Issue No. 12, 2018-2019 by West 10th

NYU CREATIVE WRITING PROGRAM COLLEGE OF ARTS & SCIENCE

2018â&#x20AC;&#x201C;2019

West 10th publishes poetry, prose, and art by New York University’s undergraduate students. It is edited and produced annually by a studentrun editorial board and the NYU Creative Writing Program. The ideas expressed in West 10th do not necessarily reflect those of NYU. The NYU Creative Writing Program faculty includes Catherine Barnett, Anne Carson, Nathan Englander, Jeffrey Eugenides, Jonathan Safran Foer, Terrance Hayes, Edward Hirsch, Katie Kitamura, Hari Kunzru, Yusef Komunyakaa, Nick Laird, Eileen Myles, Joyce Carol Oates, Sharon Olds, Darryl Pinckney, Matthew Rohrer, Zadie Smith, and Darin Strauss. The Creative Writing Program has distinguished itself for more than three decades as a leading national center for the study of literature and writing. West 10th NYU Creative Writing Program Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House 58 West 10th Street New York, NY 10011 west10th.org Copyright © 2019 West 10th NYU Creative Writing Program’s Undergraduate Literary Journal ISSN: 1941-4374 Printed in the United States of America

Editor-in-Chief

E Yeon Chang

Managing Editor

Angelica Chong

Prose Editors

Chelsea Chang Natalie Whalen

Assistant Prose Editors

Polina Solovyeva Jake Goldstein Abe Thaler Christhalia Wiloto

Poetry Editors

Brittany Abou-Suleiman Natalie Breuer Simona Ivanova

Assistant Poetry Editors

Travis Schuhard Henry Trinder Eva Gu Cosmo Halterman de Ocho

Art Editor

David Stapleton

Web Editor

Abe Thaler

Web Design/Art Editor

Amira Dhanoa

Copy Editor

Ian Herel

Executive Editors

Matthew Rohrer Darin Strauss Joanna Yas

Staff Advisor

Joanna Yas

TABLE OF CONTENTS Editor’s Note 7 An Interview with Tony Tulathimutte 29 Poems by Ken Chen, Guest Contributor 54 Contributors’ Notes 61

Poetry Ian Fishman

Sunken Autumn

Lily Cohen

girlhood

Leah Muncy

Observations

Connie Li

Julia Torres

哗哗

Larenz Brown

Biology Final Exam Review Guide

Kassidy McIntosh

It Seems I Am America

Bailey Cohen

Two Poems

Miguel Coronado 60 Editors’ Award Winner

(This is Not a) Love Poem for Elon Musk

For a while I even forgot the peace lilies

Prose Paul Oliver

The Stye

Dawn Wendt 35 Editors’ Award Winner

La Pigeon

Katerina Voegtle

American Dream

Art Priya Pasad

The Wait for Who

Maria Garland

Firework Heart

Fernanda Amis

Family Orchard

Sara Miranda

Life is Gud in Barcelona

Maria Garland

Survival

Ladan Jaballas

Paint Drop

Ladan Jaballas

Portrait Twist

Sara Miranda

The Roofs of Montmartre

Maria Garland

Your Thoughts Are Electric

Sara Miranda

Buildings on Buildings in Lisboa

Monique Muse

Front Cover Back Cover

Peak 616 Altimetry

Priya Pasad, The Wait for Who

Editor’s Note

It is with what feels like an undeserved amount of honor that I get to introduce this year’s issue of West 10th. When I first came across its small Club Fest booth freshman year, I had no idea just how much this journal would come to define my time at NYU. As it has for many others, West 10th afforded my writing a first home, and from contributor to poetry editor to now lastly editor-in-chief, my growing involvement in the magazine has undeniably and graciously affected the growth of my undergraduate literary career. I like to think that I have learned great writing and reading by example from our contributors and editorial board. However, even with such great teachers, I admit that curating this issue—ultimately deciding which pieces to home—was much more of a daunting task than I expected. (I shamelessly blame my brilliant predecessors for making it look so easy.) Thankfully, West 10th has always been a collaborative effort, and what follows here are the results of truly collective and passionate decision-making by our editorial board. Together, we compiled this issue by narrowing down the pieces that we simply had to fight for, along with the ones that we didn’t need to fight over at all. In the end, we all agreed that the pieces we chose merited more eyes than ours, and we are so incredibly excited to share them with you all. Of course, we are only able to share these stories and poems with the generous support of NYU’s Creative Writing Program. This issue quite simply could not have been completed without the guidance of Joanna Yas, who offered constant encouragement and unfaltering leadership to our team. Matthew Rohrer and Darin Strauss, our executive editors, took the time to read and select our Editors’ Awards

WEST 10TH

recipients, and have always acted as wonderful advocates for West 10th. Weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d also like to thank Aaron Petrovich for the time and care he always puts in our beautiful design. A huge thank you to Ken Chen for allowing us to print one of his poems, and to Tony Tulathimutte for so honestly and playfully conversing with us about reading, writing, and everything in between. I am indebted to all my fellow editors for their many efforts and insights, but am especially so to managing editor Angelica Chong for making her manage more than she should have. Thank you to all of the writers and artists whose work we werenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t able to include; I hope all your pieces find a loving home. And, of course, thank you to all of those who are reading. We are most grateful for your support. E Yeon Chang

Ian Fishman

Sunken Autumn

the world has color still * three months clot into one grey dance * so time for now is quiet and flatter than it used to be * sundays we skid outside amherst * steal acorns * wallow wetlands * sling black dogs from the ink of our throats back into the prairie scuzz * there is always something to muzzle and be muzzled by * those dull blue mornings the crows seem to like * a wood stove on the windâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s breath * the nighttime the dogs all melt into * each day decapitating itself * regenerating later * my friends and i * in love with looking * for nothing * and finding it

* everywhere 9

Lily Cohen

girlhood

glowing palms balmy pink and magma red dandelion fingers over flashlight bulbs quilted bed covers heavy over head lost barrettes in tangled hair driftwood on a messy sea cotton and goose feather ocean shore it is safe and warm here. a ceiling-stuck star constellation glowing green firefly sanctuary belly lava lamp eyes rolling and crawling little creature heavy breath, high pitched wild laugh crooked jack-o-lantern smile sparse with teeth jump high! and land. grip the ground farm animal toes run all the way home from the school bus stop in crayon drawn afternoons from nighttime stepping on the heels of shoes laces tied in tedious bows look how fast I can go! without tripping dripping ice cream streams sticky cheeks chin and wrists reach down to your ankles and splash 10

Lily Cohen

sun sparkled water in the open air droplets dance and fall. all clean now. summer is just summer and not the season of someone.

Maria Garland, Firework Heart

Leah Muncy

Observations

I pinned my glass panel with the purple flowers Against the white wall, instead of the window. It is hard to get the light where you want it, anyway. My toilet runs all night, it sounds like it is raining. One day the bathroom floor is wet because it did rain inside. This is called a leak. I don’t know my Super says. My bathroom does not have a window, but it has a fan, But not a window. It is hard to get the light when you want it, anyway. I didn’t have to look when I changed the water temperature From hot to cold in the shower. That means I can call my apartment “Home.” Hot too hot, cold too cold. There has been one fruit fly in the kitchen for months. There have been no flowers in the kitchen since August. I had a dream that dying feels just like fainting. What if dying just feels like fainting? A person in front of me in line orders a cortada. What the fuck is a cortada? “I shot a deer,” my great aunt says to me. “Don’t tell anyone.” Three mismatched kitchen towels hanging on the oven door handle. “I shouldn’t have brought this up to you,” a friend says while bringing it up to me. 13

WEST 10TH

I can always remember the grass: dying, or green, or freshly cut. I remember the lamps, particularly. No bulbs. There is really only one way to arrange furniture in a living room. The first night in Nanaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s house I get very cold but I am too afraid to tell her. It is an old house. There is nothing she could do. Someone could say I have built character. I build character like a house. Cold too cold hot too hot. I am so vain! I wrote that note to myself. I taped it to the mirror.

