Issue 28
Summer 2021-22
Poetry by Stephanie Ge ’22
Art by Yuka Masamura ’21
I. Hourglass
A tongue snakes out
touches a crystalline flame
Imaginary, prone to the damp
Fragile and fearless.
A soft tongue rests upon
the ocean’s shining brow
Nothing, not even a breath of still air
Could ever pierce this time capsule,
this hourglass.
II. The Dream Dimension
A fine noose captures the daggers
of a soul that bores into its walls
through half-lidded flaps of skin.
But all this is jumbled in the personal mind.
Its pieces, juxtaposed
watched over by impersonal flame and cool crystal.
Ears and eyes and noses lie helter-skelter on crimson cloth,
threshing white limbs carry pale white faces
along the tide of this red river.
III. Innocence
Look up, a father says to his son,
The sun is setting. Clouds hang heavy
over the lip of the land.
The ancient oak stretches its limbs in anticipation.
It will rain tonight.
The son - pointing his nose to the clouds -
perceives instead
a giant paint-brush,
twirling gracefully upon its natural palette.
IV. Earth
Nature holds Pan Gu’s heirloom close to its spirit
just as the sky runs thick with the whites
of an egg,
his fur ripples as he exhales
and that trapped eye glares in malevolence,
as the whites become colorless he falls
asleep
Love and Divinity
“I’ll remain where I’ve stayed, among homes whose roofs raised me, upheld aching canopies”
I think of places I’ve left, when I believed I was old, knowing no strife but the chimes of Sunday’s dawn
“I’ll miss the exile I found in him, praying for our shared Earth, as his name was company enough”
I feel empty of her now, a hymn who exploited life, whose echoes long left a church I fled changing
“I’ll live by the bridge now, far from faithful to life, for I’ve just faith in me to prolong waning girlhood”
I love who I would’ve become if I still held those not ill by accident, not drowned by aging niagara
“I'll cry for god’s bells who allow my lapsing, tolling mind, who hear solemn time atoned by naïveté”
I regret who I am, having left places I miss, praying for heart in she who lasts to please remember me
“I’ll rename children his name, one that scared away solitude, who will rename old friends’ names too”
I often imagine how much pain we might’ve left unfelt if I’d stayed and hummed those bells’ chaste notes
“I wonder what I’d know if he didn’t cross rivers who divide divine memory, but deluded age like me”
So I returned to emptied pews, by our simple church for a final time to watch oakwoods grow in forlornity
“From the steeple’s belfry I spot a good canopy who shades walking people who avoid a river dim”
An elder oak missorted rosebuds and hell’s bleeding thorns, vexed green by nature’s hurried reprise
“Snowed upon, nearby his tombstone, the priest at the frozen lectern pardons my waxing grief for him”
At the wake of my broken self, awash by her flooding psalm, we are dying prisms who refract timeless loss
“With age my grief for him surpasses our old oak, as I cross the drying river he traversed years before”
I hear her apology for growth; a sullen anthem for wide-eyed attrition and too little valor not to change
“Yet in my wistful side of my wilting pain, come my death with his in the belfry, I know he heard tolls in his boyhood, too, fading names in the river, our union by the covered bridge as eternal as desired youth.”
Prose by Benjamin Herdeg ’23
Photo by Quisha Lee ’24
Birth by Sculpture
Poetry by Isabel Su ’22
Sculpture by Terri Moore
Nainai [1] twists petal-delicate paper
through her fingers, time-worn and
strong as if her bones had never yearned for
something she wasn’t meant to touch;
I watched her crease chromatic life from flat
bored expanses with unconscious and unknowable
skill but I know because the art of hunger in my
soul is fed by her freshwater tears, just
as my eyes are hewed from her resilient
flesh, or else maybe I was sculpted from
mud like our ancestors, how elegant their
creation. Maybe I can believe it was my nainai
who did the molding, who pressed resolute thumbs
into cold dirt and forced life from primordial slime,
who made Adam and Eve want to fly just as I do, to
take leaps from nude palm or brown riverbank into
the loneliest expanse of the unknown, but not without
the softest pressure of our maker’s fingertips on our backs.
[1] Mandarin word for one’s patrilineal grandmother.
Photography by Doug Wang ’23
10 steps to become a better artist
Poetry by Irisdelia Garcia ’14
here is a step by step guide to become a better artist:
1. let your anger guide you to the rock.
in that
let your rage help you navigate the forest that sprouts from your ribs
and find the boulder that sits in the middle of the brush
covered in moss and damp in an autumn rain
and scream into its stone
until you are lightheaded from
the way your insides speak to you.
it will scream back.
