Volume 1, Issue 5
With a Bang or a Whimper
Letter from the Editor
I am bumming about leaving this place in less than a month but I also can't wait to set my post-college foundation. I've tried to express my feelings about graduation but I just can't capture the exact feeling. My moods have been shifty on the issue. College has been a blur; an overwhelming experience of new people and new ideas and a growing awareness of the world; a growing sense of the role I want to create for myself in the world. It makes me feel like I'm exploding just thinking about the uncertainties of the future.
I know about a couple things. I know Kim Hooyboer is taking the reins of quarterlife next year. I know that this year was a successful first year for the magazine because we are continually improving the management of the magazine, submissions are encouraging for the future as a variety of people are sending creative and entertaining pieces, and things can only get better from here. I know there will be applications for staff positions next year.
I am taking this space to thank everybody who has ever picked up a quarterlife. Thanks for your interest. I hope we fulfilled your need. Thanks for everybody with the confidence in themselves to think their voice should be heard by others and braved their writing in the public's eye. Thanks Ben Gannon, the man with the plan. Thanks to Kim Hooyboer who keeps quarterlife afloat and thanks to the rest of the staff for struggling through the rough debut year. Thanks Carly Rue for helping us get started. Thanks George Bridges, Dean Cleveland, and ASWC for financial support. Thanks English Department for teaching me; especial thanks for Andrew Osborn who is a fantastic professor as well as the faculty advisor to quarterlife. Thanks Hashimoto, Scott Elliot, Josh Emmons, Katrina Roberts, Don Snow, and all the other professors who help writers reach their potential on the page. Thanks everyone involved in blue moon and Pioneer because the literary universe can never be too big and the bigger the better.
I have learned some things here that I feel I need pass on to the younger folks. The most important thing I have to say is hygiene is important. When in class don't say, "I feel like" and then state some opinion, there is a better way to make statements in class. Don't talk about your significant other as if he or she were important to the class discussion, he or she does not have anything to do with Core. Some people can't grow beards and should just accept that. Keep writing as much as you can. Sometimes you just have to try growing a beard. Don't punch things. Sit up straight. Try to love others. If you can't love others, at least treat them with respect, we are all human. Never stop exploring. That includes reading as much as you can get your hands on. When you are about to graduate, don't think you are qualified to give any sort of advice. Give advice anyway because some things you say might be nice, like that love/respect thing was pretty nice but the rest is all trite. Know when to stop because the convention is too worn out and any sort of postmodern self-consciousness can't help it and that love/respect thing really wasn't all that good. Hope you thanked everyone. Remember to thank your parents.
I am glad that I am leaving here having accomplished something with this magazine. I am happily stepping away from it and I am looking forward to seeing how it changes and grows as different people filter through this school. Whitman, I feel like we've been good for each other. Goodbye.
Delta Blue and Corn Gold
Megan McPhaden
It's a bright Sunday morning in New Orleans, the kind that instantly warms a chilled and sleepy face with golden rays. But today is not a day for steamy coffee and crinkly news. We sit on a concrete stoop in a mostly empty and boarded-up neighborhood in the upper 9th ward, waiting for our volunteer coordinator to drop off the key for 1317 Feliciana. Few residents have moved back since the levees broke and the flood washed out their houses, and we are here to help clean up. Across the street, two black women linger in the pleasant morning. One wears a boxy pink gingham frock, the other, black sweats and a headscarf the color of mermaid scales. They motion us over.
"What color do ya'll think?" The woman in pink shows us some paint chips. "I wanna paint my house. Somethin' happy, somethin' sunny. I like this one. ‘Corn Gold.' It's a good color, don't ya'll think?"
We look at the chips and nod. "That's a nice one," I agree. The woman in pink shares her stories from the flood-- how she watched the water rise, how she moved up to the attic, how she punched through her roof to reach air as the Mississippi rushed in, and pieces of her home rushed out.
"Yeah, that's how it was. Uh huh. Yeah. Yeah." Her friend says little, just a few validating remarks and shakes of the head. When she parts her lips, a solid row of metal-capped front teeth shimmer.
"I seen people down here dying. Dyin' from the water and mold, yeah, but not just that. Plain dyin' from grief. I lost so many friends from grief, so many." She shakes her head. We don't know what to say, so we examine the strips of yellow shades again and say that, yeah, that one there is the happiest hue.
