Issue No. 14, 2021-2022

nyu creative writing program college of arts & science

2021–2022

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 forty years 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, Katie Kitamura, Hari Kunzru, Joyce Carol Oates, Sharon Olds, Claudia Rankine, Matthew Rohrer, Ocean Vuong, 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 © 2022 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 Sophia Nickoloff Warren

Managing Editor Lisa Cochran

Poetry Editors Alexandra Bentzien, Karli DeChant, Hyeyeon Park, Ashley Wu

Prose Editors Marguerite Alley, Rebecca Stevenson, Zhen Yu

Art Editors Cameron Saltsman, Ameya Shelby

Web Editors Nicholas Dharmadi, Ben Hefter, P.J. Mullins

Copy Editors Samuel Haecker, Amara Shein, XY Zhou

Executive Editors Matthew Rohrer, Darin Strauss, Joanna Yas

Staff Advisor Joanna Yas

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Editor’s Note 7

Interview with Hala Alyan 52 Poems by Ada Limón, Guest Contributor 33 Contributors’ Notes 72

Poetry

Yoon Jin Kim 9 to take the edge off memory Gentle Ramirez 10 Name for the Order? Editors’ Award Winner

Cynthia Chen 20 A pornography starring salt and milk Caleb Willett 21

Tiffany Leong 31 Memento Mori, Mother

Eka Savajol 57 Two Poems Maryam Khalifa Al Shehhi 65 I Don’t Want to Write a Qasida Using Your Language

Prose

Alison Long 12 Estragon and I

Cristina Coppa 23 The Mother Whose Daughter Gave Birth to Me

Samantha Stokes 36 How to Cope with Sudden Disasters Editors’ Award Winner

Lauren Stanzione 51 I Am Meant to Be Here

Maryam Khalifa Al Shehhi 69 From A t o Alif (and Everything in Between)

Art

Natasha Segebre 11 Beach Bound

Natasha Segebre 19 Woman and her Dog

Ella Kaplun 22 anonymous Ella Kaplun 30 Lifeguard Chair

Natasha Segebre 51 The Pickup and Silhouettes

Natasha Segebre 65 Tree Line

Natasha Segebre 69 Dreamer

Natasha Segebre Cover Onlooker

Editor’s Note

When I first joined West 10th, I was a second-year who had just returned from my first year abroad in Florence, Italy. I was windswept by the city and shocked by the culture I had grown up with. Searching for a sense of belonging, I found myself as a poetry editor. Meeting with the West 10th team, reading astounding submis sions from the NYU creative writing community, and making fulfilling connections, I had truly begun to feel like I was home.

Then, news of the virus began to spread. A tidal wave, I was forced back to my hometown by unrelenting tides. Stripped of the in-person events that make the college experience feel like college, I was waterlogged. I think that every past and current member of the editorial board can understand when I say that COVID-19 shattered what the publication had previously been. This year, after two years behind turned-off Zoom cameras, we began to rebuild.

To the West 10th team, I am grateful for all you have given to this issue. With your hard work and dedication, we have created some thing that we can be proud of. As the first group of in-person editors since the start of COVID-19, you underwent an extremely selective application process. For this, you should be proud. Poetry, prose, and art editors, I thank you for the time and energy you have given to this year’s submissions. Though the talent in the submissions was over flowing, with careful and attentive eyes, you curated a breathtaking publication. I am grateful for our copy editors’ care in ensuring that each published piece is exactly as the contributor wanted. Finally, I thank our web team for their constant enthusiasm, communication, and adaptability. I remain impressed with and touched by the unique skill sets of each editor on this year’s board, and I commend you all for your hard work.

It is without pause that I thank this year’s contributors, to which this publication truly belongs. Your words and your vision have cre

ated the foundation for this magazine, exploring themes of identity, motherhood, migration, language, and more. This body of work can only be described as one which exceeds boundaries and blurs borders. I must say that I am blown away by the readiness with which you have spilled your heart onto the page and lens.

I find it significant to note the incredibly immense number of women, non-binary, and LGBTQ+ people involved in this year’s pub lication—both editors and contributors. In a time during which our rights are being actively oppressed, I am grateful for the opportunity to support and uplift you. I am thankful for your voices, which are necessary in our space and every space.

Of course, this issue would not have been possible without the support of our incredible Creative Writing Program. I would like to extend a hearty thank you to Joanna Yas, whose patience, wisdom, and supervision has guided me through my time with West 10th. Thank you, Matthew Rohrer and Darin Strauss, for your attentiveness in selecting our Editors’ Award recipients as executive editors. Thank you, Jerome Murphy, who is always ready and willing to support in novative student efforts. Thank you, Deborah Landau, for directing this wonderful Program. Without you all, this publication would not have been possible.

This issue has the honor of featuring our guest contributor, Ada Limón, as well as our interviewee, Hala Alyan. Thank you both for taking the time to contribute so abundantly to the publication, which would not be the same without your talent and wisdom shining on its pages. Additionally, I would like to personally thank this year’s man aging editor, Lisa Cochran, for all that she’s done in support of the editorial board, our contributors, and myself. Thank you for being such a steady and constant pillar throughout this process. Finally, thank you to our readers. Without you, West 10th and its efforts to publish unique, empowering, and expressive art would not be possible. We hope you enjoy our fourteenth edition.

Nickoloff Warren

Sophia

Yoon Jin Kim

to take the edge off memory

forget or death of memory or dīs remember without space is disremember without re-petition is dismember or pulled apart from the center like a pitted stone fruit is a seed extracted from the womb like a migrant released or some body carried away or transported over space time like the sun pulled down

Gentle Ramirez

Name for the Order?

Winner of the Editors’ Award in Poetry

I change my name each time I place an order at Starbucks And my pronouns are sweetheart, sweethearts, or they, My sun pickled skin be my superpower —& gets me double take at Whole Foods, keeps me invisible.

Invisible like the streets of the Bronx, like the burning at the border, like the water that doesn’t hydrate.

My whole time at Starbucks I drown in diuretics the way capitalism destroys me yet I keep showing up. Bloodthirsty and vulgar—I am thinking about living, I am thinking about surviving, I am thinking about what Is going to happen next.

Oftentimes captivity, I mean caffeine, makes me feel like There is nowhere to run, and I am in no shape to try. I keep being voluntarily constrained, to learn civility from colonizers, where right and wrong keep my iced cold brew black. The cashier marvels at my transformation every three months, Loves that I keep my black hair blend illegal, That I keep the barista guessing, leaving the Americanos ground and confused.

I don’t need to be named in this country that don’t know freedom. But I do need two shots of espresso over ice to stay woke I do need these batteries until the revolution starts. So that eventually I’ll give them my name, Myself, myselves, myself.

Natasha Segebre, Beach Bound

Alison Long Estragon and I

In the middle of the pandemic, I often felt that my roommate, Estragon, and I were the only two people left in a tiny, stage-sized world. We waited for the whole play to either end or move forward.

Six months ago, in the early spring, Estragon asked me if I wanted to go with her to a plant shop in Chinatown. After about thirteen steps up the stairs towards our subway exit, I looked to my side and found Estragon suddenly sweating beads from her forehead. Holding onto me instead of the filthy railings, she informed me that she had lost her vision for a few seconds and that we needed to get something to eat immediately. This really could not wait, as Estragon had been methodologically starving herself for about a week, living solely on tortilla chips, salsa, and, very occasionally, a singular emergency Oreo to power her brief trips to the nearest deli. The emergency ended in us quickly ordering take-out porridge from a place around the cor ner and finding a bench in the meridian mall on Allen street where Estragon could safely collapse and get some carbohydrates into her body.

We sat like two delicate ladies, with our legs crossed and masks folded beneath our chin, each balancing a tub of searing hot porridge on one knee and skimming the surface with the corners of our plastic spoons. An older gentleman wearing light khaki shorts and fisherman sandals sat down on the bench across from us. On both sides of our little island, the traffic swooshed past us. Each car summoned a sud den draft, calling the dust and carton pieces to dance in circles on the ground before us. The older gentleman had a plastic bag of groceries hanging from his wrist, and that bag was flapping and crunching in the draft, keeping time to the beats of an obscure undercurrent.

As Estragon quickly recovered from her near-death experience, she got involved in a rant about how this other girl’s Instagram an noyed her in a myriad of ways. I was entertained at first when Es tragon listed the girl’s crimes against the International Protocol on Moderate Attention-Seeking, but she quickly became repetitive and began to run out of breath.

Silently nudging an empty Coke can under our bench with my foot, I decided to refrain from pointing out to Estragon that her own social media was almost identical to the one she was chastising. There were many things I refrained from saying in the past few months, like, “You really ought to stop punishing yourself for the increasingly apparent rolls of fat on your stomach. Because that’s what antidepressants do, they make you put on weight. And sometimes, when you’re in a whirlwind of emotions all the damn time, you don’t necessarily realize how irri table you’ve become from all that dieting. Instead, you just talk and talk and talk to silence your anxieties while oblivious to the fact that everyone else has stopped listening.”

I never said a word about these things. I promised myself I never would. Whenever these thoughts came up, I just turned to thinking about something else.

I started to think about how there is something magnetic about Es tragon. When I was out with her, people stopped to talk to us and called us “girls.” The guy selling chicken and waffles at the food truck on campus was madly in love with her. She ran after every single dog owner in the park and told them she used to have a German shepherd. She broke into tears twice outside the spinning doors of her dormitory hall, both times for the same guy with blue eyes who ghosted her, and both times she squatted down on the pavement, refusing to walk, insisting that she wanted to be a mushroom. Afterwards, when she began to feel alright, she leaned against the limestone wall, smoked, and drew smiley faces on the tiles with her cigarette butts when she was done.