2. listen to the water.
the ocean is the the biggest gossiper i know
and she is ready to tell you every secret of the
greatest pieces of art she has ever seen.
the sea will tell you that Atlantis was underappreciated
and Venus was actually brown-skinned, not fair,
when she sprouted from the clam shell.
she gets excited about the Moon and her changing faces
and they still meet every night to speak on the nothings of the shore.
3. pay attention to numbers.
222. 444. 111. 999. they call these angel numbers.
i believe my stepfather visits me through the number 118
and my spirit guides come to me in the number 333.
you will be called to things.
always look at the clock when something moves you.
right now it is 12:42am
and i feel a lonely apparition longing to be remembered over my shoulder.
there is a bittersweet poem in that.
4. follow your mother around your house.
even if she is but a ghost of herself.
she is trying to find her bearings again after the loss.
follow her to the kitchen, the bathroom, the living room.
watch the way she eats, how she doesn’t eat enough.
there is an art in the way we mourn.
it fuses with our bone to make sculpture.
it forms and warps the skin and i am finding my mother underneath it all.
tonight, i will cook for her dinner.
5. swallow an eyelash.
pick it from your lid.
do it, try it.
see how it disappears in your teeth.
art is an eyelash lost in your gums
undetectable, indelectable, and annoyingly stuck
in between where my wisdom teeth and a singular child’s tooth still sits.
it is uncomfortable to eat the curtain to a window
but how else will the people see.
6. have tea with your ancestors.
mine like ginger tea, boiled over the gas stove
with a layer of agave sitting in the bottom of a mug.
they like it hot enough to burn the roof of my mouth.
this makes the skin there malleable to inscribe
their secret hymns before they leave.
they tell me they love me and they are proud of me
while i smile with blood on my lips
humming songs i swear i’ve never heard before.
7. fight the white dragon that sits in the corner of the room at 3am every night.
and you will need to fight him every night.
this is the same monster that visited your ancestors by the shore
and tried to swallow them whole in a sour, fiery breath.
this is the same dragon that tells you that perhaps today is the day
you deserve to die.
the dragon’s scales are shaped like flaming crosses
and he is hooded in a white cloth with red eyes that glow hate through the dark.
once you win, and you will win, mend your wounds for tomorrow’s battle.
8. nurse everything that comes from your hands like your child.
my first born was a poem.
and she was carried in me full term
and born out of my fingertips.
nobody prepares you for your oldest to talk back
to demand your wisdom at their grown age
but they, too, witness the world in your eyes
and your art, too, wants to grow with you.
you will never stop being a parent.
9. center those who cannot see this.
center the ones that cannot afford to read this so freely
so unconsciously
so without worry.
the ones who sit in cages begging for a book to adore.
the ones whose skin is their greatest power and the world’s greatest
grievance.
they cannot change the way their flesh wrapped around their bone
but you can change the way your fingertips trace their collarbone.
10. this is a call to action.
in that
this is a sign
to let your fingers
speak for the silenced
for the ancestors who could only tell you their stories in dreams.
transcribe their visions of liberation
into your sternum
so that the revolution bleeds out of you
sweet and unchained.
Irisdelia Garcia is an interdisciplinary Puerto Rican artist and writer from The Bronx, NY. She graduated summa cum laude from Amherst College with a BA in English with a concentration in Digital Humanities. Garcia also holds a certificate in Multicultural Theater Practice from the Five College Consortium. Her work centers Puerto Rican history, ideas of embodiment and gender, and the repercussions of colonialism. Garcia has been awarded with the Academy of American Poets College Award for her poem now published poem Dear Maria, centering nature and the devastation of Hurricane Maria in 2017. She has studied and performed with La Pocha Nostra in Mérida, Mexico (January 2017). Garcia was also part of the EMERGENYC 2020 Residency through The Hemispheric Institute at NYU and has been a Generation NYZ Creative Fellow (2019-2020) with Ping Chong + Company. She has moved on to be a collaborating artist with them, showcasing work for their Nocturne Remix 2020 anthology. Garcia is now production associate for La Pocha Nostra and also works in collaboration with publishing company Restless Books to facilitate conversations about classic literature with immigrant and migrant communities in collaboration with the New York Public Library.