Fernanda Amis, Family Orchard

Connie Li

哗哗

It could have been a dream, that it was dark and raining and warm, and there was yellow light behind me while I looked onto the wheat fields. Yellow light through the sheets of rain. I think we needed it. The rain. I was younger and the poet Hai Zi was my older brother, scribbling in a notebook that narrowly avoided the downpour. I looked outside waiting anxiously for my parents, and the scratch of pencil, a sigh that sounded like a furrowed brow drew me away from the open door to the harvest. My brother did not speak to me. I can only remember two walls. I heard laughter approaching, the kind that only comes from a long day’s work. It’s my parents and they look a bit different. I take their jackets, usher them to the table. We don’t speak. It’s warm and goldenrod.

Paul Oliver

The Stye

dith opened the microwave door with two seconds left on the timer. A clumsy error. She liked to open it exactly one second before the beeps. Her Hot Pocket steamed. A perfect meal for a Wednesday afternoon. Its grease saturated the paper plate she placed on her lap. She thought it might stain her drawstring sweatpants. The sweatpants were part of her system. A simple system—she bought clothes in various shades of gray, always one size too big. Dark, ill-fitting clothing dissuaded men from looking at her body on the street, and laundry was easier without separating items. Hot Pockets were another part of the system. Hot Pockets at home, halal carts on the go. Both deserved full marks for affordability and convenience, two indicators of a marketable food product. Her compulsion to identify the benefits of every product was an instinct instilled by her work. She was a freelance infomercial writer. Her current project required a script for a new product called The Shower Shimmy, a plastic bar, installed parallel to a shower curtain rod, with hooks to hold shampoo, soap, and the like. She didn’t understand the name. She didn’t understand the product. No one seemed to understand the product. But it was her job to assess The Shower Shimmy and highlight its best features. To pay her rent, to buy Hot Pockets, to eat Hot Pockets, to sit on her futon in her gray sweatpants— all these things somehow depended on her ability to write a compelling script about The Shower Shimmy. Or at least compelling enough to convince the late-night viewer that leaving the T.V. on was preferable to finding the remote and turning it off. Edith didn’t own a T.V. herself. A laptop and a phone were 17

WEST 10TH

enough. But mostly she read books—so many books that her bookshelf couldn’t hold any more. She piled new books on the twin-size bed in the guest room. She called the room a guest room despite a dearth of guests. It had been vacant for two months since her former roommate had abandoned the city for her hometown in Iowa. Since Edith couldn’t afford to keep the room empty for another month, she had agreed to let someone live there. Someone named Alan. Edith had seen his post on Facebook seeking a room on short notice. To live with Alan, an acquaintance from high school in Salt Lake City, seemed better than to live with a stranger. He accepted her offer but said he would only be in New York temporarily for a visiting teaching position at Columbia’s English department. A swelling sensation pained Edith’s lower left eyelid. She blinked deliberately, heavily. A stye. She hated styes. A warm compress would reduce the inflammation. She wondered, as her molars mashed a warm gob of Hot Pocket, if she had any clean washcloths to use. Would she say anything inappropriate to Alan when he arrived? She stood in front of the bathroom mirror and realized she was quite drunk. She had imbibed an entire bottle of wine as she waited for his knock on the door. Although if she said or did anything indecorous, it seemed inconsequential to her. She wanted a purely transactional relationship with him—a monthly direct deposit, an exchange of money for space. But it was very possible she would drunkenly say something sexual. In the weeks leading up to his arrival, after she offered the room, she frequently conjured images of him—elaborate fantasies about fucking him in strange places. On the high school football field with a crowd watching, cheering for him, berating her. In a classroom full of his eager Columbia undergrads, bent over his desk while he simultaneously lectured and pounded. In an unfinished concrete basement with a knife at her throat. She didn’t want to live such scenarios, no, but they got her off, in tandem with her hand, when they played in her head. She liked to smell her fingers after she finished. And usually she forgot to wash her hands before she rubbed her eye. 18

Paul Oliver

Prior to the prospect of Alan as a cohabitant, she had a proclivity for her purple battery-powered vibrator, which she dutifully cleaned after each use. But thoughts of Alan incited a primordial imperative to connect her own hand with her crotch. Now only her deft phalanges satiated her clitoris. No longer did inorganic—or foreign organic— objects appeal to her sexual appetite. Edith wanted herself, and she liked to imagine wanting Alan. She kept looking at herself in the mirror and remembered her high school prom, senior year, with Alan. The Listerine-blue boutonnieres, Alan’s faux-silk tie, the tulle swathes on her skirt. He pressed his semihard penis on her hip while they swayed to some unfamiliar slow song. She didn’t mind; she protested later when he parked in the empty church lot near his house and told her to unzip his pants and suck his cock. No, she told him. He pleaded and pleaded. He convinced her to take swigs from a plastic bottle filled with vodka. Edith relented. She remembered his zipper, her wet lapping tongue, her gags, his little moans—these sounds all amplified by the dark silence. Streetlights cast tall shadows and illuminated her bobbing head until it ended. She swallowed and smiled. In the passenger seat on the way home, she kept mute. She vomited at home, alone. The muteness persisted. She ignored Alan’s texts, his calls, the occasional letter, until his attempts at contact waned and eventually stopped. Their Facebook correspondence regarding the empty room was their first interaction since prom—it was their first communication as adults. She justified it to herself with the pretense of financial desperation, the necessity of a roommate. But, really, she just wanted to see him. To observe him. To know how this man lived. Did he think about that night as often as she did? Would it even be possible to answer that question by seeing him in person? She needed to know. She needed to know what kind of person he was—who he’d turned out to be. She knew the Alan who occupied her mind, the one who emerged nights when she lay awake, unable to sleep. The din of traffic in the dark, the whir of her little window A/C unit, and Alan, Alan, Alan. *** 19

WEST 10TH

Alan arrived with one suitcase and a backpack. He looked haggard. He greeted Edith with a somnolent half hug. They said hello, and Edith asked about his flight. Alan had not flown in from Salt Lake City as Edith had expected. “No, actually, I flew in from a writers’ retreat in Marfa. Have you heard of it?” he said. Edith had heard of Marfa, although she’d never been. She knew it was a place for writers and artists to focus, experiment, and do drugs. “I’ve heard of it. I’ve never had a reason to go. There’s enough ketamine in New York for me,” she said. “Ketamine?” Alan sounded confused. “You know, horse tranquilizer. People snort it. K-holes?” “I’m not familiar with it,” he said. “Well I read about a writer who did it in Marfa. 10:04 by Ben Lerner. He thought ketamine was cocaine. According to his book.” “Oh, Ben Lerner. The glitterati pretty-boy.” “Um. Yeah. Well—sorry. Come on in,” said Edith. She ushered him across the threshold with a sudden gesture. “Here’s where you’ll be,” she said, lifting a large curtain to reveal the book-covered twinsize mattress beside a small dresser. “Is this—is this the bedroom?” “Yes.” “This isn’t a bedroom. There’s no door.” “There’s a bed.” “You said this was a two-bedroom apartment.” “It is. Converted. This is the second bedroom.” “This isn’t a bedroom. This is part of the kitchen or the living room or something. I don’t even know.” “Well it’s your bedroom now. I’ll clear the books off the bed right away. Sorry I forgot to do it before you got here.” “You sent me a photo of a real bedroom. That’s why I agreed to live here.” “That was a picture of this room.” “You conveniently excluded the lack of a door from the photo.” 20

