2019– 2020
WEST 10TH NYU Creative Writing Program’s Undergraduate Literary Journal COLLEGE OF ARTS & SCIENCE
nyu creative writing program college of arts & science
2019–2020
West 10th publishes poetry, prose, and art by NYU’s undergraduate students. It is edited and produced annually by a student-run 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 has distinguished itself for more than three decades as a leading national center for the study of literature and writing. The faculty includes Catherine Barnett, Nathan Englander, Jeffrey Eugenides, Jonathan Safran Foer, Terrance Hayes, Edward Hirsch, Katie Kitamura, Yusef Komunyakaa, Hari Kunzru, Nick Laird, Joyce Carol Oates, Sharon Olds, Claudia Rankine, Matthew Rohrer, Zadie Smith, and Darin Strauss. The program director is Deborah Landau. West 10th NYU Creative Writing Program Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House 58 West 10th Street New York, NY 10011 west10th.org Copyright Š 2020 West 10th The Undergraduate Literary Journal of the NYU Creative Writing Program ISSN: 1941-4374 Printed in the United States of America
Editor-in-Chief
Travis Schuhardt
Managing Editor
Jake Goldstein
Prose Editors
Johanna Dong Victor Galov Aurora Huiza Katherine Elizabeth Robertson
Poetry Editors
Ian Fishman Eva Gu Cosmo Halterman de Ochoa Charlotte Hutzler Thomas Jiwon Lynch Sophia Rose Warren Ashley Shannon Wu
Art Editor
Julia Romero
Copy Editor
Taylor Stout
Staff Writers
Devanshi Khetarpal Noah Borromeo Alec Frey Dawn Wendt Jeannie Morgenstern
Executive Editors
Matthew Rohrer Darin Strauss Joanna Yas
Staff Advisor
Joanna Yas
TABLE OF CONTENTS Editor’s Note 7 Poems by Franny Choi, Guest Contributor 50 Contributors’ Notes 66
Poetry Devin Lee
9
Nebraska
Vivian Holland 13 Editors’ Award Winner
5th period by the lockers
Yagmur Akyurek
16
Three Poems
Angela Cai
33
Three Poems
Shawn Steinig
47
Veins
Gentle Ramirez
62
Two Poems
Prose Marguerite Alley 23 Editors’ Award Winner
Trespasser
Angela Cai
40
Animal Grief
Ethan Seavey
57
Mutual Putrefaction
Art Trevor Barker
6
Fisherman
GARCÍA
12
Left in the Rust
GARCÍA
15
Hopewell Junction
Sarah Levtich
21
Two Photographs
Trevor Barker
31
Two Photographs
Trevor Barker
39
Hanging Gardens
Sarah Levtich
48
Two Photographs
Trevor Barker
57
The Pianist
Trevor Barker
65
Heaven Surrounds Us
Trevor Barker
Cover
The Druid II
Trevor Barker, Fisherman
Editor’s Note
Though it may seem sentimental to say, there is something uniquely remarkable about sitting down in a room of editors to talk about submitted works. You might expect it to be a tooth-and-nail, bloodfor-blood sort of affair—and sometimes it is—but more often I’ve found a surprising gentleness to the process. It’s not moments of debate or arguing that fill my mind when I think of the creation of the journal you now hold in your hands, but the softness that comes in the moments after those moments, when the table is mostly silent and we’re unsure how to move forward, until, timidly, someone says: Hey, you know, I kind of really liked this one. It is this voice, this impulse, this gentle love of craft that has guided the creation of this year’s edition of West10th. Perhaps because of this, it is easy to express my gratitude for all of the editors who read the submissions and contributed to the selection process. With an almost entirely new editorial board this year, everyone brought to the journal a unique voice, talent, and energy, which all contributed to the identity of this year’s edition. Though not an easy process by any means, the passion and thoroughness of the editorial board made the process far easier (and, dare I say, more fun) than it could have been, and for this, too, I would like to express my thanks for the work put in by every single editor. The collaborative process was consistently exhilarating, from our greatest debates to the always-satisfying moment when everyone around the table agrees that, yes, these are the ones. With that, I would be remiss if I did not thank our wonderful contributors. Many of the poems and stories in this journal escape categorization or classification, and play with form and genre in the
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expressive, energetic way that only young artists can capture. I was consistently blown away by the quality of the submissions, and it was always a delight to read a piece and then not be able to stop thinking about it for days to come. It is this sensation that I hope to pass on to the readers of this journal, and it would not have been possible without your contributions. This issue would not have been possible without the generosity and support of the Creative Writing Program’s faculty. Without the guidance, patience, and support of Joanna Yas, this issue would simply not exist. We also want to thank Matthew Rohrer and Darin Strauss, our executive editors, for reading and selecting our Editors’ Award recipients, as well their constant support and advocacy for the journal. We would also like to acknowledge and thank Aaron Petrovich for the layout and design of these pages. Thank you, truly and immensely, to all of those who have worked tirelessly behind the scenes to help this issue come to life. Huge thanks are also in order to our guest contributor, Franny Choi, who has generously allowed us to publish three of her poems. I would also like to personally express my deepest gratitude to managing editor Jake Goldstein for doing so much management and work that I may forever be in his debt. Lastly, thank you to all of you who are reading this journal. Whether you’ve been reading West 10th since the beginning or this is your first time, we would not be where we are today without your support, and we cannot thank you enough. Travis Schuhardt
8
Devin Lee
Nebraska
My grandfather used to have a body like the corn stalks Six feet and eight inches Of fragile limbs And a face like home That grew strong and steady Out of the soft Nebraska earth By the time he was sixteen His shoes had stretched into legends And his shoulders were carved into wings That carried his name Across basketball courts And back roads Through hard hands And hollow cities The Giant of Lincoln was scratched into school desks I’ve never seen a photo of him from back then Where he didn’t look like a monument Built high above the class of 1947 To commemorate every man from the East Who chased pictures of the plains Until he dropped dead in the Heartland With hopes that one day his sons would eat so much And want so little That their shoulders could grow past God
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I think that’s why they liked to print his name in the papers And hang his picture on the walls of the bank Because if you tilted your head just right He looked like a romantic notion that was barely breathing Because his torso was so long And his shoulders so broad That you could paint a map of the whole county With all its rivers, railroads, And waves of grain On the skin across his chest Where he could bring it back to life Over and over again With the rise of his lungs Maybe my neighbors back east would say That there’s nothing too impressive About being the biggest name In “nowhere” But I don’t think he would mind Because he threw away that letter from Harvard The second he remembered You can’t see stars over Boston Because he married the first girl to bang on his motel room door And say “keep it down” Because he’s been a registered Republican since he met her But hasn’t voted that way since he decided it wasn’t right At the age of 74 Because he knows that names are only as good As the men they are built on And even now As the body that guided him Wilts towards its final season I’d like to believe he’ll go knowing 10
Devin Lee
That there was a time When empty roads waited for him To march down their middle And make them holy again Clearing themselves of every car and every cricket Just so the Giant of Lincoln might have a chance To walk along their spine With his arms outstretched Towards those vast, forgotten fields And let his head drift Dazed into the Nebraska night
11
GARCĂ?A, Left in the Rust
12
Vivian Holland
5th period by the lockers Winner of the Editors’ Award in Poetry
But you see I don’t want to fuck him, she said, folding her legs, they all want to fuck him I am in love with him, she said, and she pinkened across the nose, they only want him for his biceps because he could throw them around like rag dolls and I don’t know he just lives in a little villa inside my head, she said, they all treat him like an armchair or some prized race horse they have never written a word for him they don’t even hear him when he talks and anyway she is the one who wears him on her finger and she made the promises and she lived the years so really no I’m not really in love with him she 13
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is in love with him, she said, and she began to cry.
