Volume 2, Issue 4
Are We There Yet?
Letter from the Editor
All progress begets the question, “are we there yet?” It is the pestering whine from the backseat, the critique we must make of our government, the elephant in the room of every relationship, and an essential tool for self-reflection. We ask the question out of anxiety, skepticism, longing, desperation, and uncertainty. Yet, the question is also indicative of our fascination with the drama of progress, the beauty of the unknown, and the freedom of absolute possibility.
The theme is the persistent mantra of our quarterlives. Freshmen find themselves one year into a new there. We are almost always passing through theres — due dates, transitions, seasonal shifts, years of study — and yet there is no end. A quarter of our campus graduates this month, arriving at the striking realization that the accomplishment of twenty-two years is not the there we’ve been seeking. If this is there, then how did we get here and where do we go now? There is a telescoping concept stretching out before us infinitely. We may never get there — there may not even be a there — but at least we’re on the way.
This is our quarterlife.
Free Falling
Douglas Carlsen
we used to climb trees, perched, watching the world
soon, it was not enough — then taller trees —
then faster climbs — we would wrestle and fight
to be there before each other — pushing
shoving and yes an occasional sharp
kick against knuckles to loosen a hold
always laughing — screams of absolute joy —
swaying in the utmost branches, and then…
…coming down
there were two trees that stood near each other
approximately seventy feet tall —
old firs— we would climb slowly, conserving
energy then standing aloft as high
as the tree would allow — equal — staring
at each other until the smiles began
and then the laugh and then the shout then down
falling was never quick enough for us.
we would climb down head first,
gravity assisting, muscles pulling,
legs pushing, jumping off branches, forcing
our way down through the weave of limbs and leaves.
landing, arms outstretched above our heads and
dying with that ache — that heart-rending bliss —
we lay stupid, having surely seen god
To the Lifehouse
Chad Frisk
The key is not to oversimplify, but there it is: a really long beach. Favored with the distinction of having water on both sides, it had some special name and is the longest of its kind in the entire world, a giant mess of sand and driftwood some lounging god casually spat into the Pacific Ocean long ago. But that’s getting to the heart of things a little too quickly, perhaps.
Stepping back: the early days of a road trip in the latter days of May: a thousand gaudy expectations pulled from various expressions of pop culture, not to mention the uncountable, sourceless impressions that slip through the cracks between television and film to evaporate into the cultural collective. You know the story: a group of dudes, miles of roadway, and a destination somewhere in the Red Hot Hills of California. The old coming of age story played out on an endless vector of blacktop along which you thrust yourself and your car until it ends and you get there. Until you get somewhere. To be fair, we had a girl with us, so maybe we were about destroying romantic conventions from the start; though, when I think about it there was plenty of romancing going on between E and C. Puns aside, they were definitely boning in that tent of theirs.
In many ways it was an unconventional road trip, or at least it didn’t live up to the illusions cast by car commercials. I mean, we camped a few times. Yeah, we camped two or three nights in clean, safe campsites, sat around a fire and clumsily (read: drunkenly) performed sing-alongs to the same two Chili Peppers’ songs strummed out on a guitar, over and over again. Somebody told a scary story. We drove a lot. I guess that’s all a road trip is, when you get right down to it, but it’s just that there seemed to be a definite element of madcap mayhem (meaning) missing form the whole thing; nobody hired a hooker, it was only suggested once that we make off for Mexico, and the closest thing we encountered to a bear was a drunk old man named Richie who once spent a week in an insane asylum for trying to kill a gopher with a .357 Magnum. I guess that last one is pretty good, but really our camping episodes boiled down to three dudes in a tent meant for two giggling and poking each other all night while the other two people had silent sex a few yards away in contempt.
What I’m saying is that we set out looking for the revelatory object at the end of the road(trip), but, just looking at the list of places we went, I don’t think we’re anywhere yet. I don’t think we found it.
* * *
So there it is: meandering miles of the world’s longest sandbar, as fine as any silky SoCal beach near the waterline but getting chunkier with distance from the refining hammer of the waves. Moving up the beach is like going back in time, as the well-sorted particulate along the surf seem to forget millennia of weathering, ages upon ages of wind and rain and even larger, more powerful agents of deconstruction as they clump together, swiftly shedding the past as they gain cohesion and girth, cluttering the middling reaches of the Spit in piles of rock nearly large enough to call boulders. Looking all the way back, not necessarily up the beach as the wave breaks, but back towards where the trail stumbles out of the hills, you can see even further back in time, yes, and space, too, because lining the beach that way are the wide white bluffs of Dover, a prehistoric memory of the sand beneath my feet, a living, breathing precursor to post-historic beaches to come. Something in the way those tall, imposing bluffs trailed away down the beach and into the hazy, sea-white morning light made them seem like a watercolor dream out of the distant past, an incomprehensible sweep of rock leached from the mind of a dozing colossus and spread across the western sky in grainy, ethereal pixels too resonant to be an illusion.
