Table of Contents | Volume 13, Issue 1 Cover Consanguinity
28 Letter to that Stranger
Aisha Bhoori
Sophia Yanis . Photography
4 Neonatal Resuscitation
16 Bitterness is a Paralytic
5 Abyss
17 koffietafel vroue
Staff Writers Bridget Irvine, Co-Director Jacqueline Leong, Co-Director Leyla Brittan Anna Gibbs Cleo Harrington Theo Lebryk Grace Li Emily Oliveira Erik Owen Victoria Sanchez Emily Zhao
6 I WANT TO SING YOU A
18 Malala
dArt Board (Design+Art) Sam Wattrus, Design Director Hannah Byrne, Art Director Carmella Verrastro Melinda Li Ruben Reyes Grace Li Jenny Ng Bridget Irvine Qing Qing Miao Jacqueline Leong
9 Tirade
Lauren Claus
Audrey Thorne . Photography
Jacqueline Leong, President Bridget Irvine, President Managing Editors Qing Qing Miao Jenny Ng Editorial Board Matthew Aguirre, Editor-in-Chief Jacqueline Leong Bridget Irvine Erik Owen Deirdre Carney Theo Lebryk Leyla Brittan Ellen Zhang Victoria Sanchez Katie Berry Una Choi Siqi Liu Anna Gibbs Jon Galla Emily Zhao Social Media & Publicity Deirdre Carney Business Board Qing Qing Miao Bridget Irvine Jacqueline Leong Directors of Staff Development Erik Owen Qing Qing Miao
Faculty Advisor Daniel Donoghue With Special Thanks To: The Office for the Arts at Harvard The Undergraduate Council The Harvard COOP
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 © 2016 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.
SONG Jacqueline Leong
7 par la lumière
Sophia Yanis . Photography
8 Ilum
Sophia Yanis . Photography
Isa Flores
Deirdre Carney
Sophia Yanis . Photography Zeke Benshirim . Collage
19 Constellations
Ellen Zhang
13 There Is A Soccer Field Here
Bridget Irvine . Photography
14 Ten Years Later
Edith Enright . Drawing
15 Ursa Major
Andrew Bauld
Bridget Irvine . Photography
Geyser Tail Bridget Irvine . Photography
34 Ethylene
Wife Lauren Claus
24 KT
Andrew Bauld
31 Geyser Head
22 Pariter D’s Lab Assistant-
11 Trauma
12 Third Floor Farm
20/20 II Tez Clark . Photography
32 Visiting
Bridget Irvine . Photography
23 Rendezvous
Jenny Ng . Film Stills
Tez Clark . Photography
20 Primrose Sun Rising
10 Jumper Cables
Annie Harvieux
30 20/20 I
Jenny Ng . Film Stills Edith Enright . Drawing
Bailey Trela
Ellen Zhang
35 Artichoke Dreams
Tamllyn Chen . Gel Transfer, Acrylic, Gel Pen Artichoke Heart Tamllyn Chen . Gel Transfer, Acrylic, Gel Pen
Stanley Market, Hong Kong Edith Enright . Drawing 36 Fairy House II 25 In the Right Place
Inez Okulska
26 The Biopic
Annie Harvieux
27 Archives
Aisha Bhoori . Photography
Bridget Irvine & MaryGrace Irvine . Sculpture, Photography
37 Beach Day
Edith Enright . Drawing
38 On Friendship
Michael McGlathery
39 Baseball
Edith Enright . Drawing
Neonatal Resuscitation LAUREN CLAUS
Label me and I will gift you silence of the old ones, hold your breath till it comes like it has to, wet the mouth with milk - not sweat - and kiss your brow until it succumbs and smells like me. She wears pink fabric, all unreal, and shall not touch you, skin on mine like waves on darkness. I make you move, still. You are raised up – a thousand hear the spine of my strength breaking. I am your mother, so label me and drink this bit I give, above the empty wall I nourished still with stares. I trace back echos like you live. You will make this noise next night in my dream. The first gift that we learn is our own scream.
Abyss 4 | Tuesday Magazine | Lauren Claus | Neonatal Resuscitation
AUDREY THORNE | PHOTOGRAPHY
Abyss | Audrey Thorne | Tuesday Magazine | 5
I WANT TO SING YOU A SONG JACQUELINE LEONG I want to sing You a song, I want it four Beats to the measure, I Want it regular, I want it to be Able to take over your heart If your plastic prostheses should fail, Should your buttons go dead, and The glass of your screen splinter. These words are finished, but see— It does not matter. I have given up On eight-bit crutches. I think I have found a better way, I think I have found the best way. So I give this to you without The memory of recording, without The perfection of production, Raw and in analog, Voice in a hundred shades, Untouched by binary hands. Oh, but this is not enough, I want To sing it to you straight from my lungs To your brain. Hop the knot of tangled Wires and earphones, wide: So you need not worry about ripped foam, Naked treble, lyrics seeping from The rift like a pound of blood, Your heartbeat to the metallic snarl. So you don’t have to panic When the record scratches, When the compact disc stutters, And my voice skips on vital words, I -You With the in-between swept into the void Of scrambled digits.
