Fall 2012 issue - Nassau Literary Review

Transcription

the Nassau
Literary Review
Fall 2012
The Nassau Literary Review is published semi-annually by
students of Princeton University. Reproduction of any material in this magazine, except for purposes of review or with the
written permission of the editors, is strictly prohibited.
Copyright © 2012, The Nassau Literary Review, ISSN 0883-2374
Editors-in-Chief
Stephanie Tam ’13
Natasha Japanwala ’14
Managing Editor
Lizzie Martin ’14
Prose Editor
Ben Goldman ’15
Poetry Editor
Katie Horvath ’15
Assistant Prose Editors
Margaret Fox ’13
Jonathan Lin ’13
Michael Granovetter ’15
Art Editor
Cristina Flores ’12
Assistant Poetry Editors
Maia ten Brink ’13
Mirabella Mitchell ’13
Cameron Langford ’15
Submissions Manager
Misha Semenov ’15
Assistant Art Editor
Erin McDonough ’14
Head Copyeditor
John Michael Colon ’15
Assistant Copyeditors
Emma Boettcher ’14
Margaret Hua ’15
Design Editor
Diana Goodman ’13
Assistant Design Editors
Erin McDonough ’14
Samuel Watters ’15
Business Manager
Dipika Sen ’13
Webmaster
Glenn Fisher ’15
Treasurer
Greer Hanshaw ’13
Publicity & Events Coordinator
Elizabeth Shoenfelt ’13
Prose Staff
Lolita De Palma ’14, Jared Garland ’15, Cosette Gonzales ’15, Tyler House ’15,
Sravanthi Kadali ’14, Ben Koons ’15, Isabelle Laurenzi ’15, Elizabeth Lloyd
’13, Diane Manry ’14, Natalie Scholl ’13, Albertine Wang ’14
Poetry Staff
Sean Paul Ashley ’13, Phway Aye ’15, Matthew Brailas ’14, TZ Horton ’15, Ana
Istrate ’13, Natasha Japanwala ’14, Pallavi Mishra ’15, David Paulk ’15, Allison
Somers ’15, Helen Yao ’15
To Our Readers
“’Tis strange—but true; for truth is always strange;
Stranger than fiction: if it could be told,
How much would novels gain by the exchange!
How differently the world would men behold!
How oft would vice and virtue places change!
The new world would be nothing to the old,
If some Columbus of the moral seas
Would show mankind their souls’ antipodes.”
–Lord Byron, Don Juan
“Stranger than fiction,” truth provokes thought, and thought provokes art. Those at the forefront of the arts have always pressed just
beyond the boundaries of convention, challenging their culture—and in
doing so, transforming and renewing it. And how much we gain from
the exchange!
This year, the Nassau Literary Review proudly celebrates 170 years
of publishing art and shaping culture. The Review seeks to inspire and
develop the literary community in Princeton and beyond, both through
the publication of high quality prose, poetry, and art, as well as by hosting community events and partnering with arts groups on campus. We
continue to navigate the elaborate relationship between truth and fiction—trusting that the journey will take us to new and exciting places,
inside different perspectives and outside of our own. Hoping that, as
we continue to publish fiction, we may promote dialogue surrounding
that elusive and strange creature, truth. And here, as we feature creative
nonfiction for the first time in our history, the boundaries of genre,
truth, and fiction, break down.
The work that we’ve chosen to feature in this issue crosses those
elusive boundaries in powerful ways. We are thrilled with the prose
pieces we’ve chosen—works that examine unique themes and worlds.
Likewise, the poems featured in this issue are wide-ranging in their
experimental natures. Our centerpiece, too, showcases three pieces of
creative nonfiction that are varied in their subject matter and form,
each of which is excellent in its own way. That heterogeneity is where
this issue shines; we are inspired by and proud of the sheer diversity of
its parts and the boldness of its pieces as they break rules, challenging
any labels we might place on them.
Fall 2012  3
This same diversity is one that we strive to encourage in our literary community on campus through events like our launch party
at Small World Coffee. Crowded with readers, writers, artists, photographers, musicians, and coffee enthusiasts, this was an evening
that celebrated our publication and the arts on campus. We hope
that this issue reflects that same sense of celebration in a new way,
and that in flipping through its pages, you will share in the vibrant
creative community that brought it to life. Above all, we hope that
the Nassau Literary Review will facilitate the exchange of truth and
fiction, giving you—and all of us—the opportunity to see our souls
and those of others a little more clearly.