Along the hump and spilling over onto the backside of the beach was a bizarre litter of driftwood and human detritus thrust upon the strand as if it were the long disassociated remains of some monstrous and unknown wooden creature of the deep; its various pieces were slumped in formless decay upon the rocky, time-confused sands, having long lost the coherency of rusted-out nails and rotten skeleton. Halfway to the lighthouse on the headland of this long, thin island sat the chewed-up front half of a boat, disgorged from the gut of this manmade beachwood Monstro and evidence that either Job was real or that I regularly watched Pinocchio as a child.
I’m walking this beach that is at least 50% a figment of my imagination, and I’m looking for a Palantir, you know, one of the lost seeing stones. Glossy, globular, seemingly black, my eyes are peeled and I’m not taking any chances, because just maybe some time long ago when it was too early for sand and indeed high time for hobbits, back when the earth was still stuck in between the beginning and all this civilization that’s happened since, maybe some wizard got stabbed and dropped one. Don’t get me wrong, I know it’s a nerdy game I’m playing with myself. I’m really just half on the lookout for a rock that is passably spherical and sort of big, so I can pick it up, thrash around a little bit, and pretend to commune with the Great Eye.
There’s nothing, and I see all of my beautiful illusions dissipating into a disaffected nothingness I knew was there all along. You see, the beach was pretty boring in itself, worth depressingly little unless you played with it a bit. That’s what I was trying to do, play with the beach a little bit, bring it out of its grey-filtered, monotonous shell with a quick hit of Imagination, but I’m not six anymore, and I needed a certain cooperation I just wasn’t getting. I looked out at the slate waves plunging doggedly through the indecipherable blades and lacerations of a steady breeze that couldn’t figure out if it was an onshore or offshore flow, and I actually had a moment where I wished for the day (which, despite the clouds, the wind and the seemingly endless walk, was quite pleasant) to be over so I could spend some time translating it into memory; so that I could put merpeople into the sea and gods who threw driftwood lightning bolts into the sky and sort of believe in them. I actually thought that.
I had a few dark moments there, a minor spiritual gloom that I knew I had to mock even as I dabbled in it. Dipped my toes in it, so to speak. I walked beside Luke for about fifteen minutes, saying nothing and thinking about patterns in rocks and diamonds in my mind, stray beams of light catching a cresting wave, and I absently wished that the diamonds were real and set in Neptune’s crown instead of the mere chance collision of photons and H20 molecules. I was searching for all the signs, all the signal markers that I would recognize from all the stories I have read that would show me the first step of a stairway to the sky, to somewhere, but I burnt myself out because of course there was nothing like that. Just sand and foam. I don’t know what Luke was thinking about because I didn’t say a word; I was too busy thinking about a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the ocean floor, and how the fragments of my vibrant memory could do little to shore up the ruin of this godless, fog-smeared beach. I’ll tell it straight: that was about when I decided to stop reading for a little while, because Eliot should never seep into your everyday life; it just makes you feel like an ass.
We eventually got to the lighthouse and made a lunch of wine, apples, bread and cheese, reveling in our reproduction of high culture but knowing full well that our wine was boxed, our cheese cheap, and both purchased on sale at Safeway. The bread was great though. Someone even asked us if we were European, which we immediately affirmed in very broken English.
It was at about this point I wondered if turning a corner is a favor nature throws at us, or a decision we make on our own, because my outlook rapidly began to change. The view from the top of the lighthouse was littered with transformative touchstones, and as I looked out at the adjacent keeper’s house and then the sea beyond, I had the pleasant feeling that I had been here before, that I had been here before a hundred times, in a hundred different universes. The beautiful thing about this place was that it contained multitudes, was lacquered over with so many representations of its kind that all at once it was in Maine, poised in stately windswept silence that gathered the sun into slow, timeless strokes of air; it was a lonely headland in California, watching for surfers out amongst the big, grey swells; it was sprung from the anonymous pages of some book I couldn’t quite remember having read; it was the shining beacon and enormous letdown from another I could remember all too well; it was the shining, imaginative locus of all lighthouses that have ever been, a platonic space of infinite possibility and endless iterations; it was the place where the tooth fairy finally dies in Darkness Falls; it was on the headland of Olympian Peninsula in Washington state, at the end of the longest Spit there is. It was somewhere.
On Desire
Kim Hooyboer
Trace my veins and tell me lies.
Read me my lifelines.
Tease the threshold.
Ease a hushed finger down my wrist
where the veins fan out in fleshy mounds,
river delta of my hand,
skin so pale the streams run clear.
Ink in the lines. Follow until they disappear
beneath the skin, callused and opaque.
Make up the rest. Throw anatomy to the wind.
Allow my blood
to weave elaborate root systems.
Draw its true form.
Now, carve them out. Watch the blood pool
beneath the blade, leaving a slug-like crimson trail in its wake.