You can decipher sans energy, No power except in the vibrations Of your eyelids and the bones In your head, I want your lips to trace the Syllables in real time, and When you ask me to say it again, The words will be different, No instant replay, But I am not a machine, see, And these verses lie beyond The synthetic recall of your hard-drive. Because these words do not go well with Static, the pop of a broken Wire, they need not play in stereo when I Can press them to the canals of your ears, these Words that do not play as much as Soar through the space between our Skin, and the pauses between the beat: Sometimes I’m not musical, But I will sing this to You, dead notes and all, off-color flats And love too sharp, I Give all of this to you because It is all I have, And you, you, This is all you can take, This specific sound capacity Of your heart.
par la lumière SOPHIA YANIS | PHOTOGRAPHY
So here, to you: this song From my throat to the shell Of your ear, these sounds
6 | Tuesday Magazine | Jacqueline Leong | I WANT TO SING YOU A SONG
par la lumiè | Sophia Yanis | Tuesday Magazine | 7
Tirade ISA FLORES
sleeping between blue walls we know the feeling of noon. he crawls into the second dream the one dreamt before waking to let the cat out, quarter past one, houses shuttered and cars marshalled like so many resting metronomes, unticked on their driveways. this is when we know we slumber: the world with its eyes kept under the palms of its hands. only the curtains watch for the sidewalks and when the sun cracks the house she does it gentle lays the blade on the pillow soft, soft until it points north and we’re un-spined, open-backed oozing on dawn’s hot pan. there is the lawn mower, the fourth alarm, the radio two doors down before the coffee and the white pill and the third dream, the one dreamt after waking to the smell of the car alarm and the premonition of sunburned eyelids. outside, the second bird dives and the cat slouches into the shade.
Ilum SOPHIA YANIS | PHOTOGRAPHY 8 | Tuesday Magazine | Sophia Yanis | Ilum
Tirade | Isa Flores | Tuesday Magazine | 9
Jumper Cables ANNIE HARVIEUX
I chose to wake up happy, and it sort of works when I’m well-caffeinated, and away from things that make me anxious, and the kind of low-key busy where I’m pleasantly occupied without being overwhelmed. I chose to wake up ‘happy’ and exercise and start flossing my teeth again and read past the front page of the newspaper, and use a blue lamp when I need to. I decided it was time to start complimenting things aloud like the quality of the day (nice, good, warm, bright) and the calm of the lake (smooth, endless, creamy blue) and the beauty of the way you lay out words in sentences (as strong as gold-dappled evening sunshine). It was time to start asking questions again, and time to call back, and time to speak to people without being afraid of what thoughts were running past unannounced inside their heads. It was time to compliment more often than I apologize and listen until eyes alight. It was time to wake up to an alarm and to start things that I care about (a job a book a friendship) without continuing to coast in neutral, time to escape the habit of not starting things to avoid failure, interaction, or introspection. I chose to wake up happy (lots of days I painted the face on, really) because I didn’t know how much longer I could coast without collision and I knew that a hollow, inauthentic try would not only be shameful but unsustainable, what with sixty-odd years left to live. I told myself I was waking up happy even when I basically wasn’t, to start. To get going. Like using jumper cables on a car. Small things warm me inside, like sparse well-chosen words and braided sunshine-bleached hair and the twinkling tips of lapping waves. Soft, loose fabrics and dogs that press their sides against your legs. I’m here to gain electricity, to keep going. I just need to find what can give me a jump.
Trauma 10 | Tuesday Magazine | Annie Harvieux | Jumper Cables
JENNY NG | FILM STILL
Trauma | Jenny Ng | Tuesday Magazine | 11
Third Floor Farm ANDREW BAULD
Ever since the watermelon burst through the sink, Elsie knew something was amiss. When the green carrot tops bloomed from her shoes, and the heads of lettuce took root atop her bed, and mushrooms spawned in the basement washing machine, while corn stalks grew out of the radiator, poking yellow ears through the windows, she was baffled. A farm does not grow in the middle of the city, her parents said, when she told them of the radishes sprouting between the sofa cushions. Especially not in an apartment building like ours. But as vines of green beans climbed their way among the banisters, and tomato plants suspended themselves from cracks in the ceiling, Elsie decided maybe a farm in her apartment, in the middle of the city, wasn’t such a crazy thing after all. The strawberries that ripened in the drying rack were the reddest she had ever seen, and the purple eggplants that appeared in her coat closet were the size of newborn babies. She even named the rooster, the one that had taken up residency on the front stoop. Homer crowed in the early morning hours, alerting the homeless and the businessmen alike of the sun growing thick between the avenues.
12 | Tuesday Magazine | Andrew Bauld | Third Floor Farm
There Is A Soccer Field Here BRIDGET IRVINE | PHOTOGRAPHY
There Is A Soccer Field Here | Bridget Irvine | Tuesday Magazine | 13
Ursa Major ANDREW BAULD
I wonder where you would be right now if I had chosen my slicker that rainy morning on my way to work instead of the umbrella? A mass of bodies, huddled like cats awaited the groan of an Orange Line train’s doors to open and relieve them all from the weather. Each apart, hooded, islands in their various shades of waterproof fabrics. Except for two, sharing a handle in the early morning rush. How lonely we all would be at this very minute, your mother and you and me, disconnected as stars without the lines of happenstance to join us in meaning.