Yours,
Stephanie Tam, Natasha Japanwala, & Lizzie Martin
4  The Nassau Literary Review
Contents
Centerpiece
H. S. T.
Day-Makers 36
Daniel Feinberg
Vicky Gan
Natural Disasters 42
The Brief Life 47
Poetry
Michael Brashear
Alexander Leaf
How to Survive 7
Exposed 15
After the Fall 16
Pallavi Mishra when the flood comes 17
Carter Greenbaum
Maia ten Brink
Matthew Brailas
Ben Koons
Ana Istrate
Your Business Trips 18
I am a Puzzle 19
Concert 25
Summer on Sickleton Road 26
Moment 29
The Letter 31
1844: after a savage beating he wakens to the
ghosts 52
When My Brother Was Three a Dog Bit Out
His Eye: I Follow These Memories Like
Blood in Snow 53
Brother Triptych 55
The Prophet John Murray Spear in Lynn,
Massachusetts 57
In Chastity Repose 65
Mid-Afternoon Bowfishing 68
excavation, Satie 74
marble bust covered at stair bottom 75
the land keeps you 77
the midnight darkness of Mr Dagley 78
Fall 2012  5
Jessica Ma
Dixon Li
Love 88
Portrait of the Farm as a Young Poem 89
Evan Coles
Still 91
TZ Horton song to suburbia 94
Jiayan Yu Verbatim 95
Translations
Misha Semenov
All That Had Filled My Soul by Nikolay
Zablotsky 70
The Fish Market by Nikolay Zabolotsky 72
Prose
Genevieve Bentz
The Stiffness of Royal Icing 10
Natasha Japanwala
Lizzie Martin
Struggle 20
Too Small Yet 60
Lauren Prastien Vacation 79
Art
Luke Cheng
Young girl on couch 9
Boy, window, and lamp 30
Kathryn Rose
Untitled 28
Untitled 97
Jocelyn Chuang
The Devil in your Vanity 24
Waking Dreams 59
Untitled 87
Joanne Chong thesis 5 51
Capella Yee
The Wedding Train 54
Antares 71
Genevieve Irwin My Mother 67
Lauren Hui Fen Ling Brown Isolation 76
Natalie Scholl
In Memoriam 93
Michael Brashear
How to Survive
Remember your underpants.
Don’t forget to floss.
Carry a pocketknife except
for when it will make you look
paranoid.
Wash your eyes in the rain.
Dry them in the sun.
Don’t forget how warm
it feels to bask in that place
home.
Ramble down to the swamp
promptly place your head under
scream the green memory away
it’s only bubbles
breaking.
Hear the creaking
of dead wood beneath
your feet and the dirt
are going to be made to part
unfortunately.
Hard rocks in the soles of old
leather boots worn raw and ragged
remind of hillsides your faded eyes
must be sure to recognize.
Fall 2012  7
Most importantly
never give out
your real name
hide it behind cool nerve and slow talk
or bury it beneath a poplar in the wet
soil.
And if you find yourself
naked or cold,
hungry for the other and
elsewhere lies what you want
shake the dust off your legs
and start over again.
Young girl on couch, DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPH
Luke Cheng
Genevieve Bentz
The Stiffness of Royal Icing
It is summer, shiver hot, at approximately two in the afternoon. My aunt and
cousins are sitting around, slouched in the heat, bellies like bubbles from all the
grilled meat and bread and cold salads and raspberry lemonade. The party is almost
over and a fly has fallen haphazardly into my cup. I fish it out so it won’t die amidst
the corner of an ice cube and a bloated berry. I wouldn’t wish that on anything, even
a fly that has already marched across the fondant, leaving tiny footprints in the sugar.
My aunt smiles at me, standing with a limp fly on my finger, as she walks toward
a third glass of champagne. Mark, her boyfriend and soon to be my second uncle,
holds his glass gingerly, quietly. His hair looks like dead grass after a rain – thin,
limp, a pale and empty brown. He drags his left loafer across the carpet toward the
foot of his chair. It rustles softly.
So how do you like school?
It is nice, my sister replied blankly, standing to his left.
You are in . . .
Sixth grade.
Ahh . . .
We read slim multicultural books about strong women and learn Roman
numerals.
Well, that’s . . .
I am the tallest person in my grade.
Your cousin tells me . . .
We had a man come in and talk to us about the Tulip bubble. I spent the entire
time thinking about how the back of my legs stuck and unstuck and restuck to my
chair in the June heat.
I know something about trade and markets . . .
I know. We all know.
Here you go, my aunt intervenes, holding a French bottle by its base. I fold over
my sister’s collar. My mother looks worried because my aunt’s hand shakes when
she pours. I see her watching from the doorway, I can see the twist between her
eyebrows. Besides my aunt’s swaying and thinning ankles, I can barely tell. But my
mother knows what multiple sclerosis looks like. One of her patients has it. She sees
it every month, progressively melting away a face and a body and a firm handshake.
I am not sure if I am supposed to know. I am not sure it is possible to miss.
The shorter of my cousins runs through the house with a yip. Her hair is dirty
and her legs are bone pale. Summer has barely cracked open. My aunt is forty-nine.
I grab my cousin and throw her kicking over my shoulder, ankle bracelets chiming,
white arches smiling, and head outside. The clouds look like they are about to cry.
The next morning we pour out of the tent that has been pitched in the backyard.
The house is small and we like spending mosquito nights outside. We can talk about
things, under sleeping bags, by fireflies. All the adults stay indoors. We can see them
drinking through the kitchen window. Coo coo coooo. We pretend my sister made
that noise. I fall asleep with her blond hair tangled on my cheek.
In the morning my large cousin gets up early and marches around the inside
perimeter. Her feet squash my arm. Garghhhh. My sister sounds like a deep sea
monster, thundering awake. I feel the dew dripping from the tent seams. The tracks
hum which means a train is coming. We stand out in the cold air and watch it roll
by. We stand in a line. We stand by height. I get goose bumps from the cold air on
my wrists and the train passes and the day yawns bright and sharp and we break with
a whoooop and run inside, feet slapping on the paint-peeling deck.