Art by Amelia Wang ’21
Beachfront Living
Prose by Jerry Qiao ’22
Photo by Scout McKibben-Baeier ’22
Upon initial observation, stories of dust and flea carcasses were piled high on the windowsill. Its paint job had already faded, leaving scattered blotches of dove white along the corners. As neighbors passed by under the violet, Malibu sunset, they remarked upon the resemblance between the chapped coating of the property and their crinkled lips from last winter. From afar, their gazes could barely make out the contents of the interior from its only opening: a moldy, half-cracked row of bay windows. However, as curiosity drew them closer, it became clear that the interior served as a puzzling contrast to the house’s outdoor decor. Laced in elegant, silky drapes, the living room was teal-hued and furnished in a simplistic yet lucrative manner. The overhead pendant chandelier dangled, embellished with the provocative shades of precious stones. The eight-foot custom couch tangoed, embroidered with pillows that displayed portraits of the family dog—adding a homey touch among the artificial luxuries that loaded the room. The neighbors were shocked, unable to walk away from the same, filthy window that had repulsed them just moments ago.
That same evening, the owner returned home to unwind. Closing his eyes, he reminisced about his younger days at the beach, diving formlessly into the water. He tried to relive these memories by looking out from the row of bay windows that adorned his living room, yet his view was obstructed. Covered in a thick blanket of moss and mold and a spiderweb of cracks, the window now served as a mirror, rather than an opening. Suddenly disturbed by how far he had strayed from his younger self and the nature around him, the owner rushed outdoors. He wiped at the grime that had collected on his property with the flamboyant handkerchief in his suit pocket. Tears rolled down his rotund cheeks as he returned to the living room. The view was gorgeous. As he observed the sandy coves of Malibu Beach, the crescendo of the waves into the sonata of nature, he felt a sense of elation; after all, this was beachfront living.
Harmony
Poetry by Sarah Asante ’22
Art by Ryan Eom ’21
The ferocity of your touch,
The fondness of your embrace,
Your proclamations of love
Are the most profound endearments I will ever know:,
Binding my heart to yours
You are the inertia of my universe,
Radiating unwavering light
to remedy the jaded artifacts of my heart.
Your lips overflow with the sweetest nectar
and I bask in it,
Until my veins churn with its sickly sweet enchantment,
And every nerve ending within me is lit ablaze;
At once I am intoxicated
For your love is like absinthe,
And who am I to resist temptation?
Photography by Angela Choi ’21
Secret Garden
Prose by Anne Sappenfield ’21
Photo by Sydney Goldstein ’22
I.
Dreams of a secret garden reflected in the crisp ceramic sky, and to each horizon of the darkness when she closed her eyes. They nested in the quiet roots of her mind, tales whispered from her bedside of children who had never grown old, for whom the world was in a constant state of opening, without close. In a suspended blossom of youth they hung, in a secret garden, and she tugged those shades of budding pink and green along behind her though the darkened halls.
In wood paneled rooms, skeletons sat still, the air thick with dust. Musty with the scent of decades of knowledge growing stale. Stories of lives once lived now tied in dusty bindings. Those, whose gesture used to shake the earth, now piled on cramped shelves. Buckled shut for decades by lack of curiosity. The floorboards creaked as she walked across them, dead words stared at her back, wispering, worn under the weight of the nameless.
II.
On that afternoon she realized that she had given up hoping. The doors had closed, and the expanse of greenery outside her window had been trimmed down to centimeters off the ground. Empty, with no mission but to be observed. As her eyes drifted from stale brown walls, to stucco lawn, she closed her eyes.
They speak of miracles, when the body manages to take over what her mind was not capable of understanding. So, with all logic stacked against her, she rose that afternoon from the decadently decaying velvet, and pressed her shoulder into every door, until she stood under a plaster sky. Nothingness ran as far as her eye could see. But, on an afternoon when nothing was making a difference, she started walking, in the hopes of bumping into something.
III.
The trek was long, and more uncomfortable than most would like. Manicured grass pricked though her shoes like needles, as the sun shone like fluorescent light onto this eternity of order. She walked with her eyes tied forward. Until pain melted into numbness, and left and right led in the same direction. She walked with the knowledge that something would eventually occur, and her movement had nothing to do with it.
Nothing stirred with her tread, pacing on the solid void, her life force seemed eternal as the pull of the earth itself, so long as she kept moving.
IV.
Eventually, as time dissolved into pure continuum, something of dimension appeared quietly, lurking across the horizon. She wasn’t sure if she could see it, but the presence was clear, and with one foot over another, the earth turned under her step, and drew the glitch at the end of oblivion closer to her.