Follow the ink with meticulous care,
across the shoulder,
down the neck,
skim the groove
of my clavicle,
to the heart of things.
Pry back the skin and scoop
a single nail beneath each thread.
Pull. They will detach in fleshy strings.
Rip them out.
Rearrange. Reroute.
Bleed me dry until I am an ivory shell,
loose leaf paper, dusty flakes.
Just don’t let me see;
you know I can’t stand the sight
of blood.
Amulet
Dena Popova
We were singing the song for the donkey,
And you didn’t trust me that
I was crying truly.
And you were laughing like hell
Every time I started the refrain:
The donkey brays in the afternoon,
In the afternoon the donkey brays,
While chewing its donkey thistles.
And then I gave you to try
The soup with meat balls
That I was preparing the whole morning.
I let you sip the hot soup
And you burned your tongue,
So you could be quiet
And I could finish the song
For the donkey:
And the donkey gazed at
A lady bug on one of those
Damned thistles
And choked
On one of those damned
Thistles.
And I was crying so much
That I couldn’t finish the song,
And thus you never understood
That in the little castor
That I always wear on my neck
And that you like to kiss so much,
I keep a hair from the crest of the donkey,
And the dead body of that lady bug.
Dear Chicago
Ben Kegan
It was a slight sting in my foot. I noticed it as soon as the airplane landed, a pinch that caused my toe to tense inside my shoe. At first it was gentle enough, like a pine needle caught in the cotton of a sock. I stood up from my seat in the airplane and it was there, this little sting that had stuck with me all the way across the country. Perhaps when I took off my shoes at the airport it slipped inside me. I shook my foot to make sure it was not just asleep from the long flight from Chicago to Los Angeles, but it felt different from a foot falling asleep. The pain was more specific, located only in the edge of my smallest toe, where the fleshy meat of the tip folds underneath the nail. Now I could only guess how long it would stay with me, this tiny pain in my smallest of toes.
I had to leave many things behind when I moved. I knew this was inevitable. My sister had made the same trip several years earlier and I remembered her leaving me large boxes full of items she could not take across the country. Now I had filled my own cardboard boxes and paper shopping bags full of photographs, clock radios, and soap dishes to leave behind. It is a sad thing to say goodbye to your home. How do you tell your coffee maker that you are sorry, and even though it has been faithful you must now part ways and find a new coffee maker to greet you in the mornings?
Take me with you, the coffee maker pleads.
No, I couldn’t possibly, you reply.
Then promise me you will find the same model, so even though I am here and you are there, you will be reminded of me.
Yes, that is exactly what I’ll do, you consent.
But you both know the lust for a new coffee maker is very strong. And when you are in the store, with so many shiny coffee makers to choose from, that former model will appear bland and old fashioned next to the newer ones. And you will think to yourself, yes, I loved my old coffee maker very much, but this one has an automatic timer.
Before I left I made every effort to tidy up my life. I folded my friendships neatly so I could place them in my suitcase without wrinkles. I gave my job to someone else so it would not go to waste. I donated my romance to charity so it would not be left out to spoil. I canceled the subscription to my daily routines. I even wrote a very nice goodbye note. It started with Dear Chicago, and ended with if you ever need a place to stay in Los Angeles please do not hesitate to call. I had a very long checklist and by the night before my flight every box was ticked and all I had was one suitcase and an empty apartment.
When my sister and I both lived in Chicago we would sit for coffee and she would delve into tales of whomever she was dating. I would listen while she talked about the men in her life. She was very good at falling in love and did it often. Sitting with my sister was a time for me to learn about falling in love because I was not as good at it as she was. That is the way with siblings: often one is better than the other at certain things. I was very good at piano, and she was very good at falling in love.
After my sister moved I no longer heard about the men in her life in the same way I did when we lived in the same city. At first I thought it was because casual conversation necessitates proximity. Over long distances our correspondence became formalized. I thought that maybe she stopped telling me about the men in her life because she could no longer say, you know that Indian restaurant on Devon we went to with Aunt Molly, he took me there. I hoped that now, since we would be walking past the same restaurants again, she would be able to resume these stories. Having just ended a relationship where I was very much in love, but could no longer remember falling in love, I was longing to hear her talk of men and romance.
Emily opened the door of her apartment. Her hair was damp, and shorter than the last time I had seen her. She had a slight frame and looked healthy. The interior was tastefully furnished. A built-in bookshelf stood next to a low leather couch and several hardcover photography books lay open on a dark coffee table. My sister had an eye for aesthetics and it seemed her move to Los Angeles and her new job allowed her to realize the decorating style she desired. It was comforting to know she was doing well, but I still felt a touch of intimidation, like a frightened skier watching a companion successfully glide down a steep slope. I was still on the top of the mountain, looking on with envy as my sister walked about her apartment with no concern for tiny pains lingering in her foot. She was older than me and this never showed itself more than now. I lagged behind her. She had finished moving; she lived here now. For me the palm trees I saw out of the taxi window were novel. I had only seen palm trees on vacation.
