Sound of gasping, crunching, waves conquering. If he survived, he would’ve seen the blue, sagging faces, the skeletons, the eye holes, the scowls. But this story is not about the Prophet. Not really. It’s about that human wall. It’s about those people like us. We were the ones who projected onto the Prophet our presumptions and our preconceptions. We believed in the role of the pilot and the stewardess and the passengers and we categorized them. We became the people in the seat belts, the people waiting to hear what they need to think, waiting for their cue to cry and their cue to pray to a God that they don’t believe in because that is what they’re supposed to do. We became the human wall, people blended together until there are no distinctions between our bodies, until we are just a pair of eyes that can watch as we remain immobile. — Amy Robinson is a member of staff writers.
U n i c y cle s J o a n i e K im
watercolor paint and markers 3 pieces of 5� x 12� 2010
Unicycles | Joanie Kim | Tuesday Magazine | 29
U n titled Jo e P o irier
Digital Photograph 2011
30 | Untitled | Joe Poirier | Tuesday Magazine
Unt it led Joe Poirier
Digital Photograph 2011
Untitled | Joe Poirier | Tuesday Magazine | 31
Written Wonderland POETRY | MAURA CHURCH
VII. Wandering Spirit VI. Reverence This collective conscience, where my wolves run wild, play home for our finest dreams. On this morning of creation, we sit in nature’s maternity ward, witnessing as our landscapes of origin birth coyotes and buffalo and redwood shoots. I am a guardian, not a gardener. My love grows and burns like a backfire, lighting the path of vigilance. Let my gospel spread— let me sow the seeds of appreciation, of preservation, of conservation, and let my disciples revere this touch of tundra where my kindred spirits, my canine poets, bound with leaps of wildness.
I came upon the glacial brook, my dusty feet aching for its icy murmurings. I was baptized in these mountain springs and my religion was that of Muir and Mather and Murie and all those who had come before me and anchored their wandering spirit in this true and rich landscape. I am the daughter of some ancient force that carves Grinnell through gray and crumbling peaks. The parallels of history make a smile on my face. I see the Antiquities, I see Roosevelt and Udall and Carter and all those who made this land mine. And in their honor, I dip my toes close to stream’s mossy bottom and breathe, and dream.
32 | Winter Wonderland | Maura Church | Tuesday Magazine
Necrophilia FICTION | LOUIS EVANS I. Everyone would be a surgeon, they said. So when he, smiling, made the first cut, she was just a blankness for incision. And the scarlet blossomed unseen and unremarkable across her breast. II. She had slipped, not jumped, he told himself. He would not notice her ghost’s surefooted dancer’s stride about his room; the longing, lonely glances toward the river. III. Ashes to ashes; there was dust under her fingernails and she kept waiting for the phoenix fire to leap out from them. It didn’t, of course.
bled out. And next night her hand was gone at the wrist and she was bleeding into a spring in the high mountains, poisoning it. And so it went. And one night she was disembodied and blood was everywhere, crashing like an ocean, and she woke up dead of anemia. They don’t take journals to be autop-
So she stepped in. VIII. When I was seven I came to believe, through an obscure psychic alchemy I performed on Old Yeller, that no boy could become a man until he shot his dog, and I would spend hours every night looking Ricky in those warm brown eyes just coming out of puppyhood and steel myself to do it, poking him between those eyes, hard, whispering bang as he licked and licked my hand. Later on I somehow came to realize this was not the case, and I remember how hot my tears felt, hidden in the attic, dripping down my forearms and onto my jeans. That night I let him sleep in my bed—the only time, because I knew I would not have to do it. I never had to do it to Ricky. But now I kinda wish I had. I would have known how to do it for Mom.
”But that doesn’t mean the dreams are done for .”
