THEAFTER DARKISSUE
Staff
Editors-in-Chief
Kinnia Cheuk
Harper Love
Managing Editors
Fatou M’Baye
Brunella Tipismana
Everett Yum
Associate Editors
Keya Bajaj
Chloe Budakian
Owen Curtin
Lexi Eskovitz
Carter Flemming
Oliver Giddings
Angel Hu
Ethan Kan
Claire Nam
Sukriti Ojha
Tara Singh
Will Sussbauer
Moe Shimizu
Miranda Wollen
Copy Editors
Sophie Garcia
Terence Harris
Elijah Hurewitz-Ravitch
Cameron Jones
Anna Papakirk
Bella Washburn
Layout
Adam Bear
Ashley Wang
Illustrations
Neve O’Brien
Anna Chamberlin
Davianna Inirio
Thisbe Wu
2023-2024 Editors who contributed to this issue
Gavin Guerrette
Audrey Kolker
Ana Padilla Castellanos
Olivia Wedemeyer
Emily Khym
Isabel Maney
Jonas Loesel
Andrew Lau
Soren Ramirez
A Note From the Editors
Dear Reader,
In our first issue of the academic year, the YDN Magazine considers how to begin anew is also to look back. The past is embedded in even the most decisive reinventions.
The stories in this issue take place at the intersection of memory and futurity. A Mormon convert contemplates his life and soul in the darkness of a London train car. A Baldwin novel follows a traveler into a soirée spent with both a past and future lover. A boy dances in the aftermath of a house fire. A year of campus protests prompts students and faculty to examine Yale’s historical and contemporary role in politics, world injustice, and student activism.
Thank you to our tireless associate editors, copy editors, managing board, design team, and writers — both old and new — for the love and care you have put into this magazine. Thank you to Audrey Kolker and Gavin Guerette for handing your baby off to us. Every issue we publish this year will, if we’re doing anything right, contain some trace of the year we spent under your leadership.
This is After Dark. Read it, remember it, and emerge from the shadows with a copy tucked in your pocket.
Kinnia and Harper
WHAT’S
When Craig Birckhead-Morton ’24 was arrested for the first time, on Beinecke Plaza on April 22, 2024, it was on purpose. The arrest was an act of civil disobedience meant to force the University to recognize the past seven months of protests and the war in Gaza.
His second arrest — at a rally on May 1, his twenty-second birthday — was unexpected. While the rally was on Alexander Walk, police issued a warning calling for protesters to leave. Since several police cars had surrounded the protest at that point, Birckhead-Morton approached a police officer to ask where it would be convenient for protesters to disperse. He was immediately arrested and then charged with two counts of first-degree criminal trespass and one count of disorderly conduct.
Birckhead-Morton is currently pursuing a master’s degree in Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University. He is still connected to Yale and the ongoing protests, both in spirit and by necessity. He returned to New Haven on September 19 for a court hearing in which his charges from May 1 were dismissed and his first-degree trespassing charge from April was lowered to simple trespass. He has no criminal record.
Since last October, pro-Palestine student organizers at Yale have set up multiple encampments on university property, staged rallies,
WHAT’S IN A YALE EDUCATION? A Year of Student Protests
and organized teach-ins to call for a ceasefire in Gaza and protest the University’s investment in weapons manufacturing companies. Students who support Israel have hosted counterprotests and demonstrations. Many students have held memorials for the hostages killed and taken by Hamas, as well as spoken out in national media about antisemitism at Yale. Though students are generally united in their hope for global peace and security, sympathies on Yale’s campus are split between two sides of the same war.
As Yale gears up for another year of activism, these students are confronting the tensions of campus activism head-on — to contradictory and at times hopeful results.
But other forms of ideological bifurcation have emerged from the past year of student protests. Disagreements about activism at Yale often go beyond taking sides in the Israel-Gaza conflict; instead, they highlight fundamental disputes surrounding Yale’s role in society and its duty to students as an educational institution. As Yale gears up for another year of activism, student activists are confronting the
contradictions and tensions of campus activism head-on — to contradictory and at times hopeful results.
As Yale gears up for another year of activism, these students are confronting the tensions of campus activism head-on — to contradictory and at times hopeful results.
What is Yale’s role in society?
Yale’s endowment totaled $40.7 billion in June 2023. Within the 0.3 percent of the endowment which is publicly disclosed, the University has invested more than $110,000 in military weapons manufacturers through exchange-traded funds (ETFs) as of February 2024. In their rallies and encampments, student groups like Yalies4Palestine and the Endowment Justice Collective have consistently demanded Yale to disclose the entirety of their investments and divest from weapons manufacturers. According to an Endowment Justice Collective Instagram statement, without a formal policy on investments in weapons manufacturers or transparency mechanisms, there is no way of knowing whether Yale and its shell companies are investing more in the weapons industry.
Their detractors, however, believe that divestment needlessly complicates Yale’s purpose in society. It “introduces so many restrictions into the academic focus that Yale should be having,” said Isha
Brahmbhatt ’24, former chairman of the Tory Party at Yale. She believes that the University’s global impact comes from its education of globally-minded students; the ethics of Yale’s investments or the university’s stance on social issues are less consequential.
Within an institution that has educated much of the political elite of the U.S., including five U.S. presidents, a Yale education is still seen by many as a jumping pad for future global leaders. Elven Shum ’24, former vice-chairman of the Conservative Party at Yale, argues that Yale students are positioned uniquely to “amass their own power or influence” and eventually influence national policy. In the time before most students achieve “world leader” status, Shum advocates for volunteering at the local level: “Serving people at a soup kitchen is probably just as, or more impactful, compared to your individual add to whatever protest at Yale.”