My aunt is sitting at the head of the table, looking like a queen, slicing bagels.
My sister tries to fit her hand inside the center of a pumpernickel one. My mother
snatches it away with her long fingers and pursed lips. I think, based on her sour
expression, that she has forgotten to put cream in her coffee.
We always have bagels. All sorts, walls of them. I’ve used them for school projects,
to fish, to make friends. We get them for free because my aunt used to run a bagel
plant. I used to think it was funny, imagining her poking and prodding dough and
dropping things in boiling water. I used to think a chemical engineer made elaborate
levers and conveyor belts for the delivery of baking soda. Crucial: the correct ratio of
poppy seeds and sesames. Now I know it’s mostly clipboards and the monitoring of
moisture levels from an office high above the grated floor with a small window that
looks down at the belts like so many little paperclips. Paperclips, like what we used
to pick out dirt from under our fingernails so we wouldn’t have to wash our hands.
Paperclips, like the necklaces my cousins and I linked and wore matching, after the
summer, many towns away.
Her first husband met her after a melt down with the flour on the second floor.
She had to come out of her office for personnel problems. Apparently he looked like
a polar bear, all covered in matted white clumps, with a toothy smile. He was a baker.
Fall 2012  11
She had a PhD. He travelled and sold self-rising products. She laughed. He asked her
to dinner. He made jokes about yeast. She blushed.
My oldest cousin wants to be a dancer. She is always splitting herself in doorways,
for an extra stretch standing up, and in alcoves. Places dogs aren’t likely to interfere
with eager noses and wet tails. She looks like her father but has my mother’s eyes.
Today we sit on the deck, in the mid-afternoon, plucking leaves off a mint strand.
My aunt’s new boyfriend is taking a smoke break, we can tell from the snap of
the screen door. My cousin puts her head on my shoulder. We sigh in time with the
breeze and the leaves and the soft green rustle seems to whisper to us, only we don’t
know the language, so we smile and pretend and just listen to the rhythm.
With her sun-warmed brunette hair spilling over my shoulder, the leaves seem
to murmur in time with her breath. She will never forgive her father but her younger
sister will. I hear a rattle bug, off in the distance, its rattle-whine breaking the silence.
I am not sure what I can or should say, so I sit, picking leaf after leaf, flat-brimmed
and warm, and let the mint fill the space between us.
It happens when my Uncle is traveling, selling baking supplies for his distributor.
At the local supermarket he stops to grab a diet coke. She is behind the bakery counter,
wearing an apron, sliding a cake that looks like an animal into the fluorescent case.
He sees her from where he is standing in the meat aisle, next to the skinless chicken.
She wonders why he is asking her about what supplier they use. Their eyes loiter.
His are blue.
She explains that the purple flowers are hard, pointing to a sheet cake that looks
like a plank of wood. He nods, sympathetically.
He asks for her to write you are beautiful on a small chocolate torte. She fidgets.
She grabs the pastry bag and tilts her head and tries to suck in her stomach. He puts
his hands in his pockets. He gives her his card. Her name is Jennifer.
He gives the dessert to my aunt. You are too sweet.
They get drinks two weeks later, after a cheesecake purchase and the delivery
of cookies from another bakery with a dozen frosted lavender flowers. Jennifer.
Jennifer. Jennifer. I can’t stop thinking about you.
The spiked smell of smoke wafts through the mid-morning. My chest feels a
slight pull, as if drawn by a string, like a singing doll.
I ignore it. My mother can’t know that I smoke, that I have rolled the dark
tobacco between my fingers and spent evenings walking down the train tracks with
Russel, the kid who drives the noisy truck. That we have sat on the railroad trestle,
dangling our legs into the dawn. That when we kissed the taste of cloves and menthol
lingered in the back of our breaths, like old friends passing in a crowd.
Mark defends cigarette companies, in Congress.
I thought it was a joke, but my mother is not a funny person. She has seen my
uncle, on the German side of the family, hooked up to breathing machines. She
knows how her father died. She sees the hoarse smiles and yellowed voices in her
office complaining mid-wheeze. She knows. My sister has had the Dare to Resist
Drugs and Alcohol Education, in school, since she was eight. She has the t-shirt,
which I wear, sometimes, ironically, My cousin has seen smoggy lung tissue all hazy
and sooty and starting to crisp. But we are happy for my aunt.
Mark has loved her since they met in college. My aunt has loved him for the
past two years, when they met again, at the first class lounge of an airport. I think he
looks like an amphibian. It is his face and legs and general moistness.
We used to eat candy cigarettes but now we can’t. I think it cuts too close to
home. The cigarettes he gets are real and free, but he has no place to smoke them
except back decks and sidewalks. He makes millions a year. I’m not jealous. He
shares awnings with bums and glass-eyed men clutching malt liquor in tattered bags.
He always offers one, or three, or a pack. Is that kindness?
The frosting specialist, as she calls herself after a weeklong course in nozzle
technique and proper spreading form, is 5’7. She is twenty-four. She likes stretch
pants and pink push up bras. Drinks cheap Rosé wine. Likes country music and
silver jewelry and has a small tattoo on the inside curve of her right ankle. Her name
probably ends in “-any”. Like Tiffany or Brittany or Stephany.