"Yeah, that is a nice color, huh? Thanks, sweeties. I just wanna come home, you know? I want my community back here, too."
The key arrives, and we thank the women for their stories. "No, thank ya'll. God bless you for being down here. Really. We ‘preciate it so much. God bless ya'll."
Katharine, Annelle, Morgan, Steve and I fly from Walla Walla, Washington, to New Orleans to volunteer for a week. It is only our first day, but I am overwhelmed and already feel like I need a break. Flying into the city, I notice that only streetlights, no building lights, illuminate the city into grids, and as our taxi driver navigates through the 9th ward, my airborne suspicion proves correct-- there are no house lights on. Street after street, houses are boarded up. Even though we arrive on Saint Patrick's Day, no one is celebrating outside; the mythic perpetual party isn't part of this urban landscape. Each house is spray-painted with a large X and TFW. We learn the meanings later; TFW stands for Toxic Flood Water, and each quadrant of the X reveals information about the house. The top quadrant is for the date the house was searched; the left quadrant, the group that did the search; the right quadrant, the obstacles in the house; and the bottom quadrant, how many bodies or animals were found inside.
We gut a house, pick up debris, and till new beds in a community garden through the volunteer organization Common Ground, which offers housing and food in exchange for work. Our housing for the week is in a classroom on the third floor-- the only floor that wasn't flooded-- of Saint Mary of the Angels Catholic Middle School in the upper 9th ward. When we arrive, the room is full of sleeping volunteers. By the rays of moonlight streaming through big school windows, I examine the classroom. Cutouts of famous African American scholars border the chalkboards. My inflatable mattress is halfway deflated and fuzzy with dust. A chalkboard at the far end of the room is covered in writing, but I can only read the words in caps at the bottom. "THEY LEFT US HERE TO DIE." I tiptoe between bodies to get closer. A group of local residents had taken refuge in the school, because it was the only building in the neighborhood that wasn't completely submerged. The U.S. Coast Guard saw the residents waving from the large classroom windows, but didn't come to help. They were abandoned, left crying for help.
In the morning, we don full-body, blue polypropylene suits, respirator masks, goggles, and rubber boots in preparation for gutting a house, so the owners will soon be able to move back. A safety talk in the morning reminds us of what we need to be careful about: black mold, asbestos, toxic flood water, rusty nails, moldy ceilings falling on our heads, brown recluse spiders, and staph infections. My stomach tightens and I miss the safety of home. I want to feel happy to help out, want to be strong, but I'm pissed that I have to do this work. Shouldn't the government be doing this? A year and a half after hurricanes Katrina and Rita and the following floods, shouldn't the entire city be more cleaned up, not just the wealthy neighborhoods? Hurricane Rita hit 3 1/2 weeks after Katrina, keeping much of the city flooded for nearly 6 1/2 weeks. I'm shocked about the destruction, debris, and despair that still remain. I didn't see this on the news at home. Before Katrina, New Orleans housed 484,674 people, but in July 2006, the population was down to around 250,000. Neighborhoods are deserted, houses boarded up, and debris is still everywhere, a year and a half later. In the back of a truck, driving through the city to our worksite, spray paint messages flash by. Dog left. Come home Marvin, we miss you. 1 person found. TFW. TFW. TFW.
Perhaps there is still so much destruction because the city government wants some of this land—yellow notices tacked along doors in the lower 9th ward warn absent residents that they have 30 days to clean up their houses, or else. If your lawn is not manicured, if there is trash in your yard, or if your house is a threat to public safety and you don't do anything about it in the next 30 days, the city will demolish your home and seize your land. The mayor wants to bulldoze the lower 9th ward so moneymaking casinos can bloom. So the five of us pull out clovers and pick up trash to give the displaced people who can't afford to come back a chance to keep their houses.