14 | Tuesday Magazine | Edith Enright | Ten Years Later
Ursa Major | Andrew Bauld | Tuesday Magazine | 15
Bitterness is a Paralytic DEIRDRE CARNEY
They were mewing and so soft and one of them crawled right up to you, snuggled in your infernal coat (god I love hate that thing)
You put sugar in your mocha lattes because you can’t stand the bitterness.
and you were blank. Dead stare. I’d like to think,
Funny, Cos you’re the most fucking bitter person I know. Do you realise that,
honey, that you were holding back tears that day but all signs point to you just
my dear? That the words you say practically drip off your tongue like sticky, day-old coffee? Sometimes, when I watch you speak,
being dead inside. Where does that sugar packet go, for god’s sake? Do your inky curls suck it up? They’re sweet to touch,
darling,
smooth and bouncy.
I want to shove:
Nothing like you.
•
a sugar cube
•
my fist
•
a baseball bat
could be that plump and full
•
(my tongue)
without being chock full of fructose.
Or perhaps your lips. No human mouth
into that pretty little mouth of yours just to get you to shut the fuck up. I honestly don’t know how you stand yourself,
see if it’s sweet like a pomegranate or as bitter as a grapefruit, just like you,
babe. One hint of emotions, tears, or - god forbid -
asshole. I’m afraid to find out.
sentiment and you’re off, out the door, onto something else. What are you running from? You’ll put sugar in the sweetest fucking drink Starbucks can make without putting you into a coma, but a sweet gesture and you’re out? What the fuck is wrong with you? A box of kittens wouldn’t get you to smile. I know.
I just want to bite it, sometimes,
I was there.
Truly, I am. Because if you are as bitter as you seem, if that sugar really does just dissolve then I’ll never be more than
koffietafel vroue
SOPHIA YANIS | PHOTOGRAPHY
pointless sentiment to you, won’t I, love? And you’ll run away, sweet-as-fuck mocha in hand, a torn sugar packet the only sign that you were ever here at all.
16 | Tuesday Magazine | Deirdre Carney | Bitterness is a Paralytic
koffietafel vroue | Sophia Yanis | Tuesday Magazine | 17
Constellations ELLEN ZHANG
The sky comes unhinged with drunken stars ambling,
The time I learned that
meandering, peers a boy
boycott did not mean
ready to take the shaky ladder
a new haircut for a boy
leaning by the railings
and that the same water
drowned in moonshine
I brushed my teeth with
shimmy it up as I gaze,
could knock teeth out
hazily at his dull figure
I never knew burdens we carried were based on mere history
I know what dead is
Malala
18 | Tuesday Magazine | Zeke Benshirim | Malala
it is a rabbit lying in a cage
Terra incognito in the dark
with mangled fur
abyss as he stretches
encircled by half chewed carrots
his fingertips to where
pellets scattered amid
the drinking gourd
unmistakable scent of sulfur
dims with
it is also his father
every flicker
ZEKE BENSHIRIM | COLLAGE
Constellations | Ellen Zhang | Tuesday Magazine | 19
20 | Tuesday Magazine | Bridget Irvine | Primrose Rising Sun 8 | Tuesday Magazine | Lance Johnson | The Bye Bull
Primrose Rising Sun | Bridget Irvine | Tuesday Magazine | 21 come to my window | Sophia Yanis | Tuesday Magazine | 9
Pariter D’s Lab Assistant-Wife LAUREN CLAUS
You made a world like nothing new was falling, melding thoughts between our thighs. Tert-butanol comes toxic, and some fragments of a fragile life could come color me slowly, make me wish cleaner. Still I feel the glass beneath my nitrile finger, that I make new again for you to make pieces of your world, the last one before science has it all and you pretend we just remember laughter when your world was made from more than liquid in the beaker. Some day my gold ring will know your chlorine and I’ll find another hand.
Rendezvous III & IV 22 | Tuesday Magazine | Lauren Claus | Pariter D’s Lab Assistant-Wife
JENNY NG | FILM STILLS
Rendezvous III & IV | Jenny Ng | Tuesday Magazine | 23
In the Right Place
KT
EDITH ENRIGHT | DRAWING
INEZ OKULSKA
Stanley Market, Hong Kong EDITH ENRIGHT | DRAWING
24 | Tuesday Magazine | Edith Enright | KT | Stanley Market, Hong Kong
Smoking is not a real help with his cough. He knows, but it isn’t so easy to get divorced after 40 years of a pretty happy marriage, he says. Actually there’s no reason to, no one has cheated and we still understand each other very well, he adds after taking a deep drag on his nicotine wife. Time was passing by and he still sounded like a broken bus engine. I started to count the days from the moment the cough moved into our house. As the clock hands clapped 73 I said enough. Such an odd number, you could say, and I would agree with you. It’s no reasonable period of time, nothing usual as a month or two. And maybe that was why. As long as you’re able to rationalize your fear it doesn’t really affect you, and with the number 73 there was no space for rationalization, so it hit me. I insisted he visit a doctor. He was perfectly fine, he kept saying, but finally he gave in and went. Was it me or was he affected by the 73? Anyway, the physician had his blood test made and after a short act of interpretative reading he ordered X-rays of his lungs. The results were available on the same day but we had to wait another day to see his doctor and to get them explained. The answer is in your hands, but you can’t decipher it, you can’t unravel the mystery of the visual, black and white representation of your body. Your body has its secrets, you know that and you allow that, if you have to live with each other – and it’s a literal life sentence for you both. You have to learn how to respect your own privacy too. But not this time, you know, this time I was too involved. He left the X-rays on the table and went for a walk. That is how he deals with anxiety, with fear and sadness, the first step always the step outside. I’ll get out of here with my problems and you stay here. So I did. Just me and the photos. Me and the desire of
knowing the truth. I was inspecting the light shapes for a while – I could see lungs and a small white hole on them, on the right side. It’s not a hole, it’s something on his lungs. My hands are shaking. I am pathetic, I know, but I can’t help looking for the answer. I type in the Google search bar: “lung cancer”. Click, view graphics. The whole screen filled with X-rays. Each of them with this white spot on the right side. I feel one, then another one, and then there is an exodus of tears coming down my cheeks. He came back, it’s raining out there - even for his movie-like walk away it is too cliche to be outside now. I wanted to put a welcome smile on my face, but there was a post-hysterical grimace instead. At least I tried. “Are you crying?” “No”, I answered and this time it has to be a movie. I can’t be a part of such a kitschy scene in my own life. “No”, I answered and started to cry out loud. And then, after the storm had gone, I talked to him and explained what I learned from the internet. He turned white as his lung cancer on the screen, but didn’t say a word. The movie remains mute. And then the next day came. The day of truth, the day of confirmation, the day of sentence. He went to his doctor (who is, by the way, a good friend of his) and trying to stay calm told him his story. About what he saw and what I found. His voice a little bit higher than usual, a little bit trembling, face forged from steel. The doctor listened and laughed out loud. “Damn, dude, it’s your heart. But if it bothers you I can cut it off.”