14
GARCĂ?A, Hopewell Junction
15
Yagmur Akyurek
I’m Standing in Pioneer Valley Wishing for It
On this splotchy patch of pavement, I want more pavement to kiss, more curb to wobble on, and a bush. I want pepper jack on pepper jack and my teeth pointed. I’m in Amherst wishing for Amherst, to hide hungry behind farmhouses, your leg entwined around mine and the bunches of rye. I want to roll out the muscles in my calf, then strain them again. I want the flash on and I want the flash off of my face, please everyone stop looking at me. Hot sunburn peeling off my skin, I want to shed whole like a snake and have my body set ablaze, my face setting the sun and the sun not setting. I want my arms out. I want my head tilted and eyes squinted, wind circling like Salem witches, 16
Yagmur Akyurek
feet submerged in the water till I am nothing but a stick figure in the reservoir. I want to bury the shade and knock out every lamplight, breaking the glass in my mouth and watching the shards spill out. I see it all fall: broken bulb, cardinal blood. I wish I weren’t wearing a white dress. Do you hear me? I wish I didn’t always have to clean myself up.
17
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On the Heartland
Why do people in the countryside never pump their own gas? Nine miles of searching and fear echoing half of my face, I should be pretty grateful now: some cigarettes and a piece of pumpkin pie in my car, fuel in my stomach, the dew disappearing from the grass. Oh, how I dread the dew. It means night has come, probably from the side of sky that is always turning, always craving a piece of security, but for what? I finally have gas; why still the questions? I don’t know when to look pretty and just shut up. My therapist says only half of me lives life to the fullest. The other half is never satisfied. It’s not like I pick dew violets in the Wisconsin fields, wondering if I am pretty or not. But I do long to live. I burn the wax on both sides of the candle. I meet girls behind the center city gas station, sharing smoke and folding tardy slips until the piece of cheese in the sky has moved across the plate, and the bowl piece is tired of being passed around, only half desired. Afterwards, I sleep. I do not stick my head in the gas fired oven. I place empty bottles of Mountain Dew into neat rows, like they are concertgoers swaying side to side and I am the main act. It’s a pretty 18
Yagmur Akyurek
drab situation. I want my head to be a pretty place, with vines growing from all four corners and pieces of lavender strewn about, like the family farm in Minnesota, the side of the Sandstone curb where daisies are not a miracle. On behalf of all Midwesterners, I love the Midwest. Even its raindrops like honey dew, its thunder and windchill. On unspoiled Madison days, I hit the gas like smacking a mosquito dead on the wall and gas myself up in the side view mirror: I am not pretty, I am beautiful! I would like to believe this, even when dew drops spill from my eyes, even when I have to piece myself whole like a landscape puzzle at half past eleven on the bathroom floor, lying on my side. In the gas station parking lot, with the dew long gone and a half-moon etched into the pretty daylight with a piece of a chain, I would like to be on my own side.
19
The Aftermath
Julia says the girlfriend of the class president should be called First Lady but I am always lastvin line to present during U.S. History and my legs are feeling perpetually stubbly. (My mother says I should befriend some more hairy Middle Easterns). Plus I was never your girlfriend. “Too soon,” you say coolly, meanwhile the entirety of my life hangs in the back of my head, at the turn-around point where tender and ever-moving becomes flat and scalp, sometimes pimples. But follicles grow and curls ricochet. They know nothing else, I don’t blame them. Frothy white suds and tang of the mulberry fluid, you are rotten like the milk my mother refuses to toss. You are what has happened to me. Self-less but my selfish is still. I get cat-called and feel validated. My head is lull and saggy, like a wet sock after sledding or old man balls, held together only by the neon orange string from my first pair of Target Converse. Sly lick of the lips my only gratification amongst chap and flake. Flake like you. But at least you kissed me better than I licked me. Do you love me still? But that is just The Kooks talking, not me. I drive on Route 2 and watch the hills of the white trash winery roll over into Wealthy W Towns, wondering how much patience I will have for Wellesley tonight, but my most important right toe is beginning to twitch and all I yearn for today is to step on the gas pedal full-through, to feel the motorized jolt of insoluble completion and popliteal freedom, rush of MetroWest gust and blur of quaking aspen, emptying my RAV4 of its manpower like I could not do to you. People say you could eat your finger like a carrot if your mind didn’t stop you. I think it is the same with my foot on the gas. 20
Sarah Levtich, Earth Backbend
Sarah Levtich, Hazy Fields
22
Marguerite Alley
Trespasser Winner of the Editors’ Award in Prose
U
pon turning fifteen, I found that a number of things I’d once thought to be perfectly innocuous had become obscene. My father’s friend Laurel was one such thing. “So, what do you think?” she said, motioning to a newly-dyed bob of blonde hair. She was dressed as a cowgirl, as she always was when we came to visit. Lightly washed boot-cut jeans, button-up floral shirt, brown fringed jacket with copper buttons. It would’ve looked ridiculous anywhere, but it was even more so in front of her suburban Knoxville condo. What I realized was more ridiculous, however, was the fond smile my father fixed upon her. “You look stunning,” he said, and kissed her on both cheeks. The day was soupy with humidity. Tomorrow I would be heading out into the wilds of eastern Tennessee, back to Camp Clinch for the last fortnight of summer vacation, but as per tradition the night before would be spent on Laurel’s pull-out couch. Laurel was an old friend of my father’s from when he’d still worked in broadcast news— she’d been the most junior of correspondents, just out of college when they’d met, while he had already spent years as a producer. When they’d both been laid off half a decade ago, my father had become a stay-at-home dad and Laurel had moved states but stayed in touch, reminding us of her available extra square footage when we came through Knoxville every August. Her family never came to visit, she said, and she hated for the space to go to waste. “I’m thinking Thai tonight,” Laurel said, shepherding us inside. “They have this green curry that I know you’ll love, David, at this place up the street.”