My younger cousin calls her “the cupcake.” My aunt appears to laugh about it.
I walk around offering miniature quiches that we bought frozen but which come
out of the oven in fifteen minutes golden brown. Mr. Newt sits next to my aunt and
holds her hand. He tilts his head toward hers. She has a perforated smile.
She calls to my sister. Can you get me some ice water? My sister pouts, not
realizing that the stairs up from the house to the deck to the kitchen to the left to the
water cooler to the fridge to the ice drawer that is heavy would be too much. That the
last time my aunt came to visit she tried to make it a joke, but we all were sad. She
couldn’t open the refrigerator door.
My aunt fell.
Maybe when my uncle heard the snap, as he must have, as her rib pierced her left
lung, half-way down, maybe that is when he stopped loving her. Maybe it was when
he saw the x-ray. Or when the tests came back and the reason she had always been
so thin and delicate was because her body was consuming itself. Maybe it was when
he realized you can’t have sex with someone in a wheelchair. Maybe he imagined
her death -- the drugs are expensive and her mind would go and he would be a husk
Fall 2012  13
and her body would be a chewed out cob. Maybe he just wanted an excuse to leave.
My uncle wanted to be young and I wanted to be old. My aunt wanted to live
and my cousin wanted to die. We all wanted to in the abstract sense, the imagined
sense, the it-would-be-better-only-if-I-could sense. All of it excuses, in different forms,
replayed again and again.
The dusk is falling. My mother and father and aunt and Mark have merlotstained teeth. The grass is cold beneath our feet. I am braiding my cousin’s hair, on
the stone wall, our legs straddling either side as if it were some prehistoric beast. I
feel a bug biting my calf. I quickly smack and my fingers are bloody and its body is
broken and black and ever so small.
The houses across the cove have windows that reflect the setting sun. The ridge is
burning, the water aflame. Each house as if made of embers, of burning newspaper,
of marshmallows about to spark up bright blue.
My aunt will be dead in five years. It will be more like four, the last spent in an
automatic bed with a tube instead of a smile. My cousin will try to be a dancer. She
will fail. She will stop eating and grow thin, nervous, pale. I will come visit her in
New York. She will have white walls and white sheets and white skin and short hair.
I will hug her and, reaching over and enveloping her broken frame, whisper “I won’t
leave.”
But not today.
Today we will go inside and eat raspberries and light the stove when our parents
aren’t looking and learn, from carelessness and washing our hands instead of
watching the pot and then smelling the smoke and then the shrill beEP bEEP BEEP
of the alarm and then my mother’s wine flushed smile and my aunts laughing lean as
Mark slips in his expensive shoes from water sprayed all over the stove and floor and
wall to dampen the flames and laughing, us all in a heap on the floor laughing, and
the dog too, yes the dog too, and the fireflies outside chiming in a great soft chorus
Now you know! Now you know!
Tomorrow morning we will remember. We will find the pot charred, its copper
bottom useless. We will find that no amount of steel wool or tar soap will be able to
scrub away the soot. The burn marks lingering like tealeaves or memories or maybe,
simply, like breadcrumbs months later found in the back corners of side rooms.
Alexander Leaf
Exposed
Turn down the lights in the dark room
and bathe us deep in your silver salts,
replace the night with foil, cast the stars in gold.
Now, watch as we develop,
pulsing and glaring in the fluorescence,
blinded creatures newly discovering
nakedness against each other’s skin,
going numb with the knowledge
that we’ll be liberated and we’ll melt
clean and we’ll burn sweet like liquor
Fall 2012  15
Alexander Leaf
After the Fall
Snow flurries in
through the cracked open
window, rivulets
of lake water racing
down the steps of ice
and sandstone, with tall
rusty railings lining
either side of an empty
footbridge. I step out.
A large metal sign
says not to hike
the gorge. A man
must have fallen, smashed
into the exposed
bedrock. Someone else
found him lying
belly down, water
bending around
his cold fingers, and saw
himself there, eroding
like stone,
and built the railings.
Pallavi Mishra
when the flood comes
when the flood comes
you won’t be ready. “not now,” you’ll say,
“I’m waiting for a phone call. my
underwear has holes in it. I haven’t done
the breakfast dishes.” then the waves will come
and you’ll taste salt in the corners of your mouth,
water bubbling from the piano,
a clownfish in the coffeepot, all the pictures blown askew.
and you’ll walk to the splintering window,
leaning over the green-rushing street. the alarm clock
will go off upstairs, insistent,
your ears will rush with the sound of the water, the water
will wash you clean.
Fall 2012  17
Carter Greenbaum
Your Business Trips
Dear Hunter,
The nights are quiet by the beach; no wind.
If I stood at the end of a jetty,
I was a lighthouse. It was that dark.
When a swell rises in the distance,
at first, the water
recedes. When it returns, the ocean
will triumph over the sand.
That’s us too—
and the break.
The first time you returned, I saw a figure
becoming man as you approached.
And then you kissed me,
because that is what people do; the hero
must prove his claim. Next time you see the shore,
see, instead, how it contains the water; see
how I claim you.
Wish you were here,
Chase
Carter Greenbaum
I am a Puzzle
Dear Hunter,
When, after many years, I stopped
being a mystery to you, we stopped sleeping
on top of the covers. This thing: Love.