On that day, the thought about smiley faces on the wall made me smile. Estragon was complaining to me about how the girl habitually used random white boy cameos as some kind of trophy in her pic tures. The old man across from us stood up and left. Estragon lidded her half-eaten porridge, did a double take in the direction of the man, and asked me, “Did you see . . . ?”

“Yep,” I said.

“You saw him . . . ?”

“Masturbating, yeah.”

We laughed.

“Urghhh . . . But did you actually see him . . . ?”

“I had a feeling he was. That plastic bag in his hand. It was mak ing some really suspicious noises.”

“So you didn’t see his balls.”

“I didn’t—What?”

“I saw his fucking balls. Through his fucking shorts.”

“Oh, no,” I said, letting go of the plastic spoon. My half-eaten beef ball dropped back into my beef ball porridge. “You should’ve told me.”

“I want to wash it out of my eyes.”

Estragon held the take-out bag open for me so I could put my container inside. “He probably wanted you to look,” I said as we both stood from the bench. I gestured toward an overflowed trash can a few feet away.

Estragon swung the bag forward a little. It hit me in the shin. She started to laugh. “I can’t believe—I’m never gonna unsee it—” I laughed with her.

“Them, Estragon.” I took the bag from her hand and placed it on the top of the trash can. “You’re never gonna unsee them.”

At the shop, Estragon talked me into buying a ZZ plant—a truly impressive looking tropical beauty with glossy, oval leaves—and she named it “the tree.” Any online list of “The Top Ten Indestructible House Plants” will point to the species as one of the easiest things to

care for, so it naturally took me a good while before accepting that the plant’s health had been on an irreversible decline ever since we brought it into our apartment. In the first few weeks, it developed sev eral yellow spots which soon turned into several yellow leaves. By that time, Estragon and I were still concentrating on figuring out whether the tree had already been sick when we got it from the shop. But as we trod carelessly into the fall, the once dark green and almost cartilagelike foliage had mostly shriveled into wrinkled parchment. It was all too late.

Estragon was delighted by this. After witnessing my many at tempts to resuscitate the tree, she started introducing me as “the plant killer” to every Tinder date that she invited over. This became a nec essary ritual for her, as it always offered a good excuse to lead the guests to her bedchamber for a private viewing of her expertly tended peace lily.

While I sat in my room with my essays and my loudest playlist, trying to drown out the noises of palm-meets-skin and Estragon’s moans through the walls, I thought about how I always failed to point out any of her faults in fear of a confrontation. Because there is some thing fatal about her. She retold the experience so many times—the police officer, the ambulance and the psychiatric hospital without a single sharp object. When people asked her why, she rolled up her sleeves so they could see the razor marks that mapped the span of her adolescent years. See that? She always had such inclinations, and now, the medical leave and hospital bracelets are proof of a real fight in which she had found meaning. And look here, see the cigarette burns that decorated her shoulders? This is why you don’t mess with her.

Even if people tiptoed around Estragon, she could always find a reason to despise them. At times, it felt as if she got to know people in timately for the purpose of becoming disillusioned and walking away thinking she was superior. Earlier this year, someone fell out of Es tragon’s favor. She took out her verbal chainsaw and tore them apart in a group chat of a few hundred people then asked me to choose sides. She was once fragile, and now she’s prickly. People treated her

wrongly in the past, and now she refuses to be taken advantage of again. Except when she wants to, like that blue-eyed boy she couldn’t stop texting even when he stopped texting back.

After Christmas, Estragon settled into a relationship with a man from Westchester who listened blithely while she talked for hours about her appreciation of YouTube celebrities. The tree had gone completely bald, and Estragon had since been referring to it as “the dead tree.” Looking back, I was deeply unhappy around the time. I realized all of our mutual friends seemed to have either left the city or been denounced by Estragon in one way or another. It became easy to talk to them about how Estragon made every conversation about herself and how I was tired of listening to her rants about everything and everyone around her. I felt that my life with Estragon had warped into a drawn-out game of waiting to see who’d be next to go. I wanted to stay in New York, but I also wanted a different life, one without Estragon slamming the microwave doors in the middle of the night.

Then I found out Estragon’s passport had expired and she couldn’t renew it anytime soon because the embassy was closed. She was not going anywhere, so I decided to get away. I bought a plane ticket to leave the United States and submitted an application for a gap semes ter on the same night; Then, I called up my only remaining friend in the city, Alison, who had been an ex-friend of Estragon’s, to ask if I could drop off the tree at her place while I was gone. She replied, “What about Estragon?”

I explained to Alison that Estragon was out of the question. There was no way I could leave this plant with Estragon when she saw it as nothing more than a bunch of sticks in a clay pot.

“No,” Alison said, “I meant what are you going to do about Es tragon?” I didn’t know. No one knew the answer to that. After I left, she would be stranded in an empty city with no friends. Maybe this would send her back into the dark spiral of inevitable abandonment, helplessness and self-hate; or maybe she would be perfectly fine and develop new relationships that actually last. I tried not to think about whether she would be okay. I knew that no one was in any way re

sponsible for her, not even me. But somehow, our lives were tangled in a way that leaving her like this would equate to the act of smothering a defenseless creature in deliberation. Her sufferings had made her sa cred, in front of which my self-preservation would become a crime un forgivable in all the reiterations of our friendship in the days to come. Two days later, I broke the news to Estragon over text. About two seconds after I hit send, I heard Estragon wailing in the other room. “When’s your flight?” She stormed through the two doors which seemed like unsurpassable barriers to me just minutes ago and stood barefoot in the center of my bedroom demanding the logistics. I had not swept my floor for a week, and there were stray hairs everywhere. At the foot of my bed, there was the aluminum foil left from a burrito I ate last night. These were the perfect specimens of things from which Estragon would usually recoil in disgust, so I flinched as she opened her mouth.

But there were no points made about the state of hygiene, which was somehow all the more disturbing. Estragon inquired after the date of my departure and the price of my ticket. When the questions were exhausted, she sat down. I watched as she arranged her legs—legs cladded in fluffy, cream-colored pajama bottoms—into a comfortable position on my dusty floor. She then unlocked her phone and started swiping through her Instagram feed without saying another word. For a few minutes, there was nothing but the sound of her thumb nail hitting and dragging against the phone screen while I silently contemplated fleeing from my own bedroom. Then, she looked up. “Why are you deserting me?”

Oh, it’s my parents. The school, immigration law, ticket prices, the virus coming back, all that. I had to take a gap semester. A gap year, maybe. I don’t know when I’m going to come back. When everything returns to normal, perhaps?

I remember apologizing, but I didn’t say what I was sorry for. If I was a better person, I should have apologized for secretly falling out of friendship with her and for secretly arranging my departure; I

should have also apologized for making up my mind to be unresponsive to all her texts except the ones about the lease. But the truth was, if I had another chance, I would not have handled it any differently.

In that last conversation I had with Estragon, I thought about that afternoon we spent downtown, when one of us almost fainted and both of us were flashed by a stranger. It seemed so alien to me that on that day, we could laugh simply because we decided we could. Behind Estragon and all of her magnetic fatalness was the unspeakable lack and anxiety which terrified me. I couldn’t answer her question about me leaving her behind because it was the question itself that was the problem. If I had an obligation to anything, it was my pride. I once reveled in the belief that I was someone a little better than her, and for that, I was truly sorry.

Natasha Segebre, Woman and Her Dog

Cynthia Chen

A pornography starring salt and milk

I eat my ramen raw when I am as raw as the cow acting like a ho with its tits out.

They taste crispy like your eyes when you bite my shoulder and tell me that the coconut smell of my hair doesn’t suit me well. I ask you what aroma would fit my realm. You poked at my cheeks with your lashes and laugh. Something sharp, you say. Something that could leave traceless scars in the air we breathe, staining a sheet I’ve never masturbated on. But I don’t own such sheets, so we go on a hunt to look for new ones, especially those that are absent of the smells of fabrics and us. We find leftover broth of cooked ramen and roasted skin of turkey. The oil reminds me of summer, when the heat dried up my sweat and the freezing milk stained my throat—where words I wished to have said ended up, flowing between our dread of the nudity of language. The homeless guy was reading sonnets on the Thanksgiving night. So when I walked past him, I recited a poem with my cheeks about a packet of ramen undressing itself in front of the pot, seducing the boiling milk to burst out of its container. A false sense of exhilaration aroused by the encounter between salt and milk, by the furious combination of sex and kids. When I’m raw, my ramen is raw, and everything is as raw as me, standing naked in front of the pot, tits out.

Caleb Willett

that same spring i learned to refer is to forget daydreams, coriander

chickadee whistles cracking on barn-door echoes stir the air to snow can i see the web? it’s only tangible through touch. widow or recluse? fall came, sweet basil slowed down my nervous system first then not at all whip-poor-will, like that! you say as i approximate the mourning dove’s mourn leeches ring-road shale, water lily, putrescence sunfish sunbathe by think you think like me? think you think you think like me? think you’ll wait and see?

Ella Kaplun, anonymous

Cristina Coppa

The Mother Whose Daughter Gave Birth to Me

Summer in Lima is the season of everyone jamming to their favorite tunes. High schoolers falling prey to aestival love gather at someone’s house and listen to Yahaira Plasencia’s romantic “Tú” while sunbathing on the terrace. Their younger siblings swing their uniform jackets and convulse to the electric beat in Tilsa Lozano’s “Soy Soltera.” The house next door is filled with nostalgic forty-some thing-year-olds returning from work to JAS’s “Ya No Quiero Más Ska” as they reminisce about their teenage shenanigans. This salsatropipop-ska amalgamation threatens normal decibel levels. However, the ruckus that’s a product of this generational battle of the bands stays on one side of the park; on the other, a three story house buzzes with recuerdo music sung by a jovial old woman who has no consideration for noise pollution. A woman who is unaware of her shouting when intending to whisper. A woman whose voice upstages any other chanting at a birthday party. A woman who not only sings, but who dances. A woman who taught her granddaughter how to dance like a Peruvian. That woman temporarily lost her identity whenever she heard her favorite singer broadcasted on 88.9 FM. Even though her name is Margarita, she imagines herself as the song’s recipient, “Fanny,” while her hips sway to the static-riddled melody of Leo Dan’s baritone blasting on Radio Felicidad. She beck ons me to join her. My short legs surprisingly keep up with the broad moves as I try to adapt the few marinera lessons I had received to the hanky-less ballad invading the living room. The green flecks embed ded in her hazel eyes shine against the chandelier’s warm light when she comes back from a twirl and lowers her gaze to my chubby, pureesmeared cheeks.

