TUFTUFTS T S OBSEOBSERVER RVER III. THE LITERARY ISSUE VOLUME CXL
table of contents staff EDITOR IN CHIEF: Owen Cheung MANAGING EDITOR: Myisha Majumder CREATIVE DIRECTOR: Abigail Barton FEATURE EDITORS: Ethan Lipson Evan Sciancalepore NEWS EDITORS: Yumei Lin Cana Tagawa ARTS & CULTURE EDITORS: Wyoma Chudasama Josie Wagner OPINION EDITORS: Sonya Bhatia Mahika Khosla CAMPUS EDITORS: Ryan Kim Juliana Vega del Castillo POETRY & PROSE EDITOR: Akbota Saudabayeva VOICES EDITORS: Rachel Dong Siddhant Talwar CREATIVE INSET EDITOR: Brigid Cawley ART DIRECTOR: Laura Wolfe LEAD ARTIST: Kelly Tan LEAD COPY EDITOR: Mira Dwyer
STAFF WRITERS: Sevie Browne Rachel Carp Aroha Mackay Issay Matsumoto Myles Platt Lee Romaker DESIGNERS: Evelyn Abramowitz Kate Bowers Janie Ingrassia Joanna Kleszczewski Richard Nakatsuka Brenna Trollinger Sofia Pretell COPY EDITORS: Melanie Litwin Addie Lovell Unnathy Nellutla Gloria Revanche Amanda Westlake PUBLICITY DIRECTOR: Nasrin Lin MULTIMEDIA DIRECTORS: Madeleine Oh Esther Tzau PODCAST DIRECTORS: Ethan Lipson Arely Mancia EDITOR EMERITUS: Lena Novins-Montague CONTRIBUTORS: Ned Carlson Fiona Dolan Paula Gil-Ordoñez Gomez Michelle Li Marisa McCarthy Patrick Milewski Juliette Wu Tiffany Xie
the literary issue page 2 _____________________________________________ letter from the editor akbota saudabayeva page 4 _____________________________________________ stories you wish your mother told you gloria revanche page 6 _____________________________________________ an elegy to all the slightly overweight, middle-aged immigrants tiffany xie
page 7 _____________________________________________ sick zi yi lim page 8 _____________________________________________ evolution annabel xu page 12 ____________________________________________ maybe i’m a lion morgan farrar page 13 ____________________________________________ costumed self-portrait adam krasnoff page 14 ____________________________________________ graveyard blyss cleveland page 18 ____________________________________________ prayer for alice’s future luca rogoff page 20 ____________________________________________ poland spring paula gil-ordoùez gomez page 22 ____________________________________________ the hotel off highway 81 addie lovell page 23 ____________________________________________ second coming luca rogoff page 24 ____________________________________________ moneyslurpeemetrocard jady zhang page 26 ____________________________________________ q rae qingrui sun page 28 ____________________________________________ photos and poems megan kang page 29 ____________________________________________ saying goodbye in an airport akbota saudabayeva
FEATURE
letter from the editor
2 TUFTS OBSERVER MARCH 9, 2020
Dear Reader, I did not know how to speak when I came to this country. Wide-eyed and Cyrillic-sympathetic, I learned English at age five. My parents often tell me that I cried on the way home from the first Monday of school because I thought all the kids spoke Kyrgyz. English did not yet exist to milk-toothed, Russian-slurring Bota. Thаt was me, learning how to spell “rose” and “color” while everyone was at recess. Me, learning tenses, while everyone around me contracted their clauses. Me, now, an editor and a writer and a soon-to-be American. My grandparents, dried apricots with laughter sitting in their eyes, would poke at me. Who would have known that she would grow up to write better in English than in her native tongue? This was first-generation immigration: holding hands with two lands at once. I believe that it was only through the virtue of being a foreigner that I was able to grasp the English language at its neck, learning it through lesson and mixing its elements with a slavic sensibility. In this sense, writing in English became everything I grew from and everything I was experiencing for the first time. My mother, pouring me black tea and spooning me mouthfuls of kasha, nurtured me not only with food but with poetry. Collections—those of which she bought for me on her commute home from work—of Robert Frost, Langston Hughes, and Emily Dickinson composed the first lyrics that built my childhood vocabulary. I was a kid hungry for energy, for bouncing words and language to devour. I sat sprawled, scrunching my brows at “Out—Out,” “Mother to Son,” and “I’m Nobody! Who are You?” Punctuation, personification, epiphany. These were the concepts that textured my burgeoning adolescence, the water that allowed my tongue to later flower with prose. I find myself to be a garden now; I’ll go through my day with a poem in the back of my throat and cannot speak until it is written. And now, as a university student, words provide me a sanctuary of safety. I am no stranger to anxiety. The everfluctuating world we live in is pasture enough for my imagination, presenting me with perils of placelessness that so often paralyze me. When I was an ill child, my mother advised me to sweat out my sickness. So when I am visited by this panic, I brew boiling water with dried leaves and chase it with blackcurrant jam, shoving on socks and layering on blankets. And I write, because writing is just another way for me to sweat. All the chaos residing in my mind translates onto the page, ridding me of cerebral static. It is the immediacy allowed to me by the reassuring spine of my journal and the command I hold over my words that anchor me to the present moment. I imagine my nomadic ancestors, moving and settling and shifting and staying, moored by the stories they told each other over hot tea and burning toasts. This tradition, passed down to me through blood and belief, allows me to create solid ground upon which my shaky legs can find stability. In extension, reading allows entrance into the worlds of other people. It is a passport. I remember traveling past the confines of Tisch while gripping the thin chapters of Stephen King’s behemoth IT during finals, eyes glazed over from the computer screen and stomach greasy with acid. I remember crying into the pages of The Tsar of Love and Techno when flying back to Boston after winter break. I remember waking up, forehead dripping in cold terror, to find solace in a set of Russian poetry that sits on my bedside table. These are escapades and escapes. In the process of editing this magazine, these writers have invited me into their lives. I have walked into their kitchens and sipped tea from their cups. When reading these following pieces, I ask you to take things slow and read the pieces like a timeline. Linger in the lines. Leave your scarf in the beginning stanza and come back for it. These are sacred spaces, open for you to walk through and to savor on a Monday morning. Warmly,
Akbota Saudabayeva Poetry & Prose Editor
ART BY BRIGID CAWLEY
OCTOBER MARCH 14, 2019 9, 2020 TUFTS TUFTSOBSERVER OBSERVER 3
By Gloria Revanche
stories you
ot rm you sh wi
he r told
4 TUFTS OBSERVER MARCH 9, 2020
you
She did not love her first boyfriend either, even though he’s your dad. Keep your options open, because she was the bougie yellow girl who wrapped Johnnie, Jean-Pierre, and Frantz around her finger. Keep your options open, because your aunt was the bougie brown girl who kept Junior, Francois, and Ricardo in her back pocket. The hair that grows everywhere, from the thick bush on your head to down there does not have to be tamed. Though she tried. She shaped her waist to submission, going to sleep in belts and drinking lemon water but you don’t have to. Your relationship with men will be strange. Where she came up, it was expected to kiss the feet of men though she was a goddess. She taught you to cover, to be awkward in your own curves because she hated the the big bones she gave you. She made you learn a foreigner’s tongue, kept the sway out of your hips, because she thought there was no room for Third World Girls. The stories she never told you were the heirlooms she never gave you.