1317 Feliciana was someone's home, maybe someone's everything. Maybe a little boy and girl played tag or hide and seek in this home. Maybe the neighbors came over for Sunday brunch. I want to take a step back, want to breathe deeply, meditate on what we are about to do, but my respirator mask only allows a certain amount of air per breath, and workers from my team already have their arms full of the household goods, ready for dumping on the street. We take out everything. School books, moldy couches, newspapers, tax receipts, a white ceramic toilet and sink, buckets of paint, a roll of barbed wire, armfuls of undistinguishable moldy stuff, kitchen utensils, wallpaper covered in black mold, paintings that once hung on walls, a full length mirror, a pale blue teddy bear, boxes of clothing, shoes, an orange thermos, cabinets, plaster walls, horizontal wooden strips between supporting beams, molding around windows and doors, a fuzzy Santa hat. With sledgehammers, a found golf club, and shovels we beat the house down, rusty nails flying everywhere. One hits and breaks a hanging chandelier, crashing down glass and toxic floodwater on Katharine. This is ridiculous. We should be wearing hard hats. I call Adrian, our volunteer coordinator, to ask for hats, but he just laughs. They don't have enough.
Thank god for music. Across the street, two men are cleaning out their duplex and pumping out the latest R&B hits at full volume. Around 3p.m. they take a break and invite us over to their steps.
"Ya'll wanna have some barbeque?" one man hollers from across the way.
"What?" I'm still in whacking mode.
"Ya'll aren't ‘fraid of black people food, are ya?"
"Hah, no of course not," I respond quickly, slightly shocked. I toss a piece of window molding onto the reusable woodpile. "You have some barbeque over there?"
"Yeah, com'on over."
We untie our respirators and lift our sweaty goggles over our heads. The guys have prepared us a feast of barbequed chicken wings, sausage, white bread, bottled water, and beer.
"Wow! Thank you so much. This is so generous!" I exclaim.
"That's southern hospitality for ya. We ain't got much, but what we got, we share."
At the end of each day, 1317 Feliciana is emptied out into four piles on the street-- reusable wood, paint containers and other toxics, trash and debris, and photographs the family asked us to save. An old box of slides is full of wedding and nature images. We save a taxi driver license plate, a painting of a roaring panther, a fur and silk vest, and a yearbook. Before we leave, we bring the items back into the house so they will not be carried away, and arrange them on the bare floorboards. That's all that's left. A small still life in a hollow home.
It takes our crew of eleven members three full days, working 9 to 5, to gut the one-bedroom, single-story house. I have a new appreciation for what makes a home.
There's still life here. Noisy festivities down the street lure us to take another break. Today is Saint Joseph's Day, and a man dressed up as an Indian shakes his feathers and stomps his feet to tambourines and drums on the potholed street. New Orleansians grasp any excuse to celebrate. Call and answer songs belt from the wrinkly throats of two old black men. Girls' clothing sparkles from rhinestone designs and heels provide distance from gutter trash. We tromp up to the celebration in our heavy boots and blueberry suits, eager to experience some New Orleans culture. After chatting with a friendly woman about Saint Joseph's Day, we pull our masks back over our eyes and head back towards 1317. She turns to us with a last comment. "It was nice talking to ya'll. White and black folks don't talk much down here in New Orleans."
New Orleans is still very segregated, which may be why white and black folks don't interact much here. The poor are primarily black; the rich are white. The rich folks in the French quarter live 13 feet above sea level; the black folks are mostly underwater, still swimming. But now, much of the black population has been scattered around the country, with no means of returning home. Many were forced at gunpoint to get on busses and leave. Free volunteer labor like ours and cheap Mexican labor are now brought in to clean and rebuild the city.
But why rebuild a city that lies below sea level? Are the homes worth saving, when they might be flooded again? The levees broke in 1956 with Hurricane Flossy, and Hurricane Betsy led to catastrophic flooding in 1965. It could easily happen again. If homes are rebuilt on the Mississippi flood plains, an organized evacuation plan must be in place, and the levees need to be stronger. Hurricane Katrina was partially a man-made disaster. There were no plans to help the elderly, disabled, or people without cars or the means for transportation to leave the city. So they just waited for the storm to hit. The US Army Corps of Engineers knew that the levees were not strong enough, so in 2005 they asked Congress for money to rebuild them. Congress rejected the proposal-- that money was needed for Iraq. We continue to rebuild another country while neglecting our own.
Thousands of roofs are still blanketed in blue tarps, concealing punched-out holes left by souls trying to escape rising floodwater. New Orleans now has the highest per capita crime rate in the country, and residents watch as their neighbors and loved ones die from grief.