We made small talk as I sat. My sister listed restaurants and neighborhoods where I might enjoy living. She commented on the weather and on her favorite theaters that played old films and served beer. She talked about her work as a layout editor for a high-end magazine, the type with oversized pages and glossy photographs. I listened, and wanted desperately to ask her if any men had made her fall in love, but the pain in my toe was very distracting.
How could I have been so careless, I thought. I should have taken more precautions to ensure this pain did not sneak inside me when I left. I should have worn two pairs of socks and watched where I put my feet more carefully. Now I have this twinge inside of me wherever I go.
I woke up on the couch. A thin patchwork quilt I recognized as my mother’s was wrapped around me. I wiggled my toe, but felt no sting. This is very good, I thought. But as soon as I stood up I felt a rattle in my ear. It was not a heavy rattle, more like a small washer that had become loose inside of an old wristwatch than the metallic clang of a noisemaker. It must have happened while I slept. The pain in my toe had wiggled itself loose. I slept with my feet raised onto the arm of my sister’s couch and that must have caused the prick to float down toward my head until it was inside my ear. It had gotten stuck there, and now it rattled when I moved, like the faithful snare of a drum. I tried to soak up the rattle with a cotton swab. When that did not work I tried to drown it in the shower. It was trapped there, and now I had this pain lingering about in the folds of my ear, like a tiny marble lost in a child’s maze. It was frustrating because it was taking up space inside of me that could have been used for something more pleasant. I could have taken the scent of Lake Michigan in October with me, or the sound of Grant Park in the spring, but instead this space was filled with a sting that rattled inside my ear.
At dinner that night Emily sat across from me. We had finished our meal and were chatting over chocolate cake and very small cups of coffee.
You have not told me any stories about men, I said.
No, she answered. It seems I left falling in love in Chicago, with my scarf and microwave oven.
I could picture the scarf easily, soft gray cotton with pale stripes of cobalt, but I did not remember falling in love. It could have been in one of the other boxes she left behind, far away from the scarf, buried beneath old address books and unused light bulbs, but I found it odd that of all the things she could leave behind she would choose to leave falling in love. Perhaps she thought she had packed it with her, but accidentally left it somewhere else. Or maybe she got two boxes confused and left the one she meant to take and took the one she meant to leave. That must have been awful, I imagined, to open a box expecting to find falling in love, only to discover decks of old playing cards and back issues of magazines.
I’ve been on dates, she added. But none of them have been the type of dates you can turn into stories.
How sad, I said. But I suppose that is the case when you want something, but realize you have left it somewhere far away.
I have been trying quite hard to fall in love, but I can’t. It is like trying to play a song I once new by heart, but have not practiced for years. I feel like I remember all of the notes and rhythms, but when I sit down at the piano to actually play it my fingers are sluggish and sloppy, instead of the quick precision I remember them having.
But surely you can get better, with practice, I add.
I am trying to retrace my steps, my sister says. I found a restaurant I want to eat at and tomorrow night I have a date, so there is always a chance, but I am not optimistic.
It was difficult hearing my sister talk about her inability to fall in love. I desired the comforting familiarity of the way she spoke about whomever she was falling in love with. I needed her words to distract me from this pain in my ear. I wanted to believe my sister’s love stories could survive a five-hour flight and the stress of moving into a new home.
Two weeks later I moved into my own apartment. It was modest, but it was all I could afford. I did not have a job yet, but hoped to find one soon. I had written warning labels for industrial machinery in Chicago, but now I wanted to write for television. I placed my suitcase in the center of the barren apartment. Standing there with all of my belongings inside of my luggage I thought how similar this emptiness of my arriving was to the emptiness of my leaving. You could go your whole life leaving and arriving, but if you tripped and the arrivals and departures flew through the air and landed on the ground in a shuffled mess it would be impossible to put them back together in sequence.
There were many decisions facing me at that moment. I had to decide in which drawer I was going to place my silverware and in which drawer I would keep my phonebooks and take out menus. I had to pick a side of the closet to hang my shirts and a side to hang my pants. I had to select upon which shelf of my refrigerator I would place my milk and where I would keep my pasta. These are not easy questions to answer and are made more difficult when a twinge of pain is loose inside your body.
My process of settling was a constant negotiation between this pain and my apartment. Alone, unpacking my few belongings and trying to make a strange place familiar, the pain grew most uncomfortable. I did all I could to appease it, but it was unpredictable. It threw a tantrum in my hip when I hung a photograph of my sister and me at Wrigley Field. It squealed and pounded until I had no choice but to relent and place the photograph in any empty drawer. At other times it would be conspicuously quiet. When I spent two hours trying to assemble a desk I bought at a furniture warehouse it did not make a sound. I eventually grew concerned and whispered to it under my breath. This was when I first started talking to it. Initially I only made threats.