It’s never been easy. That’s why we sweat,
even with the window open.
From that window, light, like a bursting of stars
from the ocean. Not the real kind,
but a reflection. A strange echo. So close,
you could touch it. Heat from galaxies exploding
in the tides. The moon opened up
toward us like a carpet of calcium, white
on the water. The world was bright.
And waves—the sound of water lightly
crashing like a chuckle of water over the
break. The sound of laughter. The real kind.
There was no one else in the world,
but us. Blueberries in a carton
Fall 2012  19
Natasha Japanwala
Struggle
Most of the local butchers had pulled down their aluminum shutters just before
noon, when the call to prayer was sounding out, and the procession had snaked its
way to the city center. Even the foreign chain decaled all over with the red silhouette
of a cow had its fluorescent lights turned off, and Yasmin and her husband had no
idea where to buy their chicken. Nabila, their older daughter, sat in the backseat
thumbing through a yellowed volume of Shakespeare’s sonnets, occasionally folding
over the corner of a page before turning it over with her spit-licked fingers.
On the dirt road, across from the stagnant creek, they eventually found a
makeshift tent with an orange barrel in its center. Their silver Honda screeched
to a stop in front of the tent, bringing the back window Nabila was leaning against
close beside the barrel. As the butcher ambled towards them in his bloodstained
vest, Yasmin unfolded her dupatta such that its starched white creases covered the
sweatpants and t-shirt she wore on days off, before leaning over her husband and
asking for the six whole chickens they needed.
Nabila, who had been vegetarian for all of eight months, watched from the
corner of her eye as the butcher removed the first chicken with its pink atrophied
legs from a cage so cramped that only feathers bulged from the spaces between its
twisted wires. She turned in time to see the chicken held by the head, and the blood
pouring out after a single, sleek slit was drawn across the white cartilage tight around
its pulsing neck. Yasmin turned in the front seat, to read the pre-drawn lines on her
daughter’s face as if they had words written on and in between them. Both watched
the dark tufts of hair on the butcher’s thick fingers as he shook the bird before
tossing it onto the wooden plank that served as his cutting board.
Yasmin was sure Nabila would demand that they park somewhere—anywhere—
else, but she remained silent. It was only after the fourth chicken had been slaughtered
that she turned and fixed her eyes on the leather covering the back of the driver’s
seat and squeezed them shut. Once the chickens had been skinned, disemboweled
and tied into plastic bags, they were flung into the Honda’s waiting boot, where they
landed with a thump that caused Nabila’s eyes to burst open after a sharp gasp. Her
father glared at her in the rearview mirror, paid the butcher in crisp hundred-rupee
notes and didn’t pull out of the spot they were parked in until he had finished
testing all the ringtones on his cell phone, and selected a new one that rang out with
the ringing shudder of many little bells.
Azra wrapped her arms around one of the four planks that just barely held up
the roof of the newspaper stand. Its splinters scratched her cheek when she pressed
the side of her face against it. With her cropped hair and scavenged trousers and
t-shirt, she looked like the little boys that throbbed on the edges of every main street,
their knuckles sore from rapping. She watched the busboys in their checked shirts,
carrying glasses of mango and sugar cane juice, ice-chilled and soaking the paper
wrapped around them, like white shirts on rain-drenched bodies.
The newspapers no longer delivered copies to the defunct stand, but old
magazines were still pinned to its wooden frame with rusted thumbtacks. Its unglossed covers had the henna-green splash of hands that curtained the demure faces
of a film industry also defunct. Azra often found herself staring into the actresses’
kajol-rimmed eyes, which blazed with the façade of a freedom unknown to her. Three
buttonquails sat by her side, with yellow legs and a splatter of black spots on their
pale wings. She had fattened them with birdseed she begged from the man who sold
goldfish by the creek in plastic bags. They, too, lived in a bag she had made for them
by knotting the corners of a piece of netting; a bag she held up to the windows of
the Toyotas, Hondas and Suzukis that parked themselves before the vendor’s stand.
It was a Karachi afternoon like any other; the roads’ packed dirt glared up at
the blazing sun, and rings of sweat stained and cooled the underarms of Azra’s
cotton shirt. The woman on the sidewalk across the street stared at Azra through
the rectangle cutout of the cloak that veiled her drained face. When a silver Honda
pulled into the parking spot by the newspaper stand, she rose to her feet, pulling her
dishrag from a bucket of grey water, and walked over to wash its windows. The rag
left fine dirt particles all over the windshield, and the man with the thick mustache
in the driver’s seat had to press a button that shot out lines of clear water to clean
the mess she had made.
Wasim, the busboy who saved orange skins for Azra after they had been pulped
in the press, was the one who brought the man with the mustache a tall glass of
pomegranate juice, freshly squeezed on a silver tray. Occasionally, the woman in the
passenger seat would take the glass from him, sip through the blue-striped straw,
leaving pink marks all over it when she handed it back. Every now and again, one of
them would stretch their arms over the front seat, to offer it to the girl sitting in the
back, but she would shake her pony-tailed head without looking up from the thick
book she gripped with glistening fingernails. Azra didn’t miss Wasim glancing at this
Fall 2012  21
girl out the corner of his eye, when waiting in earnest for the empty glass he would
take back to the stand to be rinsed.
