Jenny Ng, President Qing Qing Miao, President
Editorial Board Jacqueline Leong, Editor-in-Chief Bridget Irvine, Editor-in-Chief Edyt Dickstein Emilie Robert Wong Matthew Aguirre Erica Eisen Anjie Liu Jenny Ng dArt Board (Design+Art) Sam Wattrus, Design Director Zoe Galindo, Art Director Jacqueline Leong Qing Qing Miao Stella Fiorenzoli Erica Eisen Saad Amer Erik Owen Michael Luo Annie Schugart Hannah Byrne
Staff Writers Annie Harvieux, Director Brian Kim, Director Anjie Liu Kristen Shim Social Media & Publicity Bridget Irvine Business Board Saad Amer Jenny Ng Qing Qing Miao Donors Wenyi Cai Josh Haas Faculty Advisor Daniel Donoghue With Special Thanks To: The Office for the Arts at Harvard The Undergraduate Council
Tuesday Magazine is a publication that engages in and furthers Harvard College’s artistic dialogue. In our biannual magazine, we seek to present a cross-section of Harvard’s intellectual life and amplify the arts, showcasing student voices by publishing their creations. We accept applications to join our staff at the beginning of each semester. Submissions from the Harvard community are accepted for publication on a rolling basis throughout the school year. Please visit tuesdaymagazine.com for more information about applications or submissions. Copyright © 2014 by Tuesday Magazine. All rights reserved. Reproduction without permission is prohibited.Tuesday Magazine is a publication of a Harvard College student-run organization. The Harvard name and/or VERITAS shield are trademarks of the President and Fellows of Harvard College and are used by permission of Harvard University. This product was printed in China.
Table of Contents | Volume 12, Issue 1 Cover
4
Cinderella
.
Tanner McColl Collage
Opening Scene From a Non-Fictitious Movie Miles Hewitt
Possibly
6
Echolocation
. Photography
Photography
22 Beneath Our Feet Zoe Galindo
.
Photography
Tanner McColl . Pen
7
Writer’s Block
8
Pfoho on a Sunny Day
9
Two Trees
Watercolor
Stella Fiorenzoli
.
Photography
11 In Passing
Photography
26 La PietĂ
Preparing For Battle Brenna Hilferty
.
Photography
27 Becoming One Through Music
.
Photography
Matt Krane
29 Concrete Blossoms Alice Hu
Matt Krane
Nature Calms Harriet Kariuki .
.
. Photography
30 The Ocean Creates Friendships Photography Pen & Colored Pencil
13 Grail
Namrata Anand
14 How 2 Live Your Life: A User Manual Gregory Kristof
.
28 Note from the Trapps
10 Planets
Matt Aguirre
Alice Hu
Harriet Kariuki
Kristen Shim
Tanner McColl
24 after before Ms.
Kristen Shim
Annie Harvieux
12 Woman
Matt Krane
25 Kaleidoscopic Series
Overcrowded
16 Treehouse
.
Daniel Schwartz
Emma Santelmann
Alona Bach .
Saad Amer
23 Fields
5
Alice Hu
20 Red Dress
Harriet Kariuki
.
Photography
31 Light
Silvia Golumbeanu
35 Portal
Riley Carney
.
Photography
36 Hoarding Henry Shah
38 Shadow Play Alice Hu
.
Photography
39 Closing Scene From a Fictitious Movie Miles Hewitt
Featuring: Matt Krane - winner of the Charles Edmund Horman Prize in Poetry Miles Hewitt & Daniel Schwartz - winners of the Edward Eager Memorial Fund Prize in Poetry Gregory Kristof - winner of the Thomas Wood Award in Journalism
Opening Scene From a Non-Fictitious Movie Miles Hewitt
In Russian there is a word for the type of love like the fire ejecting from the fire, curling ruddy with spark, explains the girl, watches the guy, tall, metaphysical, he’s known to dream things that are dreams not things. She from the city so is used to this. She really wants to avoid World War in Ukraine, guy too admittedly but will prioritize the hookup, he will make too many moves tonight too fast or maybe not any moves too fast, the cameraman tries not to think about his girlfriend, so vividly not naked. The director tries the same scene unscripted, thus capture battered way, the conversation cannot. A twisting ebb of flame, a twist. Somewhere above a gigantic raised eyebrow reigns. So at least someone is convinced. She explains this Russian word cannot be translated, he watches so she will keep moving her mouth. Someone is throwing a Molotov cocktail somewhere and someone is talking about love as fire, someone is trying to revolutionize someone, they will keep trying.
4 | Tuesday Magazine | Miles Hewitt | Opening Scene From a Non-Fictitious Movie
Possibly
ALICE HU | PHOTOGRAPHY Possibly | Alice Hu | Tuesday Magazine | 5
Echolocation EMMA SANTELMANN
As I fumbled in the dark and tried to interpret your nebulous mannerisms, something of a spark, so spectacular and dulcet, found its way through my suffocating night. But it was never quite the same once you had spoken; my senses became confused until my nerves were severed and my sonar broken so beyond repair that I lost all signs.
Crowded
I am not the Dulcinea you sought on your quest. Your echoes must have wandered off along the road from your thoughts to the windmills. I guess not even a knight always keeps his word.
TANNER MCCOLL | PEN
6 | Tuesday Magazine | Emma Santelmann | Echolocation | Tanner McColl | Crowded
Writer’s Block ANNIE HARVIEUX
I want to write about the time I was bold and courageous or the time I was tender or the time I was a burnout junkie with no story at all. I want to write about the time I had long willowy legs and an elegant face with big warm eyes. The time I ran down the road in the night, a streak lit burnt orange in the black by streetlamps and stars, unbuttoned coat billowing behind me, running towards someone or maybe away and taking everything in, not just every sharp breath insular to myself but everything around me, every brick in the walls and every gritty brick corner of the cobblestone sidewalk or the smoothness of the tar road. I want to write about the time I was in a room full of people and felt everyone, connected and warm, or, better, the time I was with one person and felt that person was everyone and they felt it back. Instead, I’m going to have to write about the times I’ve had. Like the time I got jammed in the plastic sliding door of the train. Or all the times I sat half-awake on the edge of the couch as we all just talked and laughed. Or the way snow looks when it gleams and sparkles under the midday sun or the way water catches light or the way eyes dart down when their owner has something to say that he doesn’t want to express or the soft downy coat under the smooth, otterlike outer coat of many midsized dogs. Or what it’s like to be anxious to show someone a story or play someone a song and how even if they don’t feel it they’ll still smile and come to dinner. Or what it’s like to sit next to someone on the train and find that they know my favorite things and will talk about them of their own accord, or, better, can sit there saying nothing at all and maybe I can just glance at them sideways a few times and feel warm. I’m going to write about the time I ran down the street with my coat buttoned up, every sharp breath insular to me, to get to your building faster. There is burnt orange light above me, but the stars are dim in the city and I can’t feel the road’s texture under the cork bottoms of my shoes. That’s all right though, because there’s an odd comfort in how the air in your stairwell’s smell is a musty-clean sort of familiar, a combination of paint and dust and paper. There’s comfort, even, in the painfully bland eggshell walls, especially in the way the people inside crumble far less easily than they feel they will. I sit down on the couch, slide my feet out of my boots and cross them beneath me on the cushion, and pull out my notebook and pen.