Shum and Brahmbhatt’s concept of Yale as a politically neutral, academically intense cradle that fosters future changemakers is partially shared by the University. In early September, University President Maurie McInnis announced the establishment of a committee to recommend whether Yale should refrain from commenting on matters of public significance. This move comes as many universities nationwide, including Harvard and Columbia, have adopted ver-
sions of institutional neutrality amidst a rise in student protests this year. Institutional neutrality, a concept which was first introduced in the University of Chicago’s 1967 Kalven Report, aims to protect free speech on campus by preventing the censure of minority voices who do not agree with the public view.
But Yale’s celebratory attitude towards its history of student activism suggests that being strictly politically neutral may erode some elements that the University prides in its education. A quote from anti-apartheid activist and first president of South Africa, Nelson Mandela, is carved on the granite wall north of the Beinecke Library — “YOUR FREEDOM AND MINE CANNOT BE SEPARATED.” The sculpted monument is, per the epigraph, “dedicated to the people of South Africa who were supported in their struggle for freedom by members of the Yale and New Haven communities.”
These celebratory commemorations indicate that the University considers civic engagement part of its education. But Yale’s endorsement of activism has always been retroactive.
The memorial refers to the student protests of 1986, when student activists installed a shanty town on Beinecke Plaza calling for Yale’s divestment from companies doing business in apartheid South Africa. After ten days, campus police dismantled the encampment
and arrested over 70 students. According to the Yale Investment Office’s website, the University did eventually adopt divestment policies in the early 1990s — but only after Congress had passed the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act in 1986 and many multinational companies had already withdrawn from South Africa.
Despite Yale’s efforts to shut down the anti-apartheid student movement in the 1980s, it now celebrates these protests’ success in one of the most prominent campus spaces. The University continues to broadcast its students’ historical involvement in campus activism; last year, the Sterling Memorial Library hosted an exhibition commemorating campus protests in support of New Haven’s Black Panthers on trial.
These celebratory commemorations indicate that the University considers civic engagement part of its education. But Yale’s endorsement of activism has always been retroactive.
An education in activism?
In student activist spaces, education goes beyond seminar readings: it consists of learning from others’ lived experiences. Over the past year, pro-Palestine activists at Yale have organized through means other than mere disruption of campus life. Through teach-ins, reading weeks and screenings, they seek to educate themselves and other students on the situation in the Middle East.
During the ten-day occupation of Beinecke Plaza in April, at the Gaza Solidarity Encampment, protesters held a zine-making workshop and conversation with Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins, professor of anthropology at Bard College. Omnia El Shakry, professor of history at Yale, hosted a teach-in about anti-colonial revolt and the Palestinian condition. James Forman Jr. LAW ’92, J. Skelly Wright Professor of Law, spoke to students about his experience organizing with the anti-apartheid student group Brown Divest/Free South Africa during his undergraduate years at Brown.
“You should constantly be asking yourself, are we taking the time to learn from people who were doing it before?” Forman advised an attentive crowd of more than 70 student protesters on April 19. While students can be on the
on the vanguard of activism because of the lack of established institutional structure, he said, this also means that it is hard for them to learn lessons from previous experiences and connect to the lineage of activism from decades ago.
Still, Yale institutions have shut
down educational forms of student activism. Danya Dubrow-Compaine ’25 is an organizer with Yale Jews for Ceasefire and J Street U. To her, these organizations are spaces for those who feel alienated from mainstream Jewish institutions because of their views on the war; they also offer opportunities to educate the student body on Zionism and its history.
Dubrow-Compaine and others in J Street U planned to screen a documentary named Israelism at
the Slifka Center for Jewish Life in December 2023. The documentary, which follows two young American Jews as they learn about how the version of Israel they were taught in Jewish institutions differed from Israeli policy and people in the Middle East’s lived reality, was controversially received in the States and on college campuses like Hunter College, where campaigns were held to stop the film’s screening.
At Yale, the Slifka Center’s Board of Directors originally approved the screening before reversing the decision one week before the event. Students held the screening in the basement of Silliman College instead. In a conversation with Uriel Cohen, the executive director of the Slifka Center, Dubrow-Compaine learned that the approval was retracted because of concerns regarding external backlash from donors and Hillel International. (In an email to the Magazine, Cohen wrote that donor contributions do not change or impact Slifka Center’s mission, values or methodologies.)
Jewish students’ endeavors to screen Israelism at the Slifka Center illustrate how activists attempt to disrupt the ideological status quo at Yale through education, both among the student population and within Yale’s official institutions.
“Israelism is a documentary making very well founded mainstream critiques of settlements in the West Bank, and yet it was deemed to be beyond the pale in a way that rightwing speech on Israel specifically
is just often not,” said Elijah Bacal ’27, who is involved in J Street U and Yale Jews for Ceasefire.
Shutting down the protests: for student safety?
While student organizers maintain the value of campus activism within an educational institution like Yale, the University has often taken action to quell ongoing protests and prevent future rallies from evolving into larger occupations.
On April 22, 47 Yale students were arrested by Yale police and charged with criminal trespassing after police raided the encampment on Beinecke Plaza. On May 1, four people were arrested (two Yale students, two New Haveners) towards the end of a demonstration on campus; the arrest of a non-Yale affiliate involved the use of disproportionate force.
The University claims that these arrests were made in order to protect students’ safety.
Right after the arrests, former University President Peter Salovey wrote in a statement to the Yale community that student protesters had chosen to end conversations with Yale deans, rejecting offers to end the protests and meet with trustees. At that point, the administration determined that “the situation was no longer safe,” as they “became aware of police reports identifying harmful acts and threatening language used against individuals at or near the protest sites.”
Following the police reports, Chabad at Yale released a state-
ment on April 21 condemning “brazen antisemitism” during the period of Beinecke protests: “The situation came to a head last night, when unauthorized protests blocking common areas led to a hostile and dangerous confrontation for Jewish students on campus. A dear and beloved student leader of Chabad at Yale was surrounded and struck by a sharp object and ended up in the hospital.” The student wrote about the incident in the Yale Free Press and spoke on national media about it; her account has since been questioned by other journalists and outlets.