“Tú fuiste buena al pensar que yo a ti te amaba ya,” she croons and loops me under her arm.

“Estas son cosas que pasan y . . .” I carol and try not to trip on her Dr. Scholl’s sandals.

Again, she whirls while we finish with “. . . es el tiempo quien después dirá!” Seeing her in all her gyrating splendor, five-year-old me wonders why Mami Margarita had never been a singer, dancer, or ar tiste of some kind. However, I was wrong to assume my grandmother had never formally engaged in the performative arts.

Years after our summer impromptu frolics, she recounted her school days of acting, singing, and dancing in school plays. She remembered she was once casted into the role of a wise old granny who defended her family’s mischiefs and, in the process, invoked the audi ence’s laughter. Who would have known that she’d stay in character for the rest of her life?

For another production, she sang Pepe Miranda’s hit single about his revered muse which led to a clap-thundering audience, enamored schoolboys nicknaming her after the song’s title: “Cristina.” She be came flustered by the attention and often hid behind her older siblings whenever a male classmate tried to talk to her after school.

She was also bewildered by not being called by her real name.

Until this day, I am still intrigued by our nominal connection since the sixties. She never knew why that song led to her school nickname; virtually all Peruvian ballads at the time featured a female moniker as its title, and she had interpreted plenty of those with the same devo tion. Regardless of the lovestruck classmates’ rationale and her past confusion, it’s a beautiful reoccurrence. Before I was even a zygote, destiny had already determined that this woman, officially my grand mother, and I would share not only a nickname but maternal-filial love. Destiny had planned this for us as well.

The first person to hold me in their arms wasn’t my mother or my father. Tired from seventeen hours and twenty minutes of labor, my mother had momentarily passed out due to ongoing bronchitis, a

tardy doctor, and an induced amniotomy. My father was nervously pacing in the hospital’s waiting room. By default, after the nurses cleaned amniotic fluid and clotted blood from my newborn skin, they handed my blanket-wrapped body to the woman who had traveled 3678.517 miles to see me: my grandmother. That was the first time we met. Upon cradling my skinny form, she took it to herself to fatten me up, which she did for the following six months. As my mother needed to recuperate from the bronchitis, my parents decided she and I were better off in Peru, where it was summer, for my first months of life. Therefore, it was my grandmother’s time to shine, as no one knew how to use limeño produce for its salubrious qualities better than she did. No one knew how to turn a six pound newborn into an eighteen pound baby in half a year better than she did. Banana puree. Isla banana puree. Pear puree. Apple puree. Squash puree. Spinach puree. Potato puree. Sweet potato puree. Nutritious concoctions that mixed most of the above purees became my diet. On Channel 4 of the Peru vian TV network, Mami Margarita followed the teachings of a nutri tion expert called Teresa Ocampo and stayed up to date with the latest information on healthy foods. Even though neither my mother nor uncles had any health concerns, my grandmother always wanted to nourish her children with wholesome ingredients and fed them short of committing gluttony. Of course, she would do the same with me.

By the time I was starting to sit up by myself, I had to deal with the extra complications of a fat belly, stout extremities, and rosy cheeks reddening with exertion. My grandmother’s care stripped me from any chance of developing the coveted slim figure and resigned my baby body to reincarnating Siddhartha Gautama before he became Buddha. Despite her modifying my anatomy, I will never hold it against her because she introduced me to Isla banana puree.

After Mami Margarita left her performer days behind and married my grandfather, she became a successful entrepreneur, in part thanks to my grandfather’s connections and his position in the Policía Nacio nal de Investigaciones. During the eighties, she was a renowned pâ

tissier in Lima and catered custom cakes to wide-scale affairs: civil weddings, ec clesiastical weddings, di amond weddings, silver weddings, ruby weddings, gold weddings, anniver saries, baptisms, birthdays, quiceañeras, con certs . . . Through one of these events, she met her adored idol: Leo Dan. They hugged and smiled for the camera as my grandfather took their photos. My grandmother never smiles for pictures and opts for a model’s expressionless countenance instead. I believe the only other instance in which she made an exception was a small sepia portrait de picting my grandparents after their two-week honeymoon. My grand father’s slicked-back hair enhanced his youthful handsomeness, and his arms, toned from his routine training, held her. Mami Margarita’s cheeks easily flush due to her alabaster complexion, but she refused to let the smallest buff of blush transcribe as gypsum dust on photographic paper. At the ripe age of nineteen, she had mastered the classic red-carpet beam.

Years of strenuous labor brought by manually fashioning sweet creations made her quit the pâtisserie business and venture into an other industry during the nineties with the help of her young adult children and her recently retired husband. They inaugurated “El Cat,” the second pub in Peru to provide patrons with complimentary video streaming on a cinematic screen, a novel experience for the country in that decade. As soon as you set foot onto the waxy red floor, a bouncer quickly scanned you and let you into the main room. You

were then promptly greeted by a smiling waiter—my aunt if they were short on staff—eager to take your order while you settled the velvet chair in the best angle to watch music videos on the giant screen. You probably also saw my uncle to the side managing the song requests from other clients. Hidden from the mystifying ambiance of the vid eo pub, my mother would prepare your pisco sour or sangria. After finishing your drink and tiring your eyes from the projecting images on the giant screen, you stood from your seat and made your way to the cash register at the far end of the establishment. Taking out your leather wallet from your back pocket, you would approach the cashier to pay your tab until you were met with glimmering hazel eyes. “That will be S/25, please.”

While handing her a check or a bill and a silver-gold coin, you would stare at her irises, as her eye color is a rare sight among the Peruvian population. However, if you stared too much, she would signal my grandfather to come out. With a menacing glare, he would place himself beside Mami Margarita and palm the lump of his revolver in his front pocket. You would quickly avert your sight and leave before you incurred the wrath of the ex-commander.

On your way out, you would pass by a neon sign with the “El Cat” logo: a sleek silhouette of a black cat that served as a backdrop for its green eyes. Sometimes, you would hear clients’ murmurings that the feline’s eye color was similar to hers. Sometimes, they asked the waiter if this was true. Sometimes, you would hear that they called Mami Margarita by another nickname behind her back: “la gata.”

Birds, butterflies, and cats roam across the adjoining gardens of the residential lane. This last creature’s weight tends to bend the bamboo-like branches of my grandmother’s cane begonias, so when ever she sees one of these strays climbing down the bougainvillea roofs in her garden, she quietly shoos them away. On the other hand, if a passing dog even begins to lift a hind leg, she takes advantage of its sen sitive hearing and optimizes the potency of her voice through a vocif erous chant: “¡Anda animal feroz que primero es Dios antes que vos!”

As the canid scurries away, she goes back to watering her bird of paradise flowers with small flicks of her wrist. The soil is now perfectly moist and won’t drown the orange-blue blossoms.

It really is no wonder that my grandmother loves gardening. After all, Margarita means daisy in English. What I do wonder about is the salience of nomenclature in a person’s life. Is it mere coincidence that Mami Margarita loves flowers because she was as precious as one in her parents’ eyes? Or has her name unconsciously driven her to taking a liking to them? Or, what’s more, does her appellative have no rela tion to her affinity with plants?

The world may also never know why my daisies died. While my grandmother visited me and my family when I was eight years old, I bought a pot of daisies. The buds were already blooming by the time we returned from the store, and I was so excited to follow in Mami Margarita’s horticultural steps. She told me how to take care of the plant and trusted I would follow her instructions. I dutifully watered the flowers until I returned from school one day to find burned petals, withered stems, and arid soil. I didn’t know the sun could be so jeal ous of a daisy’s angelic aureole. Never again will I let a plant die on my watch. I’ve recently adopted a potted succulent. Mami Margarita has encouraged me to raise it with love even though it doesn’t need me much. I just hope the plant thinks of me as I think of her: as a mother.

Still, I am partially ashamed for not having the wisdom to take in more sought after plants like Mami Margarita. However, I realize that I am at a disadvantage compared to her upbringing around flora. Even though I have always lived across the street from a park, the most contact I had with plant life growing up was running on cut grass and climbing pine trees. On the other hand, my grandmother spent most of her childhood days frolicking in the vegetation of her parents’ country estate. Surrounded by acres and acres of greenery, she played hide-and-seek with her brothers and sisters among the corn fields and coffee harvests. While playing tag, she had the luxury of picking or anges and sweet lemons from low-hanging branches without slowing down her chasing.

Another game, the one she liked the most, was a highly competitive scavenger hunt. The first one to find a bird’s nest among the hundreds of trees and thousands of shrubs on their property would be the winner. She does not re member any more if she had ever won, but she does remember climb ing a fruit tree and observing tiny, featherless birds chirping for their mother’s return. In silent admiration, she sat with them for the rest of the day. Perhaps, she ruminated on what it meant to be a mother, or how to mother her future children. Maybe, she resolved to become the best mother ever.

All I know is that whatever thought she chased in her puerile mind turned her into a great mother. A grand mother.

Ella Kaplun, Lifeguard Chair

Tiffany Leong

Memento Mori, Mother

I knew the acridness of acetone before I knew the scent of her skin, Ma, I called her Ma . . .