Paul Oliver

“I’m sorry you don’t like it.” He squinted. “You have something on your eyelid,” he said. “Looks painful.” “It’s a stye.” “How long has it been there?” “A couple weeks.” “You should put a warm compress on it.” She had neglected to clear her books from the bed, and she had neglected to use a warm compress for her stye. Pus, or whatever was in there, she didn’t really know, continued to fester. She saw the reddened pustule that protruded beneath her eye in the mirror every morning and every night. Yet she did nothing. The stye grew for another month after Alan moved in. What had been a red pustule was now a sizable bulge large enough to distort her vision. She pressed it with her forefinger. It felt like a hard lump, about as firm as the rubber eraser on the end of a pencil. She needed to see an ophthalmologist. Someone with sterilized eye-blades and an M.D. Alan’s presence in the apartment exacerbated her compulsion to masturbate. She discovered she liked to see him. She liked to watch him. She watched him pour almond milk into his cereal bowl. She watched him lumber from the bathroom to his room, dripping, in only a towel. She saw his silhouette as he dressed, flashes of flesh where the curtain parted. The layout of her apartment made voyeurism easy. The breakfast bar in her kitchen faced his room. She often perched atop the wooden kitchen stool and pretended to type an infomercial script while she peered through the slit in his curtain. She responded to any glimpse of his movements with ferocious manual friction. Her drawstring sweatpants easily accommodated a hidden hand. Once, when he unexpectedly emerged, she feigned a fierce itch on her thigh. He seemed oblivious. Even after memorizing Alan’s teaching schedule, Edith was reluctant to leave the apartment—she didn’t want to miss a moment of 21

WEST 10TH

him. To remain omnipresent was the only way to know, with absolute certainty, everything Alan did in her apartment. But one afternoon she noticed an old file on her laptop: an infomercial she had written, about a year ago, for a high-end nanny cam system called PinCam. These nanny cams were not secret cameras in teddy-bear eyeballs; the PinCam system, installed by professionals, recorded footage through nearly imperceptible pinhole apertures in walls. She knew Best Buy sold the system, along with same day installation, and she knew, since it was a Thursday, Alan wouldn’t return to the apartment until around eight o’clock. On the downtown Lexington Avenue line, hurtling towards the Best Buy at Union Square, she felt awash in relief. The store clerk said installation would take four to six hours, and she could access live and recorded footage anytime through an app on her phone. He reassured her installation would be complete before 8:00 P.M. She handed him her credit card—the one she rarely used, only for emergencies. When the installation crew arrived at her apartment she lay supine on her bed, arm vibrating, fingers tensed, thighs pulsing. She was locked in an airplane bathroom with Alan, his hand over her mouth, his hot breath in her ear—until her door buzzer interrupted everything. She let the crew inside; they clambered up the narrow stairs. Power tools and odd electrical equipment strewed the worn hardwood floors. Three workers total. “Show us where you want the cameras, ma’am,” said the boss. Edith penciled X marks on all three walls in Alan’s room, two in the bathroom (one near the sink, one in the shower), one in the kitchen, and one in her own room. The crew gathered their equipment and went to work. By the time Alan returned, the cameras were operational, streaming to Edith’s phone. Alan set down paper bags full of groceries in the kitchen. She watched him put the groceries away. He picked his nose and wiped a booger underneath the lip of the countertop. Boogers didn’t disgust her. She never ate her own, but she liked to pick her nose and flick the dry ones. Alan went to his room. Edith kept watching while he undressed 22

Paul Oliver

down to his boxer-briefs. She preferred men who wore regular baggy boxers, whose testicles, she imagined, could flap freely against their thighs as they walked. She had read somewhere that men who wore boxer-briefs and regular briefs had lower sperm counts than men who wore boxers. But maybe it was the other way around. She couldn’t remember. She wanted to ask Alan where he bought his underwear. Such intimate garments deserved careful consideration, she believed. She bought her own underwear from a boutique—everything was hand sewn in a southern Italian town with a label to prove it. Her seven pairs of panties were the most expensive clothes she owned. She rarely washed them. The amount of hair on Alan’s chest and belly surprised her— dense black curlicues. It grew in a sort of T-shape from the band on his boxer-briefs up and outward to his nipples. He was supposed to have smooth, porcelain pectorals and a raw abdomen, all made tacky with sweat. That’s the way she imagined him. Like a boy engorged to the size of a man. She watched him for the next four hours until he fell asleep, and she continued to watch even as he dozed. The rhythmic rise and fall of his chest soothed her; it lulled her to a liminal level of consciousness. At some point during the early morning hours she sleepwalked to the kitchen. Wakeful awareness besieged her just as her hand gripped the handle on the microwave, one digital green second left on the timer. A warm Hot Pocket, her prize. Alan’s daily schedule determined Edith’s for the next several weeks. When he was at the apartment she was on her phone, entranced by the live feed. Too entranced even to masturbate. She just watched him. She only slept when he slept, and he didn’t sleep much. At three, four, sometimes five in the morning, his eyes would finally close. He woke every weekday at seven-thirty and returned around eight in the evening. Edith enjoyed his morning routine the most. That was her favorite part of the day. Tousled hair, bleary eyes, he wandered to the bathroom to shave, shit, and shower. Sometimes he forgot to brush his teeth, she noticed. 23

WEST 10TH

Edith found time to work during the day while Alan was at Columbia. The Shower Shimmy people told her they were “extremely dissatisfied” with her first draft and terminated her contract. But she had a draft due soon for another product called Poop Stick, a cheap toilet plunger with some sort of novel functionality she hadn’t bothered to learn yet. What improvements could be made to a toilet plunger, anyway? she wondered. The inventors were young twentysomethings, as infantile and boorish as the name they’d chosen for their product. Trust fund babies, probably. But since she hated her job she rarely felt compelled to do any work. Edith lived in coffee shops with her laptop. Rarely the same shop—she didn’t want people to remember or even notice her. She told herself she would work on infomercials and instead Googled warts and fungus and Staph infections and goiters until she got hungry or thirsty. When she got hungry or thirsty she found the nearest food cart and ordered a lamb gyro and a Poland Spring. Full bellied and bladdered, she’d find another coffee shop and do some more Googling (ways to die, medieval torture devices, what is cloud computing, world record for swallowing billiard balls). She always returned home before Alan. She ate Hot Pockets for dinner. The days continued this way, unbroken by any substantial conversation with Alan, or anyone else, really. She eluded him as much as she watched him. But one evening, a foggy Thursday, he caught her in the kitchen. “Hey, um, can we talk about something? I know I’ve been distant while I’ve been living here. But do you have a minute?” “Sure. Absolutely,” said Edith. But she wanted to say No and fuck no. “So, look. I owe you an apology. Long overdue. For prom.” “Oh,” she said. She wanted to fire a nail-gun into her ear. “Yeah. I know. Yeah—I’ve been thinking about what to say, how to say it, ever since you messaged me about the room here. And I’m going to do a bad job, even though I’ve been thinking about it every day. Anyway. I’m sorry. I had a big crush on you back then, and you 24