I will find you and cut you out of me. I will swallow poison and kill you, I told it.
But I soon learned it did not respond well to such hostile language, and before long my tone became more somber, often pleading.
Just let me fall asleep, I would beg in the evenings when it was worst, just after I turned off the television or while I was brushing my teeth.
Leave me alone just for tonight and you can bother me all you want tomorrow, I begged.
It did not cease altogether, but it softened itself enough so I could close my eyes and drift away, still in its presence.
It was shy at first, but as we spent more time together we grew increasingly comfortable in each other’s company. This comfort did not make it hurt any less. Now it moved about inside of me more freely, often showing up in unexpected places. If it was in my elbow one day I might find it in my wrist the next. I began to know its behaviors well, as is the case when you live with someone in intimacy. At night we fell asleep together, the pain tangled inside me. It would stir in the mornings and wake me earlier than if I were sleeping alone.
On a sunny morning I met my sister at a coffee shop she recommended. We sat outside, across from each other at a small iron table. My sister hid behind a large pair of sunglasses. We talked about my new apartment until the topic of her date inevitably came to the surface of our conversation.
I just couldn’t fall in love with him. It wasn’t like I didn’t try, I did everything I could to fall in love with him, but nothing would work, Emily admitted with a tone of disappointment.
Don’t be too hard on yourself, I said. Maybe he wasn’t the right man for you.
But he was the right man for me. I could tell immediately. He was perfect for me.
I’m sorry, I said again and took another sip of my coffee. My pain was lingering in my throat and I hoped the warm coffee would sooth its presence without making it disappear altogether. While the pain was discomforting it was a discomfort I had grown accustomed to. I found myself able to tell it things I did not usually tell other people.
One evening after a particularly long and violent argument we sat on my floor exhausted, the way people do after they fight and yell at one another.
I’m jealous of my sister, I admitted. She has always been able to move more easily than me, even when we were young. She was very good at gymnastics. You have to be good at moving to be good at gymnastics, I added. And I am jealous that I have you inside of me and she is able to live without you.
After that night things changed between the two of us. It became clear we would not be living together much longer. My pain would disappear for long periods of time without explanation, and then show up while I was doing my laundry as if nothing had happened. We fought with increasing frequency. Our quarrels were intimate, which made them all the fiercer. However, I could not help but feel the vulnerability and ugliness we exposed during these arguments brought us momentarily closer even if they were ultimately heightening our frustrations.
One evening my sister invited me to a party a friend of hers was having.
You should go without me. They’re your friends and I don’t know any of them, I told my sister as she was putting on earrings in her bathroom, the door open.
That’s exactly why you should come. You need to meet people. And I want you there as my date.
Emily wore a black dress with an open back that was both tasteful and alluring. She had always been a better dresser than me. I decided to go, because while my pain was fluttering in the small of my back, I knew my sister was hoping she might meet a man at the party, and I desperately wanted that as well so she could tell me a love story and things could be like they were in Chicago.
The party was at a friend of her co-worker’s house. The women wore delicate handbags and expensive necklaces. The men wore sport coats and shiny shoes. The atmosphere was warm and cheery. If the party were in Chicago it would be in the springtime. But we were in Los Angeles and it was nearly winter.
Come over here, my sister said to me. I want to introduce you to someone. She pointed to a handsome man in a well-fitted charcoal blazer. Our introduction was an excuse for their conversation.
Daniel, this is my brother David, she said.
We talked about moving and about Los Angeles. Emily said witty things and Daniel touched her arm as he laughed. I excused myself to get another glass of champagne. While my pain and I had arrived together, I had not felt it for quite some time. I remembered it saying something about the bathroom, or maybe it was fresh air. At the time I was happy to see it disappear amongst the crowded living room, but now I wanted it back, or at least to peer across the room and know it was nearby. I circled the living room, weaving between the small clusters of remaining guests, looking for that tiny pain. I knocked on the door of the bathroom, but it was empty. I checked under a pile of cocktail napkins and empty glasses, but it was not there. I walked onto the balcony and searched the lawn, but I did not see it.
From the balcony I saw my sister talking with Daniel. Peering inside through a large window, they were framed perfectly, like a still from a movie. A dim light from an overhead lamp fell onto their shoulders, adding a silver glint to their hair. They had moved to a couch in the center of the room and were sitting next to each other, taking turns sipping from their glasses. They appeared happy, and I do not doubt they were, but my sister was not falling in love. Her eyes darted across the room, pausing to read a clock hanging above a marble countertop. When you are falling in love you do not care what the time is or study the bubbles in your champagne glass as my sister did.
I leaned against the railing, removed from the warmth of the party, I felt alone. I thought of that pain, and while I did not know where it was, I tried to cultivate it because it was one of the few things that felt familiar to me in this strange city.
I felt a tap inside my shoulder. It was the ache, tight and sharp. I smiled because although my pain and I had parted ways at the party, we had come back together at the end of the night, the way lovers do, drunk and happy to feel each other’s presence as they whisper, let’s go home.