The nights which my troublemaker kid-body imprinted the cracked-leather couch, waiting, I waited, for the sound of Mother. Hours dug into the cushion, drowned out by a TV tuned to a pixellated pipe dream. Ma came in midnight, bent-backed, cracked soles chemical-fumed, sandpit eyes, hollowed soul . . .

Not a word, not a single word from her worn mouth. A hand threaded through my thin strands and warmth touched my forehead off-screen, where Ma’s chipped nail polish carried the emptiest gleam. The day I turned thirteen I was product of sweaty palms, Justice lip gloss, pimpled summers. A heat coiled in the pit of my hairy stomach.

The day I turned thirteen Ma told me I was too dark, Only boys could be dark. When I bled for the first time she tore my jeans apart, stinging sweatclang of a sink slick with ink— this sting, this sting— how much farther could I play the part?

Emerging sea-beast, a girl’s hide— how was I supposed to know the female phoenix

meant panties drenched in peroxide?

She held me, she fed me; the only scent I knew of her: bleach on my arms and the boiling pot, clearance-sale lotion and my baby brother’s snot.

The day I turned thirteen I thought I was a woman, how Ma wished I was a woman.

To spend your last years among rusted vents and pity flowers and my fingers smoothing the crinkles of your gown. Dated magazines, peeled mandarins, red pills on trays.

When I leave the hospital it is dark, and my flesh purpled, so it must be me, the one who decays.

You were right, Ma, I’m rotten work— A corpse was born on my wedding day; it was buried under my veil. You were right—about men and my strife; I couldn’t handle that I still have dreams about your kitchen knife. Sliced apple froths in my palm, the scent of an end which impregnates aches lingers. We who slip into sterilized silence. Ma, our hands never touch, they retract at the skim, So I think they never will Ma, I get so sick of you sometimes, I feel sick around you, So I hold my breath, so you hold my breath . . .

Poem by Ada Limón, Guest Contributor

Ada Limón is the author of six books of poetry, including The Carrying, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. Her book Bright Dead Things was nominated for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Her work has been supported most recently by a Guggenheim Fellowship. She grew up in Sonoma, California and now lives in Lexington, Kentucky where she writes, teaches remotely, and hosts the critically-acclaimed poetry podcast, The Slowdown. Her latest book of poetry, The Hurting Kind, was published in May 2022 by Milkweed Editions. She is the twenty-fourth Poet Laureate of the United States.

Ada Limón

How We See Each Other

I forget I am a woman walking alone and wave at a maroon car, assuming it’s a neighbor or a friend.

The car then circles the block and goes past me five times. One wave and five times the car circles. Strangers.

It is the early evening, the fireflies not yet out, I trick the hunting car by pretending to walk into a different house. I am upset by this, but it is life, so I make dinner and listen to a terrible audio book on Latin American

Literature that’s so dull it’s Dove soap. Violence is done and history records it. Gold ruins us. Men ruin us.

That’s how the world was made, don’t you know?

A group of us, to tune out grief every week, are watching dance movies. Five women watching people leap and grind.

Every time I watch the films, I cry. Each week, even though we are hidden from each other by distance, I know

I am the first to break into tears. Something about the body moving freely, someone lifting them, or just the body

alone in movement, safe in the black expanse of stage. The body as rebellion, as defiance, as immune.

Aracelis writes to tell me she’s had a dream where I am in Oaxaca wearing a black dress covered with animals.

In her dream I am brushing and brushing my hair with a brush made out of animal hair. There is a large mirror and a room full of books. History comes at us through the sheen of time.

I write back, Was it ominous or was it hopeful? She says, The word I am thinking of is “strong.”

I kindle the image in my body all day, the mirror, the brush, the animals, the vast space of the imagination,

the solid gaze of a woman who has witnessed me as unassailable, the clarity of her vision so clean I feel almost free.

Samantha Stokes

How to Cope with Sudden Disasters

Winner of the Editors’ Award in Prose

The condensation on the Modelo bottle wet my fingers. The glass almost slid and shattered. Because I was about to piss myself, I went to the bathroom. I was familiar with it—my favorite dive bar, outfitted with worn graffiti and three-dollar PBRs, always playing blues punk or something adjacent. The bathroom smelled like vomit, and so did I. I went back upstairs, and my seat had been occupied during my absence.

“Hey, that’s my seat.” I jutted a finger in the direction of the barstool.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” the faceless patron muttered, “Do you want me to get up?”

He turned to me, and I noticed that he was attractive—not attrac tive enough to get nervous, but attractive enough to consider as a sex ual prospect. I said, “No, it’s fine,” and dragged an empty stool next to him. It was a painfully conspicuous move, but he didn’t seem to mind. I nursed my fifth beer for twenty minutes before he spoke again.

“Are you here alone?”

I snorted. “I always am.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Exactly what it sounds like.”

A sleeve of tattoos crawled up his arm and breathed into the fab ric of his Bauhaus tee. He studied me for a moment, as if trying to place a vaguely familiar face.

“You come here often?” he finally said, returning his gaze to the kaleidoscope of bottles stacked behind the bar.

“Every night.”

“Really? What keeps you coming back?”

He laughed and nodded. The opening notes of “You Make Me Sick” by Satan’s Rats whined over the speakers, and a couple bikergang-types at the end of the bar nodded their heads ever so slightly. They cracked jagged knuckles and twisted the yellowed bristles of their beards.

“I guess those are the most important prerequisites,” he said. “Pretty much all you need in a bar.”

Inadvertently, I thought of him. It was one of those intrusive flashthoughts that comes on as quickly as it dissipates. I thought of him with his pointed chin, brown eyes freshly lit like kindling, and the warmth of his hands, so unlike the frost I’d become accustomed to re cently. I hated that this memory made me want to order another beer, or have sex with anyone within a mile radius.

I didn’t cry at the funeral. Those dry eyes confused friends and family, and they hissed behind my back: does she not care? How do you move on, just like that? They’d snap their fingers to punctuate the just like that, and I’d beg for a single tear to appear at the corner of my eye like a diamond and slowly roll down my cheek, promising I hurt more inside than I could verbalize. And then I grew angry, because is there a proper way to emote grief? I’m still trying to be purple and blue all over, maybe just to prove to myself that I am sad, that I do care, but all I want to do is drink more and have sex.

The only insurance-covered therapist who was accepting new pa tients was a stern Catholic woman with sturdy calves, skin mottled by varicose veins. I was convinced she was made of leather, the crepe paper of her hands squeaking as she gripped her clipboard. I told her: I think I’m using sex as self-harm. She swallowed, and the gold cross hanging against her decolletage winked in the fluorescent lights. She asked if I’m using protection, and I said yes. She didn’t say much else. Instead, she asked how I’m “coping.” She eyed the skinny silver band on my finger, seven years worn. I twisted it around and around. It’s not that I hadn’t tried to take it off. Soap, water, lotion, and oil

“Fits all the prerequisites: drinks are cheap, music’s good, bartenders are a little mean.”

couldn’t get the embrace of that fucking ring to release its grip. No, it haunted me like a promise of futures that have exhausted themselves and dissolved, or futures that are being lived out in some parallel universe—one where I’m happy and drinking Arnold Palmers, sitting out a summer storm with my daughter on our screen-in porch. I’m coping fine. I’m going to AA. I’m doing my daily gratitude journal. I’m exercising weekly and taking magnesium and steaming broccoli. And these weren’t necessarily lies—I was healing in ways conducive to capitalist functionality. I was recuperating in ways that make me capable of occupying my quiet cubicle, fielding inimical calls and scribbling esoteric notes on pink Post-Its. But then I clocked out and hit the bars, alone as always, and every week I took home a small army of men, all overcompensating and equally mediocre. When it was done, I lay there with my head spinning, suddenly overcome with an apoplectic rage at the realization that I had no choice in my par ents’ decision to bring me into the world.

What I didn’t tell my therapist is that I woke up every morning with a starchy mouth and briny headache, sure that someone or some thing was sitting on my chest and forcing the air out of my diaphragm. I didn’t tell her that every morning, I ignored the careful precipice of stained IKEA dishware teetering in my kitchen sink, pushed aside the single stick of butter and browned avocado occupying my fridge, and procured my first ice-cold Modelo of the day. I didn’t tell her that the amelioration of my depression seemed like something far-off and impossible to grasp, that I’d considered what my brains would look like splattered on the sides of the train tunnel, and that I’d been using anonymous video chatting websites just to have someone to talk to. I didn’t tell her that my grief was a wound I’d been trying to stitch over with the most sagacious medical integrity, but that these attempts had become almost farcical—here the wound splits, over and over and over. Here the raw skin shows, flesh and bone, that calcified sadness peeking out like some ivory harbinger of eternal longing. Here grief jellies and congeals around your flesh like adipocere, and you sink into the plush of your barstool, waiting for that parasitic infection to

eat away at you until you stiffen and rot, a tree gnawed at by some fungal plague. So I sat there, rotten and petrified, until my synapses were so fried I could sink into a beatific apathy.

“I’m guessing it’s been a rough day,” he continued when I didn’t respond. I glanced at him. Mop of curly auburn hair, hand molded to a beer can, weathered band tee.

“Do you eat pussy?” I asked. His mouth gaped, and I shrugged. “You’re not a regular. I doubt I’ll see you again. I don’t see the problem in being straight-up. We both know the reason you started talking to me.”

“So chivalry’s really dead then, huh?”

“I mean, why does anyone talk to a girl at a bar?”

“Because they want to get to know them?”

“Bullshit.” I shook my head, fidgeting with the lip of my beer. “That’s the kind of thing you save for dates or slow-burn romances with friends or co-workers. No one chatting up girls at a bar is look ing for marriage.”

“Did I say I was?”

“It’s hard to believe any man starting up small talk is actually in terested in what I have to say.” “That’s a bit pessimistic. You act like you’ve never made a new friend in a bar.”

“Sure I have. But I always end up fucking them.”

“Well, I’m not necessarily saying that’s out of the question.”