Paul Oliver

looked so beautiful that night—I didn’t know how to handle myself. I’d never been with a girl like that before. And no one told me—I didn’t know. I didn’t know that what happened in the car that night was wrong. It felt good. But it was wrong. The whole thing was wrong. I knew it was wrong when you started ignoring me afterwards. It has haunted me—still haunts me. So I’m sorry. I must’ve made you feel like an object. I’m sorry.” He began to cry. “You did.” “I did w-what?” “Made me feel like an object.” They sat together in the kitchen, without speaking, while he continued to cry. She watched him cry. When he stopped, he said, “I also need to let you know that I found another place to live. Somewhere that has a bedroom with a door. I found it a while ago, actually. Also,” he pointed at her eye, “you should really get that stye looked at.” “Mhm. When do you move out?” “End of the month.” After a pause—“Are we good?” “No.” “Hm.” “But,” said Edith, “I didn’t know you thought about those things. I’m glad that I know now.” She went to her room, closed the door, and watched him sit alone in the kitchen. Alan moved out. Edith didn’t offer to help him with anything. Days of solitude passed, marked only by empty cartons of Ben and Jerry’s. When there were twelve empty cartons, Edith decided to call an ophthalmologist’s office. Her stye hurt, and it was increasingly impairing her vision. She didn’t scream at the receptionist like she wanted to when the receptionist said she needed a referral for an appointment. She calmly explained that her situation warranted attention, that her vision was blurry because of the stye, that if she couldn’t get an appointment she’d probably gouge her eye out with the dirty spoon she’d been using to eat whole pints of ice cream. The receptionist said Let me see what I can do and Edith said Thank you and the 25

WEST 10TH

receptionist said Okay the doctor has half an hour tomorrow at 3:30 in the afternoon. Edith arrived the next day at the ophthalmologist’s office at 3:52 in the afternoon. She signed in; she sat on a sticky chair; she followed the nurse when she heard her name. A man in a white lab-coat entered the room. “Hi hello there, I’m Dr. Rothstein, pleasure to meet you.” “I’m Edith.” “Hi there, Edith. Get lost on the way here?” “Um, no. No problems getting here.” “Interesting. Well, you know, your appointment was for 3:30. It’s now,” the doctor looked at his watch, “3:57. Your appointment ends in three minutes.” The doctor produced a jovial smile. “All kidding aside, I should be heading out from the office right now. My son has a little league baseball game that starts at 4:30. He’s the pitcher.” “Oh okay, I’ll reschedule.” “That’s an impressive stye you’ve got there.” The doctor bent to look closer. “Yeah, yeah. That’s nasty all right.” Edith squeezed the thing with her thumb and forefinger. Dr. Rothstein furrowed his brow. “Have you been doing that often? Squeezing it like that?” “I guess so, sometimes.” “You really shouldn’t be doing that. You really shouldn’t. That’ll make it much worse.” “So when do you want to reschedule?” “Reschedule? You think I’m letting you leave here with that on your face? No way. Certainly not. You’re here now, and I’m here now, and we’re going to slice that gusher open. I don’t want you to have to come back and get lost again.” The doctor rubbed his chin. “Wow. That’s a gusher all right. What a stye. I’ll be back. You wait right here.” “Okay.” Dr. Rothstein returned with a rolling cart which had a tray of stainless-steel instruments on top. He picked up a scalpel. 26

Paul Oliver

“You know what this is?” he said, brandishing the blade. “That’s a scalpel.” “Correct.” He put the scalpel down. “Afraid of needles?” he asked. “Not particularly.” “Good.” He picked up a syringe and said, “Close your eye.” Edith felt the syringe puncture somewhere near the affected part of her eyelid. The doctor left the room again and returned after a few minutes. He held the scalpel and said, “Hopefully the numbing agent has set in completely. This’ll be quick—don’t open your eye.” With an adept motion, Dr. Rothstein sliced open the stye. “FUCK FUCK FUCKING BASTARD.” The doctor laughed at Edith’s exclamations. “I guess the numbness didn’t set in all the way yet. Oh well, all done now. Hold this cotton pad on it for five minutes.” Edith pressed the pad on her face. “Sorry for swearing at you.” “It’s all good, all good. That must’ve hurt. If you hadn’t gotten lost on the way here and arrived on time maybe I wouldn’t have been in such a rush.” The doctor winked. “I’ve got a game to get to. The nurse will take care of you. Bye-bye.” When Edith removed the pad she saw what Dr. Rothstein meant when he had called her stye a gusher. Blood and pus soaked the pad and oozed down her cheek. She held the pad for five more minutes until the nurse entered and told her she could leave. She walked to a Dunkin Donuts across the street. She pulled out her phone and found Alan’s name in her contacts. New message. Copy, paste. She sent him a link to the PinCam live feed in her own bedroom.

Sara Miranda, Life is Gud in Barcelona

An Interview with Tony Tulathimitte

Tony Tulathimutte is a New York–based author who has written for The New York Times, VICE, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New Republic, N+1, Playboy, and The Paris Review. He is the recipient of a Whiting Award and an O. Henry Award, and his debut novel, Private Citizens, has been called the “the first great Millennial novel” by New York Magazine. Currently, he teaches a writing class in Brooklyn called CRIT. *** WEST 10TH: How do you write (day-to-day, when, where and how)? Which medium do you like to work with? If you use your computer, which font do you like to write in? Where do you find inspiration for your characters, settings and plot points? TULATHIMUTTE: I’m a computer guy but will go longhand to keep from fucking around with what I’ve already written if I need to just squeeze a draft out. I like a basic Times New Roman, which ever since the shift to Calibri will end up marking me as a “product of my era.” It really doesn’t matter though, font fussiness is for poets. As for inspiration, like every other writer, I get it wherever I can get it, but inspiration doesn’t count for much in writing. WEST 10TH: Similarities between you and your character Will, both being Asian and having worked in tech, have often been pointed out. Do you at any level resent this identification or do you find it natural? How much of yourself do you see/integrate in all your characters? 29

WEST 10TH

TULATHIMUTTE: I did worry about being identified with Will on the basis of race, which ended up being core to his character. I wanted him to self-consciously inhabit a stereotype, as a way of getting at one of the more invidious aspects of racism, the way that its gaze gets internalized into a DuBoisian double consciousness. Then I refracted that through Internet-era image culture and Asian-American identity. In other words, I knew people would see Will as The Asian Character, and Will knows it too, and that’s what’s fucked him up. Anyway, Will is no more or less autobiographical than the other protagonists. And even if it were memoir it couldn’t be comprehensively accurate. All narrative is fiction in the sense that it arranges and frames experience selectively. Like, in this interview, I can claim these opinions as my own, without claiming that it adds up to anything like an accurate picture of me. I’m trying to be interesting, for one thing. WEST 10TH: As an Asian “millennial” writer, how do you grapple with people’s expectations of the kind of fiction you should write? Do you have any advice for young minority writers who may feel obligated to write explicitly about their identities? TULATHIMUTTE: One paradox of developing as a writer is that at first you rely on external reception to gauge your improvement, but ultimately you’ll never be happy with your writing until you can make your goals strictly intrinsic. This isn’t to say feedback is useless; it’s about using feedback to strengthen your work on its terms, ignoring that which wants it to be otherwise, and exercising your gratitude and spite. WEST 10TH: How valuable do you find satire as critique in a world that seems to have gone insane? In a world where people can’t tell the difference between Onion and NYT article headlines anymore etc. TTULATHIMUTTE: I don’t know if satire has ever been useful in recent history. It didn’t work for Vietnam or Afghanistan or Iraq. It has 30