IV. “Death doesn’t always change people,” she said, slipping into my bed. Our bed. I wanted to believe her, but her fingers were so stiff. And cold. V. “Medical error,” the coroners told each other, trying to explain why the autopsy had turned up a brass pocketwatch in the place of a heart. “Medical error.” But there were just the two of them in the room. One took the crank within his fingers, but the other reached out and gently moved his hand away. VI. When she turned twenty she dreamt of pricking her finger gently, painlessly with a needle, and the blood dripped and dripped and dripped, seeping through the wicker floor. And she awoke, fingertip smooth and scarless, and wrote it down in her dream journal with red ballpoint pen whose ink dripped not at all. When next she dreamed her finger was missing, and the blood poured into the bathtub, slow and delicious like sap, lapping against the white porcelain, and she sat against its cast-iron lion’s feet and
sied or buried (perhaps unwisely), so it ended up in the landfill, and the pages, one by one, made their way to the sea— But that doesn’t mean the dreams are done for. VII. People would ask why she did it—if they knew, if she could answer. She, after all, was the first sati. They would ask her if she did it for love, or propriety, if her relatives pressured her, if there was nowhere else for a woman to go in the world, in those days. The truth was it was none of that. She was no great lover—he even less. He was just a husband. The tears were just of circumstance, and her sole sacrifice to circumstance, too. Her family would have, more or less, supported her. The truth is she looked out at the pyre and one flame, one slender, precious flame reached out to caress her cheek in a way that she had never felt before—
IX. Coda Behold: here is your covenant. Always things draw to a close. Even here the story goes on ending.
— Louis Evans is a member of staff writers.
Necrophilia | Louis Evans | Tuesday Magazine | 33
Sea Spider to the Tufted Marshallia (Colosserideis colossea)
(Marshallia caespitosa)
POETRY | STEPHANIE WANG “How is it to sprout from a moist and nourishing ground, to see the world with many heads, open-faced?” My roots are tangled, the wind rocks me back and forth upon a glass stalk. My heads are numerous and splayed, roaming as one floating herd. These stamens cannot see your multi-orbs, rolling darkly, sharpening wave after wave. You coil in your jar of formaldehyde, your legs, an orb, a feeble, briny cluster of pine needles. “Where did you roam, those rolling days, never-ending?” In water, an atlantic valley and the world was tinted as sky. It was all I could do just to grasp at the edge of a crevice and pray for something less infinite. It seems that the sun has bleached you, the air has fed you, sustained the green of your leaves. I wonder, can you know of movement everlasting? I am laid out, splayed into three long necks. I was rooted, challenged by breezes, now, am a fusion of sand. I am white as exoskeleton. The wind carried sacks of clouds to me, made the air a shore to waves. It was all I could do just to grasp at each dirtthin crevice, swearing to hold on.
34 | Sea Spider to the Tufted Marshallia | Stephanie Wang | Tuesday Magazine
F l i n t ’s F ie ld W h i t n ey D o n ald so n Photograph 4” x 6”
Flint’s Field | Whitney Donaldson | Tuesday Magazine | 35
En ume ra t e d H e a rt S u tra I ngr id Pi e rre digital image
36 | Enumerated Heart Sutra | Ingrid Pierre | Tuesday Magazine
En u me ra ted H e a rt S u tra (d et ail) I n g ri d P i e rre digital image 2 0 11
Artist’s Note: The copying of sutras is a sacred act. Here we see the Chinese characters of the Prajnaparamita Heart Sutra written down by their stroke order. The result is a visualization of the private work of devotion. The minuscule numbered type resembling code and encryption suggest a modern spiritual practice that is at once engaged with the ancient practices and alienated from them.
Enumerated Heart Sutra | Ingrid Pierre | Tuesday Magazine | 37
Glistening
POETRY | REBECCA MADDALO
As dark as sand, your hair I tug and pull Keep watching as you move towards the edge I grasp you closer, trying to feel full Of love; your eyes on mine, a silent pledge. Your fingers sprint across this soft terrain An artful smile, the arching of your brow Your breath is arctic fire, full of pain In ecstasy, I scream my newfound vow. My fingers tense, my nails become like swords Our hard-earned sweat will glisten in the night The moonlight through the curtain’s our reward I lie within your arms and all feels right. We’ll sleep, entangled, till the ’morrow’s sun Reminds us of the web from which we run. — Rebecca Maddalo is a member of staff writers.
38 | Glistening | Rebecca Maddalo | Tuesday Magazine