In the RIght Place | Inez Okulska | Tuesday Magazine | 25
The Biopic ANNIE HARVIEUX
The biopic starts when she’s smiling as a baby, her outdated eighties toddler clothing mixing daisies and plaid, her baby pictures an odd juxtaposition with the fact that we (in the dark room in the velvety seats in front of the screen) all know that she died of a coke overdose at twenty-nine. We’re waiting for the film to mention that. They interview her parents. Stoic mom with feathered hair, leather-skinned dad with a choked-up voice. Stories conflict a tiny bit. Divorce. Different colors of wallpaper fill two backgrounds. They establish her prowess, her genius, by showing a few shots of her, rust-red Gibson in hands, plucking away at notes in her late teens. She looks so much younger. Her cheeks are rounder. Her navy athletic shorts fit horribly. From my perspective in my dark velvety seat, I like that. They make a sudden cut to her fame, magazine covers spinning out of thin air with her picture on the cover. Video clips with her skin tinged purple from the spotlights on a massive stage. I want to step back, to see her sitting on that brown couch again, plucking out notes, to see the way a thread of thought becomes a note and a song. I want to watch her scratching on a notepad with a dull yellow pencil, and bringing her ideas to someone and recording a rough first take filled with voice cracks. I want to paw through her notebooks and listen to her slowly explain her process in her speaking tone. Instead I get a read-aloud part of a Rolling Stone interview. I don’t know who’s reading. They’re not shown onscreen. I can’t look away from the way that the man who loved her looks at her. The narrator says they fought when they were drunk but I think to myself that I fight everyone when I’m dead sober. I wonder if he would stop in the doorway and listen as she practiced in their home, not announcing his presence, just leaning against the doorframe. Or if he was the type who didn’t like all that sound in his house. I wonder if he complimented her songs, or if he knew which ones were about him, if any. The biopic focuses in on the drugs themselves, leaving their links to anything in her life; art or anxiety or interpersonal relationships; nebulous. I watch her become thinner and hate myself for considering it beautiful, then watch her become emaciated and feel a wave of grief. Her tattoos sag. I leave the theater once the biopic has ended. It ended on a positive note, though I don’t remember how they did it. Shaking the hand of a celebrity I admire is often, in fact, seeing them bored, a tired artist waiting for going back to the van for some food or a nap or waiting for the opportunity to wash their hands after all the shakes. Watching the biopic of a celebrity I admire is less of a process of finding answers than of finding holes in a story. I’ve read the interviews in Rolling Stone, but I don’t get to study the full range of expressions possible in her face, the types of things she says during dinner from her seat at the kitchen counter, the actual joys and frustrations behind the watereddown snippets of dialogue we encounter on the glossy page of a magazine, one I’m sure she regarded with the same disdain as myself when hearing my own voice in a recording, or saying something hollow, a fast “I love you” or “It’s okay,” to avoid having to express things more complex that could easily be misunderstood. Instead, I want to walk astride her, sun setting beyond the concrete, hands in our pockets. In silence.