I knew my sister missed falling in love terribly, the way I knew I would miss that pain when I awoke one morning and felt only its absence. I imagined sitting across from my sister, two cups of coffee between us, telling her how I missed my ache. She would laugh and tell me that I had simply grown accustomed to it, and soon enough its absence would fade. There would be a pause in our conversation and in that moment I would have to decide whether or not to tell my sister a love story. To admit to my sister that I had fallen in love would be to admit to an act of theft. I had fallen in love with this ache, and she ached to fall in love. If she asked for it back it would crush me. I couldn’t help but feel I had stolen it from her, but that is what siblings do: they take things from each other without asking and do not return them.
A History of My Politics
Leslie Beach
Pick an era, any era!
The Sixties, I’d reply (though it was more like
1968-76, a vague cloud of days that felt right), late
as ever, loyal to my mother and her
grapes, following the booted Spanish syllables of
El pueblo
Cesar Chavez
unido
woven belts
jamás sera
and silver rings
vencido.
All round, wound about
my fingers and my waist
bright colors separating Gap jeans from a plain white t
and that was about the size of it. It was cool, so painfully
hip to be a hippie, to buy
your clothes a bit too bright, a bit too big
and make that vibrancy call out your
authenticity.
My waist and fingers, belly, reluctant breasts were
round like peace signs. Round like the buttons
proclaiming JFK, tracing out
a black hand holding a white hand holding a soft green olive branch
splayed open-bodied across my mother’s dresser.
Her father told her not to go to peace marches.
He’d worked, that’s right, in a government soiled by McCarthy
on the fresh water board (a marine biologist tangled in bureaucracy) that kept him drinking
anything but water
‘til it dried him out. He watched his friends go down
one by four by eighteen for speaking their minds.
He didn’t want his baby girl on a blacklist, but she,
dripping with—what?—
went
anyway.
She placed her Birkenstocks behind the booted Chavez, marching
not against the grapes but for the growers
on those weekends between offering herself to her classes
in songs like ‘Juanito
cuando baila’ and ‘Head, Shoulders, Knees,
and Toes,’ drove across the border with a black girl and a latina and with her long red hair, next week got them all invited onstage at the production of (naturally) Hair
and that, that, that is what I wanted
‘til the day of My First Peace March.
Iraq not ‘Nam
and food not bombs not what if they gave a war
and nobody came
(because the thought of not
dropping things from things on things
is evidently no longer in our vocabulary)
and then, when a handful of kids from my class opted out of the optional march,
there were these mutters
(how can any of these kids NOT want peace?)
showing all too murkily how far we’ve come.
When our authority figures are the organizers, what good is a walk-out?
We made no sacrifices. We all got excused absences
to wander about by the library, perch in sunpolished trees
and shout glossy slogans that demonstrated no understanding
(I knew that because I didn’t understand
though I couldn’t make myself shout either).
the ones making the statement were the ones who stayed behind.
II
a caution held close to the bone:
that’s my other inheritance.
birdflugoldstandardcollapsenomoreoilrelocalizationronpaulistheonlysmartmaninpoliticsbuy some land just in case always have cash on hand don’t buy anything you don’t need if the car says it needs service don’t trust it just wait
I’m not sure when I started
distrusting my parents along with the rest of the world,
imagining my own abandonment, my ideal scenario being
to be left
on the beach
on an outcrop, one of those cliffs that had gotten
delusions of independence and sprouted wild onions and a freshwater spring.
I’d pluck mussels from the rocks (abandoning lifelong vegetarianism
in the interest of lifelong survival) and stew them in water and onions, letting the sun
warm and flavor them. I’d weave
dry grasses and feathers into ropes and coats and rugs, cool
my eyes on the surf and swim three times daily. The mussel shells
could be ground in water and a trace of their own oil
to make ink
for company.
There were less idyllic possibilities.
Cardboard boxes whispered to me of shelter, corners
between yards and fences pontificated on how long I’d last
before discovery. Berry bushes and miner’s lettuce and sour grass and stubborn spearmint
pressed themselves between my fingers, squealing
what good salads they’d make, protesting I could TOO fill up on them
if need be. In craft class
I learned to make a basket
from pine needles and raffia. I couldn’t convince myself
to convince my mom
to let me carry raffia with me
at all times. But there was clay
in the soil
and going unnoticed
was essential.
III
I am on the playground
counting for the tire swing. We play airline when we get it—Max Murray is my best friend
and he is the announcer. He likes
Delta. I like
United. They give me goldfish
crackers. He likes
Colgate. I like
Crest. He likes
Bush. I just got told
by my mom,
you
don’t
have
to like your president.
She likes Clinton, Crest, and United.
so I guess I
like Clinton.
IV
Suddenly someone is listening to me. He’s
fifteen and I’m venerable and
I say I need to live
with integrity, no more.