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My father raised a playful eyebrow at her. “Oh, you’re so sure you know how I like my curry?” “I’d bet money on it, darling.” I watched the two of them from the foyer and the sordidness of the whole thing hit me at once. It unnerved me that I’d spent years coming here and never noticed before the way they leaned further toward each other with every sentence, the way my father grew animated and certain, the way the endless conversation between the two of them sucked all the extraneous air out of the room. I began to sweat with outrage, an indignant warmth crawling up my neck, but neither of them was paying me any attention. On the wall behind them was a huge, garish female nude, rendered in shades of pink. I thought of my mother back in Virginia, unable to join us in dropping me off at camp ostensibly because of her usual Saturday night shift. Did she know about this, and could she know about it and let it happen regardless? My mother with her sharp, deadpan humor, her cold practicality. I watched Laurel brush back the fringe on her absurd jacket as she laughed too loud in the quiet house. “The fact of the matter is,” I explained to Sofia, “is that I can’t prove that he goes home after he drops me off at camp. For all I know he spends a whole week with Laurel before bothering to trot back to my mom.” The air was slick with water from an afternoon shower, humidity pressing against my nose and mouth and eyelids. The grit kicked up from the soft dirt pathway congealed on my sweat-dampened skin. Sofia and I were strolling back from the canteen, beneath a canopy of dark, dripping greenery. The day had been full to the brim with firstday camp activities, and now the night felt startlingly empty. “To be fair, you also can’t prove that he doesn’t just drive home and forget all about Laurel,” Sofia said, expression pensive. She had an innate, endearing ability to treat every issue as though it were worthy of deep evaluation, and I appreciated her thoughtful silence. “Isn’t it disgusting, though?” I said. “Like, this has been going on for years. He’s basically having an affair right in front of me.” 24
Marguerite Alley
“But you stayed there last night, right?” Sofia pushed the black bangs off her forehead with one hand and secured them with a bobby pin. “And where did he sleep?” “He slept on the pullout and I slept on the air mattress,” I conceded. “But still. For all I know he’s there right now, doing god knows what.” Sofia looked at me carefully as we reached our cabin at Campsite Sparrow, where a battery-powered lamp that one of us had left behind had long since gone out. The darkness outside felt primordial in its completeness, in the heaviness of its domination over all I could see. It had a weight that night that I still have never felt anywhere else. I expected on some level for Sofia, after her scrupulous inspection, to diagnose me with paranoia, with a lack of faith in my father’s nature. I wanted her to talk me out of this corner. But, instead, she said, “You know, there’s really only one way to find out what’s actually going on.” Our only method of procuring a car would be through Kostya, Sofia’s enormous Russian boyfriend. He was older than us, already a counselor, and looked the part—nearly six and a half feet tall with a full beard and hands so large that they seemed to engulf Sofia’s entire torso when he laid one hand casually on her hip. The bed sheets on his cot in Campsite Elm displayed scenes from The Phantom Menace. “You can take it,” Kostya said, tossing Sofia his keys. “But you’ll have to cut through the woods to avoid whoever’s on night watch duty.” It was, naturally, against the rules for campers under the age of eighteen to leave without permission. This had not stopped plenty of people before us, going out to buy drugs or booze or attend local parties. The door to Kostya’s cabin was propped open to allow in a breeze, but instead all it did was create the sense of being watched, of a presence set to arrive at any moment. “We’ll be very sneaky,” Sofia said, sending him an intrepid smirk. “Where are you going?” Kostya asked. 25
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“Knoxville,” Sofia said. “We’re gonna find out if Vera’s dad is having an affair with some cowgirl twenty years younger than him.” “Oh,” said Kostya. He frowned, leaning back on his bunk. I thought he might deliver some wisdom. But only this escaped him: “Don’t crash my car.” The heat of the day was still unspooling from the ground, collecting puddle-like around our ankles, when Sofia and I reached the edge of the woods that separated the parking area from the camp proper. There was a rough trail for us to follow between the trees, illuminated in soft focus by the moon, and once we were on it, cantering through the foliage, I felt uplifted by the decisiveness of my actions. We would go to them. We would confront the truth. This low feeling in my gut would be alleviated by confrontation, by the righteousness of my anger at its source. With these thoughts I picked up speed on the trail, allowing myself to run like a child through the night, aware of my own receding freedom. The adult world had found me at last, forced me to discover the nature of betrayal, but I was ready, I was running toward it, my feet were steady and sure. Sofia had a learner’s permit, which allowed her to drive during daylight hours in the company of someone over the age of eighteen. As I had no permit at all, we deemed it slightly less illegal for her to drive. But the roads were empty, the world on either side a solid mass of black. It was half an hour to Knoxville, not even midnight yet, but the emptiness was so complete I worried we would never arrive, that in our twenty-four hours at camp Laurel’s condo has ceased to exist, taking my father with it. “Do you think Kostya’s ever cheated on you?” I asked. “No,” said Sofia. She was the sort who not only welcomed but expected questions to be asked directly, without the illusion of tact. She was offended by roundabout conversation. “You think he ever would?” 26
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Sofia shrugged. “He’s going off to UNC Asheville in the fall, so I’ll guess we’ll find out.” She didn’t seem terribly concerned. But I wanted her to be—I wanted her skin to feel as tight as mine, for the indignation in my voice to be matched in hers. I wanted the two of us to be united against the men in our lives, to feed each other’s bloodthirst. But Kostya was innocent, or at least closer to innocent than my father. I would have to endure my anger alone. The night regained a shape once we reached the outskirts of Knoxville, illuminated by street lamps and strip malls. We cruised through downtown just as the bars were closing, and I scanned every pedestrian for my father’s dark brown beard, for Laurel’s bouncing step. But I couldn’t imagine my father out this late, even in this separate, clandestine life. I’d never seen him stay up past nine unless my mother was forcing him to for the sake of something new on HBO that she thought he’d like. Something they could enjoy together. Laurel’s two-car garage was closed, the lights across the front facade all dark. “I don’t know how to parallel park,” said Sofia plainly. The drive seemed to have bored her. The question was practically already answered—my father was a piece of shit, undoubtedly, and so there was nothing left for her to analyze. The drama of it was of no interest. “There’s no other cars,” I said, popping the lock on my door. “Just idle here.” She only grunted as I hopped out. I looked up at the blank face of the condo, its darkened windows like dull eyes. The silence of the night was punctuated by the sounds of air conditioners cutting on, of gutters dripping, of dogs barking, all sounds standing sentinel against the true quiet of the mountains, of the woods we’d come from where the ancient dark smothered all human noise. I did not ring the doorbell. The thought didn’t even cross my mind—I saw the door, I saw my hand reaching for it, the knob turning easily, unlocked, and then I was inside the darkened foyer, looking 27