But don't worry, the neon lights on Bourbon Street are plugged in and flashing. White men in business suits and college boys on spring break wander from bars to gentlemen's clubs, holding dollar beers, admiring photos of naked women on the sides of buildings. Drink your hand grenades, get a lap dance, listen to some real Dixieland jazz, flash your boobs for beads-- the N'awlins you know and love is still alive. On Saint Patrick's Day, cabbages and carrots are thrown into Bourbon Street, into the slippery beer rivers of green, gold, and purple beaded necklaces. When the parade is over, inmates from the nearby prison sweep the streets.
This city of Delta blues and Dixieland jazz is often called The Big Easy for its relaxed party laws and its historical status as one of the cheapest places in the U.S. to live. The 9th ward is one of the first neighborhoods where blacks could own homes after slavery. Because of the easy-going carefree nature of its residents, New Orleans is also known as The City that Care Forgot.
"How can we get home?"
Living in trailer parks as far away as Seattle, many New Orleansians are asking this. They want to come back to this spectacular city, want to see their families again, want to chat with their neighbors and sing with their friends, want to stroll down streets of brightly-colored houses, want to sit on their porches in the hot summer evenings and sip ice water and coke, want to fill their bellies with catfish and shrimp Po' Boys, potato salad, coleslaw, and cornbread that melts on your tongue. With its unique spirit and diverse cultures, New Orleans instantly intrigued me. More than any other city I've ever visited in the U.S., I felt a deep connection to this place-- after only a week. I can't imagine what it must mean to the residents who have lived here for generation upon generation to see their homes lost.
But some people don't want to come home. I wouldn't either, if I had struggled to stay afloat as my house disappeared under 30 feet of toxic water beneath me. I question what we are actually doing down here. Who will come back? The poor, the huddled masses yearning to be free, the Mexican workers? While the rich folk sit high on the hills, sipping cosmopolitans from their balconies, the poor are forced to live on floodplains. This is the geography of poverty in the U.S. As ice caps melt and New Orleans sinks, the poor everywhere will be the first to feel the effects. Bourbon Street, 13 feet high, avoided major damage and sparkles now, but our friends in the 9th ward struggle with the effects of Katrina daily. As the black working class was pushed out, Mexican immigrants flowed in. Home will never be the same.
What will happen to the men who shared sticky chicken wings with us? Will the woman in her Sunday dress have a chance to paint her house Corn Gold before Feliciana floods again? Will the owners of 1317 Feliciana actually move back?
On our last day, the five of us rent a car and drive south on Highway 23. We want to see the country, so we head to the southernmost tip of Louisiana, to Venice, that small dot on the glove compartment map at the base of the Mississippi delta. Delta blues. Big brass band blues. And the trumpet goes doo dat un do dat, doo dat un da ba dat. We glide past old sugarcane plantations, orange orchards, endless dusty gravel roads lined with shady plains trees, past mansions and shacks, hurricane-damaged homes and overturned fishing boats, past black mountains of coal and white cylinders of oil, past FEMA trailer parks and schools on stilts, past a closed Cajun Boiled Peanuts and Christmas Collectibles stand, until Highway 23 ends. A gravel road leads us past a ship graveyard and shrimp factory. Bayous surround us as we drive out onto a narrow strip of land, through murky water concealing alligators and hurricane debris. We are separated from the Gulf of Mexico only by patches of wet islands spotted with scraggly trees. I've never seen a bayou before, and it is strange to me-- like a flood, like a flooded forest. A lone black man, the first person we have seen in awhile, has stopped to enjoy the balmy Friday afternoon. He is sitting in a lawn chair, fishing pole in hand.
"You catching anything?" I slow the car and roll down the window. The air is thick and hot.
"Nope, not yet." He turns and squints into the sun.
"Whatcha fishing for?"
"Whateva will bite," he replies with a crooked smile as he adjusts his moss-colored cap.
"Is Venice down the road this way?" I gesture ahead.
He chuckles. "Naw, ya'll passed Venice already. That way down there," he tilts his head towards the road in front of us, "that down there is the end of the world."
"Yep," he says once more, still grinning. "That's the end of the world." He settles back into the crackly lawn chair and waits for a tug on his line.