I need to be consistent, not loud. I need
to know, not preach or protest. That is action.
I realize later
the danger of those words. What I meant
is that everyone lives the way they do and acts
the way they can. What I meant is that I’m
a mole of a girl
buried in a world that I’ve created
and I like it more.
Signs never mean what they mean to mean and slogans haven’t done much yet but
just because I’ll never wave them
doesn’t mean they oughtn’t to be waved.
I just prefer the liquid sort, the sort that slaps my ankles and fills
places as-yet-unexcavated by anything else
and washes off my dirt to leave me facing
what I love not understanding.
I will never be a group
member. Not to be trusted, groups. Prone to explosion or urgent misdirection.
I’ll never stop thinking
my choices change things. I circle comprehension in my bright belts that no longer declare anything particular about me.
I’ll never know I’ll never do such things. I’ll do what’s next. I’ll find
a recipe for wild onion soup
and make it on my stovetop in the L-shaped kitchen
letting its odor spread
my manifesto.
Summerstasis
Grace Harnois
I didn’t know what to say. Bobby was often troubled but he never mentioned a thing about Alaska. He’d been schizophrenic toward me all spring, sometimes avoiding me for days and snapping at other boys I adopted into my Best Platonic Male Friend slot, sometimes showing up at my door with plates of whimsically shaped cookies, but this sudden departure was entirely unforeseen. We couldn’t even discuss it-- his fantastical plans were already in motion, smothering my cartoony hopes for a summer of eating ice cream cones and philosophizing as the trains rumbled under the sweltering wooden bridge in Highland Park. Why would he want desserts and the companionable repetition of my five or so original thoughts when he could have adventure, freedom, and the tangle-free romance of a barren ice floe? The great fucking North was calling him home. I’d only ever read Julie of the Wolves (or whatever the title of that starkly boring adventure girl novel was) and I was convinced that Alaska held nothing other than darkness, quasi-rapists, and fifty tons of raw elk meat and I needed none of those in my daily adventures.
But Bobby bought a bicycle. It shone under the porch light, moths bouncing off its aluminum frame. Mosquitos sucked our blood in tandem, mixing a hemoglobin cocktail, as he leaned forward and touched my nose with his, cutting off my questions. “I’m coming back. I’m not going to be one of those wayward adventurers.”
His eyes were so close that they cyclopsed and I pulled my forehead away. “‘Wayward adventurers’ is a pretty bullshit phrase, friend.” I shut the door and snapped the tiny curtain closed as a final message. The stitched lavender flowers didn’t hide his disappointed half-smile. He knew that I wasn’t going to say goodbye.
So he didn’t wait. I pretended he might, but the eerily icy song was calling him and his pedals. I touched the sticky surface of a postcard, looking for fingerprints. A greeneyed wolf with an inferiority complex watched me warily as his thickly pencilled words assured me he was safe and eating and didn’t have fleas yet. I imagined plumes of scent rising from his sweatsoaked back, the filth of the Alaskan wilderness riding along in his beard, and I knew no one would fuck with him.
I slept a little and waited, the summer soaking into my pores and slowly infecting my brain cells. I didn’t answer him because he had to know I was dying and my melodrama blood levels were at an all-time high. Amusing bike trip anecdotes were pissing me off and I needed him. Silence would tell him that. He would come back. I sat in my room and pressed my face into a tiny stuffed manatee and wished…
This was unhelpful. The manatee gave a plaintive squeak as I threw it against the wall and my sadness ceased to be soporific.
The trains rumbled by. Neither the moon nor the sun brought sleep, but I found ways to be as fantastic as someone with the drive to bike to Alaska. I had to. I never finished anything I started, but the house grew littered with half-baked cupcakes (sporting unsmiling icing faces), bookshelves were organized by the author’s level of physical attractiveness, and pieces of a quilt were made from faded, stained Disney character t-shirts. My tasks were myriad and taxing. Sometimes I’d drop, exhausted, onto the grass beneath the swingset after lunch and close my eyes. The low swings smeared seasons of dirt across my nose and the neighbors’ dog licked my toes in the most comforting way possible. I liked to read Bobby’s postcards in that position, the sun blinding behind the thick rectangle of paper held against the sky. As the weeks meandered by, the messages grew less casual and more cryptic, featuring perplexing statements: “I never wanted to go to Alaska, you know. I just need to be away from some people until they figure some things out.” “You will always be my best friend. I think of you every day. More than every day.” And, the most bizarre: “Please don’t have a summer fling. That would be horrible.” Bobby excelled at friendship but was painfully inarticulate on paper.