Rabbi Meir Chaim Posner, the Jewish Life Advisor of Chabad at Yale, noted that at Yale, protests have mostly not devolved into violence, nor has he been afraid for his physical safety despite his being “visibly Jewish.” But physical safety is not the most pressing issue at hand, he said. “The issue is, is it okay to delegitimize a people on campus at Yale and not suffer any repercussions?”
Eytan Israel ’26, a Jewish student, wrote to the Magazine about his uncomfortable experience as a “visibly Jewish” person who wished to witness and document happenings at the Beinecke encampment.
At the encampment’s perimeter, he had a student marshal step in front of him to prevent him from passing, he said. He criticized how some faculty members moved their classes to the Beinecke encampment, which was “not a place many Jewish students felt safe going to” due to chants like “Resistance is justified when people are occupied,” and “Globalize the intifada,” which he and
other Jews understood as being justification for Hamas’s attacks and a call for a global revival of the 2000–2005 Intifada in Israel.
“Despite these slogans that were present at the encampments, almost every group chat in Yale was filled with messages that if you care about humanity and morality, you must come to support the encampments,” he said.
Given the accusations of antisemitism plaguing protest spaces, some Jewish student activists believe that it is even more important for them to speak up about the Gaza war. To Dubrow-Compaine, Jews for Ceasefire is “a way for Jewish students to shoulder some of the organizing labor for the Palestinian cause”: “People aren’t necessarily going to label us as antisemites in the way that they would label non-Jewish pro-Palestine activists.”
“The idea that arresting dozens of students peacefully protesting makes any of us safer is insane,” said Bacal, citing the necessity of freedom of expression and assembly on campus. “It’s true that individual Jewish students expressed feeling unsafe during the encampments, and I would never challenge the validity of their experience,” he said. “But the only thing the arrests made safer is Yale Corp’s bottom line.”
to arise about whether antisemitism was ideologically embedded in spaces of pro-Palestine activism. Organizers erected a sign listing “community guidelines” of the encampment, which included committing to “Palestinian liberation and fighting for freedom for all oppressed people” and a no-tolerance policy for antisemitism, Islamophobia and racism. A protest marshal told the News in April that if pedestrians chose not to support the community guidelines, marshals offered to escort them to
the other side of Cross Campus.
But when a second encampment was assembled on Cross Campus on April 28, more concerns started
In response, Salovey wrote in an email to the Yale community that “to claim control of a shared physical space and to impose an intellectual and ideological litmus test are not in keeping with our bedrock principles and values.” Eytan
Israel agrees: “It doesn’t matter that there are Jews that were part of the encampment,” he said.
Yalies4Palestine told the Magazine that when organizers received feedback that people were “not feeling included and represented,” the coalition “collectively” took the guidelines down. The group also stated their belief in the difference between anti-Zionism and antisemitism: Zionism is an “imperial, colonial political ideology that was created in the early 20th
ple of all different backgrounds,” the group said, highlighting their collaboration with Jewish activist groups. “A part of that is constantly examining our messaging, and Jews for Ceasefire has been very helpful in collaborating with us and helping us create safer spaces.”
To Rabbi Posner, trying to establish a difference between antisemitism and anti-Zionism, and then excluding Zionist Jews from accessing campus spaces, is equivalent to having a “plausible deniability that I’m only targeting ‘this kind of a Jew,’” he said, “which doesn’t fly.” Zionism is the belief that Jews have a right to self determination in the land of Israel, he explained. “The moment someone believes that Israel is not a legitimate country, then that is antisemitic, period.”
century to justify the genocide and displacement of Palestinian peoples from their ancestral land,” they said, while anti-Zionism opposes that ideology and is “completely separate” from antisemitism.
“We are constantly striving to make our spaces feel welcome for peo-
Still, he believes that a version of “pro-Palestine” protests on campus can coexist with respect for Jewish people and non-antisemitism. “Even though it’s complex and I can’t say I agree, it would be a movement that sees Israel as legitimate, sees Israel as engaged in a legitimate struggle, and believes that the answer to that is through diplomatic negotiations.” These peaceful discussions happen in many Jewish communities, he said.
Antisemitic actions at pro-Palestine protests are not the University’s only safety concern. Administrators have expressed unease about the “danger” of non-Yale affiliates participating in Yale protests. Sa-
lovey wrote in a University-wide email on April 22, after the arrests on Beinecke Plaza, that it was “concerning” that “some of those who joined students at Hewitt Quadrangle (Beinecke Plaza) in recent days were not members of the Yale community, and protesters were trespassing on campus overnight.”
Following police arrests in the morning, hundreds of protesters moved to blockade the intersection of Grove and College Streets, causing traffic to divert and Schwarzman Center, including Commons dining hall and the Elm cafe, to close for two days.
Afterwards, Pericles Lewis, Dean of Yale College wrote an email to Yale staff which was then leaked to student protest groups: “According to law enforcement, the core of the group holding the intersection outside Schwarzman are non-Yale protestors with a known history of violent confrontation with the police,” he wrote. “We have found that the presence of such outsiders has greatly increased danger at recent protests.”
A few hours later, Lewis retracted his words in a statement to the News: “My email regarding the protest at Grove and Prospect was mistaken and I apologize for the suggestion that the protesters might turn violent,” he wrote. “I was repeating speculation I had overheard and I should not have done so.”
Activists from non-Yale organizations — like those from several Muslim Student Associations in CT, chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine, and the Connecticut chapter of American
Muslims for Palestine — also participated in the Yale protests.