Venice was hit hard. Street posts poke their way through the bayou, slanted trees to an inattentive eye. Everything here is tilted; there is no plane of reference but the water. Driving back, we stop at a run-down gas station that still sells chips and candy bars. We eat Cajun-flavored cheetos and try to digest all that we've seen. But it can't be organized. The disaster is still so much a part of life here. They are like jazz, these thoughts and images and unanswered questions. Like houses in piles in the middle of the street. For now the most we can do is try and distinguish what is trash, what is toxic, what can be reused, and what should be saved. I grab my box of colorful images and board a plane, headed back to my safe, clean home on a hill.
I wish I could paint New Orleans yellow. Not Bourbon Street gold, not sickly yellow, not cheap hamburger bun yellow, not dehydrated urine yellow, not underwater yellow. I want to paint New Orleans Corn Gold, the color of happiness. The color of a home in the sun.
A Riotous Peace Park
Katrina Barlow
I remember red and white caps bobbing up and down, up and down and about. And also some red and white umbrellas spiraling up, and the drizzle spinning down onto the dancing red and white caps. Sometimes the faces swirled closer and then farther and then sometimes I was suddenly swimming somewhere among the umbrellas and looking down at upturned faces—big eyes, lots of them, capped with dark hair and red cheeks and funny round hats. And behind the schoolchildren were colors, crescendos of colors that far outdo the pixels in my mind's eye. I remember the crying sky and the red and white children and the rainbow fountains behind them that were thousands and thousands of paper cranes.
Years later, my father told me that he had to pick me up sometimes, my sister too, so we wouldn't get trampled by the schoolchildren that day in the park. That's when you swam up into the umbrellas, he said.
We visited the Hiroshima Peace Park on a school day. Several elementary schools were also visiting the memorial, smartly uniformed students who scampered freely under the anonymous disguise of red and white. I suppose these schoolchildren had never seen foreigners before, because they crowded us and smiled big O's at us and pulled at my dress and fingers. I was seven years old, my sister was just five, and my father was the light-haired giant that the schoolchildren tried to climb.
We sat there for almost two hours signing autographs like celebrities. Except that we were more like curiosities, like bills printed with upside-down presidents—unusual but not more useful. I could barely sign my name, and when I looked over at my sister, she was drawing lopsided trees and red balloons instead of her name. The schoolchildren kept calling my father Sean Connery; I think Sean Connery was the only white male they knew. So my dad answered to Sean Connery, and slurred like Sean Connery, and signed his autographs Sean Connery because he didn't know what else to do.
At some point, the schoolchildren drifted off towards the end of the school day, and we were left alone with the colorful cranes underneath the crying sky. Thousands and thousands of these cranes swayed in long strands: browns turned to red-oranges and turquoises melted into pale greens that camouflaged the yellows but not the shiny crisp gold cranes. Sometimes, there were strands of only gold cranes; these ones I ran my hands through over and over again.
Not far away from the Peace Park is the Radiation Effects Research Foundation (RERF), an atomic bomb research center at the top of the largest hill in Hiroshima. The hill used to be a sacred Buddhist area called Hijiyama, but the Americans took it over when they built their research facility right after the war. It was here that my parents first met. They met in the 80s under the allure of big hair and big glasses and broken English, sometime in early spring when the cherry blossoms danced off trees that were planted by monks long ago. They played in tennis tournaments together, and went to the local toastmaster club, and toured the many islands of the city in a tongue-tripping courtship. My father, at the time, was a graduate student from the United States—pictures of him show a shabbily dressed rail of a man, skinny because he had no money to eat and a thyroid problem to boot. My mother, on the other hand, was always dressed like a movie star, with enormous sunglasses framed by a mane of black hair; she wasn't allowed to grow her hair past her ears until after college, and once college ended, vowed that she would never cut it again, but I think that was the 70s talking.
During the day, they studied radiation poisoning and leukemia and met sometimes at the vending machines to drink canned green tea. At night, though, they drank with the other American researchers, and their relationship matured under the heady charm of sake and foreign affairs. They were a celebrated couple—it was still rare in Japan to date foreigners, so rare, in fact, that my grandfather threw a fit and didn't speak to my mother for a month. But my mother braved the storm, riding perhaps on the envy of her friends, and my father learned to speak Japanese so he could talk with my grandfather. Once married, my father forgot how to speak Japanese, but never forgot to love Japan and how he met my mother.