Writer’s Block | Annie Harvieux | Tuesday Magazine | 7
Pfoho on a Sunny Day
ALONA BACH | WATERCOLOR
8 | Tuesday Magazine | Alona Bach | Pfoho on a Sunny Day
Two Trees KRISTEN SHIM
only two trees in the yard dare declare their being red stand the two lovers and all the others can only blush
Two Trees | Kristen Shim | Tuesday Magazine | 9
| Planets
STELLA FIORENZOLI | PHOTOGRAPHY
10 | Tuesday Magazine | Stella Fiorenzoli | Planets
|
In Passing MATT KRANE
The aperture of the shell lidded, inside which a sea snail moved with no sail into the shore. I open it to fill it. Satisfied to shave loose sand from the rim as if a tablespoon held lives. The grains of it falling, silos of moment into a tossed shore of moments: light shoals and smooth eddies, dashed now with hints of color, bashed and swamped by such waves, each wave will run into me and into me evenly, why I trust them. Because the moonlight also is trained on me. Heavy salt air irritating my tear-ducts, ammoniac. My will-o’-the-wisp had set sweet lights
at the shore’s edge. Who pulled me toward the dark collapse of water— as each lapping is a force, a push and then pull: only returns permitted. The spiral-inward shell. I’m a witness, I saw the horizon’s arms sweep all water into my corner. I saw, I saw. And come forward. It is ethical. Not to preserve, releasing this hush onto the pale shore as an hourglass. It keeps ticking. What brought the sea’s resources together and left all in a heap, don’t know, just straighten. Here. This is what a body is for. Face it. Don’t say anything. Pull & keep it & let through. Carried: this is where you commit.
Nature Calms
HARRIET KARIUKI | PHOTOGRAPHY
In Passing | Matt Krane | Nature Calms | Harriet Kariuki | Tuesday Magazine | 11
Woman
TANNER MCCOLL | PEN & COLORED PENCIL
12 | Tuesday Magazine | Tanner McColl | Woman
Yoke lutist centaur, stitch piano bench saddle, galvani dancers calves, stirrup, paintbrush reins, rear, truth-seek filo dough egg wash sense, acquire dog pack, owl,
Grail
NAMRATA ANAND
splore swallow orb, scribble runes, vulture blooms, thrown, cut centaurs cords, string lyre, wandersing, dogs eat limb-ends, owlshouldered, forget, amputate, grow syndactyl goat body, nine moons til legs branch, hobble, tree root cavern submerge, there, dirt— poem.
Grail | Namrata Anand | Tuesday Magazine | 13
How 2 Live Your Life: A User Manual MATT AGUIRRE
It always starts difficultly because a “hello” seems 2 resonate more 4 me than “goodbye” because the end is something we tell ourselves children don’t “underst&nd” but even we don’t know what a beginning really is until something clicks & it’s “over” & it’s overpoweringly “sad” tragic & the list of thesaurus words that can’t verisimilarly paint “pain” or “loss” or that empty crushing feeling like a black hole opened up in your chest & your “heart” finally “breaks” in the way Hollywood said it would could shouldn’t ever happen 2 “anyone” but someday they tell me i’ll “get over it” & “stop whining” whatever that means but (if) when it does i’ll be “free” 2 finally realize how “good” 1 really have it because (so they told me) 1 was “lucky” enough 2 have been born “here” as if perspective dem&nds anything but any stable locus 2 “see” only that which is shown 2 me through the twistylens so 1 may not be blind or otherwise “disabled” because 1 am “lucky” “lucky” so “lucky” because 1 am not _______,
14 | Tuesday Magazine | Matt Aguirre | How 2 Live Your Life: A User Manual
1 have the “opportunity” 2 make myself into whatever mold of clay 1 couldn’t resist being shaped 2 “be” or not 2 be-come something “appropriate” though 1 don’t know what that means except 4 “whowhatwherewhen” because “how” is the 1 thing 1 do not know so the thing 1 have 2 ask with is “why” but the obvious reply “why not” seems 2 echo from the indifferent darkness of night as if 2 say “who cares” about anything anyway? & tho “1 do” either way “something beautiful” or “ugly” can “grow up” out of the decay (or ash left behind by consumption) that will someday “ be” burned, 4 warmth - heat - sustenance 4 another, called 2 be given up 4 “the greater good” because we must be “selfless” “generous” “givingcaringloving” 2 all of our children so that they may “carry on” the fire that they 2 will be sacrificed 4, 4 whatever it demands of them.
How 2 Live Your Life: A User Manual | Matt Aguirre | Tuesday Magazine | 15
Treehouse GREGORY KRISTOF
“I can drill,” Nathan says. Nathan has brown hair. It’s so messy it looks like someone tried to comb over a bunch of tumbleweeds. Today he is wearing his favorite camo t-shirt, which is also my favorite camo t-shirt, and if he wanted to he could blend right into these nettles. A few years ago at his eighth birthday party, he introduced me and my brother to everyone else as his “bestest friends.” During the party, he whispered to me that his grandma gave him a shotgun that you could turn into a .22 rifle just by switching out the barrell. Lucky! Nathan can take apart and fix anything he wants, his favorite kind of tractor is a D11 Caterpillar, and he is my best friend in all of Oregon. “It’s ok, I can drill,” I reply. “Trust me, it’s difficult.” “It’s my power drill,” I remind him. “You might break it.” “It’s your grandpa’s,” he reminds me back. “But he bought the power drill for me, to work on this treehouse.” “No, he bought it for us, to work on this treehouse.” “No he didn’t.” “Yeah,” he nods quickly. “Your grandpa told me so.” “Fine. But then I get to use the saw.” “We don’t need to use the saw.” “But if we need to use the saw, I get to use it first.” “Ok, I guess we have a deal.” “Good.” I hand him the drill, as if I’m handing over the last red Skittle of the entire pack.
was telling me about how he had just been suspended from high school for trying to stab a classmate with a railroad spike. When I arrived on the farm this summer, the first thing I did was hike down to the treehouse and stare at its remains. The quartet of trees still stood, easily the biggest and baddest of any on the surrounding hill. The trees loomed up out of pasture the color of a cougar’s fur, and the gray planks we had nailed up as a ladder long ago—10 years? 11 years? 13 years ago? I don’t remember—were nearly all that was left. They were the freshest, healthiest boards, and they stacked horizontally between the two near trees, climbing up like a rib cage. They led to the main platform of the treehouse, which used to reside fifteen feet up along the trees and which now resides in about fourteen different barns around Yamhill County. I could climb up those planks now; they would still hold me. But what would I do at the top—just sit there? How uncomfortable.