Protesters were dissatisfied with the University’s response to their efforts in coalition building. Birckhead-Morton views the University’s statements as a strategy to “break up the movement by racializing and demonizing the communities which are acting in solidarity with student protestors.” This tension comes at a time period when the Yale administration is making consistent efforts to foster towngown relations, including by increasing Yale’s voluntary payments to the city, establishing a commitment to offset the city’s loss in tax revenues, and helping fund public school tuition; Salovey’s Baccalaureate Address to graduating seniors in August 2023 also focused on the importance of community engagement in New Haven.
Yale won’t budge. What’s next for activism?
On April 17, at the peak of the first Beinecke Plaza occupation, Yale announced that the Advisory Committee on Investor Responsibility (ACIR) had concluded that “military weapons manufacturing for authorized sales did not meet the threshold of grave social injury, a prerequisite for divestment,” meaning that Yale would not be divesting from military weapons.
On September 28, three students advocating for Yale to disclose and divest from weapons manufacturers met with a member of the Yale Corporation for the first time. In the meeting, they presented a proposal for the University to disclose
the percentage and dollar amount of Yale’s endowment that is invested in weapons manufacturers and suppliers; the trustee did not commit to the terms of the proposal.
In 2018, even with considerable student voices calling for divestment in Puerto Rican debt — including a movement occupying Cross Campus for three days — Yale concluded that divesting was unwarranted, suggesting that the University’s decisions are fairly independent of student pressure.
Beverly Gage ’94, John Lewis Gaddis Professor of History, reasons that the failure of student activism to truly change the distribution of power of the institution is due to the fundamental disadvantages that students have compared to Yale itself. “The administration has been here for a long time, and The Yale Corporation not only operates in relative secrecy, but is a long-standing, permanent site of power… Most substantial change takes a really, really long time to make it happen.”
Yet even if campus activism seems futile in the moment, the handson education it provides may prove valuable to aspiring organizers. Sunrise Movement, a student-led organization in the climate movement, mainly consisted of campus activists who formerly advocated for divestment in fossil fuels as a theory of change. But as they grew more experienced in leftist advocacy, they saw the shortcomings of divestment, revamped their organizing strategy and eventually partnered with Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez to create a national campaign for the Green New Deal
that stretched beyond divestment and economic incentives for industries to cut carbon emissions. Still, to many student activists, the act of organizing at Yale is essential. Lumisa Bista ’25, an organizer in the Endowment Justice Collective (EJC) at Yale, organizes around awareness regarding Yale’s investments in exploitative industries and applies pressure on the University to divest. “It is a privilege to be able to separate ourselves from this war, but it is our responsibility to recognize that Yale is just as complicit in the atrocities,” she said. “Given that our education is tied to this corporation, it is our responsibility to challenge its wrongdoings.”
“The status quo hums along inoffensively and selfsufficiently due to its nature. Activism comes in and is, by its nature, loud and disruptive,” said Bacal.
If campus protests are unable to force change at Yale, at the very least, they disrupt campus life, said Bista. During the Beinecke occupation, students were unable to pass through the Plaza without witnessing the swaths of protesters calling for a ceasefire, or the erected pop-up bookshelf, or the sign “ASK YOUR TOUR GUIDE ABOUT YALE’S INVESTMENT IN GENOCIDE.”
Student activism remains in the limelight this semester: as violence in the Middle East rages on, students have held a community gathering on Beinecke
Beinecke Plaza during Family Weekend, handed out “Yale Divest From War” pins to performance groups at Yale, and rallied with community members in solidarity with Lebanon. Both pro-Israel and pro-Palestine groups are hosting vigils and rallies around October 7th, 2024, the one-year anniversary of Hamas’s attack on Israel.
“The status quo hums along inoffensively and self-sufficiently due to its nature. Activism comes in and is, by its nature, loud and disruptive,” said Bacal. “I think people just have to understand that these things don’t arise in a vacuum.”
by Kinnia Cheuk
The Earl of Grey
Jesus sucked our sins from the world like venom from a snakebite. He puckered up and prepared to love, ingesting our evil in the process. He carried it to the tomb and let it rupture his insides. David was trying to remember this. He stood behind the station turnstile, trying to scan his Oyster. He laid the card down, and the light stayed red. He tapped it again, and nothing changed. He set all his weight against the turnstile’s walls and struggled to stay calm — thinking about the Lord; thinking about his word, about James and John and all of Jesus’s men who wrote the story of his life before he was around to read it.
The light went green. David fell through. Standing up, he straightened his tie and repositioned his bag. He was surrounded by people leaving for the world. They sped past him to catch their trains. Some went left, others went right, the brave brushed him aside, but David felt that all were watching, and he hated the weight of a gaze. He hated their eyes rummaging through his soul, looking for something to snatch at. If it was up to David, he’d relinquish his body, his skin, his fat, the moments they held, and become a spirit that ran through London’s streets. He’d still knock on doors and speak of damnation, but he’d
do it free of the flesh. He’d be living proof — he felt you could call that living — that the Lord existed beyond the bones. But this body was his. The stubby fingers that worked at his collar were his. The eyes that, looking up, met the face of his companion Terry belonged to him. And only him.
Terry was a beautiful boy — not your typical Mormon. He had ragged black hair and a perfectly straight spine, and when he
of their training, stitched together by the Lord. It had been three months of fliers in bags, thirteen weeks of the Word on their tongues, ninety-one days of dismissive waves from people who couldn’t stand the sight of salvation. David was sure Terry had sighed the whole time. He could hear it now, that eternal groan, rushing out of Terry’s mouth.
David: “We’re a declining society. Aren’t we, mate?”
When one really got down to it, the body was the body. It was not a vessel, not something to be tamed. It was a thinking, living, entirely independent thing.
smiled you felt the world was all joy. It had been a long time since David had seen that smile.
The two men went everywhere together; Christ demanded it. They ate together and toiled together, they prayed together and slept together. When Terry used the bathroom, David stood outside and told Terry about his day. When David used the bathroom, Terry wandered off, and the piss rang out in silence.