I let my mouth curl into a small, obliging smile. I readjusted my hair, realizing that it felt like straw and was probably cocooned in a halo of flyaways and split ends. I ran my fingers under my eyes, sure that my mascara had smeared into black bruises. I wondered if he no ticed the cluster of pimples collecting at the corner of my lip.

“Too forward?” he asked.

“How could anything be too forward after what I asked you?”

“I guess that’s valid.”

“To be honest, I just got out of a long-term relationship.” I started to be honest then shivered and began to lie. “We lived in a flat in Dublin together, but I found out he was cheating. I just got back to the States a month ago. I’m still trying to readjust.”

“But you’d already consider yourself a regular here?”

I frowned. “When did I say that?”

“It was implied, I think. You recognized me as a non-regular.”

“Well, I haven’t been back long, but I come here so often, it feels like I may as well have been going here for the past couple years. I live nearby.”

“Me too.”

“Really? In Dimes Square?”

“A couple blocks off.”

“We might be neighbors.”

“Small world.”

We both drank in silence for a minute. I could see cogs turning in his brain, trying to re-initiate the ping-pong of rapport, come up with some quip to get us talking again.

“So, you just got out of something long-term, huh?”

“Yep. Seven years.”

“What a coincidence. Me too.”

“Really? Don’t tell me she was a cheater too.”

“No, actually,” he took a swig of beer and scratched his neck. “It’s sort of a long story.”

“You were the cheater?”

“Mm . . . A little more grim than that.”

“Are we playing a guessing game now?”

“Sure. How about a challenge: if you guess the reason for my relationship’s fateful end, I’ll buy you a shot?”

“Well, I’ve never been one to turn down free alcohol.” I tried to read his face: the small constellation of sunspots across the bridge of his nose; the hardened steel of his eyes. It was hard to imagine him as disloyal or abusive or anything other than the victim. Even with the sleeve of loud tattoos and the long, unruly hair, he had some quality that suggested a deeper unhappiness or betrayal. “Maybe she didn’t cheat, but she left you for someone else?”

“Not exactly.”

“How many guesses do I get?”

“High stakes.” I drummed my fingers on the bar. “Maybe . . . She’d decided you’d outgrown each other? That you were dragging her down? It was time to go your separate ways?”

He laughed. “Remember, I said something grim.”

I looked at him closely, considering my next words carefully. Fi nally, encouraged by the sleazy veil of alcohol, I released them. “Oh, c’mon man. Don’t tell me she died.”

The silence that followed punctuated the friendly confabulation we’d been entertaining, and instead, the belly of the conversation was distended by some sudden shift in tone—something that signaled an impending need for sympathy or commiseration. I felt my heart jump in my throat, wishing I could pluck my words out of the still air and swallow them.

“Bingo,” he said finally, avoiding my eyes, “Car accident.”

“Oh.” I felt like I’d been slapped in the face. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Yeah. The worst part is that she didn’t die in the accident. I actually thought she was okay; I was ecstatic. I had more physical injuries than her. But hers was internal. We didn’t catch it in time, and she hemorrhaged while I was asleep. When I woke up, her eyes were still open. It took me a minute to realize she wasn’t just staring at the ceiling, waiting for me to get up.”

I noticed he was slurring slightly, and the way the words sud denly came so uninhibited after that long, ruminative pause he’d let me stew in guiltily after my first words. It was like he’d been waiting for someone with which to share the burden of his pain. I stared at him in silence. My head pounded against my temples. and I finished my drink in one quick swallow. I wondered whether I needed to offer him physical comfort, maybe a hand on the shoulder, but ultimately decided it felt far too robotic. I wondered if he approached people at bars often just to recount this story; to have an anonymous shoulder to cry on. I’d done the same—not intentionally, but the alcohol would go to my head, and I’d find myself soliloquizing again, lingering on things that everyone thought I’d surmounted.

“I’ll give you two more.”

“Sorry,” he said, “I know that’s a lot.”

I had been hoping to get laid, and a profession of my own trauma felt like it might obliterate my chances of such a thing. But something about the storm that clouded his visage made me feel obligated to offer him the only comfort I could: alliance.

“Actually . . . Um.” I paused to flag down the bartender and order another beer. “I lied. Earlier. About the relationship.”

“Oh?”

“I was in a long-term one. We didn’t live in Dublin, though, and he didn’t cheat. He died too. A couple months ago. Alex.”

“Oh.” He thought for a second but eventually shrugged his shoulders, like my profession was too preposterous to respond to with any sort of social propriety. “She was Camelia.”

“That’s a pretty name.”

“She was a pretty woman.”

“Do you want to tell me about her?”

“I guess.” He thought for a moment. “She was an elementary school teacher, which I think is the first thing I liked about her. She was this funny contradiction of a person: covered in tattoos, dark hair, blunt bangs, that whole vibe, but then children just loved her, and she was one of the sweetest people you’d ever meet. I remember her telling me about how the parents would be weird at parent-teacher conferences when they first met her, but by the end of the meeting she’d have won them over completely. People just trusted her. She designed clothes too; she was always buying stuff from thrift stores, like old curtains and blankets . . . She’d tear them up and resew them and make these weird sweaters and skirts that were a thousand times cooler than anything in my closet. I really saw myself spending the rest of my life with her. Our friends would always complain about their respective relationship problems, and we’d nod and offer our advice, but then we’d go back home and joke about how we were the worst people to ask, how we couldn’t relate to those ‘mere mortals.’”

We stared ahead. A weight should have been lifted from our

shoulders, but now the misery that hung around us felt even more acknowledged, larger than both of us, and somehow pathetic.

“Anyways, that was Camelia.” He glanced at me. “Would it be awful if I asked you how it happened? With Alex?”

“No.” I sighed. “I seem to bring it up all the time anyways.” “Me too.”

“Well . . . Alex. He was beautiful too. I know it sounds corny or stereotypical or whatever, but he had these honey brown eyes that looked different in every light—sometimes muddy, sometimes amber. I was convinced I could read his emotions in them. He was a computer security expert, a white-hat hacker. He was incredibly, painfully smart. He built all his computers. And not just smart—he was cultured. Well-read. He would complain a lot about how he al ways felt that his coworkers were too left-brained . . . That they were scared by art or anything subjective, anything that left room for am biguity. He had this incredible ability to be so scientific and so smart, but also had that open-minded languid nature of an artist. God . . .”

I felt tears start to sting the corners of my eyes. When it first hap pened, my eyes were chronically dry. Sometimes, I would sit in my room and marinate in the vocals of Elliott Smith or Jeff Buckley, wait ing for my emotions to overflow and manifest physically. But now, months later, the tears came on all too easy and fast, spilling out in the aisles of grocery stores or during work meetings.

“He sounds like a great guy.”

“Yeah, he was. He got sick. He was pretty young—thirty-one . . . I guess he just got unlucky. Lymphoma. I mean, God—lymphoma, out of all things? It was fucking awful. I had to watch him until the very end. I had to roll him out of bed and change his diapers. It was so horrible. I know it sounds dumb, but I fucking broke down watch ing Benjamin Button because it felt like exactly what I went through, watching someone age backward, having to baby them when they were someone who you’d gotten used to leaning on. At that point, he was so skinny . . . He’d always been lanky, but then he was just bones and a hint of muscle tissue. He was so frail, I actually considered kill

ing him. I loved him more than anything, but I just thought it would be easier for him, you know? I knew he didn’t want me to see him like that. He always looked embarrassed, and he hated when people came to visit. But I just couldn’t have his death on my hands, so instead, I sat by and watched him die . . . And when he did, it felt more like a relief than a loss. It’s finally hitting me as a loss, but at the time, I was just so glad he didn’t have to feel like that anymore. I actually smiled. His family would hate me even more if they knew that, but I fucking smiled.”

He nodded. “I don’t think that’s awful. Grief is weird. There’s no appropriate way to react.”

“That’s what I’m always telling myself. But I still wonder if I didn’t do enough. I’ll always wonder if I could have done more . . . I don’t know what, but more.”

“Oh, trust me, that question haunts me everyday. What if I’d just woken up in the middle of the night and checked on her? What if I’d had the doctors check her out more thoroughly after the accident? What if I wasn’t so focused on myself and my own injuries; what if I made the active effort to keep her alive? But I didn’t. We did the most we could.”

“I know. People have told me that a million times. But I don’t think I’ll ever truly believe it.”

“I mean, I don’t believe it now. But I have hope that I will, sometime in the future. I don’t want to resign myself to a life of self-flagellation, you know?”

“Yeah. No. You’re right. It just . . . It haunts me. I can’t even sleep alone anymore, or at least not sober. Otherwise, I’ll stay awake all night, staring at the ceiling and wondering whether God might come down and smite me for my negligence.”

“Wow. I thought that was just me.”

“Same.”

He paused for a minute, seeming to run his next words over his tongue a couple times before speaking.

“Would you want to . . . Sleep over tonight? Nothing sexual,

obviously. Just so we don’t have to be alone? And so we can be with someone who understands?”

The proposition seemed bizarre at first. A platonic sleepover be tween two traumatized people? At this age? I imagined sleeping with him, or near him, maybe with a pillow between us, talking and philos ophizing into the witching hour, the way I used to with girls at middle school sleepovers. No tension, no ultimate promise of sex I would feel obligated to fulfill. Maybe it’s what I’d wanted all along.

At that point, I’d distanced myself from the few friends I had. My therapist called it “self-isolating.” I’d always been an introvert. For the most part, in my late twenties I leaned on Alex, who was the kind of person that could spark stimulating conversations with any one around him. He was a great listener, a prolific writer, a debater, a questioner—I often wondered if there was anything he didn’t know. I also wondered why he’d ever chosen to settle down with me. But soon, the questioning gave way to appreciation, or some feeling of in explicable luck, and I spent every morning running my fingers over the hills and valleys of his face. Without him, I realized how badly I needed him to break me out of my shell. I’d try to go out sober and would find myself wishing I was at home finishing whatever dog-eared and highlighted book I was halfway through. But even with my asocial tendencies, there was a part of me that needed a modicum of human comfort, a feeling of community.