* “Gregory, remember to come back in soon and finish your summer reading!” my mom shouts from inside the farmhouse. Nathan and I look up. He is drilling planks across the two near trees so we can make a ladder to climb upwards, where we will build the treehouse platform. I am sawing circles into a board twice the size of my bed. This board will be the floor. “Gregory!” My mom says again. “I already finished it, mom!” I shout back. * “Then why is the bookmark in Artemis Fowl placed It used to be that every summer when I went back to my only halfway through?” Artemis Fowl is about a kid who grandparents’ sheep and cherry farm in Oregon, the treeoutsmarts his enemies by always knowing what they are up house that Nathan, my brother, and I built ages ago was al- to. It gave me the idea to some day become a spy (if my ways there, saluting proudly from the hillside. This summer parents let me). I tried to convince Nathan to become a spy, too, but he just wants to be a hunter. Specifically, an when I went back, I discovered the treehouse dismantled. elk hunter. I will never have to worry about going hungry, More than dismantled: It had been thoroughly dismemhe says, because when we are grown ups he will be able to bered, minced, wrenched joint-from-socket until all that sneak into the mountains with his rifle and bring back elk remained of the roof were tawny tufts of splintered wood. Someone told me the farmhands took it down and used the with antlers as big as oak branches. He will drag that elk battered planks for either scrap wood or firewood. Which is all the way to my front door and then we will eat it with salt and maybe some gravy. fine; we hadn’t been up in that thing in years. “Answer me, Gregory!” my mom says again. I don’t think Nathan knows that our treehouse is no Nathan rushes to my aid. “I saw him finish the book, longer. The last time I talked with him was three ago, and he
16 | Tuesday Magazine | Gregory Kristof | Treehouse
Mrs. Kristof.” “Me, too!” my brother adds. We all know building this treehouse is more important than my elementary and high school and college educations combined. I saw through the remaining board--zirchh-zirchh-zirchh--and Nathan restarts the drill and my brother begins hammering on this annoyingly bent nail--bambambam!-- and soon there is no hearing my mother over the noise. I sometimes wonder how Nathan is so polite (“Pleased to see you, Mr. Kristof!” “Would you like me to help with the dishes, Mrs. Kristof?” “Say, Mr. Kristof, would you happen to need some help operating the bulldozer today?”), since the rest of his family is so not polite (except his grandmother, who jokes about beating him with her belt, but does not actually--she is all right). Nathan once told me that he tries not to be like his father, who he has met a few times and who I have met only once, when he drove by us in his truck and shouted curse words at Nathan for five minutes before driving off. “Do you know what this treehouse needs?” Nathan asks me and my brother one day as we sit high up on the platform, which we have just secured with rope, nails, and wire. My brother and I glance at each other. “Another board right here?” I point between two of the trees. “Nope, we don’t need that. What this treehouse needs,” Nathan says, “is a secret entrance.”
ing to Ecuador and Colombia to sharpen my Spanish (if I didn’t make it to AP Spanish by senior year, I would have been grounded for at least a month), which meant spending less of my summers on the farm. Nathan and I stopped seeing each other regularly during our summers, and news about him accrued to me in shards. Shard: Nathan got fired from the gas station for being inefficient with the pump. Shard: Nathan has a girlfriend. They first met while skinny-dipping in the same pond, and within an hour he knew she was the one. Shard: His current best friend (my brother and I having abdicated that title ice ages ago) is in prison for the statutory rape of Nathan’s sister. Nathan blames his sister. Shard: Nathan will be going to community college to study auto-mechanics. Shard: Nathan will no longer be going to community college to study auto-mechanics. I should try harder to see him. But these days, what would we talk about? I’m a MacBook-toting philosophy buff who has lived on three continents, attended high school in Westchester County, New York, and who once tugged at his English teacher’s sleeves until he agreed to supervise an independent study on the ontological argument for God’s existence. Nathan is a camo-wearing, college un-bound engine junkie who no longer lives with his mother because she is serving a five-year sentence for attempted murder. The chasm is so unbreachable it cannot * even be articulated from me to him, although he may not This past summer, after seeing the dismantled treehouse for know that. the first time, I texted Nathan for the first time in my life. Then one afternoon a few summers ago, he just showed Back when we were little, he lived with his grandmother up—he never needed invitations, and it didn’t matter that five minutes down the hill from my grandparents, and when we hadn’t talked in two years. I was sitting by the farmI went to the farm every summer he would always just be house window when I heard a vehicle coughing up the hill. there, waiting. He’d saunter up without calling beforehand, The red pickup slid to a halt outside and Nathan stepped because who needed phones? out. He wore a hunting cap, carpenter jeans with hammerDuring high school, Nathan moved to a town thirty loops, and work boots so robust they looked like they were minutes away to live with his mother. He worked at a gas made to protect feet from falling chainsaws. It turned out station to pay their rent while she, young enough to be his he had built the truck himself out of spare parts, which older sister, sat on the couch and did meth, bought meth, explained why the rig had a two-inch wheel axle lift. My sold meth. Nathan told me during that time that he would first thought was that he had not changed since the time never try meth because he did not want to turn out like his we were ten, that only I had changed. mother. During my high school summers I also began travel“Gregory!” He rushed over and bear hugged me.