PHOTOS BY GLORIA REVANCHE, DESIGN BY SOFIA PRETELL
MARCH 9, 2020 TUFTS OBSERVER 5
an elegy to all the slightly overweight, middle-aged immigrants By Tiffany Xie I was sweating on an overly warm October day when I passed an empty baseball stadium. I want to go to a baseball game, I thought. I’m a lucky charm for underdogs. A few years ago, my dad told me that the Rangers had been on a losing streak until I showed up to their game against the Calgarys. It was the only sporting event I’ve attended that wasn’t a mandatory class trip to see the Mets. When we went, I remember he wore a Calvin Klein leather bomber jacket from Macy’s. I don’t remember much else. Suddenly I began to cry. There was no one to hide the tears from but I still wiped them away, pretending there was something in my eye. I think kindness is meaningful. These words are a memory minefield laced with the lost details of what constitutes me. My dad, one of numerous bluecollar Chinese immigrants in New York. You know, the ones with the Banana Republic dress shirt, black slacks two inches too long, the brown Clarks dress shoes. Usually I go about life in a haze, but some days I look at my parents and it occurs to me that I know nothing about them. I’ll then try to change that by asking them things like, “What’s your favorite color?” or “Can we have a dog?”, but that’s not what I really want to ask. I’m not even a dog person. What I want to know is, what did it cost my parents to have me? How did my dad get those hockey tickets? Was he happy? I regret having been so bitter. It hurts when I remember how I used to tell him off for not dressing better, for dropping out of college, for being an embarrassing father. I wonder how that made him feel on the day we went to see the Rangers. I wonder how he felt in a world I imagine he found lonely. I think of the time he and my mom fought over something trivial and maybe it was the last straw on the camel’s back or something because when I woke up the day after, there was a note on our rickety dinner table and he was gone. He wrote that he felt unloved. That he wanted to die. Yet, he also wrote that he’d try to hold it together until he could drive me and my stuff to campus in about a week. Being our only source of income, he was intimately aware that we couldn’t afford last minute Amtrak tickets. I know I’m a truebred New York son of a bitch because my first thought was, “So depression really is genetic.” My second was, “I’ll transfer to Columbia to save money, help out at home, and take care of my baby sister.” Like, what the fuck? Where did my dad go? Some things are unspeakable to me. Not because they’re horrific or something, but because I don’t know how to shape these bits of my life into words. I was told once that writers are the only people who try to recreate the world using things that aren’t a real part of the world we live in. No trees or skies or emotions are made of words. Humans made words. We made them to mold them into ideas that allow us to think of trees and skies and emotions in a way that’s both further and closer to us. But there are times I just can’t think at all. I feel like I’m falling and falling, simultaneously light as a feather and crushed by the atmosphere’s pressure. Was this how he fell? Dad, dad. I’m sorry. 對唔住. 6 TUFTS OBSERVER MARCH 9, 2020
PHOTOS BY TIFFANY XIE, DESIGN BY SOFIA PRETELL
PHOTOS BY MICHELLE LI, DESIGN BY SOFIA PRETELL
S
K IC
In the summer, there’s a specific intersection on Boston Ave that is dense with familiar colors. Groceries cradled in both arms, I pretend that the paths are lined with jungle. This corner is so never-ending in its summer-ness that it just about looks like home. Now, here, I am always somewhere else. The cold climbs into me and I make a routine out of complaining about the Fahrenheit scale, breaking out in hives, dreaming about hot soup draining down my throat. Grateful for gravity and what it does to soup. I do everything to cure what my sisters say is homesickness, a bellyache, a deep longing for familiarity: I buy tropical fruits, watch local news channels, call my parents once a week. I negotiate my belonging-ness to home, tell stories from memory until I believe they are mine.
By Zi Yi Lim
The last set of plane rides draws near. In Singapore, there will be no seasons. Just the same heavy humid exhales, habits that sit comfortably in twisted questions. Peace at a standstill, guarded by trees that take a decade to bear fruit. Heavy air makes for a suffocating kind of love, already stained with a prophecy of sacrifice. How long will it take for me to grow sick of home?