26 | Tuesday Magazine | Annie Harvieux | The Biopic
Archives
AISHA BHOORI | PHOTOGRAPHY
Archives | Aisha Bhoori | Tuesday Magazine | 27
Letter to that Stranger AISHA BHOORI
You like Kafka, I remember, because I once heard you tell another bartender as much. You pointed to my bag—teal green with a big blue eye floating next to a beetle shell covered in hexagons that were red and above which said, in scrawled cursive, “Metamorphosis”—when you thought I was preoccupied, my eyes scanning a flyer for a jazz festival lying on the counter. “Gregor is the shit,” you grunted but you were already mixing shit—some tamarind here; a bit of charred sugar there —by the time I turned towards you and smiled. You can make a mean cocktail. That’s what The Washington Post says, though I wouldn’t know. I’ve never had one. I know you have a framed license stashed in the back of your bar, behind gin bottles sitting on the bottom of a shelf you built—over a 10-or-11-month-long-period; I forget which—by yourself. You used to hang the license beside the painting of a weeping Buddha but external validation, you’ve since found, is a fucked business. But you have a business too, one you don’t want to fuck up, so it’s there. Stashed in the back. … I want to say that when you arrive, you do so in a way that reflects your persona—posh and proper and polished. But there is only this: you trip. On my outstretched left foot. I don’t see it coming and neither do you, likely. My sandal grazes the hair peaking out from beneath your gray cuffed jeans. And I extend my arm as if I can catch you. As if I can catch the force pulling you down towards the concrete ground. Lucky for me, I don’t have to. You catch yourself. Waiting for someone special? you ask. I’m sitting on a mostly empty steel bench at a mostly empty bus stop down the block from a cat café. I decide, after a brief but awkward pause, that Godot is an acceptable response to say. So I do. You will later tell me this is when you knew. Knew what? I will ask, and you will flash a wide grin as if I knew too. As if there was something to know, even. But
for now, you mention Beckett. Something about aesthetic intent. Something about him trying too hard—don’t we all? —to be absurd. Something about art being more about the chase (of finding a meaning?) and less about the thrill (of generating one?). More about delicately subverting the banal. It’s hot, the bench I’m on. And it’s getting even hotter because the sun is now hanging in the sky directly above it. Above me. You notice the sweat dripping in soft thuds from my nose (that, or you want to get closer: physically? metaphorically?), but instead of asking if I want a sip from your water bottle—close with a degree of separation— you ask me to join you in the shade, in leaning your back against the brick wall of some building. Another café, for all I know. Another hipster place, for sure. We stand like this, extremely but barely close: our thighs brushing and our bodies radiating and spreading and depositing heat in the back chambers of our backwards hearts beating fast with the realization that the warmth we might feel—or at least I did; I still do—was from purgatory. We stand like this. You: calm and cool and collected, hands clasped to melting plastic. Me: hot and sweaty and warm, hands clasped to burning brick. You raise your toxin-filled Poland Springs to your lips, and I ask you if it’s normal that I’ve been waiting here for the past thirty minutes; if I will have to wait for, say, another half hour or so. You seem mildly surprised. You’re not from around here, you say. It’s a statement, but you ask it as a question. Obviously not. We continue like this: you stating veiled biographical questions— about the Jersey Shore; about my religion; about my fancy-ass school; and me delivering curt and snarky answers back. When you ask what I am doing here, in DC, then, I say that I’m with TIME Magazine. Oh, thank god you’re not an intern, you say. They fucking run this town. In their creased pantsuits and knee-length skirts. So fucking fake.
28 | Tuesday Magazine | Aisha Bhoori | Letter to that Stranger
I feel mostly fake when I smile and laugh and validate your sentiments, but thank fucking God! you can’t tell. You tell me instead that you’ve always wanted to have a press pass. Can I see yours? So I show you and, in the bottom right corner, under affiliate, we both read “Time.” No status, intern or otherwise, specified. Thank. Fucking. God! I want to say that I’ve stopped trying to justify this lie of omission and affirmation, that it was out-of-the-ordinary and tragic and wrong for all of the right reasons. But there is only this: I lied a lot that summer. To my therapist: No, Kevin! This has nothing to do with the thrill. Let alone the thumb. Or the onion. It was Mimi, the damn café cat. She gave me that scratch. To my first-year proctor: Yes, Kristin! I love D.C., this sepulcher of a city whose marble monuments do a half-ass job of shrouding its insincerity. Yes, that’s right. I said yes. So yes. I lied a lot that summer. So when you ask me what I am doing here, in Georgetown, I am surprised that I tell you about loitering. About feeling thrilled during it. About feeling ashamed by it. About feeling concerned that, though it is a transitional state, it is also a perennial one. A condemnation or blessing. Both or neither. Purgatory. The bus comes and with it goes any sense of intimacy. Because it’s hard to feel the internal heat when we’re overwhelmed by the external kind. Because there’s standing room only and so personal tensions are at an all-time high and interpersonal patience is, well, at an equidistant low. We lurch forwards and backwards, our thighs brushing but lacking spark, as the bus screeches to a halt every so often, stopping at places you know very well and ones I don’t know at all: Navy Yard and Gallery Place and Columbia Heights. I’m impressed, really, that and you ask why I’m working on the Sabbath. I have Sunday, I explain. You take your time repeating my statement back to me. You… have…Sunday? You laugh. You can’t have a day, you explain in turn. Can’t possess time. That’s absurd.