Azra had been selling buttonquails long enough to know that the families who
drove silver Hondas were not the kind to buy a bird to take home, or at least not
the kind to buy one from her. She had her successes with the women who rode
sidesaddle behind skull-capped men, who handed over notes stained with chewed
betel nut for a soft-stomached bird to clutch with the hand that wasn’t holding onto
the motorcycles’ ripped leather seats. Akram, with his white beard and mottled grey
eyes that had never quite learned to see, was one of those rare road-sellers whose
triumphs lay with the polished cars of Karachi’s elite. It wasn’t just the sympathy
factor; Akram knew well that the city’s wealthiest families were not the kind to step
out of their air-conditioned cars to sip juice on the sidewalk’s plastic chairs. When
the men called out to the busboys for the bill, he would hobble over, holding a box
of tissues, offering it for twenty rupees. They almost always bought it, handing over
loose change with their juice-stained fingers.
Nabila felt almost like throwing open the door and running along the creek to
the mausoleum in the distance, its dome decked with fairy lights. There, she could
curl on the carpeted steps leading up to the saint’s tomb, as the city’s most destitute
did. She had often watched them pass in a blur, while being driven home on weekend
nights, her lips stained with the Johnnie Walker her friends loved to borrow from
their parents’ stash. “Are you sure you don’t want any juice?” her mother asked,
perhaps for the fourth time since they’d left the butcher’s stand.
“No! I’m not thirsty right now!” Nabila slammed Shakespeare shut in spite of
herself.
“She’s thirsty, all right. She’s just trying to make a point.” Her father glanced
at her in the rearview mirror, turning the handle that creaked the window back
into place. “Never mind,” he turned to his wife, grinning. “She can have some of
that chicken for dinner tonight.” Anticipating outrage, he dramatically squeezed his
eyes shut, and held his hand over his head in mock-protection, while attempting to
reverse the Honda with the other.
“Shut the fuck up!”
The words spilled easily, as words mumbled often do. But, unlike too much water
rolling over the edge of cut glass, Nabila knew, immediately, that this couldn’t be
soaked up. Her mother shot up from the CD player she had been fiddling with and
in the petrified stillness that followed, nothing moved except her father’s teeth. They
clattered against each other. Just as they had the day she had had her nose pierced,
except he had slammed his fist into the wall immediately afterward. At the time,
she hadn’t said anything, remaining instead in the mint armchair by her bedroom
window, her fake diamond stud glinting. She feared her father’s pounding the wall
would cause the electric bulbs to fizzle out, but the yellow spotlights continued to
burn, long after he had shut the door and stomped down the hallway. This was worse.
In the rearview mirror, Nabila could see his widened eyes, but instead of heating up
with anger, they were fixed open in fear. He was looking straight at her, and though
her eyes met his reflection, she couldn’t have said she was looking straight at him.
None of them saw the bag of birds, positioned near the rear wheel, and when
foot was put to pedal, to reverse the vehicle, the tire’s rubber grooves met feather.
The three buttonquails that had been cowering within their netting were ironed flat.
In Karachi, road accidents did to people what the wind did to waves: swept them
together and pushed them to the periphery of the crash site, where they gathered
around, craning their necks, trying to catch a glimpse of the wreckage. But this
time, only Akram’s ear could catch the squeaks that lasted only milliseconds before
the throats they came from were silenced. He could tell he’d found them when his
cane tapped the crumble of their bones. He pulled open the zipper of the worn
satchel draped across his bent frame, his Parkinson’s fingers trembling to tear open
the shrink-wrapped tissue boxes. He drew tissue after tissue out their cardboard
rectangle, and fluttered them onto the corpses. Bird blood caught the fiber like fire,
red ripping through white.
When Azra came back to the newsstand, the place where the buttonquails
had been was instead a little mound of soiled tissues, clumped here and there with
feathers, cartilage and fawn-colored pieces of eggshell.
Fall 2012  23
The Devil in your Vanity, BLACK AND WHITE FILM
Jocelyn Chuang
Maia ten Brink
Concert
They were marching on a road past a field
in a place they could not name.
Birches stuck out like spindly ankles
from under a pleated gray sky.
The soldiers’ pants were ashy
from sitting together around yesterday’s fire.
Their last meal had been newspaper soup,
and it would be their next as well.
In the field a half-dead piano
in an oversized jacket huddled under snow.
Murphy went over. He shook it awake.
“Play!” he commanded, his teeth in its face
like the crowded slats of a barrel.
His cigarette quivered on his lip.
He kicked it. “Play, damn you!”
The piano under his boot lifted its sagging strings
but did not sing.
Murphy slammed his gun down on its frame.
He took the piano’s face in his brutal fingers
and kissed it hard with Mahler.
Notes burned and withered in the snow at his feet
like spent shells. “Leave him,”
said the commanding officer to the others,
whose eyes and ears were hungry.
Fall 2012  25
Maia ten Brink
Summer on Sickleton Road
Old Troop Gideon raised chickens whose eggs gleamed
blue like geodes. Every morning he sold them
to the lecherous corner grocer.
Old Gideon’s hair was an affront to neighbors,
as was his lack of lawnmower,
and the thorn-bush where spiders spun hexagons.
Come June, he captured fireflies in mason jars
and buried them in the topsoil of his yard.