Treehouse | Gregory Kristof | Tuesday Magazine | 17
“Hi,” I managed, squeezed like a stress ball. “It’s been some time.” We meandered down towards the treehouse. “It’s still here, huh,” he said. “I wonder if we should fix it up a little. It’s sagging.” I probably won’t have the time, I said, which was true. “I can’t believe we built that thing,” he continued. “That was probably the best thing we ever did.” Then his eyes caught my grandpa’s John Deere resting in the sheep barn. “Have I ever told you about power-steering?” he asked as he ran over and leapt onto the driver’s seat. “Yeah,” I said. “You have.” He unclipped the oil hatch and removed the oil dip. “Look here. See these pistons move here when I jerk this lever? It lets the hydraulic fuel travel more efficiently to this twin-cylinder chamber over here.” “That’s pretty interesting, Nathan.” He believed me, of course. Nathan is 180 pounds of granite-hard proof that some people can be fooled all the time. He is enviably ignorant of how sinister the people around him can actually be. Nathan himself never lies (except when doing so would allow him to handle a cool power tool, in which case he will lie in an instant about why your grandpa bought it), and it doesn’t occur to him that others aren’t as forthright as he his. “You can tell when a tractor leaks hydraulic fuel because the pattern comes out in this shape, look down here, Gregory.” Sometimes, I wish he could register social cues. Here is a social cue: if the person you are talking to is looking off to the right at dead bark on a dead tree, instead of at the oil splotches on the ground to which you direct his attention, then he may not be fist-pumpingly enthusiastic about your lecture. “...but if I could actually have anything in the world, do you know what it would be, Gregory? Guess! It would be a D11…” All of which reminds me: what time is it? I haven’t gotten anything done today, which includes putting on a shirt. None of which is tragic, because it is summer, but I did tell myself that I would finish up Rousseau’s Social Contract by tonight “...but here’s the trick, I’m going to tell you the trick, okay? You have to first engage the clutch and then shuck this lever down to raise the bucket…” which in turn reminds me, social contract theory is laceratingly stupid, because it assumes consent can be tacit when in fact “...See what I mean? See what I mean! That’s why I prefer stick-shift to automatic…” and about then the frustration of having to smile politely during a twenty-minute speech on hydraulic fuel tightens inside me like a sand-filled
18 | Tuesday Magazine | Gregory Kristof | Treehouse
sock, bringing me down, down, down until I eventually keel and tell the kid who used to be my bestest friend that I must go back inside to complete my summer reading. * “I can nail this last one in!” I say. “Are you sure?” Nathan looks at me. “It’s the most important board of all.” “Of course,” I reply. Over the last week, we have built a secret ladder that goes up through the back end of the tree-house. We arranged the steps perfectly so it looks like a ladder only if you already know there’s a door in the back. Basically, the door is a secret because it looks like it doesn’t move, but actually we only nailed it in at one point so you can swivel it to the side if you press on the right spot. But you have to press on exactly the right spot. To get up to this door, you climb up this secret ladder, which is hard because we put the rungs far apart so robbers and girls can’t get in, and then you have to squirm your body through these two other boards, and if you make it that far you can knock on the plank in front of you three times-two short knocks, then one long knock--and then either me or my brother or Nathan will swivel the secret door and bring you in. After I pound in the last plank, I climb down and we all look up. Wow! We are standing in front of four trees and the giant wooden fort sits there so high up, like it’s floating. It looks like a big cage, the kind that a mountain man would have behind his cabin to keep his wolf in. The four trees it’s built on look like its legs, the four legs of a big beast. Right above the treehouse, the branches burst in all directions, as if the treehouse has a million arms that can stretch out over the sheep pasture to block away any bad guys. It will for sure be our lookout post from now on. We will always see mom, dad, grandma and grandpa before they see us. It’s so high up I bet you could see for fifty miles. No, a hundred miles. “There she blows!” Nathan hollers. “Let’s live up there,” I say. All we would need is a blanket. * I didn’t actually text Nathan that other day. I thought I had, but it turned out to be his girlfriend’s number. I had
not seen Nathan in some time and I have never met this lady, but news scrounged from various informants (his sister, his grandmother) didn’t paint her as Miss Fetching. She has a set of children from a previous man, isn’t exactly young, and is fervently trying to dissuade Nathan from pursuing more advanced education. I had just completed my two month internship in Beijing and had a week in Oregon before heading up to Cambridge, so I texted him, I mean her, on Monday, August 19, 2013, at 10:03pm. Hey Nathan, it’s Gregory Kristof. How are you doing! I’m back on the farm for a few days before heading back east and wanted to catch up with you. Gimme a call or stop by when you have a chance, this is my cell. Who gave you this number? Is this Nathan? My grandma got it from your sister This is his wife to be ill givr him message Ok thanks I have not heard from Nathan since, and neither have his sister or his grandmother. They hear things secondhand. I hear things thirdhand. Shard: Nathan is living with meth dealers, in a meth house, on a street known as “Meth Row.” Shard: Nathan would like to join the military but is unable to pass their drug tests. I’d like to tell him that our treehouse has been taken down, that we should take another spin on the bulldozer some time, that although we are about as similar as a hammer and an iPhone we should still try to be close friends again. But he would just furrow his brows and say, “You mean, we’re not close friends anymore?” Although the treehouse was the Acropolis of our architectural projects, it did have lesser cousins. There was that fort among the Douglas Fir trees just below the
pasture the color of cougar’s fur. The three of us threw it together in a week by ripping out oak branches and laying them in a lean-to across a felled pine. We carpeted it with ferns and twigs so it blended into the hill like one of those lizards you see in National Geographic. There was also that second shelter nestled in the forest below the sheep pasture. We balanced logs of Douglas Fir over a raisindry creek bed that snaked down the slope, and again we camouflaged the top with ferns, weeds and thistles so other people couldn’t see through to us. We left little peep-holes so we could spy on the outside world. One evening, we were traipsing through the forest when my grandpa called us, so we excitedly ran to the creek-fort and hid inside. He came out along the edge of the sheep pasture looking for us, and we sat side-by-side in the creek bed underneath the logs, peeking through the ferns and watching him stand there at the edge of the forest, fifteen feet away, squinting to try and find us. Shhhh! my brother told Nathan, you shhhh he said back--and then all three of us just held our breaths and waited--crackk! Don’t step on twigs, Nathan! Grandpa stood there staring right at us, and we sat still as foxes when he suddenly shouted, “Aha! I see you boys!” We trudged out of the fort, one by one, with our heads down. Neither of these forts still stands. Each summer I return to Oregon, I feel as if another monument to my friendship with Nathan has been hacked down. The leanto just under the ridge was there one summer and gone the next. The surrounding forest had been clearcut, like a boy getting his summer buzz. A few years later, the woods just under our sheep pasture were logged as well, meaning a five-ton D4 Caterpillar clenched its treads over our creekfort every sunrise until it receded back into the landscape, peep-holes and all. This past summer, the treehouse was finally ripped down. First, the nails were pried out and the wiring unwound. Next, the roof was heaved from its supports and tossed to the ground below, and after that the walls were wrenched down. The secret door was the easiest to remove, because we had secured it with only one nail. Finally, as much as possible was heaped onto a flatbed that lumbered away down our driveway, off to distribute the wood to who best could use it. The rest was burned.
Treehouse | Gregory Kristoff | Tuesday Magazine | 19
Beneath Our Feet
ZOE GALINDO | PHOTOGRAPHY
22 | Tuesday Magazine | Zoe Galindo | Beneath Our Feet
Fields MATT KRANE
‌ built with only silver things. And the trees were dappled mechanically. They submitted restlessly. A certain field I allowed into myself, such clear medicine. It gave me circles of confusion, something not acceptably sharp, something offered with all delicacy by the stray dogs thinly whitely grinning when they come. And they do. I would rather divert what is not enough, and allow in me a timely shade of openness, to capture as a door captures, in case a rain does fall (unevenly, as particles without a shape, at each moment an impression relieved out of the ground), or a high shiny cry above the field is batted— It was someone I knew. And the dogs, too, were named. There was then, now, a take back into of shards that had been laid on the field. A storage of yawning for safekeeping, and navigated shade at the edge. Finally the blurred mind in field is prised open. Finally the trees cast longer shadows. The shutter calls time, and more time, and even more than that.