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down at Laurel’s cowboy boots arranged neatly by the front door, her brown fringed jacket hanging on a hook beside it. My anger had converted to something strange and quiet that collected in my feet, making my steps light and careful over the gray tiled floor as I stepped into the darkened kitchen, where dishes for two still lay strewn across the stained woodblock island. I looked to the stove, where the remains of what smelled like my father’s usual lasagna recipe were sagging in a pyrex baking dish. I felt repulsed, again, by the idea that he had cooked for her, as he had for my mother and I in the years since he and Laurel had left work at the local cable subsidiary. Was this the penance we had to pay? I wondered. Was there no such thing as an attentive father that existed free of some sort of secret vice, a need to assert his masculinity if not at home than elsewhere? The cliche of it all curdled in my gut. For a moment, I was let down by his predictability more than anything else. From the bedroom I heard the sound of someone turning over in sleep: the scrape of fabric against fabric and a wet, clotted sigh. I had to see it for myself. But the hallway became long, and my footsteps lacked the silence that had possessed them before. I was shaking when I reached for the handle of the bedroom door. I thought of Sofia idling on the street outside and knew that I could go back to that, and we could retreat back into the dark. But my anger would not be sequestered—it rushed into me, renewed, and I felt it in the muscles of my hand as they gripped the knob and turned. Laurel’s bedroom was a wash of gray and blue shadows. A meager bookshelf was nearest to me, containing only Agatha Christie novels and a wilted succulent. On the floor was one of her snap-button shirts, embroidered with white roses over each breast. The indigo sheets on the bed were tangled around two bodies. Laurel was closest to me, naked, sleeping halfway on her side and halfway on her stomach, lips parted as though her teeth were too big for her mouth. She didn’t stir. But the person beside her moved. Sluggishly, still wreathed in sleep, they rolled closer to Laurel and I saw the smooth expanse of 28
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their lower jaw, the languid fall of a curtain red hair. Looking back on it now, I am certain the woman saw me standing there. I am certain our eyes met, and the utter shock in my gaze must have convinced her that I was not a robber but a dream, a specter from the unknown world trespassing into the known one, a vestige of the imaginary. Because she turned over easily, put her arms around Laurel, and did not look up again. I don’t remember backing out of the room. I don’t remember closing the door behind me, the sharp click of the knob, my own powder-soft footfalls. But I do remember standing in the kitchen again, looking at the spent dishes, at what was maybe my father’s lasagna recipe but maybe wasn’t at all, or was just a lasagna that belonged to all of us, all the women in his life who were fed by him and fell beneath the umbrella of his care. I wanted to go home. It was in my bones—the need to be tucked in, cooked for, held in the embrace of another’s jacket if I forgot my own. Laurel and I shared this in our marrow, I think. I know this now. Her family did not visit, she said. She needed a father to sink into her pullout couch, to pay for dinner, to compliment her hair, if only for a weekend. The loneliness of it penetrated me, the sorrow of it darker than dark, heavy on my chest like the wet August breeze outside. Sofia was waiting for me where I had left her. “What happened?” she asked, looking up from her phone just long enough to pop the lock on the passenger door. “Nothing,” I said. I felt her eyes on me but kept my gaze on my lap, biting hard on my bottom lip. After a moment, her hand was on my shoulder, the gentle push of her fingers a comfort. She leaned over and kissed me on the head without a word. We drove to camp in undisturbed silence, leaving behind the streetlamps and fluorescent signs and penetrating back into the suffocating mountain night. I had never been so tired, but I knew that sleep would not relieve me, that it wouldn’t be that easy ever again. I did not know then all that would unfold before me as the years 29
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went by. That the next summer at Camp Clinch I would kiss Kostya, feel the warm weight of his broad hand on my chest. That would I end up sobbing onto Sofia’s shoulder when I later confessed my sins, and that when the tears stopped she would brush my hair out of my face and nod impassively, with detached, otherworldly understanding— her own passage into adult betrayal. That the next year after that I would not go back to camp but instead spend the summer months wandering around the house my parents shared, inspecting the details of their life together and refusing to answer any questions as to why I didn’t want to go back to Clinch. And then years and years would pass, time speeding up inescapably, and my father would die and an older, more staid Laurel would attend the funeral and let me cry into her brown suede jacket, her wife patting my back. I would get married, my mother walking me down the aisle, and I’d live through all the everyday, minute betrayals that marriage entails. But eventually I would go back to Camp Clinch for one of the reunions, and on the last night I would wander through those old woods again, feel the primordial black pushing in from all sides and remember the last time I was ever sure of anything. Remember what it felt like to run, buoyed by my own certainty, into a future difficult but known.
30
Trevor Barker, The Clock
Trevor Barker, Bobst
Angela Cai
Day Trip to the Museum of Chinese in America
isolated, we make something out of
nothing.
Washing
hearts
we become curiosities,
backwards,
exotic
creatures
white
study
imagine us
not all the same under
Heaven.
Charlie, photograph our
odd
rightful names
wash away Chinaman let us all have A clean world. 33
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American imagination
usable,
false,
real people.
imagine us
belonging.
We meet out there,
we create Chinatowns
a refuge.
yellow
film
face of
desire
Chinaman,
page 21
See the splendidly natural wig
Note the Oriental cast
It would stand a hard pull on the queue. Eat the bitterness of dream
in triumph
anew
They say we write backwards. Out there, Our Chinatown. 34
How We Wade
[CHORUS: we had a beautiful vision of all of our children singing a song full of hope atop mauna kea] I’ve never seen the water in New York. Only in snatches, through window, sorrow, screen, the cracks between your fingers. But today, it glitters, lush, bitter, coralsweet. Bearing me towards my birth mother. I see boats, small enough to be birds, gentle enough to be dogs, spread heaving, healing, wandering green-blue. I’ve never seen the water in New York. But today, today, today— Today I am knee-deep in it. I have only been here for so long. 35
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Onshore a girl is singing the water goes up to her neck she is trying to reach us but her mouth is choked with salt, her ears are plugged with weed, her eyes are shut with pitch. And yet— Here the water cradles her towards me bears her to us like so much strange driftwood. In her cupped palms is the bluest water I have ever seen. She bids me drink, tip my chin back, let the cool whisper of home pass over my lips. She calls us back, to be skinned again in swollen shell. And yet it is too soon to go. So she brings a coral wreath for each of us spears mango, and peach, and biting juice on her wrist wave of writhing bodies delivers me to the sea, joyous, back to her, and the water recedes, laps at my toes the stranger I sing and the stronger she mourns. I wonder if she’s ever seen the water in New York or has it always been six feet over her head?
36
Angela Cai
[CHORUS: Give them back— your hungry your thirsty your young. Your homeless, your tempest-tossed, your children. Do not confuse them for your mighty.] A girl I hold in the palm of my hand clings to my thumb, voice no paler than a sailboat. She tells me: I have never seen the water in New York.
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of maenad glory
And euphoria— She, fool-stepped— Gold-tumbled— Iron-stuttered. Psyche dripping in her arms. Yes, to own a bramble-winged bird. Remember: you can always take flight. Remember: the beat of wings on your chest. Remember: there is still time to rest. Speak to me, lamb-soft
38
Tell me to run.