They had been paired at the end
Terry turned away from the question and moved towards the platform’s stairs.
“Even our barriers are stuck.”
It was the middle of summer. The heat swallowed David. Pools of sweat colored his shirt. His soot-black pants stuck to his skin. He writhed, subtly, unsuccessfully, before going Terry’s way.
Terry knew him. Terry knew that he had found religion the same way he found anything, by letting someone else’s idea become his.
Terry knew that David was fourty but balding, lonely but looking, ready to join the church but afraid of starting behind — yet he refused to show David grace. Terry was 19, the appropriate age to begin the mission. He hadn’t signed up to play caretaker. David had
missed the boat. One was raised in the house. One didn’t move in late. One knew the rules—they were all one had. Though Terry was stuck with David now, he’d be sure to avoid him in Paradise.
Standing atop the stairs, David looked out. Here was the middle class: clutching their briefcases, pushing their prams. Here was Barnet: a town of quiet streets and lowered gazes. The bus ran 24/7, but the conductor drove most of its route alone. Strangers and friends walked past you alike. This was not a place where you were meant to meet. This was the end of the Northern line, a place you left. Leaving, David felt sorry for those who stayed. He wanted to pull the fliers out of his bag and throw them into their faces. He wanted them to know about Armageddon and be ready for it, but he knew, he had been told, that the real battle was to be fought in the big city, in Central London and Leicester Square, under electronic billboards and neon lights, near Shakespeare busts and giant clocks, at 5:01 and 5:02, over piles of litter and sleeping drunks, around people, moving, watching, performing people with places to be and things to do, lives to live and lessons to learn, people who would stop if you could change things for them, people David felt he could save.
He kept his fliers in his bag, and turned his eyes to the tracks, and followed Terry down the stairs.
Stepping onto the platform, David watched a train depart. The next Embankment-bound trip wasn’t for another seven minutes. Terry scowled at him as if he’d wished
for this. The platform’s occupancy grew and grew, and with this David shrank. Each time an elbow grazed his arm or a knee rubbed his leg, he receded further into himself. The platform was full of happy people, smiling people, people with families, and people on phones, people with purpose who were on their way to find it, people he could not touch. Always, he felt soiled, stained. He did not want that for them. Opening up his bag, he grabbed his thermos and rubbed it against his forehead. Forcing a laugh, he whispered, “The old Herbal tea.” He put heat on heat as he continued to sweat, and murmured as the shame dripped down.
When one really got down to it, the body was the body. It was not a vessel, not something to be tamed. It was a thinking, living, entirely independent thing. It wrapped itself around the mind and pulled at the strands. Freedom from the body was death. One could not escape: not on this earth, not on this platform. Try as David might. He rolled his thermos over his head to remind his body that there was warmth in the world. He drank hot tea to burn the terror out. But this domestication was temporary. The body will not be tricked.
David, ever forlorn, was a man who had watched his life go by. He spent thirty years dreaming of success and ten years acting on it. Allowing a preoccupation to become a profession, he took the herbal tea his mother raised him on and started selling it for profit. The healthcrazed elite bought his boxes by the dozen. The Mormons bought them when they could. Herbal tea was the only warmth the Word ap-
proved of, so the Saved spent their winters between the aisles of David’s store. It was how he met Terry. It was how he found the Lord. It was why he turned towards the Light when his tea began to sour.
Still whining, still hazy, with the thermos against his neck, David stumbled through the crowd and found himself on the platform’s edge. It was time to come to. He spotted Terry, now wearing his namecard, watching from a few steps back. He followed suit. He dropped the thermos into his bag and pulled out his badge. Working the pin through his shirt, he sighed as he remembered:
Elder Hillburn.
The Church of
JESUS CHRIST of Latter-Day Saints
Wearing the badge was like advertising his fraudulence. He’d joined their team of missionaries after the deadline, so his order was placed separately. The budget printer David commissioned was untrained in the art of font. When the badge arrived, it appeared that David’s title had become a superscript and that his name was Jesus Christ.
Terry’s name was Elder Derstill. Terry’s badge was fine. Terry prayed that David would fail. David longed to forget.
He grabbed a stale biscuit out of his bag and chewed the thoughts apart. The voice on the loudspeaker reminded the crowd to stand behind the yellow line. David complied. Something brushed against his side, and spinning around he
watched a crook-backed woman with fraying grey hair move through the masses. She whispered and wailed as she walked, sending a shiver of unease down David’s spine. There was a tugging at his ankle, and, quickly looking down, he saw a child, wearing strap-on fairy wings, wrapped around his leg. He grinned, lopsidedly, awkwardly, and let out a chuckle. “Bicky!” the fairy-winged girl said. And just as David reached down to give her a piece, the girl’s mother pulled her away. It was the badge, he thought, standing back up, creeping towards the yellow line. They knew that wasn’t his name.
huffed like the oncoming train.
Totteridge & Whetstone. The cart was packed. David had managed to secure a seat. One stop later, Terry slid onto another, directly across from him. They rode in silence. The train screeched underneath. The sound shot straight through David’s skull, and into his brain, making it difficult to complete a thought. He stared at himself across the aisle, watching as the window’s curve reflected his body over the axis of his featureless face. He was an hourglass: a body above, a body below, and an empty head in the middle.
Their ride was two minutes away. David wiped the crumbs off his face. A few groups to his left, the girl made a whooshing sound as she ran in circles around her mother. Accustomed to this game, the mother whirled around too. She spun and spun and begged her child to stay near, stay safe, stay away from strange strangers and stranger ideas. David
on him. Finchley Central. The gaze would not budge. If it were possible, David would want to know exactly what others thought of him. Life would be easier if a bell went off each time his name crossed someone’s mind. Given the chance, he’d pull on his rubber gloves on and catalog the brains of those closest to him. He’d parse through the muck and pull out the cabinets until he came to the file that held his name. DAVID.