After sunset, the suffocatingly beautiful summer nights always made me want to shout something overly dramatic in my kitchen during after-dinner popsicles and stalk out into the cooling street, eventually wandering under the railroad bridge and counting littered beer bottles and fireflies. Instead, I waited until everyone slept and I lay in the backyard, sipping refrigerated red wine from a flimsy plastic cup that read BROOKFIELD ZOO – GET WILD!!!. That was angsty enough. My loneliness would occasionally fabricate a Holden Caulfield complex and I’d adorn each of my thoughts with a “goddam” and wish I were a smoker. It was embarrassing. But with the cruel teasing of the neighbor children drifting over me from the sidewalk and Bobby seemingly gone forever, I was a bit unstable. I let the slugs and ladybugs crawl onto my arms and fell asleep, tiny tracks of goo and ittybitty legs covering my skin. Insects and invertebrates liked me better than Alaska.
I woke to the 6:50 train whistle, hair wet with something unsavory. I stumbled into the house to find my sister getting ready for her token 7 AM run, every thread of coordinated jogging gear in place. She shook her head at my dirt- and dew-covered clothing and the constellations of mosquito bites covering my limbs. “I think you’re in love.” I fled the room.
It would be hours until the mail came so I showered days’ worth of sweat from my arms and legs, picturing Bobby attempting to bathe in an ice-choked river somewhere in Canada (though, knowing him, a thick layer of dirt would be serving as a second skin by this point). I stopped in the bookstore on the way to the post office to breathe in the sterile air-conditioned environment and the smell of virgin paper. On the way to the benches at the back, I stumbled into a shelf and a book titled You Can’t Ride A Bike To Alaska. It’s An Island! fell onto my foot. I swore, kicked it under a shelf, and scurried from the store, mumbling an apology to the horrified cashier. Outside, a child ran up to me and smeared thick suntan lotion on my shin, giggling as she trotted back to her mother’s leg inside the seafood market that smelled of scaly desperation. She smiled at me through the window, the halibut behind her gleaming in the early-morning light, and it was somehow significant. Maybe it was the sliminess coating my leg, the echoes of my sister’s words, or just the knowledge that my left ankle was protected from the sun’s harmful rays, but I finally knew why Bobby had left.
And I knew where I was going. The mailbox contained a suspicious-looking postcard which I stuffed into my sock for safekeeping. My backpack contained a water bottle, a bag of dried-out baby carrots, and a Neutral Milk Hotel CD inside a battered Discman. The train station contained no one. I slipped through the back door and sat on the ground next to a pile of abandoned newspapers. Other commuters tried the front door to escape the heat, but it was locked. They peered in at me, a smiling shadow in the darkened, empty station, and gave up. I hadn’t rubbed in the suntan lotion and it oozed into my shoe as I boarded the next train that stopped. I didn’t know the destination or the price so I hid in the chokey-sized bathroom to avoid the ticketing conductor and pulled out the postcard beneath the flickering overhead light.
It wasn’t a real postcard after all, but a picture Bobby had drawn on thick paper, carefully tracing the proper squares and lines onto the back (he hated the word “artist” but his ardent sketchings always meant far more to me than the wood-framed Van Gogh and Monet prints that filled the doctors’ offices of the world). The front depicted a happy Crayola-crayoned moose lounging next to a Purple Mountain’s Majesty-colored lake, with Bobby and me asleep against its stomach, hand in hand. The back was simple: a heavy, misshapen heart above the question, “Are you here yet?”
I got off the train at the next stop and followed the tracks back home, first walking, then running, tripping over the wooden slats between the rails, watching the alarmed glimpses of conductors’ faces as trains flashed by. Bobby was sitting on the front steps of my house and I slowed in front of him, gasping asthmatically and unattractively. He looked up at me silently, expectantly.
I opened my mouth “I love you, too.”
And we smiled. And smiled.
And we were finally there together.
And there were still months and months of summer ahead.
I Would Let it Fade Out
Kate Rosenberg
I would let it fade out here
This planet, like the final song on a mix tape
Life outside these windows looks wet, valuable, complete
That’s how I’d want it to finish
Dim and all bathed in murky, intergalactic sunlight
Toes tap out the beat of the sunrise
Drumming along to the bilingual love songs that escape from headphones
And bounce through this creaking, hesitating metal mammal
Atoms for notes kissing each thing they touch
And then
Fairfax
Annapolis
Philadelphia
Soft aquatic murmurs leak from Meth-mouth smiles
This. Fade out. Just here. Simple.
And it would all re-grow: the future like a cut lizard tail
I can see it refilling itself in the rearview mirror
Springfield
Bethesda
Glenmont
A soft man speaks to himself, shakes his head at a map, arms scarred white like lunar soil
Grids like these are for pretending that it won’t happen
That we won’t be covered in one hundred years of perfect snow
We’ll whisper to ourselves underground and smile
It was just right to fade out
Just here
Masthead
| editor-in-chief | Kim Hooyboer | |
| assistant editor | Leslie Beach | |
| layout editor | Deirdre Gorman | |
| copy editors | Leslie Beach Stazh Zamkinos | |
| staff | Jullianne Ballou Meghan Carlson Avi Conant Ben Kegan Robin Lewis Dena Popova | |
| staff artist | Tyler Caulkin |