Because of this, every December 7th—Pearl Harbor Day—my father pulls out a brown paper bag during breakfast for our perverse family ritual. Sometimes he already has it tucked in the morning paper so he can pull it out slyly; sometimes he makes a big ado about it and brandishes a bag from the silverware drawer or the microwave. And always, he turns to my mother and says, here's the bag for you to wear over your head today, and grins his foolish smile. Some years, my mother gets mad and refuses to iron his shirt in the morning, so he looks again like a frumpy graduate student, but a much fatter one now. But sometimes, my mother smiles and takes the paper bag and my dad gleefully cuts eye holes and a mouth hole, and then makes himself one also. And then I leave for school, but I imagine them sitting around the table remembering Hijiyama and drinking tea through cutout mouths.
Since then, I've returned to Hiroshima, a city of islands that chokes the mouth of a river so that it dribbles water into the sea. The hills and the rain and the water remind me of Seattle; my mother always says that Seattle reminds her of her home. We were staying at the house of my mother's best friend Kiyoshi. Every day, Kiyoshi's father went fishing to cook us fresh mackerel for dinner, and we picked soybeans from their garden to eat with the fish, and afterwards they gave us some crazy acupuncture with lighted incense sticks that they pushed into the base of our necks. Except that my mother's hair lit on fire, so she had a bald spot at one point and that was the end of that. One night, I stayed up late talking to Kiyoshi and her parents, and they started talking about the war. Kiyoshi's mother said that she had left for the countryside to purchase some rice the day the bomb exploded in Hiroshima. And she heard it and ran back to the city to find flattened hills and flattened homes and no family. She said that she lost her father and brother that day. She never even found their bodies. And Kiyoshi mentioned how her husband's parents had lost siblings also. They talked about how only grandparents remember that day now, that the people who were alive then are now dying. And Kiyoshi's mother said, "I think that it will be a good thing when no one remembers."
The next day, I revisited the Peace Park. I walked through the museum and saw photographs of the mushroom cloud, photographs of people with skin hanging from their bodies; an exhibit of cement steps showed the silhouette of a person who had been instantly incinerated—shadow preserved on the rock. Visitors cried all around me, I felt sick and nauseous instead. I sat down until my mother found me, like I was again seven years old and needed to be picked up so I wouldn't be trampled. No one, I said, can imagine how dirty, how dirty, how wrong we were… I know, she said. She picked me up. Did you see this yet, she asked, and took me to an exhibit of the research facility. An enormous map hung on the wall. This, she said pointing to a building, is where your father and I first held hands. And this, this is where your father proposed to me, and afterwards, this is where your father got so drunk he smeared butter on my nose. And this over here, she said pointing now to the Peace Park, this is where all of the cranes are. These are the things we should remember now, she said.
Cancer: All the Cool Kids are Doing It
Erin Pettersen
My mom says that cancer turned her into a bitch.
For eighteen years it was clear to me that my parents were invincible. Death was reserved for grandparents and pets. That's why you had grandparents and pets, so you could love and appreciate them and then cope with their loss, mourn them and then learn some important life lessons. The concept of old age was easy to understand because you could actually see it. Old people had wrinkles and gray hair. Sometimes they used canes, walkers or wheelchairs and sometimes they had fake teeth. Old people liked to watch golf on TV, drink scotch, park in handicapped spots and spill jam on their cardigans. Old women knitted or played the piano and old men mumbled "god dammit" and "Jesus Christ," put ketchup on everything and snored. For a kid, it is easy to conceptualize death coming after old age. Grandparents were old and old people die.
Parents, on the other hand, aren't old. They are young, healthy and invincible. They are these things because they have to be. They have to raise their children and take care of them, teach them, feed them, house them, love them and be alive for them. They have to be the bucking bronco, the basketball coach, the audience, the chauffer and the storyteller. The only problem is, parents aren't actually invincible. They are vulnerable and fragile. They are human. I was eighteen when I realized my mother's mortality.