MARCH 9, 2020 TUFTS OBSERVER 7
evolution By Annabel Xu 8 TUFTS OBSERVER MARCH 9, 2020
ART BY FIONA DOLAN, DESIGN BY BRENNA TROLLINGER
My mother calls me while I am on the bus and says, your sister just died in a car accident. They tell me after that I immediately fainted, right at the feet of a five year old boy. My mother, still on the phone, holds her calm and directs the bystanders to the nearest hospital, where I am given a clean bill of health and no concussion when I wake up two hours later. What my mother didn’t say was, your twin just died in a car accident. Perhaps she knew that somehow made it worse. There is an old Chinese story about a monkey king who had immeasurable powers, who lived forever and ruled both monkeys and kings indiscriminately. For an entire year when we are seven, our parents take turns telling us the story before bed, picking up where they left off the night before. Elise and I act out the story in the daytime, taking turns playing the role. Some days she is the monkey king and I am a monkey. Some days I am the monkey king and she is a king. It does not matter who is who; the story continues on. Elise and I were born six minutes apart, her first, on a snowy November evening before my parents were ready. They went out for Italian and came back with two daughters. The thing about being twins is that half the time, I don’t know where I end and Elise starts. We share socks and friends and every strand of DNA. In eighth grade, I learn the biology of identical twins, how a single zygote splits into two, how Elise and I are really meant to be one person. So it makes sense, that sometimes it seems like I am more her than myself. *** After she dies, it’s like she’s taken some of me, too. Like when the driver slammed into her, she was borrowing some of me. My body betrays me by ignoring all this, by continuing to pump air into my lungs and move blood through my veins, by keeping me alive. My body does not know Elise is gone—if it did, the membranes of my cells would implode on themselves, my neurons would forget how to fire, and all my organs would cease to work the moment Elise’s did. Everything I know about myself, I know from her. I know that we have dark hair and small hands and our eyes twitch when we lie and that when we’re nervous we hum under our breath. When we are the monkey king, Elise stands on the highest surface she can find and screams all the songs. My father says, this is how I know the difference between the two of you. Joelle does not sing. My father calls us Elise and Joelle, whichever name he’s feeling. EliseandJoelle. He has always had only one daughter. By the time Elise dies, her hair is shorter and has one section dyed red, on a dare, and her nails are painted a different color than mine, and she’s doing better in calculus than I am. None of this matters. I try to explain this to our friend Bethany one time. It’s like you guys are the same person, she says, and then adds, I know you guys are so different, but I—I feel the same around either of you. What she means, what she cannot explain but what I know is true, is that Elise is more outgoing and confident and I am more passionate and Elise is okay with uncertainty and I am never late; we are different in all these ways, but we are still Elise
and Joelle. This does not offend me. I have never wanted to be an individual. *** The monkey king ruled for centuries happily, until the god of fate called him up to heaven. There, he was arrogant and proud, and believed he could outrun destiny. He made it to the corners of the universe and carved his name on the gold pillars there, but when he returned, all he saw was lines of blood running down the fingers of the god of fate. The moral here is that there are some things you cannot outrun. Elise says that is a mean trick to play on someone. We are 10. I am the god of fate and she is the monkey king. What, she says, puffing her cheeks up in a bad imitation of him, was I supposed to do? Go past the corners of the universe? How would I have known that there was something there? In this game, I am gleeful; I have won. Why not, I reply. The afternoon sun hits us in the eyes and we lie on the carpet of the living room. Why not run past the corners of the universe? To pay for his arrogance, the monkey king is cast under a heap of stone for 500 years. I think this is preferable to the price Elise paid. At least he can still sing. *** The first day is the worst. My father looks at me blankly over the marble counter of the kitchen and without a word, locks himself in his room. Later, I hear him screaming. The sound wraps itself around the house like a vise. My mother hugs me as tightly as she can, her thin arms suddenly strong. I am so glad I have you, she says, which does not make it better. We do not eat. When I wake up the next morning there is an aching hole in my side and my head feels fuzzy, like someone has been playing around in my brain while I was unconscious. Like Elise dipped her fingers into my head and spun everything around. Even now, she is inside me. I cannot outrun this. *** Our friends come over and pile up on the bed on top of the comforter and we lay in a heap, and it all feels wrong, because Elise is not there. I say, what are we doing in biology now? We’re on evolution, Bethany says. I know that evolution is change over time. Like dinosaurs becoming birds. Or fish becoming humans. Or Elise becoming nothing. I hate evolution, I say. Bethany reaches for my hand. What else can she do? *** Everyone asks me, how are you doing, and I say, alright. I figure, being alive and breathing are accomplishments. What no one asks me anymore is, how is Elise doing. The right answer here is she’s dead but I am convinced she can’t be, because I am still walking and down to every last nucleotide I am Elise. Sometimes I want to point to myself and say, she’s right here. What does it mean to have been a twin? This I cannot answer. At night time, I pull the curtains back on my eyelids and dissect myself in the darkness, prod my ribcage with my short fingers. Elise, I call in my head, Elise, are you there? Some nights, when I am too tired to distinguish between us anymore, I swear she is. MARCH 9, 2020 TUFTS OBSERVER 9
I hear my mother pacing the living room in the middle of the night, breathing hard. Elise, tangled up in my bloodstream, floats through my dreams, laughs while I am asleep. I am never sure if it’s her in the dream or just me. It does not matter. I wake up covered in sweat. I have stopped looking in mirrors, because Elise looks back at me. My teachers make an active effort to call me Joelle, but only because there is no confusion anymore. For one long, horrible, awful day, I think about being dramatic and doing cocaine, but Elise stops me. I stop myself. I cannot tell the difference anymore. My father leaves his bed and goes back to work. He cries almost every morning at breakfast. My mother began planning a funeral, but in the end there is no ceremony. This is fine to me. How do you have a funeral when the dead girl is sitting in the first row? I have stopped doing homework, but no one seems ready to say anything to me. The three of us float around in a sort of limbo without Elise. But not completely. Her pictures are left up. The first week I reach up to take down a framed photo of her, aged nine, posing in front of the