This is mostly very true. But it takes me a while to get used to that, the absurdity: how newsrooms assign days as if they are stories themselves. Long ones, for sure, but not quite long-form all the same. It takes me a while to get used to how I can’t rearrange what’s linear, can’t substitute this chunk of the line for that shitty one from the past. How I can’t, not now or ever, go back: the best place to store, as you liked to say, what you’d rather not have. Or whom. So it’s taking a while, too, to stop assigning labels to people as if they are protagonists or antagonists or foils in many and meta and maddening plots, as if they can be dropped into a specific slot— exposition here; resolution there—on a diagram. So when you ask if there are any characters at TIME, I want to tell you about Jay and Liz and Ryan and Sam and Mark. I want to tell you all of this, but your wife calls before I can say any of it and you nearly trip—on another’s outstretched foot this time, not mine— while moving to the back of the bus to privately chat. It’s not so private because you’re loud, so I’m mostly certain I hear you say that you’ve met a lovely Harvard journalist, that you’ve met me. But I can’t be sure. I’m impressed, really, that you try still to sustain dialogue, even after you return to your railing, visibly deflated because your son has gotten the flu. But you try still and you repeat your question. But it’s your stop, too— multitasking is impossible says the enlightened one—so I can’t enlighten you. So I can only say that they’re time-intensive, the stories of TIME’s characters. You can imagine, you say, before giving me a quick pat on the back where Sam’s hand has loitered far too many times, loitered and lingered. *** The first and last time I go to your bar is the morning after I am fired. Liz had sent a text at 8:00 AM that Wednesday, a kind and well-intentioned reminder that Hackett had issued a preliminary corporate lawsuit against me; that Fox News had
made a dartboard drinking game of me; that I would, in a few hours, eat and drink my feelings away with her and Jay. It’s on us, she wrote. Where do you want to go? Compass Rose, I typed back. So here we are—a bit disoriented and dizzy from getting lost en route and, at least for Liz and Jay, a bit tipsy too—and it’s not even noon. It’s busy, your bar. Busier than I expected. And even more Bohemian, if that is possible. There’s a cheap, miniature bust of Nefertiti hanging from a rusty hook. A sign announcing “The End of the Beginning.” A sculpture of a dog squatting in a position that is a cross between midpee and fuck this flea. It takes you some time, but when you do notice me you are all hugs and Godot jokes and playful smirks. Liz and Jay are curious about you, and you about them, and I do everything I can to prevent everything but small talk from being mentioned. And the word “intern.” Lucky for me, Liz and Jay are ogling you because your ring finger, until now, has been out of view. And you have other things to do. Because it’s busy, your bar. But after you take our order—coffee and cocktails with a side of fries and bottle of Sprite—you ask what the occasion is for this midday road trip. Because you assume! You do! When the older women look towards me expectantly I look away, towards my side, and pretend to swat a fly. Rough day, I say. A few drinks in, Liz gets back to business—the one I’ve fucked up, that is. It’s a shame, truly, she begins, that this had to happen. That there was an on-therecord/off-the-record miscommunication with the Secret Service agent. That the Fox author’s book sales had to decline and make this miscommunication so blatant. That Fox took it personally. That they have grounds for defamation. That you tried to fact-check a claim and the claim ended up checking—and considerably screwing— you. Truly. She continues like this, consoling through an objective and sequential and logical list. And I dunk a fry in ketchup and mayo as Jay jumps in, telling me
what I’ve mostly known this entire time. That it is about time. That I should have expected nothing less, truly, when pitching about books and Lena Dunham in the beltway for Christ’s sake! (Here, Liz stifled a flinch). That TIME’s bureau chief was not amused by the tower of New Yorker magazines I’d left on a desk in the copy room. That maybe, and she delivered this last part under her alcohol breath, political journalism was not for me. Truly. I’m not sure how much you heard, if anything, but when you return with the check you seem unsettled. You don’t even acknowledge the generous tip Liz has left, along with the generous “Bless you” she generally leaves on her favorite waiters’ receipts. So. It was rushed, the farewell. As ours tend to be. And to be fair, it was busy, your bar. And Liz and Jay were in a rush, too. They’d gotten a Twitter notification partially through the meal about updates in a racially-motivated shooting at a Southern church. So there is some travelling for them to do. I’m impressed, really, that you try still to conduct a proper goodbye. That you try and you ask to take a selfie. To reremember this rough day. There isn’t enough time for me to compose myself—to get over the shock that you have asked to indulge in a social more—and this could a fair evaluation of my life. Truly. Mostly composed but not quite. You hold on to my phone— tapping, zooming, editing the picture with a geo-filter or new color scheme. So we loiter there, taking one glance back and having one last laugh and realizing how that— our terminated acquaintance—will be just that. *** How does it go, again? Girlturned-graying-woman dies with letter unsent. Unhappy stranger finds letter tucked in the margins of her planner. Or maybe posthumous records from her therapist. Unclear. Unhappy stranger cradles the fraying sheets, softly breathes, What do I do now, now that I know?