I found that in bars. The alcohol liquidated my solid exterior, made the challenging topics I felt too stupid to comment on so easy to slip into, like a well-worn pair of shoes. Like my wedding ring. In a haze of imbibery, I could say anything. And it provided a community, too—that was something I was always scared to talk about in AA: the community of heavy drinkers. Many of us were bonded by an un spoken dissatisfaction, a mutual disappointment in ourselves and our lives, so we came together and drank, and if we ever saw each other outside the bar in daylight, we’d probably look down at our feet and walk by in silence. An invisible client confidentiality agreement. But one thing that no one knew—not the bar regulars, or the bar

tenders, or my therapist, or my AA group, or even the nameless man beside me—was that I was grieving for two people in one horrible catastrophe. We’d already named her: Daisy.

It seems ironic now, something about beautiful little fools. We should have known better. Alex’s cancer was progressing quickly, and by the point we’d learned the gender, he was always too lethargic and existentially anxious to have sex. I thought it might have quelled his unhappiness a bit: seeing my belly round out like a small, buoyant melon; that prenatal glow everyone always talks about. But instead, he got sicker, until he couldn’t even grasp the idea of the life growing inside of me; until he couldn’t even remember my name. After he died, I knew she could be nothing more than a memory of him. I knew I would hate her, no matter how badly I wanted to love her. She was bound to have his nose, or his eyes, or his warm, tender hands, and I’d always hate her for it. She had a deeper part of him that I would never have.

So I killed her. And to some extent, I killed him. It was a double homicide—one intentional, one not—and I was the sole survivor, liv ing out both of their legacies in some sweaty bar with sweaty men, eking out a meager existence.The only excitement in my life hinged on whenever the next episode of The Bachelor was slated for.

“Yes,” I said abruptly. It came out like a burp. “Yes. I don’t want to go home alone. I really, really don’t want to go home alone.”

My nose stung, and I tried to control the faucet of thin mucus streaming toward my lip, but it was already flowing, and the man grabbed a cocktail napkin and waved it at me with his brow furrowed.

“Can I get your name?” he asked.

“Ainsley.”

“Ainsley. I’m Ezra.”

“Nice to meet you.” I held out my hand and laughed through the tears in the spirit of all the absurdity and sudden intimacy.

“It’s nice to meet you too. Do you want to get out of here?”

“Yes. Yes, I do.”

His apartment was small and unorganized, littered with books, fast food wrappers, and an assortment of half-melted candles.

“Sorry, it’s a mess,” he said, kicking at a labyrinth of books and crumpled newspapers at our feet.

“I don’t mind.” I shrugged off my coat and dropped it on the floor in a sad, wilted pile.

“Do you want a beer?”

“I guess so.”

He walked to the fridge, which was peppered with notes and photos and postcards sandwiched under magnets. I noticed a couple photos of him beaming with a lithe blonde woman, his hand tightly gripping her waist. I wondered if that was Camelia, but asking felt impossible.

I sat on the cracked leather couch, and he brought over a frosty Red Stripe. We sat together in the cloak of his flickering floor lamp and sipped with our eyes on the wall ahead, thinking of what had been tarnished and lost, all the inside jokes and fights and orgasms and road trips and meals we’d had with those now-voids of our previous lives. Things that had fallen between the wall and the couch, the itch on your back that your arms can’t physically reach. His hand slowly crawled toward mine, and I grabbed it without thinking. It felt good there, more calloused than Alex’s but still warm enough to remind me that I was sentient and had some life left to live. I squeezed his hand, and he squeezed back. Then, he twitched and suddenly withdrew it, slithering it back to his lap and dropping it to a flimsy open palm.

“Sorry,” he muttered, “It’s just . . . Do you think this is weird?”

“Two people who just met in a bar sitting on a couch, drinking beer, and quietly grieving? Yeah, it’s weird.” I laughed. “But just like you said, grief is weird. And so is everything. So are human relation ships. So is sex and alcohol and therapy and lymphoma and random disasters. I don’t think we should feel guilty for wanting to find some comfort from all the weirdness.”

“Touché.” He sipped his beer. “I can’t remember the last time I felt . . . I don’t know, not weird?”

“Everything feels weird now, right?”

“Yeah . . . Like, unreal. I feel like there’s a degree between reality and me all the time. If something so awful can happen so suddenly, with no warning and no reason, who’s to say an asteroid won’t oblit erate Earth right now? Or that Yellowstone won’t erupt, or a sinkhole won’t open up under my apartment? Disaster and death just feel like they’re two steps away every fucking second.”

“I know. And I guess that’s something I’ve always known, but I think finding your person is sort of what makes that feeling a little bit more bearable. It makes things feel a little less weird, or at least like good can come from the weirdness.”

“Yeah. Someone to laugh about everything with.”

“Right.”

It fell silent again, and I could see him tense up.His Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed down a dry throat. He seemed to be parsing over a question in his mind, maybe wondering the most polite way to ask me to leave. I didn’t want him to see that I needed this desperately, that

his hand in mine felt safer and stronger than any of the empty, loveless sex I’d had in the past months.

“Is it okay if I pretend that you’re her?” he said obliquely, still facing the wall, so quietly I thought I might have imagined it.

“Camelia?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

In other contexts, with other people, this question might have been off-putting or pathetic or even a little creepy.But in the hereand-now, sinking closer together on the battered couch, hands doing a tentative dance around each other, it felt like the most natural thing he could have said.

“Is it okay if I pretend you’re him?”

He looked at me and nodded. He squeezed my hand again.

“Okay, Alex. I’m sorry I didn’t try harder.”

“You did everything you could.”

“God, that’s so reductive. What is everything? How can any hu

man do everything? I’m sure there has to be something . . . Something I missed.”

“You’re a woman, not a deity. You can’t orchestrate medical miracles.”

“I feel like I should have been able to. For him. For you.”

“And I feel the same about you.”

“We’ll never see each other again.”

“And life goes on.”

“So it does.”

I laid my head in his lap, and he stroked my hair. It felt natural, like Alex stroking my hair. Like the little butterflies of Daisy’s kicks in my stomach. When his fingers hit a tangle, he gently combed it out. And so life goes on, and the tangles unravel.

We lie here together and pretend to be in love. In the morning, we’ll wake up and never see each other again. We’ll try to construct facsimiles of love and end up with simulacrums. Our wounds will split and heal again and again and again. A small part of us will always be missing, but at some point, we’ll learn there’s no benefit to the endless at tempts to fill it. There are some things that can never be replaced. In the weirdness of the world, where there seems to be an endless stream of somethings to supplement other somethings, where cars drive them selves and cities look like densely-packed microchips, it will always seem silly that there’s nothing that can appropriately fill that small, irksome part of us. But from time to time, we’ll find someone to hold our hand and stroke our hair. It won’t necessarily detract from any thing, and it won’t be conducive to any earth-shattering revelations, but it will promise us that we’re not alone.That our brains are better off in our heads than splattered on the sides of train tunnels, and that we’re more than the missing parts of our incomplete wholeness.

Natasha Segebre, The Pickup and Silhouettes

Lauren Stanzione

I Am Meant to Be Here

My mother is setting down the blue canister of flour. White bleeds into my sleeve as I sop up the dust I’ve spilled. She is smiling, and the light catches in her eyes—ones I always wished she gave to me: golden rings, flying blue saucers floating in peridot. Enigma eyes. This is like my mother, who in her own way has no secrets and many. Today, I am sitting around the island, our island of skeletons, and I am pull ing her strings. I am opening her so she will tell me about the past, one I promised as a child I would write for her. She is telling me about the lump on her throat when we were one person. It was like a ghost, methodically pulling at the thin, delicate skin on her neck. It was a ghost, and I summoned it as it lay barren within her. I try not to think of the notes she would be able to sing if I could have derived from another place or time. My eyes are pulled to the red exclamation mark that hugs the skin of her throat, the specks of crimson against faint hues of tawny. Pain rolls through my esophagus when I think of the incision. I look away. My mother begins unfolding the story of the bump on her neck. She begins one along the outskirts of her mind. She is telling me about a waiting room, a placental hemorrhage, and a world where we both had fallen into the void; where I would have been a cell or two, and she would have left a baby and a man. Later, when I am lying in the safety of my childhood bed, I write down six words:

I AM MEANT TO BE HERE.

Interview with Hala Alyan

Hala Alyan (she/her) is the author of The Arsonist’s City and Salt Houses, as well as four award-winning poetry collections. Recipient of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and Arab American Book Award, Alyan’s work has been published in the New Yorker, the Academy of American Poets, Lit Hub, The New York Times Book Review, and Guernica. Alyan lives with her beloved husband and dog in Brooklyn, New York where she works as a clinical psychologist, professor, and writer. She answered West 10th’s questions in astonishing detail while on the train. * * *

WEST 10TH: As a Palestinian-American person who has lived in Kuwait and Lebanon, you have experienced the culture, lifestyle, en vironment, emotions, and more of the characters you write about. You expertly describe the lives of these characters from childhood to adulthood. Now, describe yours—when did you know you wanted to become a writer? How did you start? How did you grow into writing the stories you focus on today?

HALA ALYAN: From the time that I was taught how to read, I would write. I became enamored and obsessed with stories and [connected] my learning how to read with the Iraq invasion of Kuwait, then my parents’ immigration to the U.S. It was a really tumultuous, chaotic time. I turned to books and storytelling to make sense of the world. It’s a pretty common experience: if you feel othered, different, or like you’re not fitting in, you’ll lose yourself in the world of books. On top of that, when I learned how to write, I was like, “Oh, my God. I can create my own stories.” I wrote lots of stories about little girls who could stop wars. You know, really cute stuff that now makes a lot of

sense psychologically. I think I was always writing stories about families and, without even thinking about it, immigration. It’s something I realize now: I was always writing stories that would span different countries, [about] travel, leaving places and coming back to them.