gorilla exhibit at the zoo, ready to tear it up and never look at it again, when I realize it’s a picture of me. The anger disappears as quickly as it comes. I hold the frame to my chest and cry. The oldest part of our brain is called the reptilian brain, evolved hundreds of millions of years ago before we were even human. This is the part of my brain that reminds my heart to beat and my eyes to blink, the part that listens to some ancient evolution and not me. The monkey king had the reptilian brain, and so did Elise, and so do I. This is the part of myself that wakes me up every morning, even on mornings where I am convinced I should not be woken up. When I wake up, I am forced to look at myself, and more and more I cannot stand that. I do not know how to tell my parents this. I make an appointment at an expensive salon in the city and pay an exorbitant amount of money to bleach my hair blonde. My mother just blinks at me when I get home. My father does not notice. In biology I learn there is a type of evolution in which nothing changes. Where thousands of years of pressure create a species that is exactly the same as the one before. I think this is what has happened here. A 17-year-old girl was hit by a tiny black car three blocks from her home and died on impact from blunt force trauma, wasn’t even taken to the hospital because there was nothing they could do, but it’s almost like it never happened. I eat and whine and write essays with no conclusion and when the sun hits me the right way, when people think I cannot hear, they say, can’t you see how they were twins? I am a walking billboard, a broadcaster’s voice: don’t you remember Elise? I do not know if my parents hate me or love me more for this. *** By the third week, we have a routine. I wake up before my parents, my mother goes to the gym every day, my father’s face goes sallow. My mother draws her eyebrows on black. I wash my damaged hair with the recommended shampoo. It does not help. At dinner, we sit around the marble island, say useless things. I have a bio test next week. 10 TUFTS OBSERVER MARCH 9, 2020
Are you ready, my mother says without heart. I think so, I say. I will get a C on this test, but it will be waived due to family tragedy. Don’t worry, she says, you’ve always got this, Elise— Her mouth stops in the shape of my dead twin’s name, her words floating untethered in the air. I want to reach out, grab the name, hold it to my chest. I want to be Elise. My father scrapes back his chair and gets up, leaves the table without a sound. I’m sorry, she says finally. She seems smaller. It’s okay, I say. The Chinese have a saying about pain, how it hurts so much your guts are spilling out. This is how it feels, but not just my guts. My heart and lungs and every single blood vessel, too. But I cannot say this to my mother. *** I find Bethany after school and we walk home together. Do I remind you of Elise? I ask. Yes, she says. Of course. I don’t know how to say what I want, so I just do. Does that make it worse? I ask. Yes, she says, and no. She is not looking at me; her eyes are fixed on the ground. Sometimes I look at you and I see Elise, like a shadow, she says, but most of the time I look at you and I see Joelle and none of it matters. I realize she is not looking at me because she is crying. I reach out and squeeze her hand and the space between us seems smaller. It doesn’t feel like Elise is dead, I say. You know, she says finally, you’re not as bad at calculus as you say you are. We are almost to my street. In this moment the world feels empty. No monkeys or kings or twins to be found. Just me and Bethany and an inane conversation about math. You only think you’re bad at calculus, she says, compared to Elise. Yeah, I say, I know. The road curves on itself, deposits us at the head of my block. Bethany and I keep walking, backpacks stuffed with loose paper, hand in hand. One step after the other. What other way is there to go? *** The days pass, as days do. I had thought, for a second, that maybe the universe would stop for us. The universe, as it turns out, does not stop. The god of fate threads his fingers through our futures and does not pause the tape. Bethany and I take the bus to a new thrift shop in Rye. I stand among piles of discarded clothes and think, this is the first place I have been that Elise has not. This is the first place I am only Joelle. It feels like learning to breathe again. Like I am patching up my fallen organs. I get my roots touched up. Angelic, my stylist says, before asking me for another ridiculous amount of money, and I choose to believe him. I raise my hand in calculus and my teacher calls on me. Joelle, she says smoothly, without thinking. As if it isn’t even a question. On a Saturday seven months after Elise dies, my mother suggests we go into the city and wander the Met. We walk to the train
station and take the Metro-North into Grand Central, then take the 5 train up. She pays the full suggested donation for New York residents, which I have never seen anyone do. The cashier hands us two tickets. We walk through the Renaissance wing with Jesus on the cross. My mother turns away from them. Too much darkness, she says. We look at stone statues from Mesopotamia, so worn that I cannot decipher what they are. I buy a croissant from a cafe. We enter the Asian wing and stand in front of a set of painted scrolls from ancient China. Do you recognize these? my mother asks. There is one of the monkey king. We are the only ones in the room. Here, the monkey king has just been released from his rock prison, his eyes to the heavens. Oh!, the translated caption reads, and to think, I was so safe there, I almost preferred it. But look: now that I am free, I can paint again! Goodbye, prison. Goodbye, safe haven. The next scroll is a sunset, the monkey king in the corner, casting his colors again. I think I am about to cry, but I do not. His story ends well, I know. He will go on a journey with a monk and a pig and another character who I have never figured out what exactly he is, and he will face demons and robbers, and he will never be safe again, but he will make it. I think of Elise, of our names jumbled together, EliseandJoelle, of living with her and for her. I think of mitosis, of cells dividing to create exact copies of themselves. I imagine myself as the first macromolecule case of mitosis—but it would not be Elise. It would just be me, again. I turn to my mother. I can never be a twin again, I say, I can’t bring Elise back. Her face falls. Oh, honey, she says. I can live, not as a twin, I say. People do that. Right? Right? Right, she says. In the glass I can almost see my reflection. Hair lighter than Elise’s. Half a centimeter shorter. Not as good at calculus. No, I think. My name is Joelle. I have blonde hair. I am 165 centimeters tall. I am good at biology. *** When I get home, the back doors are thrown open just in time for the sunset. I walk through the house and into the yard. On this night, the sky is alight with purples and reds, a gift of the monkey king. On this night, Elise, me, we are splashed across the sky like an afterthought. I turn to see my mother coming through the doors. What are you doing, Joelle, she asks. Missing Elise, I say, honestly. Gently. She, too, is staring at the sky, the end of another day. Me too, she says. And like this, we go on.