Fields | Matt Krane | Tuesday Magazine | 23
after before Ms. DANIEL SCHWARTZ
a stern hand sculpted of ice, frozen into a block of ice, and so were Ms. and Mr. Strandwick, walking puck thuck puck thuck puck thuck (hands two clasped minds) like the inviolable electric bond of sky and land green and blue patrolled always avoo viwa avoo viwaa by the infinitely birdlike birds a mountain child, a mountain child she called herself when they first met, she an unabashed beautiful child slaying sound, her words ickth taff ickth taff to his ear even as, ‘I too am a mountain child’ elapsing from his tongue, he mimicked, transported already (behind her, the night placed its stern fist on the sycamore table of his thoughts) to the oosh ilk oosh ilk terrors of the distant earthquake in his mind that signaled---the puck thuck puck walk alone of the future, gripped by that bond’s icy fingers, as when on the deck of a ship some foreign gaze of one’s own fixes itself to the wake, asking horribly avoo viwaaa about that wake, suffocated by its smooth slitting glide (its elegant flutter would have reminded him of how she had carried her eyes), wishing it to be separate from its motion---that Ms. would no longer be his wife him clasping her hand some year in the middle, a warm foom vidu foom vidu blush of her heart, o! she thought how his face sang so harmoniously with the deep swaying of the sun’s fur, it shedding itself in majestic beams onto the couch where one lies half-asleep, a book halfasleep on one’s chest, waiting (a cloud, recovering slish yaysh slish from the previous night’s revelry, stumbled in front of the sun) to explode by no perceptible act of will into life; but why she felt---her memory glancing that glowing burden in his eyes that had begun already to strangle her light when they first met (behind him, the scattered night lights had panted here and there like dogs in the park at dawn, bathed in stained glass light, a barking scripture of time’s correctness)---should he need wander so aarl zoov arl zoov despairingly into the dark, what could appeal (he drew his hand away timidly) there in the circling night the separation, as a life, so impossible to seize, like the disappearing exactness of a dream--one warring now, like a fitful child, not to release him from sleep, no!, not to allow him the irl jang irl jang of his own motion, (as after a lightning-flash the pause before the! gwrrSHLACK) his vision frantically tore itself from his visions---; a continent away, hastening her pace to escape the knots of an unsettling Mediterranean nap, Ms. wondered still (the handsome turquoise waves re-collecting in her mind fragments of a younger self, ‘a mountain child’ lying on the seafloor of her ear, rambling avoo viyaa avoo viya in the rain, in a memory-language now only half-known) why why, Mr. too thought, why does a puck thuck puck thuck morph into hurt (he once more granted his imagination that last graze, before she had gone, of her lips across his raining face), the sky perched in his eyes there on the green like a child feeling ganged-up against; and why she searched herself (the beautiful torch-lit dungeons of his eyes lighting her way) why did she love to walk alone in the sun
24 | Tuesday Magazine | Daniel Schwartz | after before Ms.
Kaleidoscopic Series
ALICE HU | PHOTOGRAPHY
Kaleidoscopic Series | Alice Hu | Tuesday Magazine | 25
La PietĂ KRISTEN SHIM
I would like someday to touch the face of Mary. She who held herself, waiting silent and still for him to fold her robes, to wipe her tears, and press her lips in prayer. And when he passed the son to rest in her hands, he looked down down to see his own hands imprinted
angry hands raging fearful, starving hands, dying hands that dared dared carve marble lasting. He reached up, him a mere mortal, to close her eyes. So he knew he must have known how all our mothers reach to touch their face with mortal hands only to find that they too bear the face of Mary.
Preparing For Battle
BRENNA HILFERTY | PHOTOGRAPHY
26 | Tuesday Magazine | Kristen Shim | La PietĂ | Brenna Hilferty | Preparing for Battle
Becoming One Through Music HARRIET KARIUKI | PHOTOGRAPHY
Becoming One Through Music | Harriet Kariuki | Tuesday Magazine | 27
Note from the Trapps MATT KRANE
On the rock, grains glued in silica, I stick close to myself. A dried oak wanders outward from the mountain’s negative. Roots snake through cracks. Two stuck stones, starting & staying, have fallen into each other: locked ready to shake off. Was the glacier, Wisconsin, did it, carved thick braids of sentiment out of quartz. Another’s move. Now my arms are ticking. Full of adrenaline and blood, it’s too much for skin to hold, the forearms tendons fingers cable out to grimace the wall and I pendulum over the sheer apex of New York, crossing a crux, splitting I or some part making it out to that face. The bent joint of rock. Exposed and hung out to dry. Sun pools on my back. Bullets of sweat vanish from my head’s crown. There is nothing to the south of me. All those untouched oaks, sycamore, euphorbia & underneath huckleberries drop from bush into lily ponds full of machine-voiced frogs. There’s the dipping lush of earth that begs me to spill into. But nothing holds here. Don’t let me lie. If I could I’d be weatherbeat or in Athens, at the foot of the Parthenon praying. Here’s not enough to stay. Even balance ends, end. I can’t keep my back to it. Face what you see.
28 | Tuesday Magazine | Matt Krane | Note from the Trapps
Concrete Blossoms
ALICE HU | PHOTOGRAPHY
Concrete Blossoms | Alice Hu | Tuesday Magazine | 29
The Ocean Creates Friendships HARRIET KARIUKI | PHOTOGRAPHY
30 | Tuesday Magazine | Harriet Kariuki | The Ocean Creates Friendships
Light
SILVIA GOLUMBEANU Light drips from the moon and there are cries in the dark but I can’t tell if they are of pleasure, grief, or a cat. I wake up the leaves with the toe of my boot and kick them aside on the sidewalk. Someone throws a bottle down somewhere and I regret kicking anything. The leaves rattle on the ground, little rattlesnakes on the ground, shaking around my ankles which are shaking too. I’m cold and it’s tired. No it’s cold and I’m tired. People are talking on the steps ahead, silhouettes in the light through the library glass doors. The days are steps And life a tunnel Time cement That pours in slowly, Once I stood in the amber glow of a blocklamp that hung off the side of the old building on the steps leading to the hall and the snow began to fall. It was the first snow, and I had on a new scarf and hat and I looked up into the dark of the sky and it was really a music box of a moment. I take it out of my pocket sometimes and it lifts me from bed in the mornings or tucks me in at night. With each step The quiet struggle Not to turn And lose the race. I’m not on those steps now I’m on some others thousands of miles away but someone stood here, some child sometime, and looked up into the dim face of night and formed a song of a memory they would carry with them without even knowing it. And that fills the heels of my shoes sometimes and keeps me going when otherwise I’d sit down and let the cold blow me over. And how many nights I’ve had to refill the cracks in my skin with it to feel more than just a framework of flesh and remember the little flame of a soul that makes any of it mean anything at all. It flickers sometimes. But oddly loves the sound of rain. I think that speaks for its courage. Or capacity for pain. Songs are seasons Still returning Held in palms And whispered lowly, It’s 12:59 AM. Everything is a half-remembrance. Helps the heart