An Interview with Tony Tulathimitte

produced no change I’m aware of. If by “valuable” you mean aesthetically effective, right now you’d find the best stuff in reality TV and not fiction. Nathan Fielder is just a god-tier satirist of capitalism and celebrity, it’s like watching a comedy version of the Milgram experiment. The one Sacha Baron Cohen bit where he got a congressman to humiliate himself so badly it led to an actual resignation, that was good. But in general the powerful are shameless and humiliation-proof and can and should only be usurped. Fortunately I don’t write a ton of satire. I think my writing just kind of sounds like it. WEST 10TH: How does one write sincerely and with vulnerability in world where humor is a self-effacing tool and irony is performed as a defense mechanism? TULATHIMUTTE: Okay so I’m an elder millennial and veteran of the Irony vs. Sincerity Wars of the aughts. I’m Team Irony and we lost big, but not because of like 9/11 or Jesse Thorn or David Foster Wallace. It’s because irony doesn’t scan as effectively as hyperbolic sincerity online. But I see no reason to prefer one to the other, neither are values in and of themselves, both need to be earned, and it’s not like you have to choose, and who knows if it’ll even be read as intended, or at all? WEST 10TH: Do you see your writing as political? Do you think writing should, as you’ve mentioned before, “enlighten or emancipate”? TULATHIMUTTE: Here I would distinguish between writing about political issues vs. writing intended to affect political change. I do the former, and you could argue that it’s impossible not to, but I know better than to confuse literary fiction for activism. I think that fiction *can* have political effects, it just usually happens in unintended ways. Like the Thai coup protests a few years ago—people defiantly read 1984 in public until it was banned, then did the Hunger Games salute, also banned. I love reading and writing political stuff, it just shouldn’t be anyone’s idea of praxis. 31

WEST 10TH

WEST 10TH: What kind of impact do you want your books to have on your readers and on the world? What is the most flattering response you could receive for your writing? What do you consider your most notable accomplishment? TULATHIMUTTE: I love money and compliments but I don’t care about impact. The best flattery is strong criticism that both comprehends and adds to the writing. People can like your book without getting it. Intellectual investment is the real appreciation. I thought Sarah Nicole Prickett’s review of my novel in Bookforum was superbly accurate, even though it contains virtually no flattery, except for the phrase “militantly ironic,” which I do take as a compliment. Good criticism can even redeem bad writing. WEST 10TH: Do you have any suggested reading? These could be books, twitter feeds, reddit threads, instagram hashtags . . . TULATHIMUTTE: Just anything? The best IG animal accounts are @chillwildlife, @earlboykins2, and @realllllllycooldogs with 7 L’s I believe. I love Achewood and Paranoia Agent and Samantha Schweblin’s Fever Dream and both Sally Rooney novels. Malcolm Harris’s Kids These Days is correct and useful. Andrea Long Chu’s Paper View newsletter and her review of Jill Soloway’s memoir is just full of third-degree burns. The indie game Return of the Obra Dinn is like Raft of the Medusa meets Clue meets non-racist Lovecraft. I got around to reading Alissa Nutting’s Tampa and you know a book’s good when it makes you shower more. WEST 10TH: Can you speak about CRIT? Who (what kind of writer) is it meant for? How is it different from other writing workshops? Why did you feel the need of establishing your own program? TULATHIMUTTE: CRIT is a writing class I teach out of my living room in Brooklyn. I started it because I knew I wanted to teach, but 32

An Interview with Tony Tulathimitte

not within the confines of the academic or private workshop system. Its aims are to provide writers with all the craft pedagogy they could ever need, realistic career prep, and most importantly, community— many people who sign up just don’t know any other writers. Since 2017 I’ve offered over $13,000 in financial aid to make it more accessible to broke writers. So far almost every CRIT session has had a writing group come out of it, which is not a necessity, but is a massive boon to morale and practical support. The end goal is to get outside funding via fiscal sponsorship or nonprofit status, make the class entirely free to attend, and eventually form robust alternatives to the New York publishing industry with a big-ass network of small, diverse, tight-knit writing groups. Maybe they’ll go on to do their own publications and agencies and institutions. To quote Sarah Schulman’s The Gentrification of the Mind, which partly inspired the class, “One hundred radical students in low-income writing classes in New York City could actually have an impact on our literature.” I’ll be hitting a hundred by the end of the year. WEST 10TH: Are you working on any new projects right now? TULATHIMUTTE: Sadly yes.

Maria Garland, Survival

Dawn Wendt

La Pigeon Winner of the Editors’ Award in Prose

aris felt the way cold water goes down a parched throat— refreshing, with a slight hint of desperation. The thick air smelled like marzipan and expensive perfumes. It was a beautiful Friday night with a vibrant strawberry sunset that everyone else seemed to be captivated by, dancing under the rising moonlight to songs they’d heard a million times, cheeks and bodies red as the horizon. She was looking up instead of at him. He was on his fifth or sixth, maybe, she’d stopped counting after three. Her first glass was still half full. The party raged on around them, but they remained untouched on the deck outside unnervingly stuck the way they always were—a kept-to-themselves kind of couple. The isolated, outdoor deck was fitted with a wooden railing and tables with stools, ashtrays, and the little glass of popcorn that came with every drink order. It was the popcorn that drew the pigeons, shooed off by women’s’ stilettos and men’s loafers back into Parisian oblivion. When their conversation ran dry, she piped up to fill in the silence. “You know bananas are going to extinct in a few years?” She tried. He turned to her, and frowned. “What?” “Never mind.” He nodded and turned back towards the setting sun, taking its time to get there, unusually later than she was used to. He always claimed that her sense of humor was off-beat, although lately it seemed that word was becoming less and less of a compliment. A woman came up to them, speaking in fast French, greeting the boy-whose-touch-was-now-too-much and then herself. The way she looked at him made it look like she wished they could trade places. 35

WEST 10TH

The girl actually with him wished the same. He made no point of introducing either of them. He didn’t need to. Next to them, she watched a small, particularly brave, pigeon trotting mindlessly around the deck, avoiding other partygoers taking a smoke break or requiring a breath of much-needed air, looking for any popcorn reminisces on the wooden floor. Parisian pigeons were, surprisingly, not at all any different from American ones. They still trudged through crowds expecting people to move for them, and seemed to miraculously avoid flying and crashing into someone no matter how increasingly short the possible moment of impact was arriving. They could wiggle themselves out of anything. The second wish of the night—she wished she was a pigeon. They were signs of a dirty environment, probably very disease ridden, and weren’t all that pretty to look at, which made them the perfect candidate for the next reincarnation. She could be avoided, free to search for breadcrumbs whenever and wherever she pleased. Maybe she would choose to fly to Paris, and an image of a pigeon’s transatlantic flight came into mind. She wondered if it would even be possible for a bird as lazy pigeons seemed to be. But then again, pigeons were always busy living for the next breadcrumb closest to them, they certainly wouldn’t be interested in crossing the Atlantic for the same sort of thing. When the fast-speaking, red-lipped woman left, he started smoking a cigarette. He was telling her about a concert he’d like to go to, a band she’d never heard of, and she only pretended to be listening. Her eyes were on the brave little pigeon, who was still traversing on the deck, strategically avoiding footwear intended to shoo it off. It seemed he found some nachos plastered to the wooden deck after a high heel and a few Long Islands got the best of three girls in cocktail dresses. He carefully avoided the jalapeños. “Hey, are you listening to me?” No. She was watching intensely, the bass of a rap song booming all around them as the pigeon started to get adventurous with the ground it was maneuvering through. It was getting a bit cocky as it 36

Dawn Wendt

tried to traverse through an increasing density of shoes that could provide an unfavorable outcome for the poor guy. A loud laugh rang through the crowd, and then a horrifying yelp. She watched the pigeon’s curiosity bring about the brutal end. What had been a joke that left a girl doubling over in laughter ended in an unexpected stabbing. Right through the heart, it appeared, although she was no expert in pigeon anatomy. The pigeon-stabber removed the talon from the deceased bird’s body, but made no effort to clean up after her deed. She retreated inside with her friends, perhaps a little paler than before. The pigeon died because it was somewhere it didn’t really belong. Suddenly the arm around her waist felt slimy to the touch, and she wiggled out of the closeness. She looked at him and thought up all the excuses she could make. Bathroom. Need Some Air. Have to Make a Call. He would believe any of them. He would let her go. And yet she knew she would just have to turn right back around, step right back under the heel of his stiletto-shaped arms that would leave her the same as they had been for three whole years, with a big needle shot through the middle of her stomach. Liver gorged, stomach impaled, entrails sprawled out on the floor of the outside deck of a nondescript Parisian bar. And then, she looked at him for the first time that night, and she thought of her third wish.