MARCH 9, 2020 TUFTS OBSERVER 11
By Morgan Farrar I’m not good at the flowery or the make-believe In keeping the vines that threaten to spread beyond the arm’s reach I only have two eyes, and one sad mushy slop in my head Two hands with which to grasp at—to tear and pick In as many ravenous ways as possible Maybe a leg or two to run Into the liberating depths of the forest To stumble and fall in a lasting heap Bare-skinned belly just making it out alive With the last grumble that wakes the bees I struggle to understand that divide Between the sun on my feet And the earth within my nose—each finger-picked, plushed nostril Where I can drink from the lip of the bottle And snarl barbarically at the fork and the knife With the hair that’s perpetually tangled and Where I have the most ferocious tongue They say there are lions, but I am only the most tamed kitten I hear their honey-tuned strain full of strength And can do nothing but shiver and hide I wish to let my claws sink in, To rip and shred—feel the blood pulsing under my nails To lick the wound that I have created And to cry like thunder with the clouds in my throat No matter what I get I won’t ever be satisfied I desire the wither of the flower’s bloom Nestled within the graceful turn of the earth And the pleasure that exists outside the walls of the cage Where there is no perpetual darkness And everything is worth the sun With the world as big as it is I can spread my fingers, stretch my arms high in the sky And breathe my last breath in the unreal
12 TUFTS OBSERVER MARCH 9, 2020
ART BY JULIETTE WU, DESIGN BY RICHARD NAKATSUKA
God has left a lamp on in autumn’s living room. Though the humid months have gone, taking with them their concentric circles of sweat and dirt, the air weighs more than dropped pennies, and I shift side-to-side between my curtains of skin, as though living permanently in a too-itchy Halloween costume. Remembering the year I dressed as a goblin with a carrot tied around my nose, sitting in a clumsy heap of flesh on the floor eating Butterfinger after Butterfinger, the way a howler monkey uses its hairy fingers to pry open coconuts. The way, even then, humiliation was fullness, was empty wrappers, crinkling cellophane, my chocolate-stained Cheshire grin. Humiliation which, if you let it, can feel like being followed for blocks by a man with dark glasses and a baseball cap pulled low over his face, except that when you do make it home to your basement apartment, you invite him in, and the two of you make popcorn on your greasy little stove, eating it by the handful next to one another on barstools.
ART BY PATRICK MILEWSKI, DESIGN BY RICHARD NAKATSUKA
I don’t know, maybe the whole world suffers quietly from Stockholm syndrome against their own rib cages, and even the monks, in their Alpine hideaways, shudder to think of their stomachs pressing up against their white robes, dreaming, as they always have, of shapelessness. That October, passing along a sidewalk cobwebbed with tree roots, my young limbs under the scratching, suffocating yoke of my homemade goblin, I happened upon a broken mirror lying on the curbside, glistening in the ochres of late afternoon. My face in it, sliced beyond recognition. My shoulders and torso tangled as city traffic, tangled as the curls on my small head that night when I finally pulled off my goblin’s mask, laid back on my bed, and realized I was growing.
COSTUMED SELF-PORTRAIT By Adam Krasnoff
MARCH 9, 2020 TUFTS OBSERVER 13
FEATURE
Graveyard Shift
On Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday nights, Thea had to answer to the name Doreen. A few days ago, her first day on the job, she nearly corrected the woman talking to her. Thea frowned at the memory. She reached underneath her coat, past the rough material of the oversized scrubs, until she found the real Doreen’s identification card clipped to her front pocket. She squeezed the faded photograph on the card three times before releasing it from her grip. Doreen was called to Barbados last week to see about a man, a potential suitor, and she needed a replacement night aide for Mrs. Robles. Doreen claimed that if she asked for time off again so soon after the last time, she would lose her seniority when she returned. Thea needed the money, but she was nervous about being caught. She was only a few weeks into their Certified Nursing Assistant course and had no real experience as an in-home aide. “Nonsense!” Doreen exclaimed in her commanding lilt. She went down the list of duties. When Thea politely pointed out that she and Doreen were nearly a decade apart in age and looked nothing alike, Doreen cackled and replied, “That woman more than half-blind. Beside, to all dem, Black is Black!” Thea insisted on borrowing her uniform and took great pains to plait her thick hair to resemble Doreen’s signature crown braid. The ride to Kew Gardens was over an hour. Thea was tired from sweeping up hair in her aunt’s shop. She wanted to rest her eyes before the long night ahead, but took out her flashcards to make good use of the time. The train doors were on the verge of closing when the 14 TUFTS OBSERVER MARCH 9, 2020
FEATURE
man flung his arm through the narrow opening. The doors recoiled and the interloper stepped onto the train. His name was Ozymandias. He was tall and slim with broad shoulders that filled the doorway he now occupied. Pencil-thin dreadlocks tumbled out of his gray knitted cap and the fluorescent lights illuminated his rust-colored skin. He cradled a large bouquet of orange, red, and yellow flowers in his arms and scowled at the passengers who dared to meet his gaze. He opened his mouth and shouted, “You mess with me, and I’ll put flowers on your grave!” All eyes that had failed to stay on the man traveled back to him, and passengers craned their necks in his direction, irritated that he had interrupted the solemnity of the crowded rush hour trip. “You mess with me, and I’ll put flowers…on… your grave,” Ozymandias bellowed. His voice ricocheted off the train compartment walls as he sliced the bouquet above his head. The cold air stilled and flowers took on an ominous meaning. As the train car pulled forward, the low hum of the motor and the clack of the wheels gliding down the track filled the atmosphere. Ozymandias stumbled away from the doors and sat down next to a small gray woman who quickly switched seats to avoid catching his wildness. Her movement eased the tension in the car and the passengers shifted their attention back to their phones and newspapers. Except Thea. She loosened her grip on the flashcards in her hands and welcomed the break from silently fitting her mouth around the syllables. She was entranced by the man, and could not figure out why she felt this stranger seemed so familiar. She searched for another person who was equally under his spell and locked eyes with another Black passenger flanked by two grocery bags. The woman nodded her head in Ozymandias’ direction, and shook her head in piteous disgust. Thea sighed to herself and looked away, a refusal to serve on the woman’s jury. The train had reached the next stop, and passengers entered after others exited. Thea studied the man, and watched as the feral look in his eyes faded. Ozymandias turned to the young woman who had sat next to him, and asked, “Excuse me miss, would you like a flower?” She beamed and accepted a brilliant red flower. He then handed a yellow flower to a woman sitting across from him. “Oh! How beautiful,” she replied, followed by a high-pitched giggle. Ozymandias mimicked her laugh and the woman laughed harder in response. Thea grinned at this exchange. Ozymandias continued to distribute the bright perennials at random and stopped when he had cut the size of his bouquet in half. He then sat up tall and regal, as if he were sitting on a throne, resigned to rule over a foreign kingdom he had never heard of before coming to power.