If she hadn't glanced down in that next moment, she just might have missed it, a few blades of grass that peeked above the rest, rippling in the wind. And then, a few hundred meters ahead, weeds and flowers began to fight against the toxic green continuum.
With the nerve of someone who’s last breath just shifted reality, she took one last step.
V.
This earth was different, dense, bountiful. Almost steaming under the afternoon sun. The grass held a moisture that refracted the golden light in shades of iridescent green. The air was warm, sincere, and a golden shade drew across the fluorescent daylight. It seemed rude to tread here in shoes, so she shook off her worn mary janes, and felt her heels meet the ground and her vertebrae click into place.
The tension in her neck and shoulders released, and in heaving swigs of oxygen dimension became tangible around her, and the sun lit up every translucent hair that wove along her pale skin. She shook the ribbon, tied tight and low, from her hair, and shook her fingers across her scalp until locks cascaded in the flow of gravity. Unbuttoned the top button of her dress, and then again another, until she felt her bare skin pressing against every molecule of the space around her. Her blood seemed to warm, thick and sweet like caramel, and she felt her heart rate slow. No emptiness here.
The canopy of glowing branches held her, suspended in the belly of mother earth. She was still utterly powerless, but was mesmerized watching the pulse of life itself, from inside the soul of the cosmos. There was a peaceful curvature to the energy revolving around her. And almost unbeknownst to her, her breathing synced with that of the trees around her. Each drawing in what the other let out, it could go on for eternity. Pulsing with the groove it turned out she was a stroke away from for seventeen years.
VI.
The forest began to close in, around her until she was climbing over crystal coated logs, and ducking under clouds clinging in cotton candy wisps to the thorny brush. The elevation was rising in the hollow of her chest, though the ground tumbled flat in mossy piles. The heartbeat that murmured under her bare feet began to tremble against her skin, and raise the hairs on her arms.
Though the space around her did melt to let her silhouette past, it was as though for a centimeter all around her, all the atoms were pushing outward. She was young and of little dimension, and this forest was old and of infinite depth in its detail. It was not fear that she felt exactly, but the pressure was rising the deeper she pushed into the heart of this jungle.
Power that seeped from the stars and from the core of the earth had absorbed into the lilting branches, and they draped in golden arches above her head, moving in closer. She ambled, treading over mountains of moss, soaked in dew, like sponges on the ocean floor. Her limbs stretched and pulled like molasses, swaying like saplings in a growing breeze.
VII.
She had no idea how long she had been walking in this fashion, when her bare toes collided with something solid, jutting from the squashy ground. Her eyes lifted from the cavernously saturated green, and saw, to her surprise, a shape that was distinctly angular. A 90 degree angle in a forest that swirled in a paisley pattern from surface to sky, it was utterly jarring. She looked left, and right, and saw where the thing she now identified a step was leading toward. A wall, crumbly, and covered in a sheath of ivy. A wall that looked as though it should be accompanied by a moat and keep, sitting in the middle of an acid-trip wonderscape. She laughed to herself, and approached. She moved until her nose brushed against the leaves. The ivy was thick and lush, clinging forty feet into the air, but, as she looked to her left, there was a section that seemed pushed off of the stone surface by a few inches. Walking toward it, she felt the forest’s eyes on her back, and her pulse escalated without conscious anxiety.
VII:
She, reaching out a wrist and hand, translucent skin and veins snaking, from fingertips to elbow, brushed the curtain aside. Iced and dressed in bright pastel buds, lay a swathe of eternally green april grass in shades of soft neon. This is what she saw first, staring down deep into it, down to the rich dark earth that all was pushing out of. Above it all, white moss, pale, the fairy trees of a child’s imagination. And willows, brushing their wisping branches, waiting to be played house in, and to be dipped into water. The jungle behind her was humid, in rich jewel tones, and the air here was sweet and fresh. Like pushing your head back up out, of a woodland stream, on a summer morning, before the dew has stirred. She hardly cared to identify her own feeling here, there was no need to. She saw, hanging from a tree some yards tucked into a birch grove, a wide swing, swaying, empty.
fire born from burning wood
Poetry by Taylor Maxwell ’21
Photo by Alexander Cheng ’23
From the
end
The world of glass
Stretches before us,
A mirror under our feet.
We will bleed water,
weep blood,
Escape empty, eyes
Looking full, hands
Sculpting earth, smells
New. Brains in heads
birth
Unknown color in ash
Unending, breaking
reflection
With
refraction
Hearts beating,
breathing
beginning
Cover Photo by Jerry Qiao ’22