DAVID -> DAVID -> Impression -> DAVID_Impression_Poor.
DAVID -> DAVID_Youth -> DAVID_Youth_Rough.
When the train came to a stop at Woodside Park, the man to David’s left spilled coffee on his pants. He frowned, and David mirrored him.
“Got a tissue, mate?”
“I know the feeling.” “But have you got a tissue?”
West Finchley. Terry’s eyes were
DAVID -> DAVID_Interests -> DAVID_Interests_Blank. Well, no, perhaps that was unfair. He had interests, he felt he did, only people might not see them that way. He was interested in what interested others about him. He quite liked tea. And more recently he’d found himself passionate about the Word.
Take Jonah, for example. They’d read his book last week: A man so afraid of his life’s purpose that he threw himself into the ocean to avoid it. How fascinating.
David loved the heroics of it all. No matter how loudly the thunder clapped and the waves came crashing down, God’s children would be saved, because the Bible was the book of redemption. Jonah was swallowed by a whale, a real-life whale, and still he survived and prayed and gave thanks to the Lord. He dragged the Word out of the beast and threw it into the world.
girl flapped her wings along with it. Terry pulled at his smile. He turned away from the girl and looked to David. David’s eyes met Terry’s and then quickly found the girl.
He felt far from her. Years away. He had nothing to laugh about. Nowhere to fly to. Only: envy. How was it, he wondered, that, even with her hands pressed against the world, she could stay clean. He’d rolled out of the womb all sticky, and it took him thirty-nine years to realize he’d been catching dust.
They had to know, all of them. David felt that they had to know.
This interested David— more than he could believe.
Arriving at East Finchley, the fairied girl began to laugh. The train had come up from underground and it would be nothing but light for the next few stops. She lunged over her mother’s shoulder and pressed her hands against the glass. Off, off, off the train went, and the
He had ticked his life away, and the regret was all over him. They knew his story. They were reading it now. “Lost,” on his arms. “Waste,” on his neck. “Hopeless,” across his forehead. He was thrown into life without a sense of direction. He had spent his early years inflating the world, and it was only a matter of time before it popped. Earth was hollow. It was empty.
It had been made far too large to appreciate alone. He couldn’t say it in so many words–and who would listen if he could–but he’d felt he needed Terry, even in silence, to prove that the world was still there. The whispering woman made her way down the cart. She was quiet now and pulling at her hair. Seeing her face-on, David thought she looked a little like his mother. She had the same wide green eyes, which tried to hold you, which tried to hold everything at once. They bounced around the train, and David tried to follow them. They bounced from window to window: David’s eyes bounced too. They bounced from advert to advert: David’s eyes continued. They landed on David, and, trying to meet his own gaze, he shut his eyes and suddenly saw his mother. She stood in the darkness of his mind, looking far younger than he’d ever remembered her. Only recognizable because even in her youth she had those same green eyes. She smiled. Her eyes called for him. He wanted to run into her arms, but he had no way to place himself inside of his mind, so he kept his eyes closed and watched. Realizing that he would not come, her smile broke. Her eyes moved this way then the next, but all darkness was the same. Her eyes shut, then shrank, then disappeared, and she began to age. She aged thirty years in thirty seconds, and died just as she did the first time. An old woman, collapsing in the dark, in front of a son who could not save her.
Highgate. David opened his eyes.
Carrying a clipboard, a single commuter entered the cart. She wore a Nirvana shirt and a fully-studded
face. She stood in the middle of the carriage and looked around: at the elderly woman tugging at her locs and Terry losing to sleep and David looking at her looking at him looking at her: they held this for a moment, the train departed, and the Cobain fan began:
“Right! There’s a national crisis, and national means that you’re all affected. Even you, dude,” she said to Terry, whose eyes were now completely shut, “Sunak! Your Prime Minister doesn’t give a hoot about you. He doesn’t care if you’re on this train or under it. He spends his mornings doing photo-ops with firemen, nurses, schoolchildren, people he calls heroes, and his afternoons killing them. Rolling back climate agreements, signing shady deals. Fossil Fuels has a hand up his ass and they’re fiddling around in there like he’s a fucking puppet.” Archway. “Sign a petition. The future is now. Remove the man. Remove the man. Take our future out the can!”
At Tufnell Park David waved away her clipboard.
At Kentish Town she climbed off the train.
Now was here, it was there, it was gone, it was fleeting, running, slipping through his hands, it was crushing, a weight on a weight on a weight on a weight, all of which looked like air. It had David, it held David, it was all David had, so it was never, it could never, it would never be the moment when he let the Devil in.
Prime ministers. Petitions. It was all the same thing. It all
TOTTERIDGEWHETSTONE
wanted to turn his bodily years into something to be controlled. David knew that England had gone to the dogs, but his signature wouldn’t change that. If anything, he felt it was best to get it out the way. To resign themselves to the world they created, and wait for it to devour itself.
Camden Town: again, darkness.
David lifted his head and began to scour the train’s ads: a weight loss pill called Fat(e), a new Starbucks size called Grandést. His eyes landed on an image of a woman and her children at the beach, captioned “Travelong: You can have it all.” She wore a seashell necklace that was more string than shell, and was staring, almost gloomily, at something out of the frame. David squinted. There was something she was trying to tell him. He pictured the inside of his brain and scratched through it for answers. It was easier this way, the whole thinking thing. He remembered that his early life had been characterized by feeling bad amongst the good. His mother’s love turned all things gold, but nothing felt like enough. The world was beautiful—palm trees and coconuts and their metaphorical equivalents— but the conditions of his life were barren, and there weren’t enough budget getaways in the world to change that. Now, saved, he was the good stuck in the bad. The world was end-
ing, and all he could do was smile and try to pull people out of it. He gave his eyes a break, and the woman’s sadness reappeared. He couldn’t say which of them had it worse.