Ladan Jaballas, Paint Drop

Julia Torres

(This is Not a) Love Poem for Elon Musk

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing I’ll tell you is that every morning I wake up to one more spider web on the window sill and in my bathroom there is dark mold on the ceiling that they thought they could conceal with a cellophane white paint coat and the closet light has a mind of its own, leaves you blinded when you need it most and on my morning walk to work there is vomit on the sidewalk and I think, really I truly think that I’d rather be a ball of light than a body. There is something about grocery stores that makes me feel invisible. Hunger and everything that walks behind it. There is a bird nest somewhere with too many mouths to feed and there you are in the canopy, fists full of worms, fishing for stars. A personality quiz poses the question would you rather explore the bottom of the ocean or the depths of outer space and I pick ocean, because I know I can’t breathe in either but at least I know how to swim and apparently this makes me an introvert. It’s not like one big wave hitting the shoreline it’s more like a thousand smaller waves crashing into each other before they even see the coast. In the margins of my water-damaged notebook I write do you ever thirst for something you don’t have a name for and in the dream in which you leave on the bus in the pouring rain I finally hand you the letter that says I have the answers to the questions you haven’t asked yet. 39

WEST 10TH

I am crossing over into a plane to which I cannot take you. Let me buy you orange juice. With pulp, the way I like it, and you might say through your fox smile you might as well be eating an actual orange and I might counter with no mercy then why don’t you go down there and pick one off the tree yourself? To which you might respond you can’t risk the encounter with birds. Come down from your tree before I cut you down. If I didn’t love the feeling of walking barefoot in warm grass so much I might leave the Earth behind too, dive headfirst into the expanding darkness, ankles untethered.

Larenz Brown

Biology Final Exam Review Guide

A springbok with a wristwatch plays hopscotch down the sidewalk in midtown Manhattan. He keeps a deed to the boardwalk and the thimble in his wallet in the pocket on the inside of his coat. His tie clip has a tie clip and his horns match his belt buckle. Eels shine his hooves for an hour and fifteen minutes every time he goes to the airport. A dolphin and a human enter a consensual relationship with no common language. The dolphin knows love is dark and quiet She leads advocacy groups for the development of underwater MRI to display truth in color and in blood. The public screams blasphemy but her idol is Helen Keller. Long-lashed camels stage a revolution and free themselves from desert slavery. Water hole access has since become subscription-based. Piranhas post particles of articles about veganism. An elephant is seduced by exodus and walks and swims and walks to Korea for Gangnam and plastic surgery. Ears too big belly too round skin too gray too wrinkly and no mirror is a kind mirror. Fluorescent bathroom lights are so unkind.

WEST 10TH

Alligators roll the sheets from lovers and plead amnesia in the morning. The snake sheds his skin just in time for fashion week. Cheetahs lie. Lions cheat. They both wonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t hire tigers. And fire ants spend days out by the pool.

Ladan Jaballas, Portrait Twist

Kassidy McIntosh

It Seems I Am America

My roommate is a communist, and I am alone in America, watching the red flag play in the wind born from our fire escape. America wants me dead. It seems I am America in the gyre of my mind. I am America, spinning like a Kentucky tornado, talking like a bad omen. When I move too quickly and fall down, when I skip breakfast when I want you like a predator when I use you like a capitalist. There can be no ethical consumption under capitalism and yet, I devour you like so many presidents before me. Their bodies fall down at my alter. Their skin peels away like an orange rind in the hand of your mother. She places it in the trash, delicately, so as not to disturb anyone. Tell my future, America. When is the next trial happening? I canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t keep up. Bad brain medicated. Cannot make up my mind. Cannot listen to another podcast, America. A loud Soho bar: I yell in your ear and pretend we are whispering under your bedsheets. I pretend youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll take me home after a long night of New York. But your hands are cold when we kiss goodbye. 44

Kassidy McIntosh

It seems America is me: tired weekend routine white knuckles and money, kissing colonizers and liking it, their unbeatable eyes and wide smiles. I climb in their mouths and light a match. I see the past down their throats. My skin is coffee and half and half. I stand for the anthem. Your mouth tastes like dirty water. I stand for the anthem. I dreamt you murdered my brother. I stand for the anthem. I’m coming to terms with our sameness, America. It’s a real nightmare, you should know. I do not understand when you ask me if I hate you. I say stop. No, I don’t hate you. I want YOU! Your country needs you so bad right now. Poor, misunderstood America, disrespected by Prufrock and college students. The Animals taught me how to fake it for when I began to love you, that is not what I meant at all; that’s not it at all. But there you are again, American made. Beguiled only by rich black faces on TV, in your ears, in your sheets. The others are so hard to remember. I believe they are invisible when they leave their own neighborhoods. It seems I am America, an East Coast hurricane and a forest fire. Wet for a woman’s touch, a woman’s tongue, aching to be pushed against a wall and called the greatest in the world. 45

WEST 10TH

Again, I am America keeping you all out. America: where Mary blesses me on holy Jefferson Street, where Jesus looks up my skirt on the J, and my father asks me if I buy into all this climate change business. I say, of course I do; what do you mean; of course I do. Black gentrifier says, fuck a wash and fold fuck four dollar pizza fuck killing myself. Zip up my dress. Have whatever youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re having. Buy shots for the table and take no one home. Would you throw your body on a fire for me, Dido? Dido, my dream girl, would you stop at a red light or spit in my mouth instead? Will Charon drive my taxi tonite? Why waste our time, young America plotting Palestinian revolutions from a broken couch in Brooklyn scanning the M train for survivors, allies giving dolls to black children that look like them showing them where bullets enter and exit pointing to where it hurts going to drag shows and voting for democrats combatting zionism with cigarettes and dirty underwear. I wonder what Ginsburg would make of me now. Would he call me a fascist? Would he call me baby? Would he tighten my bra strap and tell me Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m free? Satan Says your president is a cunt and I nod from inside my coffin with Sharon Olds and Morgan Parker and a chameleon to keep me warm. But what do you say, my darling? Will you kiss me already? Will you say the word black with no pause? Will you say the word black and mean it? Even though I am too stubborn to change? 46

Kassidy McIntosh

Even though I am so very beautiful? It seems I am America: kid in the horrible jakes. You are dancing, dancing around me, touching my inner thigh. You say you will never die, but I know you will. I know you will. Tomorrow when I bomb another village, when I fuck another intern, when I cage another baby and save another fetus. Perhaps you will die when I rig it allâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;everything! When I shoot up another school so everyone will know thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s just how it is. It will certainly be before I change my mind. America straightens its curly hair America wears sunscreen at night America sports fishnets America does cocaine on the weekends America cut its cable last year America touches itself to men and women America listens to Tracy Chapman America hangs posters of Che Guevara America buys avocados in bad neighborhoods America is trying to get rich quick America is not listening.