DESIGN BY JANIE INGRASSIA, ART BY KELLY TAN AND MARISA MCCARTHY
By Blyss Cleveland
MARCH 9, 2020 TUFTS OBSERVER 15
Ozymandias swayed back and forth, propelled by the movement of the train, and began to hum in a low tone. Thea observed the friendly meanness return to his eyes as he watched one of the women twirl the stem between her fingers. He clutched the flowers tightly to his chest and proclaimed, “I know where all the best flowers in the city are because I talk to them every morning!” The passengers who witnessed his earlier arrival onto the train paid no attention to this outburst. Those who had only known the Ozymandias from seconds ago were alarmed. Two of the flower girls exchanged nervous glances. One of them quietly dropped her orange daisy on the ground. It disappeared among the masses. Ozymandias’ face contorted, making the smattering of freckles on his cheeks dance. He paused to enjoy the renewed interest in him, before shouting, “You either doing the Lord’s work or stirring the devil’s pot! Every tongue that speaks against me deserved to get what they got!” He laughed maniacally, enjoying the discomfort of his fellow passengers. Thea furrowed her brow and stuffed the flashcards in her coat pocket. She had heard this phrase before. She scrambled to find her phone in order to write it down and considered giving up her seat to talk to the man. Suddenly the conductor’s compartment door flew open with a loud creak. A pinkcheeked man appeared and quickly waddled through the aisle. The eyes of the passengers followed the conductor, fully aware of where he was heading. When he reached Ozymandias, he towered over him for a moment before narrowing his eyes. He lowered his porcine face close to Ozymandias’ bouquet and shushed him before growling, “Quiet!” Ozymandias bowed his head, and muttered “I’m sorry,” into his flowers. He smiled meekly at the conductor and attempted to hand him the flowers. The conductor swatted them away. “What the hell is wrong with you? You come on my damn train, start throwing flowers everywhere and yelling about Jesus?” “No sir, no, no, no, sir,” protested Ozymandias. “What you think is not how it is—” “Quiet! One more outburst and I’ll have you kicked off at the next stop.” Ozymandias looked defiantly at the conductor, before turning his head to look at his fellow passengers. Thea tried to catch his eye, with no luck. She felt uneasy. She was certain that something was going wrong, and she was the only person on the train to notice. After a moment, Ozymandias slumped down in his seat. He placed the bouquet across his lap and clasped his hands together in mock prayer. Satisfied at cowing the man below him, the conductor looked around at the passengers and charged back into his compartment. 16 TUFTS OBSERVER MARCH 9, 2020
At the next stop, Ozymandias sauntered off the train, murmuring under his breath as he exited. He stopped in front of the gray lady who had refused to sit next to him. “Good day to you,” he said in a sing-song voice. When he made his way past Thea, a crumpled piece of paper fell into her lap. Before she could tell him that he had dropped something, he had vanished into the throng of people and the doors shut together. As the train began to move again, she stared at the scrap of paper in her hands and unfolded it. The words scrawled across the page read, “All the money in the world can’t buy you another second of your life, for money is worthless in the hands of time.” She couldn’t make sense of the missive. She felt herself traveling through her memory. She was four or five, standing in the doorway to her grandmother’s kitchen. Her grandmother liked to stay up late and much to Thea’s parents’ chagrin, so did Thea. She watched as her grandmother sloshed a can of chicken noodle soup in a mug before adding water from the tap, stirring it, and placing it in the microwave. As her grandmother watched the mug rotate, Thea coughed from the doorway. Her grandmother caught her breath and squinted toward her. Thea walked into the kitchen. “Baby, you always tiptoeing around here at night. One of these days you’re gonna scare me to death.” She took the soup out of the microwave and stirred it while shaking her head. “Can I have some?” “Are you hungry?” “No,” said Thea. Her grandmother laughed, pulled her close and kissed her forehead. She fed her a spoonful of the soup. “You don’t like to do anything but stir the devil’s pot!” Thea blinked, and she was back on the train. She didn’t have any more of that memory. She placed the note in her coat pocket, slung her bag over her shoulder, and exited the train at her stop. As she emerged from the station, Thea thought of her grandmother, how her large body became a small figure that had to remain wrapped up under a dozen blankets during the last days of her life. It was June. No matter how many covers they gave her, her grandmother insisted that she was not warm enough. She talked about things that had happened in the past as if they were going to happen in the future. Thea had misheard the man on the train, or dreamed him into being. The mind plays tricks on you when you miss someone. Thea thought of Mrs. Robles. She wondered if it was better or worse not to know how time was moving. She envied the inability to know the difference between one moment and the next. She yawned as she rounded the corner and reached the front of the stately building. She looked up at the clear night. She hoped that Doreen would return soon.
MARCH 9, 2020 TUFTS OBSERVER 17
FEATURE
prayer for alice’s future By Luca Rogoff We live out a phase of utopia & We use future scissors &
We
and
and
short and long hair.
future lengths of string.
live with a secrecy;
ecstatic and electric.