Letter to that Stranger | Aisha Bhoori | Tuesday Magazine | 29
20/20 I
TEZ CLARK | PHOTOGRAPHY
30 | Tuesday Magazine | Tez Clark | 20/20 I | 20/20 II
20/20 II
Geyser Head
BRIDGET IRVINE | PHOTOGRAPHY
Geyser Tail
Geyser Tail | Geyser Head | Bridget Irvine | Tuesday Magazine | 31
Visiting BAILEY TRELA
It had been coming on for a few years. She was still living on her own then, in the small, dark home where she’d raised her children. Names, as her children noted, were the first thing to go. A few Christmas cards were sent to distant grandchildren with titles rather than names: “Grant’s Son,” “Leonard’s Twins,” “Walt’s Baby” (this to a child of seven). Then she was convinced that her television was broken when pressing the volume button left the screen dead and bottle green. Next she informed her children that a few items had been stolen from her home. The children rushed over, only to find the missing items, for the most part, a few feet from their habitual resting places. These were the small things, problems that a few soft reminders every now and then seemed to solve. When the sister came to visit one day she found a kitchen reeking of rotten meat. In a pan on the stove was an uncooked steak, alternately dry and mushy, filling the house’s cramped space with its dark stench. After this she began to fall— onto the carpet, a table—and it wasn’t long before she was moved into the sister’s home. _____ Their mother would be staying with him for a week, because his sister and her family, a husband and three sons, were long past needing a break. Early in the morning he met his sister in a parking lot by the State Hospital and helped the mother into his truck, an old pick-up with braided seats and a rubber dashboard. They began to drive away. The asphalt crunched beneath the slow-turning tires, the headlights boring opaque tunnels in the morning mist. They reached his house, a rundown yet roomy structure in a spotty neighborhood that he rented for onehundred-and-fifty dollars a month. “A windfall,” he called it. The house next to his was condemned, and the driveway the two buildings shared was cracked and weed-riddled. When the rains came in the
fall they snuck through the cracks in the pavement and into his basement, casting mildew on the walls. He took her inside and began to show her around. He’d decorated the place sporadically, filling it with his books, his trinkets, his miscellaneous pieces of furniture. Old couches with tears in the fabric, the arms draped with quilts; a coffee table composed of milk crates. He’d hung a large piece of driftwood from the rafters in his living room. As he walked her around, she nodded at what he showed her. She paused in front of a small shrine he’d set up, more for the sake of tinkering than any strong religious feeling, to the Virgin Mary. She bowed her head and uttered a prayer. When she raised her head her eyes held a certain habitual brightness. Her own parents had been immigrants, devoutly Roman Catholic. (She had eight siblings, and if you asked her their names she would rattle off five of them confidently, stopping calmly, unaware that three were missing.) She kept the faith, taught it to her children, sometimes calmly, sometimes with a stronger hand. Just now the son, having heard his mother’s prayer, was recalling a common act of penance in their home, the offending child forced to kneel in a corner on a cold tile floor strewn with dry-hard beans. They stayed like that for an hour, sometimes two. Her belief had likewise prevented her from attending his wedding, nearly thirty years ago now. She had convinced his father to stay home, too. His prospective wife—a black-haired, energetic woman who bore him four sons before their eventual divorce—had converted to Catholicism at his mother’s insistence, but the change, apparently, had come too late. In a private room off the small chapel where the ceremony was to take place, he had cried at how unyielding she could be. They kept moving, past the idol. He showed her pictures of her grandchildren—his sons—and a baby boy that was her first great-grandchild. She said,
32 | Tuesday Magazine | Bailey Trela | Visiting
“Oh yes, oh yes,” nodding her head as he summarized their respective achievements. “Who’s that?” she asked, pointing to a picture of he himself as a child, probably seven years old at the taking, and though the man was not visible in the child, a lifetime of labor in direct sunlight having cured and creased his skin—still, you would have thought. _____ Had he been that different? All three of his brothers, by parental decree, had gone to a private college in the middle of the state, graduated on time and entered some professional field. His oldest brother ended up staying on at the steel mill where they’d all had summer jobs, becoming a manager, then something higher-up, then something higher still. He was retired now, and split his time between a large home in the suburbs of Chicago and a flat in the city itself. He himself had spent a year at the college, a stuffy, repressive place, as he would later characterize it, before transferring to a state school, where he diddled away his time, only managing a major—“Communications”—by some miracle of credit alignment. After graduating he waited tables in Indianapolis, fell in love with a girl, and moved out west. Once there he got into gardening, a craft that would serve him well for twenty years (every town, as he liked to point out, needed a gardener, a groundskeeper, a landscaper). His soon-to-be wife spent her time making pottery. They moved from apartment to apartment, lived itinerantly, and all the while he felt a certain pride in himself and his solitude, his remove. They moved back to Indiana a few years later, wanting to start a family, needing to get married. He talked to his mother, and she gave her conditions coolly. He knew that to her there was now a stain in him, an alien element that no amount of settling-down would ever eradicate. _____
For the past few years she had lived two hours north of him. He drove up to visit her regularly, staying for the weekend. She fixed him paninis, and pierogi. They played Scrabble for hours on end. Though he won occasionally, most often she was the victor. There was a new, or at least freshly revealed, singlemindedness in her playing, a ruthlessness she’d kept hidden for a long time and no longer saw the point in obscuring. When she played her mind was clear and sharp, the words coming naturally, even the twoletter words whose definitions she didn’t know. She used these frequently, it seemed she would never forget them. They were the bare cogs of a strategy. He would sleep in the basement, in his childhood bedroom. The basement, previously filled with boxes and keepsakes, toys from his youth, had flooded the year prior, ruining a lifetime of collected objects. He and his siblings had gathered one weekend and thrown almost everything out, each of them taking one or two waterdamaged trinkets back to their respective homes. Now the basement was bare, just a floor and walls of cracked concrete. This was when he and his siblings could still joke about her age, laughing at the first few forgotten things, rolling up magazines and speaking through them to combat her failing ears. They joked about growing up, her sternness, her sometimes cruelty. The first hints of her weakness making obscure sorrows seem somehow comic. Had they wanted to be angry, now would have been the time. _____ Long days in the house, the hot summer air seeping in through countless cracks and points of blistered sealing. He’d taken a week off from work, a maintenance position at a nearby religious college that he’d had for ten years. Used up any remaining vacation days. No use stockpiling. He was old enough himself. He cooked for her, two meals a day. He liked to observe her as she went about deconstructing the dishes, watching her separate the components of a vegetable medley, eating first the carrots, then the squash, then the potatoes, absorbing herself in the task of eating.