Katerina Voegtle

American Dream

1. It’s a steep way up to this City on a Hill. Dixie, Winn Dixie, Dust Bowl, Death Valley. Sweet home, home on the range, color of a scab just before it breaks open. 2. In the backseat of a pickup, I sit between memories I’ve never made. My father a paper doll in a Navy uniform, come to lift my luggage from the bus station. Feeling our way in the dark, shadows shift to landmarks, and Sinatra tries to remind us of something from behind the radio. I wouldn’t say I know Frank, but I know his songs by heart. Maybe it’s the same thing? My lips taste of Shirley Temple, and bigband blue bursts from the speakers, luring me to some pooled past, 5 memories split among 5000. 3. The American Dream is a lawn that never ends. White-picket-fenced Manifest Destiny, the kinda lawn you can walk barefoot in. The kinda lawn you mow daily just because you can. The kinda lawn you can birth 2.5 kids and a dog on. Water that lawn. Fertilize that lawn. The biggest threat to the American Dream are brown spots. Brown spots can be caused by overfertilization or dog piss, but sometimes it’s just bad soil. 4. Sunbathing on stolen land—where do you place the doormat when “Welcome Home” is a spit in the face? The American Dream is just that—you can only see it when your eyes are closed. This sure isn’t land of the free, but you’ve got to be brave to make your home here. Because behind the welcome mat is a bed with a thousand ghosts and an oasis of lead-flecked Holy Water. 48

Katerina Voegtle

5. We’re all welcomed home in different ways. For my friend, it was a punch to the face, pavement’s kiss so passionate it nearly knocked his turban off. Red red red seeping into the yellow fabric. “Go home!” 6. But it’s also the smell of salt and magnolia, neon burning on an August night. The taste of warm grape soda on a Field of Dreams, barefoot prom dance that never ends. A beautiful and aching scar to which the mountains can only bear witness. 7. Social studies: shooting drill. Twenty small bodies against the bulletin board. Bulletin board, barricade. Once a week, Mr. Orsini tells us how, if the time comes, his 70-year-old body will shield us from the bullets as we jump from the third story window. Social studies. Shooting drill. Class dismissed, saved by the bell. 8. “This is my rifle. There are many like it, but this one is mine. My rifle is my best friend. It is my life. I must master it as I must master my life. Without me, my rifle is useless. Without my rifle, I am useless. I must fire my rifle true. I must shoot straighter than my enemy who is trying to kill me. I must shoot him before he shoots me. I will . . .” 9. Electric night at a baseball game, dusk air the texture of cotton candy, dissolving just when you think you’ve grasped it. The night only exists in your headlights, anyway, and we play hide-and-seek in the tangled-up country roads. Campfire sparks turn to fireflies turn to stars. 10. Six and in my Sunday best, me and Saddam Hussein spend breakfast together. Me at the kitchen table, him on TV, me eating pancakes, him on the execution block. One last sip of orange juice and it’s time for church.

WEST 10TH

11. Marlboro Man, saddling up to ride from the mountains to the prairies to the oceans white with foam. A silhouette with leather hands, cutting his hair with a pocketknife. A puff of smoke in the blood-red dawn, disrobed emperor of the Wild West. 12. “My rifle is human, even as I, because it is my life. Thus, I will learn it as a brother. I will learn its weaknesses, its strength, its parts, its accessories, its sights and its barrel. I will keep my rifle clean and ready, even as I am clean and ready. We will become part of each other. We will . . .” 13. That cold molasses lake, summer-frozen: skinny dipping was our first freedom, flat chests burning against black inner tubes smelling of burnt rubber. The cold undercurrent a lingering reminder . . . Down there, the struggle for life is going on, the occasional thrashing of a fish punctuating the flat water. But up here, the late-August sky is the color of peach syrup, and the crickets are tuning for the night’s concert. 14. My uncle joins the NRA but he still has a Syrian accent. Superbowl on TV, sweet potatoes in the oven, he rushes to be the one to carve the Thanksgiving turkey. 15. With every Polish word butchered by my stiff, All-American tongue, I’m living out my grandparents’ American Dream. In the diner, my grandmother impatiently twists the right consonants from behind my teeth—gołąbki, pierogi. But it’s all a show. If she really wanted perfect pronunciation, she wouldn’t have spent generations ironing it out of all of our mouths. She joked that it was just to keep secrets from the kids. Maybe one of those secrets was her own mother’s name—leafing through photo albums, she stumbles over it. 16. Maybe the American Dream is just the river’s sweat dripping from oars between each stroke, droplets shattering the dawn. Maybe we’re expecting too much. Maybe we’re not expecting enough. 50

Katerina Voegtle

17. Things in my father’s closet: too many Hawaiian shirts. A poster of the Loch Ness Monster from his childhood he refuses to give up. Shoe polish in a rainbow of brown. More than one flag, properly folded. Nine empty cans of WD-40. Service khakis. Summer whites. A photograph of my mother with a perm. A napkin holder he made in Home Ec in seventh grade. A Winchester-22. A suit for each day of the week. 18. Blind plunge into an old quarry. Treetops soaked in honey. Movie theater hand jobs and drunk driving to the cemetery. 19. My little brother plays soldier all the way to the enlistment office. It’s his eyes, 20/20, that make him the Maverick my four-eyed fighter pilot of a father never could be, but it’s my father’s hands that guide the signature that makes it all official. The Holy Trinity: father, son, and Uncle Sam, an incestuous I-Want-You sticking its finger into our family photos. 20. “When Johnny comes marching home again Hurrah! Hurrah! We’ll give him a hearty welcome then Hurrah! Hurrah!” 21. Leather boots dangle off the hospital bed. Wayne McLaren, David McLean, David Millar, Eric Lawson, four muscled men dying under the same aseptic sheets. Together they are Marlboro Man, wheezing the last cancerous air out of sooty lungs. 22. Harvest time by the hanging tree, last apples clinging for dear life. The rest gather at the foot of the tree to putrefy together, a festering excess, a Thanksgiving bounty. 23. Maybe the American Dream is no more than four walls and an air mattress to fuck on.

WEST 10TH

24. “So be it, until victory is America’s and there is no enemy, but peace!” 25. And so, Rome fell, the sun rose again, and it was time for breakfast. 26. Oh yeah, it’s the American Dream. American Fever Dream. American Wet Dream. Back-whippin’, boot-lickin’ American Dream.

Sara Miranda, The Roofs of Montmartre

Poem by Ken Chen, Guest Contributor Ken Chen is the Executive Director of the Asian American Writersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Workshop, cofounder of CultureStrike, and the author of Juvenilia, selected by Louise Gluck for the Yale Series of Younger Poets.

Ken Chen

Essay on the Witness

I want to write a poetry of things, histories, and accountability. A novel of poetry, a mundi of poetry—no metaphor or color, language without saturation. What have I done? Nothing. And so the morning strikes us, flat as air. Did I say air? I meant “grief.” When the wind tore my umbrella into a skeleton, I swore at it as if it were a person. But why would I swear at a person? We often forget our kindness, as though we left it in our other pocket. We follow the trail of Law. Someone left the law as breadcrumbs pixelating like spores between the grass beneath the trees. The Law says, Leave this trail and transgress. Leave this trail so we know when to blame you. Leave so you know who you are.