& We have future bodies that are current &
18 TUFTS OBSERVER MARCH 9, 2020
We
laugh
about
pain
bodies.
and devotion. &We
& We
& We
& We
& We
& We
& We
& We
&We
&We
&We
&We
&We
&We
&We
ART BY NED CARSLON DESIGN BY EVELYN ABRAMOWITZ
manifesting narcissus
By Nina Benites
I watered my own soul but I Watered yours too because who Doesn’t want more pale amber Bursting and seeping but the August Rain soaked us both saturated our Xylems we were ripe enough to eat fleshy Fleeting beauty and vases full with Every goodbye I lean Into that magnetic winter wind gentle As your fingers when brushing away My curled hair my shriveled petals splayed I never thought we would need To declare what love our Love looked like I am Photosynthesizing in the early Spring heat stomata agape extending Into your nooks melting into your roots I Settle in find your grooves mark My spot on your neurons your Pulsing gray matter I am Sitting steely faced on Your bed you droop like thirsty shoots I Let tears dance down my Cheeks they work through The air the way my words Won’t the way we liked to and Instead I shake with reproach-dipped Moonlight eyes I miss The sun like barely hatched Bluebirds futures have a way of falling Down mid flight that is It that is our proclamation All our absorbance all those Studies all our meticulous Scrawls about nodes phloem Respiration oxygen put to an attempt at use. —After Borges and Shakespeare
ART BY FIONA DOLAN, DESIGN BY EVELYN ABRAMOWITZ
MARCH 9, 2020 TUFTS OBSERVER 19
FEATURE
Sometimes I turn all the lights off Count yellow Through the kitchen window Searching for Polaris. Soft smoke floats above A burning out filter In a mason jar to my left. Slowly my head sinks into cold tile.
POLAND SPRING
By Paula Gil-OrdoĂąez Gomez
I come across beds of fallen greenery Glistening raindrops on forest floor. Rosy clouds radiating Milky sunbeams. Chipped burgundy canoes Oozing summer sap. Mile high tree trunks Covered by crusted-over bark. I long for The land of the pines Where my hair was golden And my legs were strong Enough to carry me Over menacing roots and morning chills Kicking through olive colored water Braking only for my begging lungs. At night we dance With fireflies. 250 beats per minute In the Maine breeze. Winded, we’ll watch the sticks smolder Campfire fumes Gently envelop our cedar-built homes. Smoke parting for the North Star.
20 TUFTS OBSERVER MARCH 9, 2020
ART BY PAULA GIL-ORDONEZ GOMEZ DESIGN BY EVELYN ABRAMOWITZ
MARCH 9, 2020 TUFTS OBSERVER 21
The Hotel Off Highway 81 by Addie Lovell When I was 17 and she was 18, she and I decided to get a cheap motel room. We thought it was a preview for what our life would be like once we got our own place. It was a cold February night, with buttery clouds streaking across the sky. The end-of-winter chill glittered in the air and she drove, because I didn’t have my license. I still don’t. I watched her, impressed by her ability to turn and halt a car. I played Broadway musical soundtracks that she tolerated because she loved me. Small town America is hideous, an endless, sparse landscape of gas stations and chain restaurants. Still, creamsicle evening light has the power to make even bare, capitalism-choked land gorgeous and romantic, or maybe that was her. We stopped at a supermarket and bought 99 cent ramen; we microwaved it and ate it in our 60 dollar room. It took us three tries to find a place that let kids under 21 rent a room, but the Econo Lodge employee rolled his eyes and checked us in. We were not the first teenage couple to sneak into a motel room to get away from our parents, but we felt that we were doing something groundbreaking. We felt so grown up, not having to worry about being quiet or someone coming home early. Between laughter, I kissed her neck, then traced my finger over the mark there in the shape of a comma, a half moon, a teardrop. She played soft music through her tinny phone speakers. When she touched me, the world spun itself into a silvery haze and I felt like a wave, cresting and then spilling over in a bright white shudder. A silver barrette clung to her hair and twinkled. I plucked it out and set it to the side. I would have unraveled myself for her, would have deconstructed my ribs and lungs to make her laugh that way forever. I felt our souls take root beside each other’s in the earth, somewhere deep and ancient where we had always been waiting for one another. Afterwards, we looked at each other and breathed. I studied her face and found that I couldn’t find words to adequately capture her impossible reality. The deep coffee color in her eyes justified new words, new language, new religion. We took a shower, our hands soft and familiar against each other’s bodies, working cheap hotel shampoo through one another’s hair. I put on her T-shirt, not because I had forgotten mine, but because even when she was beside me, I wanted to be close to her. We shared a cream soda and a pint of Cherry Garcia. She put the music back on and we held each other, swaying half in tempo to an acoustic pop song. I was taller than her, but when she held me she always felt like the bigger one. I still don’t think most people ever feel close to anyone in their whole lives the way I did to her that night. If she’d asked me to run away with her, I would have said yes. We fell asleep curled into crescents against one another and woke up like that too. I haven’t seen her in years, and cannot remember the lilt of her breath or the slope of her spine anymore. I no longer miss her, but I cannot think of the joy of that night without grieving. Sometimes I think back to it and smile, before remembering what came after. I no longer listen to the songs she was playing. 22 TUFTS OBSERVER MARCH 9, 2020
ART BY MADELEINE OH, DESIGN BY JOANNA KLESZCZEWSKI