WEST 10TH: Because you understand your characters on such a deep level, describe your process of understanding them as if they were real people. Do you see a bit of yourself in them? Your family, or friends?

HALA ALYAN: I do see myself in stories. I love the idea that every person in your dreams is you, and I think every character in your books is you to a certain extent. I definitely think that there are parts of myself in all the characters, and because I tell these long, family sagas, there’s elements of [my] family members. Certainly, [there’s] elements of migration. So, even if I’m not basing a character exactly on someone in my family, I’m basing the story of leaving and coming on [their] story.

WEST 10TH: During Writers in New York 2021, I was your stu dent for a rigorous month of writing and reading. I spoke with you about Salt Houses, which I had been reading during the program. I wondered about your process of writing a generational novel with so many complex characters. You told me that Salt Houses began as a series of short stories. How did the story of the Yacoub family evolve into what it is today?

HALA ALYAN: The first chapter [of the novel] began as the story of a young man in pre-1967 Palestine making sense of what had been lost after ‘48, growing up in a city that was not his family’s, and the dissatisfaction of the youth in that generation. That ended up building up toward the Six Day War. As I was writing this story, I wrote about this character’s sister and the house they had made their home. It just snowballed, and I found myself wanting to tell more and more. I was interested in the mother and sister, who at the time were just after

thoughts of the story. Then, I found myself writing backwards and writing forwards. I wrote very chaotically—very different from [The Arsonist’s City]. It was not chronological; it was not linear. I wrote the scenes I was excited about at any given time, which was wonder ful. But as you can imagine, the editing process was really intense. I don’t necessarily recommend it—I think it’s a good way to write a first novel, but then you learn a lot and write differently moving forward.

WEST 10TH: You have explored several career paths in your life. You are a clinical psychologist, professor, writer and poet. What came first, if any? What was your original passion—the career you knew you had to pursue?

HALA ALYAN: I think I was a writer first, and that included poetry and stories. Then, graduate school was psychology, and being a pro fessor was really incidental. It was totally random. I became a profes sor because I was offered to teach a class in psychology the year I was finishing my post-doctorate, and I immediately fell in love with it. But even as I was finishing my doctorate degree, I didn’t think I would end up in that field. It’s funny how that happened. Now, it’s such a central part of my life.

WEST 10TH: How do you understand writing through the lens of these careers? Your expertise in psychology is clearly present in the trauma that plagues your writing. However, is psychology what you draw on directly to build these characters?

HALA ALYAN: Yeah, I think my background in psychology helps with understanding characters. I definitely think that is what has en abled me to ask questions about characters’ motivations, fears, and desires. That has a lot to do with the questions you learn, as a thera pist, to ask your clients. Understanding people helps you understand characters. It helps you imagine what it would be like to live different lives. It makes you ask better questions of your plot. Same thing with

teaching: I’m around writing—really incredible writing, my students’ writing, which is mind-blowingly good—so I’m inspired by people and narrative and story constantly. As a therapist, as a professor, and as a writer.

WEST 10TH: Does writing and your experience as a poet influence your work as a psychologist and professor? If so, how?

HALA ALYAN: I love that question. I think they kind of compliment each other. Writing teaches you to pay attention to detail. It teaches you to be patient—it takes a long time for a story to present itself to you, or take shape, or tell you what it wants to be. That kind of pa tience is really helpful when you’re a therapist because people take a long time to tell you their stories and to even understand what their own stories are.

WEST 10TH: You hold Kan Ya Makan (KYM), monthly open mic nights for New York creatives. KYM events are fundraisers for var ious causes of your choosing, and the attendees can donate what they wish. How did these events begin and become what they are now?

HALA ALYAN: Yes! We finally settled on a name for it. It’s Arabic for “once upon a time.” It started basically just on a fluke. During the pandemic, there were no readings, and it was the summer after COVID-19 started. I had this idea that, because I had an outdoor space, that I could have people come and read, and it would be safe. I did that a couple times, then my good friend and amazing poet, Sara Akant, and I started to do them more regularly and center them around these amazing causes. So, we raise funds and [donate] one hundred percent of the money. We unfortunately had to take a break during the winter [due to the COVID-19 surge], but I’m really looking forward to the spring and opening it up again.

WEST 10TH: In the recent globalized surge of education about Israel’s oppression of Palestinians, your work not only serves as historical fiction but necessary tools for young people’s education right now. Aside from The Arsonist’s City and Salt Houses as well as your past poetry, how have you used writing as a tool for Palestinian liberation— if you would describe your writing as that at all?

HALA ALYAN: It’s hard to describe your own work as that. I just try to write the stories that matter to me, and they happen to be undertold stories. They happen to be stories about overshadowed or mar ginalized voices. But they are also the stories of myself and my family and people that look like me and sound like me—people that grew up with similar lives because of luck and economic status or the choices that a generation-or-two ago made, like the choices that my grandfather made being different from the choices his siblings made. I’m very aware of the privilege, of the luck that’s been bestowed upon me to even answer these questions about these things and write these sto ries. I just try to do justice by [them], and if that ends up also helping people access these narratives that they otherwise wouldn’t or shift perspectives or whatever, then that’s amazing.

WEST 10TH: Does writing about the conflict help you work through probably complex emotions, or the opposite?

HALA ALYAN: Writing about occupation and oppression helps clarify your understanding of it. It doesn’t neutralize feelings, but if anything, I think it can strengthen them. It can be mobilizing. It can remind you why it matters. Art can be activism, but there are other forms of activism one can do simultaneously.

Eka Savajol

wetlands

every night i dream simply that we lay down together

your hair becomes tall grasses your body stretches out becomes the shallow water below in turn

my tongue moves as a bird diving to catch a frog

i wake up half-drowning from the puddle formed while dreaming in the humidity i sweat rain unable to fall back asleep, i hope at least you taste me now as your perspiration comes rolling in the shape of a dark cloud perched on your upper lip

i hope at least our restlessnesses meet, sweat running down the incline into sweat slow-moving deltas converging into the marsh

but i know you are far watching the hills undulate

behind the churning stomach of traffic the summer so hot, you mistake the brake lights creeping up the highway ramps for wildfires the summer so hot, my name evaporates off your tongue

here i don’t remember the last time it went a day without raining lightning rips the sky apart it falls to shreds i drink and drink the water rises mud bites at my feet needing dry land i search for your mouth but all i see are rows of teeth alligator eyes winced at the sight of me the thunder rings like a dinner bell ushering me to eat from your hand my hair wet drips in front of my face

unable to see i kneel unable to come up for water i sink further no matter how far i cast you away you return and i am the one pierced by the hook the gash curved into a smile

from above, i could see your shoulder as the smile of a boy eyeing me across the diner as the mustache i’d never see again wiped dry as the ache that comes from near-constant genuflect

from above i could see the wetlands as fields of wheat being watered instead of as endless marshes

Target Practice

As I dreamt of you drew you close through tangled tree I heard the footsteps of my mother in the dark the week after I told her I was trans. She approached her voice a hostile flash cut into the tendrils of the tree root her eyes burned red as she asked who is going to love you The sentence unfinished the echo completes it half man half nothing who is going to love you unevenly formed Unstirred unmoved I reply with pre-rehearsed sangfroid: I am a man and I will be loved A branch snaps

I dismiss it turn away back into the dream of you we continue our curling decaying through the others’ gaze

The snap resonates You lose shape your face obscured by whiteness your crotch obscured by cisness My fingers spit you out

I wake up hot and dry sit in the center of my room on the floor Duck on a lake hearing the rifle being loaded I try to recall the last time you said you cared for me I count Choke Start again I count wonder if I was spit out

in your dream too unable to swallow me so brown so trans. Choke Start again. Limp on the ground

I must Start again

Hunched shapeless I must Start again recall the last time you said you cared for me I must Start again count back the hours from now. Thirty minutes ago I was still asleep holding you pale against me I am ill again Try telling myself you are gentle again but Men like you have pulled me apart before Hands like yours have disemboweled me before in that terror I confuse cis body for cis body Confuse white touch for white touch

Start again

I try to recall the night before a loose smile as you got out of the car a tight one as you rushed back to kiss me I drove home lips curled in to preserve it until I Arrived and delivered the embrace back into the pillow I projected you onto Do you care for me Does it matter if you say you do I imagine you but I can only remember the humidity of that summer that hollowed me I can only remember so hot from breathing down my shirt to avoid sobbing I imagine youthe night before I close my eyes try to breathe into the warmth

of your face but I come up for air gasping because in your blond hair I see his and

I am trapped in the arms of the first boy I loved I am trapped in the living room

I am trapped to the backseat of his car where he let me hold him I am trapped to the park light of day snuffed out crouched in the gazebo his erection growing in my hand his face avoiding mine

I trapped in the following afternoon as I tried to tell him I loved him He stood as if suddenly realizing he was tall Wind carefully ordering hair across his eyes he replied you are a female. i am a gay man trying to get you to love me is denying my gayness

As he spoke he stood firm yet ran off through wet grass when the silence set in

If his eyes were not so covered could he have pronounced these words as fact? Could he have looked into my face my hand my shoulder pronounced me female?

Could he have accused me of forcing him? or would the sight of me turn him inside out with the memory that it was he who ushered my male hand to him?

Answerless I watch his body tumble into nothing.

On the floor of my bedroom trying to recall the last time you said you cared for me i return to the day after he ran off How I cried feet on the seat of a toilet to hide that I was in a bathroom I didn’t belong in I denied him

his existence? I denied him his existence? I reduced myself to nothing in the stall unseen Didn’t make sound to avoid hearing my voice float to too feminine a pitch I shriveled ash decomposed at the touch I became a grimacing vapor. Is it possible I became so good at denying my own existence that I denied his by accident?

