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 submissions 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 something 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 overflowing, 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 publication—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 innovative 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 managing 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.

Sophia Nickoloff Warren

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 corner 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 sudden 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 annoyed her in a myriad of ways. I was entertained at first when Estragon 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 irritable 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 Estragon. 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 pictures. 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 making 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 several 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 attempts to resuscitate the tree, she started introducing me as “the plant killer” to every Tinder date that she invited over. This became a necessary 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 something 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 intimately for the purpose of becoming disillusioned and walking away thinking she was superior. Earlier this year, someone fell out of Estragon’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 semester 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 Estragon?” 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 sacred, in front of which my self-preservation would become a crime unforgivable 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.