Trevor Barker, Hanging Gardens
39
Angela Cai
Animal Grief
T
he first time Olivia sees the animals, really sees them, she’s skipping down the street, her mother’s presence a steady warmth behind her. The baboon stops her in her tracks. The long, thin bones of its skull gaze steadily back at her, teeth unbared, sockets a deep, dizzying plunge into darkness. She’s never seen one in person before, only on her mother’s busted up old television screen or the headlines clamoring for attention from bodega stands. There’s something about the craggy shadows it casts in the midday light that draws her closer, ever closer, until she’s close enough to stretch out a trembling hand towards the long curve of a blunted fang. The moment suspends itself like unspooled thread until Olivia’s mother starts forward behind her and the baboon bounds away with a muted clatter. The animals have been rising out of their long sleep more and more, faster than they’ve been in years. They’ve been waking slowly for decades, shaking themselves back into being on museum platforms or blooming fully formed from rocks, trees, roots, the soil beneath Olivia’s sneakers. The bareness of their bodies fascinates her—the yellowed edges of jagged bone, the faces melted out of frozen snarls, the stilts still welding spines together. She dreams of mountain hares bursting through sidewalk cracks and mastodons matching her step for step on the walk home. Her mother says it’s an obsession, but Olivia lives for the wild flurries of bone that she can’t stop drawing in the margins of her homework. Olivia’s old enough now to approach them without hesitation, to follow them where they lead her. She’s newly twenty-three years old and late for work, rushing down the street, earbuds tangling, when she’s jolted to an abrupt stop by the old woman kneeling elbow-deep in 40
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rosebushes with a robin perched on her shoulder. Olivia takes a moment to duck through the gate into the little triangle of Manhattan earth with a quiet, gazelle-like step, mindful of the skeletal doe grazing by her feet. She opens her mouth to call out something soft about the cluster of lilies behind the woman, and the green pulls her in deeper and deeper until she can’t fight it anymore. At the sound of the gate creaking open, the woman unbends from her work and waves Olivia over, wide smile stretched across her face. “Get over here, hon, take a look at this!” She shows Olivia the careful way she’s nestling the rosebushes in pre-dug holes before working the soil together, hands deep brown. After a moment, Olivia kneels beside her, shoves her earbuds in her coat and digs her hands around the next ball of roots. They work until the light fades and a featherless pigeon waddles past, prehistoric in the coiled stretch of its neck. When they settle the last rosebush in place, the old woman hands Olivia a can of grape juice and beckons for her to sit beside her, cross-legged in the damp earth. They share a few moments of content silence, watching a sloth edge its way over the street curb, bundle of leaves clasped in its beaked mouth. Olivia takes a long drink and squints—there, an antelope halfcaught, lunging midburst from the gnarled wood curved against the fence, eyes wild and rolling in their motionlessness. Its hooves are stilled, kicking out against the purpling air. “That one looks . . . scared. Like prey.” The old woman smiles, smooths a gentle hand over the wooden ridges of its spine. “Don’t worry about him. He’s just taking his sweet time waking up.” She points back the way Olivia came until she can see four knobs of granite mice peering out of the pebbles lining the garden’s path, frozen and dull-eyed in stone. The woman raises a finger to her lips. “Why don’t we let them rest a little longer?” The other day Olivia saw a leopard pacing beside her favorite halal cart, her pelt still loose from the iron rods that propped her open in the Museum of Natural History. She wouldn’t let anyone near her, but she couldn’t get the metal out on her own. 41
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Olivia nods and curls a hand in the grass by her knees. “Okay.” She smiles. “Okay.” By June, the old woman, Lee, leaves her garden in Olivia’s care with a handful of seeds and a tight, cinnamon-scented hug. She’s driving off to map the flight patterns of wild geese; it’s time they called her away. The mice have long gone, and Olivia tends the garden by herself, pouring water in the fountain for the skeleton larks that nest in the sparse trees. She misses Lee’s apple tea. The gardening feels a lot louder on her own. Even when Olivia’s quiet, mind defanged, the air still fills with the steady crunch of shovel, scoop, pat, heave. The place feels almost too much her own now, a tangled sanctuary of green that eats up her mornings. She doesn’t think Lee’s coming back. She tries not to feel too lonely, tries instead to look for the mice Lee’s taught her to spot in the whorled bark of old trees. One day, Olivia pushes through the gate to find a girl-thing facedown in the loam, fingers woven through the fresh shoots of grass. Olivia pauses for a moment before she stoops and tugs at her shoulder, stumbling backwards when the stranger flips over in a burst of motion, dirt creased against her cheek. She bares her teeth at Olivia in a smile that ricochets inside Olivia’s chest. “How do I keep my cactus from dying?” Olivia blinks. “What?” The girl heaves herself up on her elbows and waves a hand around the garden. “How do you keep all this shit so green? I don’t get it. I keep my cacti on my windowsill, I give them little names, I water them, I even sing to them in the morning but they’re still dying. Get all yellow and crusty and dry. You know?” There’s two bumps nestled amongst the twigs tangled in her bushy hair. In the right light, they might be horns. Olivia pauses. Considers it. “Let me show you.” She stretches out a hand. Pulls her to her feet. She’s a bit shorter than Olivia, but the way she shifts her weight restlessly from ankle to ankle makes it hard to tell. 42
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*** Her name’s Wren. If Olivia squeezes her eyes shut hard enough, she can still taste the bitter notes of coffee drifting through the thrumming air, see the halfsprawl of Wren’s freckled cheek, arms folded up against the sticky jut of a diner table and feet drumming a steady beat against the rubber of green, plastic earth. They watch each other over pancakes all afternoon, Olivia twisting her rings round and round, Wren idly swirling a fork through the leftover syrup. “You’re one of them, aren’t you?” Olivia says in a rush, head filled with bone and gristle and fur. Wren leans back in her chair. Cocks her head a little too strangely to be human. “And? You’re one of them.” She points her fork at Olivia, careless of the sticky drops that spatter across the table. “We’ve been here way, way longer than you, you know. Own it.” Olivia frowns, twists her rings a little faster. She doesn’t know what she’s doing here, fidgeting across the table from this strange, sharp-toothed girl. She needs to head back to the garden. She needs to call her manager and tell him she’s going to be late again. She needs to fix the leak in her bathroom. But she’s missed hearing another voice in the kitchen. She’s missed telling someone else about the finches on her windowsill. She looks up. “Can I draw you?” Wren rewards her with another silvery smile. “Teach me how to plant something first.” It’s an understatement to say Wren’s not from around here. She tells Olivia stories about water and bleach and pelt. She wears boots over her hooves when it gets cold, but they’re splitting so far down the seams that every step she takes is a prelude to a sharp click. It’s that sharp stutter-click on the floorboards that wakes Olivia up in the middle of the night, even when Wren moves as softly as any girl-creature 43