I left for a semester with the National Outdoor Leadership School in late September. She was diagnosed with breast cancer in early October and began chemotherapy almost immediately. Every other Monday my parents would sit for a few hours in the hospital while the poisonous medicine tried to penetrate her disease. While she fought the side effects of chemo and tried to maintain her composure as an elementary school teacher, I backpacked through the breathtaking Gila mountain range, climbed hundreds of feet of granite and kayaked the neon waters of Baja. One Monday in November, my journal entry reflected on the stars of dawn fading with the rising sun as I paddled peacefully alongside 25 km of the Mexican coastline. I saw dolphins that day, got stung by a jellyfish on my ankle and felt homesick for my friend Will. My mom spent that afternoon sleeping away the reality of her illness. I would remain oblivious to her condition for another month.
After fifteen hours of travel I arrived at the Sea-Tac airport. The early December Seattle rain imitated the tears I had been crying all day, after an abrupt departure from the friends I would never see again. Eighty-five days in the wilderness had changed me physically, emotionally and mentally and I was terrified of how my family would react. We shared a long embrace at the bottom of the escalator near the baggage claim. I commented that my mom's hair looked different and tried hide my nervous tremble. At home I ate an English muffin while my dad awkwardly took photos of my first night back. I admired my new bed sheets and the bouquet of flowers on my nightstand and tried to re-acclimate myself to the room I had lived in for 18 years.
As I sat on the edge of my bed and listened to my parents explain what cancer was, how chemotherapy worked and the reality of something called ‘stage two,' I tried not to imagine my life without a mother. I pressed my cheek against her breast, the very breast that had once fed me as an infant and that now threatened to break the lifelong bond I shared with her, and sobbed. I confessed that I wasn't ready for my mom to take off her wig and that I needed to let things marinate for a few days before seeing her bald. A microscopic division of cells had pulled off the cloak of invincibility and revealed the vulnerability inherent in all of us. Just as wrinkles and walkers had convinced me of old age, my mom's bald head and missing eyebrows convinced me of cancer. I could see and feel the repercussions of her sickness every time I looked at her. There was no denying the reality of her health, and so with time I was able to understand her ability to die, something that had never seemed possible before.
When I woke up this morning I had an email from my mom about my taxes. After explaining one of the most dreaded aspects of adulthood to me and providing instructions on how to correctly sign some papers she moved on to a more lighthearted topic: nipples. "Things went well with the nipple making," she began, "so now all I have left are the tattoos. I'll be glad to be done with all this. The doctor asked me what size I wanted the nipples to be and I told him I just wanted some but I didn't want to spend the rest of my life looking cold or aroused". After assuring the plastic surgeon that the "hey sailor" look wasn't for her she underwent the second-to-last step in the reconstruction process.
With the birth of cancer came the death of immortality. I suppose, in honor of the feminist, breast cancer lingo, I should say that my mom kicked cancer's ass. Cancer stripped her of her hair, both her breasts and the invincible superpowers of motherhood. But after sixteen weeks of chemotherapy, a double mastectomy, six months of chest expanders, breast implants and a new set of fake nipples, she is only one minor operation away from being back to normal. Every morning she gets up with a full head of hair, a slightly fuller cup size and embraces her vitality. She works hard, savors the little things and doesn't take shit from anyone.
Immortality may have died but the strength that replaced it will live forever. That strength is real. It isn't worn on an invisible cloak, it doesn't exist in the imagination of a 10-year-old and it will survive in the memories and the DNA of future generations. On December 13, 2004 I faced the loss of a concept I had spent my life believing. Three years later, I embrace that loss openly and feel inspired by what replaced it.
Limbus Umbrae
Kim Hooyboer
I knock the ash from my cigarette
and smudge black upon my forehead
(even though it's Thursday)
Memento homo quia pulvis es
We are the religious with no religion
lost in the void between truth & untruth
zealous new converts baptized in the sacred Aganippe
et in pulverem reverteris 1
We've rubbed ink upon our doorposts and lintels
and lifted our prayers up to
logic & reason
Lasciate ogni speranza 2
For we are the Shadows fallen
between the boatman
and the judge.