Maria Garland, Your Thoughts Are Electric

Bailey Cohen

Self-Portrait as Yurico Holding His Mother’s Hand after Gabriel García Márquez El mundo estaba triste desde el Martes & we still call all of our ancestors by their first names. Watching butterflies adhere themselves to the cross-hatches behind plastic screened windows and confusing them for moths—it’s been becoming harder for me to witness anything & not think of it as a metaphor. In my mother’s kitchen, I scoop out papaya seeds with my bare hands. I know seventeen ways to cook pork & have never slaughtered a pig. My mother says I don’t like the food that I’m supposed to. I only say she would remember more than I would.

WEST 10TH

Self-Portrait as Yurico Eating a Strawberry Red-faced and enraged, I bite into red strawberries, my face blushing red. I read red words in a book my father read. All of the pages are red. All of the words are distractingly read. My skin, once red, is still red. I spit red blood out of my copper-filled mouth, ready to kiss a beautiful woman with my teeth stained red. The woman is wearing a long red dress. Our lips are being blasphemed into red. A thirteen-year-old niĂąo sits cross-legged atop a red train car holding a red cigarette with his red blood cascading from his nowreddening finger. Across the street, two men drink red wine from red cups sitting at a red plastic table. Their house is painted red. Behind it, the red sun sits, tinting the ocean red. Hell is white, and then, suddenly, a raw-meat red. I pick at a red scab and remove it. My skin, the red of a grapefruit. There is red, and then, more red. Even the sky is red. Even the roses. 58

Sara Miranda, Buildings on Buildings in Lisboa

Miguel Coronado

For a while I even forgot the peace lilies Winner of the Editorsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Award in Poetry

How the stems fell when my mother left to visit her family Not a single man among us could manage any compassion I was at the bottom of what remained The least understanding person there But I thank whatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s left of them My sisters of the dirt How they sing in my head the green, tired countries Lined in their veins And my little sister living there, singing in the leaves Her extra-light, spidery frame And let me hold you up on my fingernail, My littlest sister of dust What I cannot see but know better than anyone I thank you for all that you cover, that I forget The broken mesh of mosquito netting in the window, how beautiful the sunset is Barely balanced on its beam, the little worries cobwebbed in the corners of the room My shoulders crumpled over into the summer, to see the view from the apartment To see I could never fix or replace any of this So I stayed at the bottom, Biding my time up into a pile of tomorrows Letting a plant by a window remind me of small failures, Like an altar, saying tomorrow Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll make a new start, 60

Miguel Coronado

A new religion, for no other reason than a need to shut my hands together Into a self-forgiving lock Tomorrow my new god and I, we’re going places, Even through the dust in our eyes we’ll see everything I haven’t yet forgotten, will try not to There is a song here yet, Enough to last until tomorrow There’s music in a man splitting apart, That I cannot hear but know better than anyone, lilies, Lilies in the cracks between rib and falling heart Look up, tomorrow My mother will return to us, the lilies will straighten their shoulders

Contributors’ Notes FERNANDA AMIS is a freelance illustrator and writer. She studied graphic design at Central Saint Martins and is currently a junior in NYU Gallatin studying all things related to narrative. Fernanda’s drawings center on everyday civilian life, and the distortions and distempers that lie within it. LARENZ BROWN is a senior at NYU. He’s from Evanston, Illinois. He likes writing and hopes to develop educational technology. BAILEY COHEN is a queer Ecuadorian-American poet. He serves as associate editor for Frontier Poetry and his work can be found in publications such as Boulevard, Rattle (Poets Resist Series), PANK, Raleigh Review, and elsewhere. LILY COHEN is a first-year undergraduate and New York City native who makes a killer chocolate chip cookie and has really bad handwriting. She is passionate about making the fashion industry more environmentally sustainable (and is a co-founder of NYU’s Future Fashion Group), spending most of her money on movie tickets and candy, photography, the arts, music, travelling, going on long walks to procrastinate paperwriting, sitcoms, and the literary and poetic works of Betty Smith and CA Conrad. Above all though, she loves sharing greasy sweet potato fries with her loved ones and her dog. MIGUEL CORONADO is a senior at NYU, studying English and Creative Writing. An aspiring poet, he hopes to craft a life for himself out of poetry. IAN FISHMAN is a sophomore in Gallatin from Northampton, Massachusetts, studying Poetry and Critical Theory. He is a real human and not complex AI software moonlighting as a poet. You can most likely find him somewhere in the West Village screaming at pigeons about intersectionality, wishing he was Kenneth Koch. MARIA GARLAND is a junior studying Psychology in CAS. A native New Yorker, she enjoys taking her camera with her on long, pensive walks around 62

Contributors’ Notes the city. Through photography, she hopes to be able to capture a unique scene, whether there is a story or not. LADAN JABALLAS is a junior studying Urban Design and Architecture in CAS. She is minoring in Middle Eastern Studies and Business Studies. Ladan is originally from Ohio but chose NYU to further explore her artistic side. She enjoys all mediums of art but is particularly interested in photography, an interest that developed in middle school and has been with her since. CONNIE LI is a performer and writer completing her senior year at Steinhardt. In her writing, she explores themes of childhood and the environment, and in all her artistic pursuits hopes to spotlight Asian-American identity and contribute to efforts for inclusivity and accessibility. She currently studies violin with Gregory Fulkerson, composition with Joan La Barbara, and poetry with Catherine Barnett. KASSIDY MCINTOSH is a senior in the English department at NYU. Currently she is focusing on her Capstone project as part of the Creative Writing track, which will result in a collection of poetry. Outside of school, she works both at the Tamiment Library and at an independent publishing house and hopes to continue to work in publishing after graduation. SARA MIRANDA is a photographer, graphic designer, and writer who intends to use her interests in these creative disciplines towards her love for fashion as an artistic director for the advertisement campaigns of a fashion retailer. Born in Illinois but raised in Louisiana, Washington state, Wisconsin, and Illinois (again), she is a junior majoring in Art History with a minor in Digital Art and Design. You can check out more of her work at sarakmiranda. com. LEAH MUNCY is from a small town in Northern California. She’s a junior studying English and Creative Writing. She writes poetry, nonfiction, and fiction, and her work has been featured in Entropy and The Rumpus’ “This Week in Essays.” She would like to be a writer when she grows up. MONIQUE MUSE is a New York–based creative who uses photography and sculpture to observe the capacity of space and the environment in relation to 63

WEST 10TH the mental and physical space of humans. Monique enjoys documenting the calmness released from acknowledging the grandness of the natural entities in the world. She compares this to the minuscule space that she and every other human individually inhabits. Monique always finds herself designing and building furniture as well and hopes to figure out a way to bridge all of her creative pursuits someday. PAUL OLIVER grew up in Salt Lake City and now lives in Brooklyn. When heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s not working or writing, he enjoys eating sandwiches from his favorite deli, Lorimer Market. PRIYA PRASAD is at the very least alive, currently, and would certainly like to keep it that way for quite some time. She has numerous plans for the future, and if asked, would be able to respond coherently. This can only be done under certain conditions, like during a full moon, when she is at her most powerful. No, she is not werewolf. JULIA TORRES, originally from Chicago, is a junior in Gallatin with a concentration titled Narratives of Anti-Institutionalism, and a minor in Creative Writing. She has a birthmark on the back of her leg that looks like a face. This is her first publication. KATERINA VOEGTLE is a photographer and writer working in New York. Much of her work has to do with U.S. national myths and American tropes of masculinity. Currently, she is double-majoring in Social and Cultural Analysis and Photography. DAWN WENDT is a sophomore in GLS with a concentration in Critical Creative Production, focusing on creative writing and mixed-media expression. She is originally from Nashville, Tennessee.