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can. She snakes freezing arms around Olivia’s waist because she knows it’ll make her shriek, and she holds Olivia tighter when she screams and screams. She makes her tea in the mornings in silent apology, and Olivia draws her, and draws her, and draws her, in her kitchen, in the subway, in bars, in mirrors, in moonlight, always in color. They go to the same jazz club every weekend, watch the same white-haired man headbang beside them as if he is the one thrumming dance-frantic against the drums. Other days they stay in bed all day, lay head-to-toe like children talking about the animals they saw escape last. They trade stories about the bone-white deer Olivia gave her morning bagel to or the berry-red hawk Wren asked about tomorrow’s chance of rain, everything steeped in hazy detail. It’s hard for Olivia to remember Wren’s one of them. She can’t think about the leaving when Wren is right there, warm, dizzying, lips curling towards the buzz of the saxophone, one finger on the throat of just missing. She can’t—won’t—think past the spin Wren whirls her into as they stagger down the street, the hand she slides against the curve of her back, the flash of hooves reflecting off oily puddles. She’s not letting this go. But the seasons have moved on, even if she hasn’t. Olivia can’t think straight anymore. She hasn’t been watering the ash tree, and she’s starting to forget the curve of Wren’s spine. Everywhere she goes she hears the quick bright snap of Wren’s voice behind her. Everywhere she sees new bursts of movement, of lightless animals creeping free from where they’re propped up in mausoleum-museums, hooves clattering down grimy alleyways and talons clicking on scuffed pavement. If she looks up from where she’s planting peonies in the plant bed she can still see Wren curled up at her feet on the edge of mattress, body twisted into the half-hearted curves of an unfinished pastry, painting her nails bright orange. She can still hear her asking her what the winters are like in California. But that was Thursday. Or was it May? Olivia keeps drawing the flash of Wren’s eyes as she melted into the herd of moose heading north, one last glance thrown over a bare 44
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shoulder. She can’t stop. The heavy drumbeat of hooves follows Olivia into her dreams—she can never run away fast enough. Maybe the last real thing about her is the quick animal of her left careening wildly in her chest, foaming at the mouth. She tries not to feel too lonely, but she’s forgotten how to give her beasts up to sleep. Doesn’t even know if she has it in her anymore. They stalk her by night, glinty-eyed and desperate in the shadow of her bed. She splits her time between watching TiVo and reading ornithology textbooks from university book sales. She can’t bear to read about anything with horns, so she orders seven new subscriptions for home design magazines on Wednesday. Inside her something unfurls, blood-warm and aching. Maybe it’s time for her to leave New York. Maybe it’s time to follow the cranes home. She stretches her arms out in the shower, thinks about migratory patterns until the thing in her chest starts to become unwinged. Maybe it’s time for her to clean out her room. She leaves for Los Angeles the next week, packs herself up in her car with crumpled cardboard and masking tape and hits the road hard. She finds herself back at the La Brea Tar Pits before she knows it, the homecoming taste of the city warm and gritty against her teeth. Here, Manhattan is far, far behind her, the last things left between them the balled-up receipts and discarded breakfast bars in her backseat. Olivia’s driven past the stiff, husked elephant submerged in tar countless times, watched the sun gleam thickly off unmoving black while she channel flips through top 50. This time she stops. There’s something sickly and tired about the way the dimming light pools sluggishly over the elephant’s dry body, one desperate movement still unraveling from its trunk towards its family. Something’s wrong with the dirt here—it’s a pale, washed-out grit that trickles drily through her fingers. But she’s tired of hiding. A kid historian nearby proudly announces it’s the last Urban Ice Age. The other elephants have all gone, flightless beasts migrating home in one body of leathery movement. Olivia heaves herself over the fence to crouch on the dusty shore, knuckles pressed into the sand. They’ve left something dead behind 45
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for her, curled close like a sleeping child in the toes of the last print. It’s a crumpled-up bubblegum wrapper, messy in its folds. Inside, a quarter, a feather. She tips her head back to watch a crackling flock of skeletal geese move through the faltering sky. They’ve come to tell her the blight’s over.
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Shawn Steinig
Veins
For a mosquito there is no bad blood Or good blood Just blood And life And the heaviness in the air they feel When it’s about to rain I want their wings Their teeth Teach me how to leech In the simplest terms possible: This is insect This is skin Here is a prize With no bad or good intention Just trying to survive
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Sarah Levtich, Iris
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Sarah Levtich, Shadow Wave
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Poems by Franny Choi, Guest Contributor Franny Choi is the author of two poetry collections, Soft Science (Alice James Books) and Floating, Brilliant, Gone (Write Bloody Publishing). A Kundiman Fellow, she was awarded a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship in 2019 and received an MFA from the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers Program. She is currently a Gaius Charles Bolin Fellow at Williams College and co-hosts the podcast VS alongside fellow Dark Noise Collective member Danez Smith.
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Franny Choi
To the Man Who Shouted “I Like Pork Fried Rice” at Me on the Street
What I didn’t say before was: I know what it is to sling your hunger at a stranger to make up for a hurt. The truth is, you said hi, and I kept walking. The truth is, I was young and soft and afraid in our city, and indifference was one of the only weapons I had. You were young and brown and soft, though the city’s indifference had asked you, maybe, not to be. Both our weapons were small. Both made something inside us shrink, made our outsides strangers to our mothers. I was just out of girlhood and hungry for a shape. You were hungry, maybe, for solid ground, or maybe just hungry. Maybe I was another city that wouldn’t smile back. So you led with your mouth. My 51
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mouth led me out of your story and into my own. You said, I want I need. And I ate for a year.
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Franny Choi
When I Finally Said Daddy It Was to a Woman Whose Mother Crossed the Same Oceans Mine Did Meaning we know what promises ships bring, and what they take away. What herding, what hurt—we were driven. Into fields or across canyon beds, over water, in droves. In drought. Across bodies made heavy, or ash. Napalm acres, acrid, and the stories of shame we suckled for years. I say same not to flatten but to cross a distance. To make room inside myself for something other than a tank. Yes: open and not emptied, both sap and tapper. Both foul-mouthed roots restringing lineage: I came from a hollow. I come for a woman who moves and moves across water, toward the horizon balled in my mouth. My lenses glaze over, orange. Both our skies flare at once. We land on our own shores. The sun never sets.
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Oh My God How Does It Feel to Be Korean Right Now You know when you’re in a plane and look down and you feel like you’re looking at yourself? It’s like that, only with more singing, only with one hand tied to your belt, in a room with no windows but great lighting. Honestly, it feels great! Or: you know when you fall asleep in the middle of the afternoon, and so when you wake up it’s dark out, and so those cicadas you keep tucked under your diaphragm start getting an ego about it? It’s like, okay, it’s like when you drop an egg, but only from an inch or so high, so you don’t trust the sound until here it comes all yellow—except by yellow, I mean that the difference between North and South Korean is somewhere between genetic and aesthetic. Just kidding! The difference is sort of like the difference between a white lie and a sin of omission; in other words, it’s the thought that counts, but who’s counting? Okay, no really, it’s like this, it’s like running after the bus while rubbing sunscreen on your face. It’s like wandering around the house for hours and realizing your head was in your hands the whole time! It’s awful, it’s perfect. It’s like tying one on, a blue ribbon I mean, I mean an ankle bracelet. No, no. It’s a blessing! It’s a gender reveal party! It’s a Civil War reenactment (ha ha) you know what I mean. It’s exactly like being a white person, or imaginary, or a shell of the man you once were. It’s like waking up before the sun, or after it, and not knowing which; like waking up in the dark and, briefly, not knowing anything 54
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at all; or knowing only that it’s time, unfortunately, to get up; that it’s time to leave.