Light for the moles, he said.
A rusty unused sewage tank
was beached on yellow grass behind his shed.
You could climb in from the top.
We played poker by flashlight,
laid quilts over the floor, imagined our first girls.
Then our fathers found us out,
and sealed the cavern off.
I lost a good deck of cards, my buckskin flask,
three stolen issues of Mad Magazine.
In summer Old Gideon paid me to do his laundry,
a dollar fifty cents an hour.
His wooden war leg was thick as my arm. I didn’t ask which war.
He had a hummingbird collection in the parlor,
the iridescent bodies green as jewels or jealousy.
I had never touched a thing so delicate.
Little Ruby-Throat with its needle beak.
The Rufous Hummingbird had a crown like a new penny
and Old Gideon said they flew six thousand miles a year.
Where did you get the birds? I asked.
He touched a sighing wing. They were gifts
from a woman named Ann. And I said,
That’s a strange gift.
Fall 2012  27
Untitled, INK DRAWING
Kathryn Roseww
Maia ten Brink
Moment
You and I are drunk on the subway.
laughing and sharing an apple fritter.
For once I feel solid at the edges,
visible to the train. We stumble the stairs up
in a billow of subterranean steam.
It has begun to snow.
There are snowflakes caught
in a streetlamp’s orbital, a man crouched beneath it.
We are in a photograph of snow,
in the gray fisheye of unfocus.
Each dream movement
like a stroke of charcoal, smudged by thumb.
The snow swears silence.
I kiss you. It is time to go home
to your wife, you say.
Fall 2012  29
Boy, window, and lamp, INSTANT FILM PHOTOGRAPH
Luke Cheng
Maia ten Brink
The Letter
They crossed by train the gilded fields of July.
The boys elbowed and argued in shadow,
their eyes red with dust, barely light to see by,
only slivers between the cattle-stench slats—
the lusty purple cabbage of Mr. Koors,
Coevorden’s farmers hoeing, their hats
in the sun hovering like gulls. And there,
woodsmoke, bread baking. The painted clouds
high above the copses. Did you hear
where they are taking us? Is it far?
the boys rattled, whispered
against the boxcar’s walls. East, East!
Leo, who was my brother, pressed hard
with a pencil stub to the back of some pocket list—
Flee, he scrawled, and the address home.
He forced the letter through a hole, one hard twist,
heard its wings open, a paper cry.
The boy who had found a cricket in the corner of the car
held it against his chest, breathed to it a happy lie—
A nameless child among nameless children
held it against his chest, breathed to it a happy lie.
The boy, who had found a cricket in the corner of the car,
heard its wings open. A paper cry.
He forced the letter through a hole, one hard twist—
“Flee,” he’d scrawled, and the address home,
with a pencil stub to the back of some pocket list.
Leo, who was my brother, pressed hard
against the boxcar’s walls. East, East!
Fall 2012  31
The boys rattled, whispered:
“Where they are taking us? Is it far?”
High above the copses, did you hear
woodsmoke, bread baking? The painted clouds
in the sun hovering like gulls. And there,
Coevorden’s farmers hoeing, their hats.
The lusty purple cabbage of Mr. Koors…
only slivers between the cattle-stench slats.
Their eyes red with dust, barely light to see by,
the boys elbowed and argued in shadow.
They crossed by train the gilded fields of July.

ABOUT
THE CENTERPIECE

This semester, the Review hosted a creative nonfiction competition. Creative nonfiction (also known as literary or narrative
nonfiction) simply refers to the use of literary craft in presenting
nonfiction—that is, factually accurate prose about real people
and events—in a compelling, vivid manner. Our centerpiece features the winners of this competition, and we hope that including works from this genre will set a precedent for future issues.
We received many high-quality submissions, which made selecting only three winners a daunting challenge. These three pieces
exhibit broad diversity in style, but what they have in common
is their capacity to delight. From the beautifully crafted sentences of “The Brief Life,” to the poignant take on culture and
chaos in “Natural Disasters,” to the careful and vivid details of
“Day-Makers,” we selected these pieces because they illuminate
their subjects in fresh, thoughtful ways. In our centerpiece, we
present you with works of art that compel us to reconsider a
world we thought we knew.
— The Nassau Literary Review Editors
Fall 2012  35
H. S. T.
Winner of the Nassau Literary Review Centerpiece
Competition for Creative Nonfiction
Day-Makers
If you’re an infrequent visitor of high-end salons, exploring La Jolie in Princeton, New Jersey might make you feel like a kid on a field trip. “What’s that?” I ask
Elaine Michel, my tour guide, pointing at a sheaf of foil as we walk through one of
the stations on the floor. She explains that after a client gets highlights, squares of
foil are folded over those parts of the hair to prevent the color from bleeding. We
pass a middle-aged woman with twenty or so pieces of foil on her head and make
our way down a spiral staircase. At the bottom, I’m greeted by a chair with a large,
flat ring of metal suspended over it. “What’s that?” Rollerball, Elaine says. The
rollerball, an advanced cousin of the hood dryer, orbits the head to evenly distribute heat to fresh perms. An in-built infrared sensor monitors the temperature of
the hair. Elaine lets me peer into a candle-lit massage room before leading me back
to the receptionist area. We pass a sign for the $99 Spring Special, which mentions
a puzzlingly biblical “milk and honey pedicure,” but I don’t ask “What’s that?” We
settle into the chic, plush-brown seats near the entrance of the salon.