To sail in darkness Feeds the soul A bit of grace. A river wound through my town and it was almost beautiful from far away. At night, as you crossed the bridge looking upon the riverside houses from way up high, the lights would glimmer softly and this was also almost beautiful. One of the larger streams flowed down behind an elementary school where thickets grew densely and bullfrogs croaked their odd sounds in the darkness. This was where we went down sometimes, pants rolled up, eyeing bottles lodged in the mud, throwing sticks as far as possible from the edge of a waterfall. I would hold my shoes in my hand and walk along the cold smooth rocks in the stream, passing underneath the little bridge, and the crags on the sides would ride up so high like the edges of a deep bowl holding us safe and small. Climbing up onto the grass on the hillside by the post office I walked right into a collection of wasps once and sat crying on the bank for about half an hour while my friend splashed cold water on my feet. I could not wear anything but slip-on shoes for two weeks because of the heavy homemade bandaging. After the healing began I would walk barefoot in the fields again and step on one lone bee, right where the old wound had started to deflate. We lived in a glass case then, high upon a suburban shelf, wrapped all around by golden summer, violet nights. We were aware of the world around us, could see it through the glistening walls, but couldn’t touch it, nor taste it, and the sounds that permeated the shell sometimes were but whispers and hums. Our own worlds were vibrant and warm to the point of exhaustion, and this was when the restlessness began--the arm outstretched to touch the glass, recoiling upon finding it cold. And there, suspended like some bright orb in the middle of it all, a mid-May afternoon with the summer still growing ahead. “Cat?” His door was open so I just went in. “Cat?” “Yeah?” “Why do the kids in your class, when they act like
Light | Silvia Golumbeanu | Tuesday Magazine | 31
they like someone, they start to act very badly, you know?” He looked at me with this semi-bewildered expression and then laughed. “What? Did you see something? Who should I smack ‘cross the head tomorrow?” “No I didn’t see anything. I mean they act like they don’t care and they start to hang around very close to each other and pull hair and I don’t know what. And well I know I wouldn’t like that. I don’t think it’s nice. That they get so close without asking.” “Well, see, it’s not that they don’t ask. It’s sort of a secret agreement. But really where’d you get all this?” “What kind of secret agreement?” “You know, in a little closed room with a witness and an olive branch and--” “Cat!” “How should I know, do you see me running around here like them?” “No.” “Then I’ll tell you when I find out. Yeah?” “Alright.” I quietly accepted I would never find out. I stood silent in the doorway for about half a minute. He scribbled at something on the floor. “What’re you doing now?” “Homework.” “You still have homework?” “I’m older than you Lena, that’s how it is.” “Are you almost done?” “Yeah just a little bit more.” I had to leave sort of a pause now, so I didn’t seem too needy. I gave it ten seconds. “D’you want to go outside after?” “Yeah just meet me out front. I won’t be too long.” And he wasn’t. Our summers were spent leafing through dumps for slabs of wood to use as sides of makeshift clubhouses beneath the prickly confines of pine trees and building traps for each other underneath the dining table. Once I found a little colored pellet on the ground from some sort of toy gun and showed it to Cat. He told me he collected them. I picked them up all that summer and all that year and kept them in my pockets and spilled them into a box in my room that’s now probably collecting dust in the basement. I always meant to give them to him but got too caught up in the search to remember. A man comes around running on the walkway through the gate, what look like oversized shopping bags in each hand. His breathing is exaggerated, very loud and rhythmic. He comes down this way every night within
32 | Tuesday Magazine | Silvia Golumbeanu | Light
minutes of the same time, and he always has something large and luggage-like in each hand, and he always breathes the same way. I can usually hear him from a hundred meters off. I’ve always wanted to follow him but don’t want to end up in some back alley witnessing a drug deal alone so maybe with someone else I will. It’s getting colder. It’s late and cold and I’m not even having any fun. I was supposed to be having fun. Isn’t that what everyone says? The best years? Though I cannot Weep beside you (Mem’ry’s not To be reached in), The best years. The bulk of change in life comes quietly and spreads itself out over a sheet of years you don’t notice has been wrapping around you since the day you were born. You are swaddled in time, baptized in memory, and one day you see how much larger your hands are and cry. (The panting is very faint now, but I can see him clear down the path). Other times you feel yourself passing through the gap, feel your legs stretch out, and while crossing the bridge forget for a moment you don’t like high places and look down. And suddenly you can feel everyone walking past each other in the fog thinking maybe, maybe. Someone’s walking their dog, a little white dog, it moves so quickly. At this hour? Yes at this hour you walk your dog when you have to walk your dog. Would it be weird if I ask to pet it? Owner’s got a hood on. She looks very tired. The only apartments nearby are behind my building so one of the windows I look out on must be hers. The little white dog lives there across the way. I’ll see it again, I’ll leave her alone now. Does she keep flowers on a little glass table in the living room, hang pictures on the wall. Probably. Probably paints the walls. I want to do that. I can’t do that where I live. I have to attach everything with little blue pieces of what looks like chewed gum and maneuver hooks in the molding that’s very obviously not supposed to hold any hooks. Temporary, very temporary. I want to keep things. Maybe this is why parents busy themselves with painting houses and sit on porches drinking and laughing loudly sharing stories. Wonder that they can bear to watch you step off into the same cruelties, but then are there really any choices. A very still sadness paints everything and the buzzing comfort of home is lost, a concept that belonged to another time when you thought that part of life to be eternal. Or knew it wasn’t but felt that its passing would be so gradual that it wouldn’t even
hurt. For the most part it doesn’t. But the last few years are tipped in steel and once the final inch is removed from the skin, there is nothing left to stall the bleeding. And maybe that’s too grotesque. Maybe it’s not. At moments it dulls and the dream resumes, but to be caught in awareness for even just a night, the welt left by a crude wake-up pinch like that- Tall smooth statue Still I see you Lovely you will Always be-But nobody cares, or nobody wants to think about it, and I don’t blame them. Somebody laughs behind me, it echoes down the alleyway like a song in a dream and for a second the night’s not so empty. I really shouldn’t be out here, watching my breath swirl in front of me, self-evicted. But I’m a little weak. I can’t face them and tell them to shut up because it always ends up somehow with me apologizing to them. But I must go It’s 1:04 AM. Always forward Everything is a half-remembrance. Fearing time Will pour on me. The sky glows with a premature wintry pink light that makes everything disconcertingly bright and asks you to look at it, asks you to take a picture that’ll never come out. I go back into my room and grab a toothbrush and turn down the path to stay at a friend’s. Wind blows perfume of dead leaves in my face and down the way and sends them dancing. There is a final stairway up to the door of her building, a great brick thing with not many other distinguishing features, and my steps are pathetically heavy. In the hall I knock. She opens. Alone standing in a blue dress with no shoes yet and curls artfully placed, ready to flutter out into the night. “Hey, how’s it going?” There’s the plush carpet all spread out behind her, exaggerating the space in the room. She got lucky with this one, there’s even room to dance. “Oh, it’s going all right! But you look pretty busy--” “I was gonna head out, yeah, do you want to join? I don’t know who all’s coming. Some other people you probably know. I think everyone’s at the Plaza. It’s not really close but there’s a bus.” There is a tea set lain on the floor, and hardly anything on the walls but the calendar and a clock. What I’d give for that much wall space--I’d tape my life up there. She