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Trevor Barker, The Pianist
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Ethan Seavey
Mutual Putrefaction
I
learn you’re here. I don’t know how I learned or when I regained the ability to learn, but I know I’m pushing towards you, I’ll lose my toe with the blackened nail in days rather than weeks, and I can feel you over there. We’re the only ones still moving down here. Push towards me. Bear against the walls, dig towards me, feel me here. It’s slow work, forcing my way through. I’m sliding my arm through this dense substance, this thick, pulling everything back onto me, falling into and over me, shrouding me, leaving me as a charcoal landscape of what’s exposed. I question if art can exist in places where light is absent and where eyes dried up years ago. I’m sliding my rotting leg through the thick and pushing, hard, when I first remember you from before: you sat at the table next to me, at this shitty Italian place in town, with heathered red-checked plastic tablecloths and paper napkins that look dozens of years old. I sat with my family, and you with yours, and you sat just on the other side of the window we share. You were sweating in the sun and, inside, the fan blowing my way sent any semblance of warmth out the door, and so we both complain. If there wasn’t a wall in the way, we would’ve brushed hands, you’re convinced of it. But instead I remember your face clipping against the menus as your son passed them, and I watched as you put far too much cheese on your pasta, and I told the wildest of my daughters to look at your son, who sat quietly and politely. I find a particularly tough stream of thick, and realizing it’s an entirely different material from the thick. You remember you were in a sickeningly green dress and you 57
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watched a young girl skip rocks, while speaking to the koi pond and occasionally cracking an imaginary whip above the heads of the dipping, woven flame in an attempt to control them, and you remember your family did not find that interesting. I lose feeling in my middle finger after it hits this thicker material in a distinctly unruly way. I try loosening up the wall with my dry jaw. Splinters in the skin falling from my lips tell me this is just a root. I can go around. I know you got your food before me. I tried to remember whether you ordered before me when your family stood up and left. You sat for a moment and looked forward. You finished your glass and breathed fully, settling yourself. You remember us falling silent. We remember making eye contact. We blinked into each other. You grabbed your purse and left. The silence of the tunnels we dig touches me for a moment and pulls me away from you. I continue to wear down the thick, avoiding the roots. Being awake is superbly exhausting. I question why I’m still pushing, never stopping, constantly dislodging just enough dirt to reach the layer just behind it. Just enough energy to aimlessly scratch at the thick once or twice, then rest, and back to wearing down the tips of my contorted hands. After making it through the first root system, I’m waiting until my arm moves again, I feel another worm bite through the surface of my calf, sticking its head out like a prairie dog. I move to kick it away, but my foot hits the wall like a chisel and the world ends; thick slides sideways into my mouth and my vacant eyes, slipping into the holes weeks of decay have dug into my flesh, and my body, a soppy clay mound, is hardened by an undefined kiln for a moment, before I’m calcinated and everything is expunged from my bones. I am the thick until you suddenly remember more of our past. It’s my smell that triggers a synapse—upon being squeezed like 58
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a sponge, you guess that I lost it all at once, sending a beam of scent through the thick; if I had any room for air, I’d notice it, too. When it forces its way inside your nose, you remember a dozen Catholic women baking a dozen pies for a bake sale. The money’s going to Pearl Harbor relief—one of the moms is friends with someone whose son died in it. But instead they’re just chatting about the other women they all know, or know enough to cast judgment. You remember a tickle in your throat because of the flour suspended in the air, and you remember that I was working across the room by the ovens, and you were crafting an apple pie with cinnamon dusting the lattice top, and you thought it was simply the most wonderful pie you’d ever made. You walked towards me with no patience in your step. I, too, remember that day—those women from Church used to cause cascades of anxieties inside myself in just a minute, and I wasn’t looking forward to talking for hours about neighborhood politics. I’d spent the whole day getting ready to look perfectly average in the group, to avoid standing out. I spent another few hours feeling like the walls in my bedroom were contracting as the time to leave drew nearer, until the walls were so close that I could breathe only plaster. I felt my lungs fill up with paint chips. But my husband dropped me off before going to that soccer game with all the other husbands, so I stayed with the rest of the wives. You remember walking towards me carrying your masterpiece, and I remember the quaking emptiness that came when the tin hit my stomach and the contents flew everywhere, into my eyes and my tight hairdo—the women around me began to laugh. You ran your empty pie tray away, both of our dresses stained with the apple pulp, and I just remember clicking the number of home and twirling the telephone cord and waiting, until the very last ring. Then you came over and led me towards the bathroom. In the mirror I watched you wipe the pie from my paralyzed face. Slowly I begin to hear your voice, which hurls wave upon wave of apologies towards me. 59
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I stopped you, and the sleeves of our entirely impractical dresses become somehow stuck. You used your free hand to free us. We look back to when it stopped for a minute, and our faces were an apple’s width apart. Your lips were a light pink, I remember. Mine were a deep scarlet, and, looking at them in the mirror, I thought about how nicely our lipsticks would compliment each other. Then I remember remembering where I was. I saw that chipped pink ceramic sink and matching toilet and tub, and the light of the reflected lamp in the greasy mirror. In the opaque pattern of green and brown tiles I caught the exposition of the moment, and I looked at the open door, and pulled away from you. I walked home soon after, thinking nothing. I lose my last finger pushing back the tumbled thick, but eventually I’ve created enough space to kick towards you, which I do. The tension which allows us to remember and keeps us moving is suddenly familiar. It’s in the blending palette of our lips, how I wanted our dresses to permanently stuck together. But it’s wrong, for a married woman to think about kissing a married woman in the bathroom of a bake sale run through the Church. Then you remember me walking by at school, entirely missing your glance. My left ear crumbles away. I remember you being on the other side of the aisle from me at the grocery store. That loose feeling in my knee—that’s my calf falling off. You saw me across the field at a soccer game, and I saw you. I grind my ribs against a rock and chip them away slowly and I understand the distinct pain Michelangelo put in David’s eyes. Your son wanted a playdate with mine, and when you dropped yours off, I smiled warmly but vaguely, not wanting to call attention to our moment, if you also felt the moment. You looked in my eyes and looked for something, if there was something to be found. There’s another moment, where you look so beautiful in the doorway of my home, and I can imagine bringing you inside for a minute, then having you stay forever. I closed the door. 60
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I know you’re close. You loom huge, bearing me forward at speeds so rapid I can’t think about it, so I picture you. I remember when I signed up to provide food for a sick neighbor and, months later, seeing your name on the list. I remember your face in the weekly bulletin a few months later. And I remember forgetting about you. I don’t understand why we’re here, just feet apart, how the decrepit corpses of two who avoided the potential of something that could’ve been so beautiful can suddenly regain autonomy, can do something, even if it’s painfully digging sideways. I just missed you for a dozen years, relied on moments full of the absent “if.” And then I lived for dozens more, never wanting to dig up the grave of what could’ve been. But now, starting my way through another root system—I feel what’s left of you just on the other side of some thick, and you’re diminishing, decomposing, rapidly succumbing to the rot. I fire what’s left of my body against the thick. You come flooding in, and the rest of us falls apart. Legs and legs and arms and cracked, crumbling spine, climbing into each other and breathing the void of life down your absent chest. Fermented lips kiss the vacant space where yours would be. We collide with a brilliant release of falling tunnels and cascading earth, sealing us, bones intertwined and mere piles of rot and dust and liquified self, part of the same thick, sharing only in the present, at last becoming one, months after I was laid to rest, and decades after you were. We’re sucked upwards through the roots, and together we feed this screaming tree.