No.

Go back to sleep mom go back to sleep I am a man I will be loved

I breathe to prove to myself I am not condemned Grope around the floor to prove I am still here

Start again

A bird is out too early chirping into night at the sun of the streetlamp begging for dawn Do you find me hollow as he found me? If you called me as day broke to say you loved me would it only be “despite” my being trans or would you love me “through?” Would it be possible to even know?

You are not him I remind myself You are not him I command Start again

I am a clay disk Hear the sound of me cracking midair Hunter Send your dog out for the body

Natasha Segebre, Tree Line

Maryam Khalifa Al Shehhi

I Don’t Want to Write a Qasida Using Your Language

Note: these poems were written in 2021 for the class Foundations of Literature II: Novel and Lyric. They have been revised and edited in 2022. I want to write a poem that has its own identification card half Arab, and half Arab has no religion, no faction

Consider this a naked poem using a language of its own belonging to its definition of Arab nationalism (pre- what you call “colonialism”)

Instead of your twenty-six letters, i’ll use my alif, baa, taa with flowers on top of each and dancing letters in your so-called Harem

This poem will break your narrativeof women in jilbabs and men in kandoras* both will be naked, twenty-eight letters— and countless diacritics later

No, it won’t sound like preaching prophets nor will I speak about furious camels

it will stand in battlefield, naked, fully embracing its own being

You’ll see my naked poem dancing, on music that won’t be familiar to you with a language you won’t understand Helwa ya baladi, watani habebi, mawteni mawteni*

Take some guesses, familiarize yourself with my letters my language, my poem my music my identity my nationality my belonging my existence; (pre-colonialism)

may my language haunt you, for 1001 nights (and days), Amen

Helwa ya baladi, watani habebi, mawteni mawteni*

I don’t want to write a poem using your language, but I am.

Natasha Segebre, Dreamer

Maryam Khalifa Al Shehhi

From A to Alif (and Everything in Between)

Note: this commentary was written about the process of writing and translating a poem I wrote in 2021 for the class Foundations of Liter ature II: Novel and Lyric. It has been revised and edited in 2022 for submission.

Inspired by Abdelfattah Kilito’s book Thou Shalt Not Speak My Language (2008) which revolves around the individuality of a text, problems of translation, and the problem of world literature, I sit uate myself in blank document, wondering what poem I would write, translate, and comment on. Reflecting back and forth on Kilito’s book, I am constantly reminded of the cause I am passionate about the most; language, and specifically our Arabic language that has been colonized, altered, downgraded, and underestimated throughout the years. It’s the language I grew up falling in love with as I delved into its beauty; from rhetoric to composition, oral to modern poetry, and everything in between. Language became my personal cause, hence writing I don’t Want to Write a Qasida Using your Language (2021) and its translation (2021)

Writing the English version first involved revisiting my utmost dedication to the language I wanted to write about, connect with, and defend. Fueled by the notion of exoticizing Arabic in western media, the hierarchy and how Arabic might not qualify for the canon (an other westernized form), and along with the reminder (which isn’t a reminder because “body has memory” and memory accompanies lan guage (Rankine, 2014)) that this language has been colonized for year; I start telling my reader (which is a westernized one in this case) about the shaping of my poem; its identity, individuality, and form. After

this shaping, I remove my language from the mold of colonialism and situate it into the concept of Arab nationalism, which, although it has increased questionably post-colonialism, still remains vibrant.

Abandoning the so-called narratives of the west, this poem re moves all the bounds surrounding it, embraces its own being, and dances freely on the tunes of three nationalistic songs from Egypt, Kuwait, and Lebanon; three prominent countries that have under gone various changes and challenges, yet continue to embrace their national identity through art and music, poetry and culture, and sim ply through existing and being. The choice of including only the first two words of every song in Arabic was a radical one, as it situates the reader into a mold-less poem, causing the reader to feel alienated from a language that he/she does not understand. The final line (I don’t want to write a poem using your language, but I am) ends the poem in a very powerful tone, showing the reader that the only way I as a writer can cross bridges is through the English language.

On the other hand, the process of translating this poem to the Arabic language was not easy, because it contradicts the notion of writing in English to connect with the reader. It also situates me in the position of the reader, as it did not sound radical to write in Arabic to an English-speaker. One main complication was with the verb tens es used. In the English version, mentioning that “it will be” equates “it is” as the poem is doing exactly what it wants to do (embrace itself, dance freely, take pride in its national identity etc.), while in the translated version, “it will be” did not make sense to the context as a whole, as it is already in Arabic doing all of that stuff. The titles also reflect different contexts, as the Arabic title translates to “I won’t write a Qasida using your language.” Using the word Qasida in the ti tle only instead of staying consistent throughout the poem reflects the divide and the space in between two worlds, while ensuring accessibil ity and contexts of using the word “poem.” However, despite several complications in translating this poem, the final lines still embrace the radicality of the language. I think another complication was with literal translation. In a former version, this poem was a mere reflection

of the English version, which did not sound natural and disturbed the flow of words, hence making them one poem instead of two as I hoped them to be. Working on both as individual yet connected pieces allowed both to mirror yet reflect their individuality. I exist in a space where words and contexts are “lost in translation.”

Translation is an act of carrying, but also an act of being car ried. Teju Cole’s Carrying a Single Life: On Literature and Translation (2019) gives me the space to wonder how translation connects and enables many possibilities. Carrying my poem on language from one language to the other has not been easy, as carrying requires pow er and dedication. However, despite the bumpy roads, I carry to be carried one day to languages and cultures that I’ve never heard of. I carry because as a poet and future translator, I feel obligated to give back to literature because it’s given us beyond twenty-six letters, twenty-eight, not even a million. I feel obligated to learn languages, write, and translate for decades ahead because language is a mediator that carries words across worlds.

I want to carry, and be carried

Contributors’ Notes

Maryam Khalifa Al Shehhi is an Emirati third-year student studying literature and creative writing and political science at NYU Abu Dha bi. She is a writer, performer, translator, and mostly human. Her main interests are in Middle Eastern and Islamic studies, ethnographic research, translation studies, and post-colonial theory.

Cynthia Chen is a junior at NYU studying performance studies and creative writing. She writes towards strangeness and thinks the octo pus is the most spiritual creature.

Cristina Coppa is a writer and a student of English and American literature as well as creative writing at NYU. Her work has appeared in The Guillotine, the English & Drama Review, Comic Book League at NYU, and the Greene Street Review.

Ella Kaplun studies English and creative writing at NYU, but enjoys taking photographs in her free time. She loves experimenting with various modes of expression, whether that be through text or visuals. Ella also enjoys trying new foods, excessively researching pop culture conspiracies, and writing for NYU Local.

Yoon Jin Kim (she/her) is a junior majoring in East Asian studies. She enjoys Webtoons, lofi, cat videos, and sweets. She is working on a journal of poems and illustrations—either to publish or keep for herself.

Tiffany Leong is from Chicago. She is a freshman at NYU Shanghai currently pursuing business and finance. Her latest source of inspira tion is Watanabe’s Samurai Champloo.

Alison Long is a senior at CAS pursuing a major in international re lations and a minor in creative writing. She is stuck with no employ ment prospects in the United States (how will her humanities major and very limited skill-set ever land her a work sponsorship?!). But she also fears adjusting back to living in her home country, since that would take away her legal access to Netflix. Instagram: @1nk_a

Gentle Ramirez is an Aquarius, Poet, and Healer. Gentle challenges the traditional thought and framework personally and professionally by rewriting the stories of their own origin despite the socioeconomic inequalities’ impact on their sense of self. They determine that they are who they are, despite subjugation and struggle, not because of it. Gentle uses African American Vernacular English as a source of inspiration, creation, and connection. Gentle is a 2020 Finalist for the Langston Hughes Community Poetry Reading Committee’s Prize, and a recipient of the Oluwatoyin Salua Freedom Fighters Grant (2020). Gentle is also a New Jersey Poetry Out Loud Finalist, and a 2019 Semifi nalist at ACUI’s College Union Poetry Slam Invitational. Their work has been featured in Bryant Park Poetry, the Columbia Spectator, the Provi dence Journal, PoetNY, Washington Square News, and more.

Eka Savajol (he/him) is a screenwriter, playwright, and poet from Houston, Texas in his second year at NYU. His work has appeared in digital and print publications, songs written by friends, multimedia one-acts, and different kinds of festivals. He is grateful for his family, his friends, and radishes.

Natasha Segebre is a twenty-two-year-old photographer and artist based in Brooklyn. They recently graduated from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts with a bachelor’s in photography and imaging and a mi nor in creative writing. They were born in Miami to a Colombian father and an American mother born in Brazil. Natasha’s work spans across documentary, landscape, and fine art photography, and they

strive to create art wherever they find themselves. Their work is primarily film, and they like to be hands on in the analog process, often using experimental techniques. When they’re not taking photographs, they’re making music, videos, and constantly pursuing new creative endeavors.

Lauren Stanzione is a freshman from Clinton, New Jersey, double majoring in English/creative writing and journalism. She is an aspiring writer and long walk, deep thought enthusiast. Her work has ap peared in the Kelsey Review.

Samantha Stokes is a student at NYU who is still trying to figure out what she’s doing with her life, but knows that writing will be part of it. She focuses on prose, but also writes nonfiction cultural critique, film reviews, and poetry. She runs a radio show for WNYU exploring the underground electronic scene of the UK in the nineties.

Caleb Willett moved to Manhattan from coastal Massachusetts three years ago to study English at NYU. He currently lives in the East Village and passes time shooting pool, writing short poems, and ex ploring new walking routes through his neighborhood—whenever, of course, he is not studying.