Somewhere between Mornington Crescent and Euston Terry had woken up. Rested now, on the way to city life, he was itching to get things started. He shuffled through his fliers like a pack of cards and greeted the train with a smile. David, for reasons he couldn’t scratch, felt less prepared to go. Looking at Terry, he itched inside: here was everything he could have been. Charismatic. Christened. Comfortable in the world. At 19, David’s only God was Success. He’d chased a dream, labored through life, clutched the spirit of the age. But when he opened his hands to survey the spoils, it appeared he’d held nothing but ash.
He sat and studied his trembling fingers. They were wrinkling. Old age would soon be here. He felt it, working its way into his joints. He saw it, right in front of him. He remembered his mother’s final days. How small she’d been. How often she’d ask for moments of his time, and how few he had to give. She’d say, “That’s my tea. That’s my tea. At least sit and drink it with me.”
David grabbed the thermos— cooler now—and pressed it to his face.
Jonah had to leave.
Warren Street.
The woman tugging her hair grew more and more violent. She opened her eyes and propelled them at David. They struck a nerve, and he was jolted back. Mutters began to spew from her mouth, whispers of Leicester Square and a past re-
TOTTERIDGE & WHETSTONE TUFNELL PARK CAMDEN TOWN
turned. David felt that she was cursing him. He felt that had to stop:
“A penny for your thoughts?”
“I’ve not got any change.”
“Have you lost your marbles?”
“They’re on thin ice.”
Staring at David, with her marbles long gone, the old woman tried
to smile. She wore a butterfly brooch on her coat and the story of her woes in her eyes. She was mixing her metaphors, and mixing them well. She was going to Leicester Square so it would come back to her. She was marching to the sound of her own splitting hairs. The cats and dogs would be on her soon. She had no money; she held no change. She was a dime a dozen. She hit the nail on the head. She was bent out of shape. She felt under David, under the weather, under the weight of His words. She must be going now: control was heaven in a wrapper.
At Goodge Street, she ran off, stumbling into the wrong sta-
tion. The train moved on.
There was something about the way Terry smiled that made David hot in the head. It was an act. He moved like a celebrity: shaking hands and holding gazes. As though he was the one who wrote the Word. David had done all he could to impress the boy who radiated salvation. But seeing Terry now—bright white teeth framed between quivering lips—he was sure that the Light was the Lord’s.
The little girl with the little wings stood in the middle of the aisle swinging around a grab pole. Across the cart, she watched as
David worked at his thermos and poured himself a cup. She flew towards him to ask for a sip but was intercepted by her mother’s aggravated hand. This time it heralded another: a palm right across the girl’s face. The woman pulled her daughter onto her lap and unleashed her words on her.
David wanted to give the woman a piece of his mind, to let her take it, keep it, be forced to live with it. He’d stuff it in her bag, and wait for her to find it. She’d be looking for a number or searching for a pen; she’d empty her bag onto the counter; she’d find him there, jiggling away, cold, pink, wet. Her husband would come home and, loosening his tie, declare that “there was a brain in the kitchen.” “That’s David,” she’d say. “Ah,” he’d reply, “and what exactly is David doing on our counter?” She’d explain that they met on the train; that he’d followed her home; that he’d come to point out her cruelty; that it was his mission to enlighten the world but some days it felt hard and most days he felt tired. He wanted her to know what he thought, and he didn’t want her to escape it. She’d have to deal with the mess.
But the world would stay clean, and David would stay still, and the woman, pulling her daughter by the ear, would step off at Tottenham Court Road, taking any chance at change with her.
He lifted his thermos to his head and groaned like they would understand.
There would come a day when all this was gone. The mothers, the teas, the Terrys would all face
the eyes of God. Fire would rain down from the sky, and only the devout would be saved. Until then, trains would crash and angels would suffer and evil would wash over the world. They were drowning, and no one seemed to care. They stripped him with their eyes and dissected his soul. But could they account for theirs? He was saving others when he could barely swim himself. He was nothing. Nothing to Sunak to England to the world—Jesus Christ he was nothing to the world.
He pressed the thermos down harder and thought of salvation. He pressed down some more; perhaps this battle was not his. He rolled the metal down his arms, up his chest, against his neck, and began to wheeze. Closing his eyes, falling into himself, he shrank, and writhed, and prayed the world would disappear.
He had taken his life and wasted it, but he had walked in the Light at the end. At Armageddon, he would be spared. A beautiful bright hand would reach through the flames, and carry him into the house of the Lord. The choirs would sing, and the devout would applaud, and the hand’s fingers would wipe him clean. Gently. Caringly. They would hold his hands, and still them with love. He was the saved. Not the savior. Someone else could deliver the Word. Leicester Square.
When he returned to his body, the tea had spilled on his lap and Terry was outside of the train. He watched as his companion called his name to the closing doors.
by Eli Osei
Seaplane
What’s that thing they say about insanity?
Flying the same route over and over
In a seaplane that crash-lands on the coast?
The vehicle conceals the meaning.
I’m mean without meaning to be. Mostly
I miss a body flying over another body, Buy massages and bottles of beer, Rinse until the water runs clear.
What’s that thing they say about water?
A body is half-full of it, or more? I’m so clean.
Loose, liftable, light.
Lucid enough
To know getting in a car is not love.
What’s that thing they say about air?
by Abigail Sylvor Greenberg
If Love is a Country We Know Nothing About
I go to Paris with a Baldwinian lens.
As the plane descends into Paris, I am reading Another Country by James Baldwin. Eric and Yves have taken a trip together, and, anticipatory and terrified, they stand in a small hotel room, looked down upon by a cathedral. They venture off to an empty bistro, which is soon filled by a wave of drunken French soldiers. They clasp hands, briefly, but then pull away – hiding from who? From the soldiers? From the church? From themselves?