Second Coming by Luca Rogoff It starts with mist rising from the stamped down dust the bare earth sings in cracks and dried up creek beds; sun bleaching the last life out of their massive stones I love the way you say “cor — por — re — uhl”
ART BY MARISA MCCARTHY
when our bodies take shape, it’s between the Hardee’s and the gas station
MARCH 9, 2020 TUFTS OBSERVER 23
MoneySlurpeeMetrocard By Jady Zhang
How have you been feeling? Been exercising? Staying healthy? She asks On Monday I ate a MetroCard for breakfast I say I found it facedown grounded into the asphalt slid it down my throat in a 7/11 bathroom stall where a dime was caught between the cracked blue tiles You’ve been sleeping okay? She asks I stacked 4 pregnancy tests a piña colada slurpee a postcard of a goose on the metal counter and ate the dime too I felt heavy MoneySlurpeeBabyMetrocard
24 TUFTS OBSERVER MARCH 9, 2020
ART BY MICHELLE LI, DESIGN BY RICHARD NAKATSUKA
In the waiting room half way through a magazine a two page spread “What to do with perennials in the snow” which I tore out and kept What do u need that for anyways? A man asks It’s almost April He says I know I say I know for sure MoneySlurpeeBabyMetrocard It’s finished now. Do you feel okay? She asks My name is Patty She says Isn’t the weather awful this week? She asks But it should clear up soon She says I know I say I know
MARCH 9, 2020 TUFTS OBSERVER 25
On the way home, Q stopped by the food cart and bought hotdogs, then at the flower stand two lilies fresh out of the water. Unwrapping the tin foil, she wondered how food-cart hotdogs always tasted the best before the first bite, and so did the “Turkish” barbeque sandwich on the way back home from middle school, always looking the best hanging and rotating and getting grilled in the air. The streets at dusk were different in that remote place then. The lampposts all went on at once and the night always fell at that exact moment. Q walked along the street as she used to do years ago in that faraway city, always panicking over math exams and the weekly long-distance running that seemed so trivial in hindsight, and the air at dusk always a bit greasy from the tasty smell of waste oil and fake foreign street food. The air dimly illumined by the lampposts light used to stare at her through the heavy contaminated haze and urge her to go home. But even waste oil tasted differently in this inscrutable New England city, always with winter and her windswept hair blocking the view. Q felt cheated, but on second thought it could be that the place was hygienic after all and their oil organic and clean. There’s nothing special about today, but she became wanting to buy flowers all of a sudden. Last week she had been told that all days are the same. No festivals, no artificial commemorations. It’s always Monday in Macondo. But that we all know, we all know that, and we go on living as if we don’t. The old man wrapped her lilies in a piece of cellophane with small white floral print and handed them over to Q. Really, she doesn’t like flowers that much. Lily was the only name she knew. Lowering her head as she walked down the stairs into the subway station, Q felt as if loved by many, but she had nothing to give.
26 TUFTS OBSERVER MARCH 9, 2020
Q by Rae Qingrui Sun 孙清睿
回家的路上Q路过餐车买了热狗，走到地铁站口的亭子里买了 花。餐车的热狗总是咬下一口前最好吃，初中放学路上的土耳 其烤肉也是挂在架子上转起来的样子最诱人。那个时候黄昏 的街道也很不一样。路灯总是同时亮起，然后夜晚在一瞬间 降临。和很多年前一样Q走在街上，傍晚的空气和街边小摊的 味道一起油腻，数学考试的慌乱和八百米前的胃痉挛好像从来 没有离开过她。在陌生城市闻到烤地沟油的味道总是忍不住会 心动，吃一口又觉得被骗。世界上不同的地方连地沟油的塑料 味都是不一样的。难得想吃垃圾也吃不顺心。当然也有可能问 题出在人家用的根本就是好油。今天也不是什么特别的日子， 但是Q突然变得很想买花。上个礼拜有人和她说日子都是一样 的。节日和标志都没有意义，马孔多永远是星期一。但是这种 道理谁又不知道呢，知道了最后还是重新装作不知道地继续 活。老人把两支百合用带白色碎花的玻璃纸包好递给Q。她其 实真的是不喜欢花的，也不知道除了百合之外可以买什么。她 觉得自己好像有很多爱，但她什么也给不出。
DESIGN BY KATE BOWERS, ART BY KELLY TAN MARCH 9, 2020 TUFTS OBSERVER 27
FEATURE
by megan kang a blue beach towel to sleep on, and a sweet sky to kiss
who is she soaked in etheral thoughts surrounded by the colors of her dream
28 TUFTS TUFTSOBSERVER OBSERVERNOVEMBER MARCH25,9, 2019 2020 28
DESIGN BY KATE BOWERS, PHOTOGRAPHY BY MEGAN KANG
D
G
The roof hangs over our heads like a large tooth, rendering us tiny sardines, flipping about nervously, in the open mouth of Dulles Airport’s whale interior: brutalist beams, overhanging boughs built like radio static. the back of my neck is sweaty like the morning’s dew; it misted earlier, the pilots can’t see past five feet in front of them and maybe my plane’s delayed and maybe I’ll get the next ticket out— I’m in the slot for standby. The sun, boring down on the grimy sand of outside’s graininess, bleeds through the billboard sized windows and falls sideways on your face, a plain I’ve touched down upon before and never again. Now, the air becomes a gallery of gulps and gasps, down-turned eyes and dwindling fingers. It’s easy to find comfort in the final prostration before the guillotine. The severance of mind from body, a plane flying out from the land from which it was born. At least we are here now, right? With each other? Will you call and say my name? I’m scared all the time now, can we go back to when we walked everywhere? No engines but birds like paint strokes on a blank canvas. Let’s forget how to speak now. No air moves under our wings. The minutes flow like restless sleep—melting from one frame to another like a gymnopedie—crawling to crash like waves to shore, like chest to chest, like bread to carnal mouth. Now check-in. Coughs in the corridor. Come back. Cabin pressure low. Crying Baby. Come back. Baggage claim. Complimentary. Come back. All words, no conversation—come back—vouchsafe for now, cry later. Come back. Carry-on cameo: captain, come back.
Saying Goodbye in an Airport by Akbota Saudabayeva
MARCH 9, 2020 TUFTS OBSERVER 29 DESIGN BY KATE BOWERS, ART BY KELLY TAN AND LAURA WOLFE
lit rally luv