sounds more awake than I have all day. Her eyes are kind and eager. This is her dancing dress--the skirt blooms like a tulip bulb when she spins. I suddenly feel very embarrassed and want to go back. “Oh, no, I was actually gonna go to sleep but everyone in my building is drunk or something and they’re loud as hell.” “You’re welcome to stay here.” “Nah, it’s alright, it’d be weird if you weren’t here.” It would be but I’m tired enough that I wouldn’t really care. “I don’t mind at all, but if you’re sure--” “Yeah I’ll tough it out, thanks though.” “Hope it gets sorted out.” Well, “I’ll be alright, good night. Have fun though!” Missed that chance. “Thanks, good night!” After the door shuts I just kind of stand in the hall and think about where I’ll go. I don’t really want to go back. But I am so tired if I go anywhere else I’ll probably fall asleep god knows where and regret it very much upon waking. Maybe one of these days I will halt the reflex to turn down invitations, see what I am missing. But the thing about that is sometimes I don’t entirely stop the impulse to run away from the offer--I only delay the reaction time enough to say yes and get on the bus and then realize halfway through the ride what I’ve done and start to feel horrible. A few steps out of the building the wind picks up again and I button my coat to my neck. I haven’t been sick all season. The other day I ate a peanut M&M I dropped on the ground but it had only been there for a second. Somebody walks by coughing up a lung and I feel sick anyway. Seamless empathy. I pass by the steps of the library and decide to go up a bit, then a bit more, and go over and sit on a ledge overlooking a patch of lawn with a path down the middle. It curves around past the steps and disappears. I curl into the shadow of a pillar and disappear. There aren’t many people walking by but occasionally I can see someone below. I sort of recognize the little figure there now. “Joanne.” A slight turn of the head, then she looks back down. “Joooannnnee.” A little more than a hoarse whisper. She stops dead in the middle of the path and looks up, in the wrong direction. She turns. I roll onto my side away from the ledge and lay perfectly still. I hear her steps
Light | Silvia Golumbeanu | Tuesday Magazine | 33
start up again, here quickening, there relaxing, and I sit back up. The silhouette of her coat casts a hulking shadow that follows her like a body guard across the lamp-lit ground. I don’t even want to be spooking people walking home in the dark, I want to sleep. I would sell it all tomorrow for my own bed. I have somehow wasted only fifteen minutes which isn’t anywhere near enough for a general exodus of the crowd near my door. But to them I’m the outline of a coat receding on a pathway below and that separates us as much as anything, means no harm, but I can still feel the wind on my back that comes from on high like buildingledge glances. I want to be full of life too, all the time. But I’m full of only a bit and very diluted. And a very quiet bit. And it gets me very tired, all the time. I turn back towards my building, check the time. 1:15 AM. A bed is a bed. Catching the end of an alarm with earplugs in is like exiting a dream twice through the wrong door and then remembering to open your eyes. But it doesn’t matter much what I’m doing now. I don’t think anyone really cares what they’re doing right now which is kind of a shame because that’s all anything is, a collection of nows. But they’re so small, little invisible slivers, less than paper thin and yet that’s what life is, that’s what we cry over: all these little plucked wings less than paper thin stacked on top of each other to make a moving picture. What we care about is stories--the collection of words, not the word. The collection of pages, days, people--not the page, not the minute, not the lone midnight thought. And so stories are never told about what’s happening right now. Even if we feel them happening, the mass of them are in the past tense. Today isn’t a story yet; last night is hardly developed. It has to roll off my tongue a thousand times, the ancient epic of tripping down the library stairs two days ago. But the years up until now are stories, all of them. All of the people. None of them are the same anymore, it’s like someone came in and plucked out all the actors whose contracts were running out and put in new ones of which a few have some similar looks to the old set, but never the right shape of the nose or look in the eye. This is all just a confession, really. Even the things that are made up aren’t necessarily untrue. And there’s no real point in confessions unless you’re trying to convict someone of a crime or something. But that fact that you might read it anyway justifies it, sort of. What of life; life
34 | Tuesday Magazine | Silvia Golumbeanu | Light
has no meaning--or none that we can discern. Yet we live. That justifies it, sort of. That there is a realm of certain pain, and a realm of uncertain anything, and we choose the former. That what I’m writing here might really mean nothing, but the act of not reading it makes you just a little less certain. About anything. That to read someone’s voice is to hear it, to give them life, to justify that voice’s ever having existed. To share, to give; that’s all I ever wanted. That to hold back from talking to yourself, or from placing thought into words--an act designed specifically so that we might share!--is to bleed out slowly in a room alone. This is about the years that have disappeared. They have to go somewhere, and since I don’t know where time has swept them, I collect them here as little colored pellets from the ground. And this is my shoebox in the basement so I don’t forget. Even if I never look at it again.
Portal
RILEY CARNEY | PHOTOGRAPHY
Portal | Riley Carney | Tuesday Magazine | 35
Hoardings HENRY SHAH
I. BIDART QUOTE August 30, 2012 From Borges and I, Frank Bidart We fill pre-existing forms and when we fill them we change them and are changed. II. LOCI COMMUNES In the beginning was the white man. The commonplace book begins for all historical intents and purposes in the mind and inkwell of the Renaissance, Western-European, aristocrat-scholar. This man is wealthy, but can’t afford to buy and retain books (worth their own weight in gold at the time). The man is learned and mentally dexterous, but he can’t possibly hoard all he reads and gleans inside his head. There is too much space dedicated to marriage plots, the fluctuating value of the Florentine ducat, and the expansion plans for the south-facing garden. This man can afford a bound volume of parchment paper. It lies empty, but waits to be filled. Then refilled. Paper is expensive and he will have to write in between the lines, around the margins, upside down for legibility’s sake.
April 13, 2011 From Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell What is any ocean but a multitude of drops? V. WHO IS WALKING ABOUT IN OUR HEADS? Third grade. At this time, my mental home is populated by simple, looming characters. My mother, my father, my brother, my teacher. Several students in my class. Harry Potter. I rely too much on immediate concerns and responses for my internal chorus to become a burden. Our teacher, Jenny, introduces an activity that will consume our next month of school. Noon with the Notables. An hour in which each class member will dress up as and become a figure from history. The idea is to get as close to reality as possible — by learning how your Notable talked, walked, thought, dressed. You will be expected to know the major events of their life and talk about them as your own. When did your Notable get married? Graduate high school? Have grandchildren? The fun of this will be to transform yourself into somebody else and put them inside your head (And vice-versa) so that our Noon with the Notables hour will be a special hour with 20 people throughout time.