The plane begins to rumble and shake. Eric and Yves are in bed now. They are each other’s first lovers. They’ve made love with others before – plenty of times. But have never loved, or, rather, allowed themselves to be loved. We fall from the sky, down into the miniature buildings and toy cars and itty-bitty people, and enter the city below.
I come to Paris fraught about my sexuality. I visit Sacré Coeur two times. The white-stone cathedral hangs over the hill, its gaze harsh, aglow in golden light as the sky and city darkens. The nighttime birds begin to chirp, and a troubadour in a rasta hat sings “Three Little Birds.”
In the streets of Paris, music is everywhere. At the base of the
Eiffel Tower there is a protest – Palestinian flags wave, hijabs bob, hands clap. The top of the tower forms a searchlight, moving over our faces. A brown musician, circled by tourists, sings in Arabic to his guitar. Bars fill with sweaty people. Wine glasses and bottles of beer clink beneath chatter. A man in a daisy-print pantsuit shimmies to Michael Jackson. The metro whooshes inside long dark tunnels, their doors splashed with graffiti paint. Thick rats rustle under garbage cans.
I’m scouring for the girl I love – she might be along the Seine or sitting in a café. Before she left, we held hands at the train station and dreamed about me visiting. I let myself forget she had a boyfriend and that I was a girl. Maybe many miles away she’d realize she loved me too.
In Another Country, Vivaldo, a white “straight” man with queer interracial desires, realizes, “Love was a country he knew nothing about.” High on a roof overlooking New York, a man approaches him. “Don’t bother. It’s not worth it, nothing will happen,” Vivaldo pleads. He can’t “bear” the “intensity” in the man’s eyes– he can’t
bear to be wanted. He wants Ida, a Black woman and the sister of his late best friend, to love him. But they both don’t love themselves. “Perhaps it was he who did not know how to give, did not know how to love,” Vivaldo thinks.
I refuse to see my friend in Paris. I sip hot chocolate in Les Deux Magots – where Simone de Beauvoir, who we both adore, wrote. I look up at each person that comes through the door.
I let myself forget she had a boyfriend and that I was a girl. Maybe many miles away she’d realize she loved me too.
There are other countries in Baldwin’s novel, pockets where we can know love. After violence, the first surrender we get is with Eric and Yves in France – away from the incessant noise and shutter of America. “Yves, do you love me?” Eric asks. “Yes,” Yves answers. “That’s good because I’m crazy about you. I love you.”
I’m staying with a childhood friend in Paris, who cooks me oatmeal in the morning and
cuts up little slices of strawberry. “Love is both a feeling and an ability to show up for someone,” she says. “Your friend loves you, but she knows she can’t show up for you. You need to let her go.”
Baldwin once told the Paris Review that “It wasn’t so much a matter of choosing France— it was a matter of getting out of America.” He moved to Paris in 1948 because if he stayed in New York, he would have “gone under.” His character, Eric, makes a similar sojourn to Paris, in part, “to find out who he was, and it was his necessity to do this… alone.” And Paris, he found, was “the loneliest city under heaven.” That is until he heard music coming from an empty boulevard. The keeper of that music, a portable radio in his two hands, was Yves.
I am on a train too, outside pastures pass by. Why, I wonder, would I leave this city which met me, and let me re-meet myself?
I am dancing with someone I have just met – together we are two girl-like people in boyish dress. We get caught up in the bass, and soon they kiss me, and we kiss and dance, our bodies moving to the rhythm. They twirl me. I twirl them. We are right beside the band – a group of older white French folks puffing and strumming and thrumming. A couple, a balding man and a gray-haired woman, beckons us over, and takes our hands, spinning us around.
I’m sitting on the metro, legs spread, head tipped back, guffawing. I’m strutting down the street, holding hands with the person I met dancing. My childhood friend and I cook for each other – steaming vegetables on rice – and stay up drinking cheap wine. I visit Sacré Coeur again. Resting on the steps, I look out at the city, swaying to a troubadour’s beat.
Inside a jazz club, I am swept up by two saxophones, bass, trumpet, and drums. There are a few couples of men. One partner, tall and in a leather jacket, dances with another, their hair gelled back, rouge on their cheek bones, red on their lips.
The night before I return to New York, I continue reading Another Country. Eric is on the train: “He lit a cigarette and stood in the vestibule, while the hideous outskirts of Paris rolled by. Why am I going home? he asked himself.” I am on a train too, outside pastures pass by. Why, I wonder, would I leave this city which met me, and let me re-meet myself? New York has seen me weep and laugh and hyperventilate and be at ease and hide from myself. “It was time,” Eric answers. Time to put to the test if love is a country I can carry inside of me.
by Tigerlily Hopson
Attitude Adjustment
by Gavin Guerette
TRIPTYCH
by Thisbe Wu
This triptych is based on the Ukrainian folk song
The translation of the song is “In the field, there is a tree which is thin and high, and there are leaves on it which are wide and green.
And on that tree a black crow sits and cries, and because of the kozak a young girl cries.
‘Hey you kozak, handsome as periwinkle, who will make your bed while you’re on the road?’
He replies, “My bed will be the yellow flowering bushes and my blue overcoat.’”
House With Burning Clapboards after Lois Dodd
And here was the burn, its window smoke glaring up at the house’s brow. Blown-out glass leaving a dark tetris of mouths. I knew a boy who sheared his own sheep for a long-shouldered coat — he only took it off to dance. He would take girls into the woods and allow them to wear it only if naked. You could bend down in it and become road kill. Ass up. We all lined up to become dead and animal. Then — grease fire, one day in fall an explosion down his family’s farm road, what did he bring out, yes just the cream-colored coat otherwise naked, sheepskin smothering him through the blast. His pale nipples piqued like bird beaks open through the heat. The way he jumped over the rubble was like dancing. His name was a common one.
by Maia Siegel