What did she remember? You couldn’t ask. If you forced her hand the thoughts would dart away like minnows in a pool, refusing to coalesce for a long time after. You had to take what she offered, the half-formed and dreamy anecdotes that tumbled forth unbidden and which ended abruptly, often mid-sentence. When she spoke these things he felt, in spite of himself, a burning in his chest, a spherical ache that he quickly shooed away. She watched television, supine on an over-stuffed recliner. She slept a lot, calling out to him when she woke. After sleep she would question, complain, convict. It was so hot, and the rooms so dark, and the air conditioner’s drone troubled her dreams. The chemically cooled air it churned out felt like poison on her skin. When she was like this he felt a distilled sadness, like chilled water, collecting in his midriff. She would calm down after an hour, infused with a strangely deep repentance. Like clockwork, she would offer to help with tasks he could not trust her with. After he demurred, they would lounge around together, he reading, she sitting still and saying not a word. In these moments she seemed a thing apart from her resting place, from the room, from him and the greater world. The days passed quickly. _____ On the final day of her stay they went out. They did things he had wanted to do for a long time but had been too busy for. They went to a local garden, freshly landscaped to adhere to a European aesthetic theory, where he gave her the names of flowers. She took them and pressed them in her mind and felt the indentations quickly fade. Next they went to an old molasses factory, constructed in the 1920s. The brand of molasses was locally famous, a name that anyone from the area and over the age of fifty would recognize. The factory had been renovated ten years ago and now operated as a museum. You could walk through the sleek exhibits, stand on the factory floor, reliving the golden age of production. At the end of the tour they walked through a reconstruction of a period
general store. Cans of molasses were stacked on shelves behind the counter, with a sign proclaiming that each can could be bought for fifteen cents. He pointed out this display to her, and her face brightened, marveling at the deal. She said she would like to buy some. He waited a moment for her wonder to fade, and then walked her out of the exhibit. The end of the exhibit fed into a restaurant that was attached to the factory. It was a themed eatery that served nostalgic staples—large portions, pats of butter. They sat down in a booth. He ordered for her, calling on his understanding of her preferences. They ate quietly. Midway through the meal she excused herself, needing to use the restroom. He helped her out of the booth, and she walked to the restroom on her own. He sat back down to wait, nibbled at his food, dipped a stiff piece of bacon in leftover gravy. Five minutes passed, then ten. He became aware of a faint knocking coming from the back of the restaurant. He stood up and walked to the ladies’ room and pressed his ear to the door. Three short knocks. Having entered the restroom, locked the door, used the facilities, and washed her hands, she’d been unable to unlock the door, to exit. He spoke to her through the crack in the door, bringing her to some awareness of her situation. He tried to coach her through unlocking the door, saying that there must be a knob to turn, a bolt to unlatch. But she needed certainty, a sure knowledge. While he spoke she continued to knock. He walked away and grabbed a waitress and, embarrassed, explained the situation. She smiled, a glint of pity in her eyes, and followed him to the restrooms. At the door, she introduced herself to his mother, began to explain that there was indeed a knob, that it must be turned to the left, that it was a simple thing, really, they’d have her out of there in no time—if she would please just unlock the door. There was no response, no words. Just a muted knocking, one, two, three, saying in the purest language, it seemed to him: let me in, let me in, let me in.
Visiting | Bailey Trela | Tuesday Magazine | 33
Ethylene ELLEN ZHANG i am the bearer of misfortunes. saccharine sweetness melting into my fishnet of unkempt hair, smoke seeping into my epidermis and cuticles: strangling the nooses of logic: analyzation of every molecule, atom, detail. probing of scientific minds that ponder upon fate, which twists like a dagger and destiny, which unwinds like deoxyribonucleic acid strands nucleotide by nucleotide falters to mutations sperm of an inebriated man dreams too big for a motherless child. contusions violet like the stars, clustered on the edges of the milky way. nebulous on the fringes of metamorphosis while years melt into years like copper crippling in the flickering flame. summer bows down to change, leaves flow away.
Artichoke Dreams
TAMLLYN CHEN | GEL TRANSFER, ACRYLIC, GEL PEN
Artichoke Heart
TAMLLYN CHEN | GEL TRANSFER, ACRYLIC, GEL PEN
one bad apple spoils the barrel and i am the daughter of rotten and messy. waxy skin peels to reveal something pale, nude, forgotten, inescapable; sewn together with torn tissues are my muscles contracted; rib cages detached, jarring; heart rattled, shaken, deformed; barrel minuscule for my burdens. perfume of forgotten snakes ‘round me logic dulls my senses epitome that there are exceptions
34 | Tuesday Magazine | Ellen Zhang | Ethylene
Artichoke Dreams | Artichoke Heart | Tamllyn Chen | Tuesday Magazine | 35
Fairy House II
BRIDGET IRVINE & MARYGRACE IRVINE | SCULPTURE & PHOTO
Beach Day
EDITH ENRIGHT | DRAWING 36 | Tuesday Magazine | Bridget Irvine & MaryGrace Irvine | Fairy House II
Beach Day | Edith Enright | Tuesday Magazine | 37
On Friendship Last July I couldn’t sleep for the life of me,
On Friendship
MICHAEL MCGLATHERY
had words or the ideas of words pounding bluntly at my tired, throbbing forehead with nothing coming from me to let them out. Pounding bluntly at pages didn’t help. Nothing meant anything, and everything wasn’t helping. Called an old comrade, who sighed, said to me, “You can’t do anything but just write. Every word doesn’t have to be a fucking miracle. Every word just has to work.”
38 | Tuesday Magazine | Michael McGlathery | On Friendship
Baseball | Edith Enright | Tuesday Magazine | 39