1 Genesis 3:19; "Remember, man, that you are dust / and to dust you shall return"
2 Dante's Inferno, Canto III, line 9; "Abandon all hope"
Natural Law
Anastasia Zamkinos
This is the same space we
slept in each time we
pitched a tent or
closed a door:
moonlight bright enough
to illuminate a sundial;
a warm wind
only barely lifting the
hair on my arm:
a breath, a breeze.
Oh that single bead of moisture
dropping on my last rib,
flowers mashing into
a colorful pulp under
your heels, my knees,
on scorched desert rock,
blue in the light;
a tiny frog
with its tail still attached
crawls from the charred scars
of a desert flame,
refuses to be moved--
or saved.
Ours was a summer of
dashing across three feet of kitchen
to the right spices,
the smoking pan,
the scorched saute,
reaching around you to get the salt
and having you trap me,
at that inopportune moment of
overcooking,
pinning me against the thin metal that
held the extinguisher--
we ran the risk of setting it all ablaze.
And now I sit
a thousand miles away
on a down comforter,
thirty yards from the nearest kitchen,
breasts feeling limp,
and I am damp,
a hollow bird,
shivering, lonely
in a cowbird's nest,
sopping,
feathers clinging in mats--
but the curve of a wing,
the lines of the skull,
each is grotesquely
Becoming...
All will someday drown or dry.
I purge;
Fingers swell at the release
of the long unwritten word.
(Have you forgotten?
Have I?)
Eyes soon ache with
last night's, week's, month's tears
and oh, uncertainty.
Hair falls from stress in tangles,
lining my carpet like tumbleweeds
and somewhere, back in Arizona,
someone who has just moved in
is adjusting their watch for
daylight savings time,
And I am a thistle,
deserty,
arching and accumulating,
and now I roll,
tumble, scratch,
and soon I will decompose
and recompose
and I will someday fertilize
rich jasmines
that will grow
along your walls
and bed
and cutlery,
and I will overcome
everything.
On being a stranger at a stranger's funeral
Ezra Fox
in a whisper, a whimper
a gasp, a grasp
a life ends
and we meet
as strangers reveling
in our small ability to comfort
with small acts,
the only thing left in this world.
we have handshakes
and brief moments of eye contact
and everything is quiet
and this world can no longer speak
to us.
nor does it need to.
we are frauds in this world
and everything reveals us
to be hollow:
the shovels of dirt
landing on the coffin,
Michael, Lee's nephew,
crying sparsely
since yesterday was a holiday,
he overflows with spaces
pushing memories
out through salt and water.
the only pain ever felt
is the space-
full gaps left behind
in the bodies of the living
that are slowly sobbed together
patched up with whimpers
and gasps,
whispers and grasps-
a stranger awkwardly offering
comfort on another stranger's day.
With a Bang or a Whimper
Ben Hunter
It starts as a whimper
the unsuspecting sound,
maybe a hum or a whisper
a gesture small in shift,
just like a sniff or a shiver
the palpitation of a heart that leads to shakes and quivers
muster up the vigor
compel the urges in the mind,
ignite the silenced voice
betray the mindless influence from fools and "high-end" noise
it's time to regain poise again
it's time to claim composure
corrode and throw away the junk that crumbles and decays
there's more at stake than pride, this torture
creates a side of self that imitates the look of vultures feeding neck deep in their prey
the phantom of this opera that whispers in your ear
you hear the sound grow louder, piercing through the thickest mist
suffocating lungs, the swisher sweetness of the thunderous hum that grows ten times ferocious,
osmosis of the beating drums,
turn focus on the bleeding sun that thrashes with her rays,
the sacrifice of whimpers for conviction of a bang,
delivered by the soul inside that won't sit or relinquish,
inferno of emotion that will not quit or extinguish,
apocalypse—a cosmic whip that speaks the tongue of gods,
300 verse a million,
who would ever thought the odds,
but in this monumental bang lies essence of a whimper
the little voice that speaks so soft
the snivel that broke through its locked cage
cocked bang, It burst, expression heard
the repressed stir
belief shines through, and hope climbs high as truth is found
in form no simpler
Its voice is heard with bang or whimper
Masthead
| Editor | Drew Arnold | |
| Layout | Kim Hooyboer | |
| Copy Editors | Lizzie Norgard | |
| Staff | Ben Gannon Danielle Alvarado Toby Kahn Ben Kegan Stazh Zamkinos |