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Gentle Ramirez
PREFACE
We begin and end at the moon. On its orbit curling its tongue and spine Around the darkness. Only a moon in its cage knows rest. There you’ll find her curves like icebergs and me, Hurling to my singed destruction—cupping her empty face—thirsty. On another planet, in another timeline, I am performing an autopsy on my shadow, Looking at my heart only broken once, Looking at my ribcage, caged at sea. In the same timeline, the sun is burning and bitter, sour and troubling. Tight air instead of fire bleed music. Then in that dimension, I read books for breakfast, Survived on spoonfuls of dirt from my father’s grave, And kept cracking mirrors until they are windows that untie all of my knots. Now you see, young gazer, that when we leave it up to the stars It is the 8th dark day that god never created. It must be true right here then, that you know what to ask for, right at twilight.
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Gentle Ramirez
Blood-Burning Moon
I am the enslaved African that failed at following the North Star, I dug my own grave looking for the underground and ended up buried, with my chest cavity caved in—I pushed up roses from concrete coal. I am the African thrown overboard and couldn’t swim, but somehow waded in the water —washed up on the shores of the Hudson harbor. I be from New York, one of the Harlem migrants calculating carcass and dancing to the blues circling celestial bodies in jazz clubs—hoping my antidote turn me. I am the big boy that kept the white man in panic. Pressured strain on my spirituals turn me into stardust quick. I am the big dipper, a big gay fat supernova, who stay ready, fist up, chin tucked I got the moon close in my back pocket, & I know god and space on fire like me. I be that black mammy, never seen myself not pregnant or not exploding. back split in two! and all, Promise me this chile’, when our nerves shoot out our feet, and Uncle Tom’s Coffin calls, tell him the waxing crescent phase has not failed us yet! The gibbous moon is Coming to remind us of the coming of Jesus. 63
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o’lawd— Amazing, Galaxy Grace, how sweet the sound, Of every pentatonic scale, I touch, turns brown.
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Trevor Barker, Heaven Surrounds Us
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Contributors’ Notes Yagmur Akyurek is a sophomore in Gallatin studying literature and visual culture, exploring how narratives can inform place. Born in Ankara, Turkey and raised in the suburbs of Worcester, Massachusetts, she is interested in how communities interact with their surrounding physical landscape. She also likes to draw, paint, cartwheel, walk by the East river, braid hair, watch Brokeback Mountain, and eat buffalo cauliflower. Marguerite Alley was born and raised in Durham, North Carolina and is currently a sophomore at NYU. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Bodega, Albion Review, Mary: A Journal of New Writing, and Mochila Review. She has been recognized by NYC Midnight and the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards and is an alum of the Iowa Young Writers’ Studio and the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop. Trevor Barker is not very comfortable talking in the third person. But, to summarize, it would be best to say that he has his hands in a bit of everything. Currently majoring in biology and minoring in creative writing at CAS, he spends his free time reading, making photos, and teaching at an after school program in Chinatown. His writing and photography both meditate on human vulnerability as well as the natural world around us. He thinks that life is all about love and all about growth: by reading, listening to others, and creating, we are collectively able to accomplish both. Trevor was born in Anaheim, California, and plans to go to medical school. Nevertheless, he will always be generating new work and is very grateful to be a part of this year’s issue. Angela Cai is a sophomore studying English and social and cultural analysis. She is originally from Southern California, but you can find 66
Contributors’ Notes
her haunting Battery Park and dreaming about living in a cottage in Switzerland. GARCÍA is a full-time actor, student, and Scorpio. They dabble with multiple artistic mediums; photography, directing, pottery, crocheting, painting, writing plays, poems, and short films. When they’re not binge watching Netflix or Hulu, they’re kicking it with their beautiful friends at game night. Instagram: @whatisgarcia Vivian Holland is a queer writer living in Brooklyn. (This is also how she starts her poetry competition bios because it seems to be a reoccurring theme among winners. Most attempts thus far have been fruitless.) She is studying organic chemistry and music theory at Gallatin with a minor in creative writing. She has filled a total of thirty-four notebooks/journals from cover to cover since she started keeping track in 2013. Her most recent obsessions are David Foster Wallace, John Oliver, pistachios, and the color red. Her pastimes include sprinting from her bedroom to the screaming tea kettle she left on the stove and yelling at her house keys until they appear. Devin Lee is a senior at NYU studying politics and Latin American studies. She is originally from Denver, Colorado and describes herself as a “wholesome western gal.” In her free time, she enjoys staring at the dogs in the Washington Square dog park. Sarah Levitch is a junior in performance studies with a minor in philosophy and French. With a love for photography and writing, she likes to linger in the cracks of New York to observe quotidian life. Recently she’s been questioning the construction of time and whether or not her mind is a time machine. Gentle Ramirez (they/them) is a trans non-binary poet from the Bronx. Gentle’s work centers poetry to revolutionize concepts surrounding race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, class, ability, citizenship, 67
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universal forces, and more. They hope to build community worldwide and join freedom struggles domestically and abroad. Gentle is a 2020 Artist-in-Residence at the Rhode Island State Council for the Humanities’ Rhode Island Black StoryTellers (RIBS) and featured at their Funda Festival. Their work has been featured in The Columbia Spectator, The Providence Journal, PoetNY, Write About Now Poetry, The Westerly Sun, Book Depository, S pace-Ship Arts, in anthologies and more. Gentle is also 2020 Finalist for the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts’s bid, a New Jersey Poetry Out Loud Finalist, and a 2019 Semifinalist at ACUI’s College Union Poetry Slam Invitational. Gentle is a BA candidate at NYU and most recently the author of their first book, Ultram (KDP, 2018). Ethan Seavey is a freshman in the Liberal Studies program, planning to study prose writing. He’s loud for being considered quiet, a frustrating 5'11 and 1/2", and from the first suburb west of Chicago, Oak Park. He’s still told he has a Chicago accent. He disagrees. Seavey’s writing is the intersection of a dozen or so years of Catholic education and a rather inopportune case of homosexuality. He managed and wrote for his high school’s award-winning newspaper and literary magazine. He has never written one of these bios before and hopes he didn’t screw it up. Shawn Steinig is a student at NYU studying psychology and creative writing. She specializes in poems and short stories.
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