A full III. INSTRUCTIONS Use this book to record and store valuable commonplace morsels from what you read, hear, and observe. It may be helpful to categorize book by subject and date, label, and properly attribute your entries. Attempt to note will down only the words of others. This is not a journal or diary. By placing your be own words herein, you are pompously suggesting your own cerebral kinship a with Dante or Moses.
I choose Mahatma Gandhi. I take the exercise seriously.
textual tessellation
A full commonplace book will be a textual tessellation — a constellation of words and thoughts and ideas arrayed and connected only upon stepping back.
IV. PURPOSE The commonplace book has no objective or intrinsic “purpose,” no quantifiable reason for existing. But, truly, of what purpose are any individual components? What is the drift and glide of fog but weather? All that our minds are is I. There is no other output. You are not a ventriloquist.
36 | Tuesday Magazine | Henry Shah | Hoarding
At home, I become the renouncer. I sit in between my father and a cockroach to keep him from killing it. I renounce peanut-butter, a decadent food. I renounce television. I get a close buzz cut, renounce fashion and warmth (it is January). I also renounce complicated and violent speech. My thoughts slow. Life becomes emptier. Other tenants of my head retire to more obscure rooms, and a single bulb lights the entire house. My brain pulses slowly with Gandhi’s homemade loom, rehearsing and rewinding simple mantras. During the culmination of the project, the high “Noon,”
parents will be invited in and we will appear in costume, ready to be our character in front of strangers. We are meant to speak voluminously from the perspective of our Notable. We are meant to regale others with our pitchperfect imitations of Lincoln, or Florence Nightingale. The 3rd grade Gandhi doesn’t regale anybody. I spend 27 minutes of the hour refusing to speak, an act of nonviolent resistance to the choice of violent, warmongering Notables by some of my classmates (Roosevelt, Caesar). For the remaining 33 minutes, I evade questions and evade a location by the window. My Gandhian garb, a linen bedsheet over boxers and undershirt, is inadequate for any but the most stoic. And Gandhi may have walked into my head and captured my name, but my arms still goosebumped like no other. VI. DEFINITION OF HENRY SHAH, MOTHER, GRANDFATHER In my beginning was a white man. Or an Indian man. Or a white woman and Indian man. Why Henry? I dunno, if you were a girl we would have named you Zoe. Or India. Don’t give me that face. It was actually very common to give names of colonies as names in Victorian England. But Henry was something your father and I could both agree on. And I think it works. Tim tried calling you Hank. You’re not a Hank. Just a Henry. Why are we Shah? We were made Shah. It is an honor. You know our caste, yes? Vaishya? Tradespeople? So why do we have name Shah? Shah is name of kings, okay. Like in Iran, Shah of Iran. But we are not kings. But Baaji Shah, this is ruler of Gujarat just before Mughals come, gave us his name as honor. So we are not like the other Gujarati Vaishyas, yes? Patel, Raj, they are same caste, but do not have name of king. So there was drought, and in India, king is responsible for feeding the poor people. But drought went on for too long. And nobody had food, everybody kept to self. And Baaji Shah runs out of food. So who does he look for? He looks for Shahs. He knows they will save secret food, because Shahs always save and hold onto everything. And Shahs had enough to feed whole kingdom of Gujarat until drought is over. And you see, we always save enough for everyone, even if we don’t show it at first. This is why we are having name of king, Shah.
VII. FREE ASSOCIATION — INTELLECTUAL TRACING October 17, 2011 From Romeo and Juliet, William Shakespeare Juliet: What’s in a name? That which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet.” I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz, or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off. I see it feelingly. Reason in madness! What is the phrase for the moon? I do not know. I need no words. Nothing neat. None of those resonances that break and chime from nerve to nerve in our breasts, making wild music, false phrases. I wrote my first novel because I wanted to read it. It’s why it feels so good to laugh, or speak in tongues, or chant in Bengali — it’s not English anymore, it’s not getting squeezed through any hole. So cry all you want, I won’t tell anybody. Am I the person who used to wake in the middle of the night and laugh with the joy of living and more than once gazed at the full moon through a blur of great, romantic tears? Mother, I cannot work the loom. I am broken with longing. Spilling water from my back, you call and I come. Another gorgeous thing that should not have happened, gone again. If to love implies spending one’s life loving, it become nothing more than a point of reference, and we still need to seek an understanding about all the rest. Sometimes I feel like the caretaker of a museum, but it’s a huge empty museum where no one ever comes, and I’m watching over it for no one but myself. I am a museum of myself. The child becomes fixed in the dazzle of his/her self-reflection. For now we see through a mirror, darkly; now I know in part, but then (when?) shall I know as I am also known. But what am I but that which can be seen and known as a whole? What do the parts and cells and nerves mean if I am only one me to the world? When will I unfold? Will I ever unfold? Of what use is a map more detailed than the landscape itself? VIII. UNBOUNDED BOUNDED September 1, 2010 From Ulysses, Tennyson I am a part of all that I have met, yet all experience is an arch wherethrough gleams an untraveled world.
Hoarding | Henry Shah | Tuesday Magazine | 37
Shadow Play ALICE HU | PHOTOGRAPHY
38 | Tuesday Magazine | Alice Hu | Shadow Play
Closing Scene from a Fictitious Movie MILES HEWITT
The narrator who we are learning not to trust has taken the revolver from the closet. Pink nymphomaniac titles wound across the faded suburban plane, shots rang out, the dog’s tail wag really the first onscreen motion. The shadows getting a good glimpse of this guy’s face, they’re in store for more, millimeters being of equal use in film or ballistics. He’s lost his family at several key junctures, the daughter with the nosering running off with the boy in the band named after something transmitted sexually, the son throwing baseballs at lowhanging birds, graduating to rocketry, eventually mashing his shuttle into the side of the moon, but in real life, in the movie. The wife sleeping with anyone else. So he has the gun as well as his second-favorite jacket. He will be wearing it for the whole film. It was given to him at Christmas by his son, it has a sports logo for a fictitious team. The sport is unidentifiable but is a contact sport. A shadow falls somewhere possibly important. The director graduated from USC’s film program and this will be second-best after Cheap Shot (2021). The director is in love but afraid of family life. Meanwhile we know if he’ll just hold on a sec the daughter will run away from the boyfriend. All abuse is disappointingly predictable. Like driving down I-5 and making it home in time to find the wife finding a picture of her at their wedding tucked in the pocket of his favorite jacket, necessitating the whole settling-for-the-next-best-jacket saga plaguing him throughout. She took it out. We missed that shot. Behind the shadow that falls somewhere possibly important the son is truly dead but maybe reconciled with the rest of the family. Maybe the narrator can stop now. The dog walks back into the room, there is a long look between Man and Best Friend. The dog has cancer. We know this. The man reaches down to pat it, the dog accepts the pat. The man straightens up. They are still looking. We can tell the man is thinking about the gun shots earlier in the film. He wants a happy ending and so do the rest of us.
Closing Scene From a Fictitious Movie | Miles Hewitt | Tuesday Magazine | 39