Elaine, a friendly, talkative older woman with curly, brown hair, tells me she
started working at La Jolie eleven years ago after quitting her job as a social worker,
which didn’t pay enough for the amount of stress it gave her. After her husband
agreed to it (preferring a “happy cosmetologist over a neurotic social worker”), she
went to cosmetology school to get her state license. Different states have different
requirements for cosmetology licenses. Connecticut requires 2,100 hours of training spread over a year, while Nevada only requires 400 hours. New Jersey lands
between the two at 600 hours. After getting their hours, students take a test that
has both written and hands-on components. If they pass, they get a license.
Elaine ended up getting her license in her forties, and she now works at La
Jolie as a Premier Hair Colorist who also does relaxers, perms, and makeup. Wanting to understand perms better (since the only image the word evokes for me is
that of a hood dryer), I ask Elaine to explain how they work. Elaine tells me there
are two types of perms, one to get the hair straight and the other to get it curly. To
do the second kind, you need to use perm rods—do you know what perm rods are?
she asks. I’m not sure, so she goes and grabs a few and puts one in my hand. It’s
a hollow, plastic, orange tube about the size of a lipstick case. The texture on the
outside resembles goose bumps. One end is closed, and the other end has a removable cap that is leashed to the rod by a black rubber string. Four tic-tac-size holes
run lengthwise along the tube like hyphens with spaces in between, and they match
up with four holes across the hollow.
Elaine explains that a client’s hair is wrapped around the perm rod and rolled
all the way to the scalp, at which point the cap of the rod is secured to hold the
rolled-up hair in place. To make tighter curls, one uses a perm rod with a smaller
diameter—instead of a lipstick-sized rod, one might choose a cigarette-sized rod.
Wrapping the hair takes up to an hour. The next step is to douse the scrunched-up
hair with the perm solution. Ammonium thioglycolate, Elaine says, slowly spelling it out for me, restructures the hair by raising the cuticle layer and breaking
down disulfide bonds. A perm rod is unrolled every five minutes to check for an
S-curve—if an S-curve appears, that means the client’s hair has been sufficiently
curled. The solution is then washed out and neutralizer is applied, which reforms
disulfide bonds and hardens the hair into its new shape. The rollers are taken out,
more neutralizer is applied, and the hair is rinsed in warm water for three to five
minutes. After all of this, the client is not supposed to take a shower for 48 hours
to let the neutralizer fully harden the hair.
When asked how she first became interested in fashion and the beauty industry in general, Elaine says it all started with makeup.
“At five-years-old, I carried a candy lipstick in my pocket,” she says. “When I
was 14, I started experimenting with makeup. That’s when my parents let me put
it on. By 15, I was wearing fake eyelashes—I wore them every day in high school. I
don’t know if my parents ever knew. Maybe they thought my mascara was just really heavy?” She chuckles at the thought.
Elaine adds that her mother, who only used lipstick on special occasions,
was appalled by the amount of makeup she used as a teenager. When asked how
makeup trends have changed since ten years ago, she ruminates for a minute before
saying that “the change isn’t so much in how makeup is being used as in what is
being used.”
“I think people are moving toward more natural products these days. Did you
know talcum powder is carcinogenic?” she says. “And the shimmery, shiny stuff
with neon colors—some of that is made from crushed insects, which isn’t necessarily good for your health. Most people don’t know that.”
In Not Just a Pretty Face, Stacy Malkan, cofounder of the Campaign for Safe
Cosmetics, exposes more toxic secrets of the beauty industry. While trace levels of
lead in lipstick are claimed to pose no health risks, Malkan believes such claims
come from companies that only test their products for short-term effects, like rashes, swelling, and eye irritation. Most chemicals in cosmetics “have not been tested
for their potential to cause long-term health problems like cancer or reproductive
harm.” In 2000, the Center for Disease Control (CDC) in the United States pubFall 2012  37
lished a study of the presence of “phthalates”—a set of industrial chemicals linked
to birth defects in the male reproductive system—in the bodies of average Americans. Dibutyl phthalate (DBP), the most toxic phthalate of the seven different types
discovered, was found to be at the highest levels in women aged twenty to forty, the
ones most likely to pass on the chemical to a developing child. DBP is an ingredient in thirty-seven popular nail polishes, top coats, and hardeners made by L’Oreal,
Maybelline, Oil of Olay, Cover Girl, and other popular brands. Toxic chemicals
have also been found in cosmetics other than lipstick and nail polish. In 2006,
hundreds of Chinese women demanded refunds for Proctor & Gamble’s SK-II, an
expensive skin-whitening cream, because it was found to contain the toxic metals
chromium and neodymium, which cause eczema and dermatitis. Since the SK-II
incident, chromium has been found in skin-whitening creams made by Clinique,
Estee Lauder, Christian Dior, Max Factor, Lancôme, and Shiseido.
The concept of a deceptive cosmetics industry seems very “meta”—makeup
itself, in covering women’s faces, blurs the line between enhancement and deception. That makeup might entail yet another dimension of deception makes it all
the more interesting. Elaine goes on to tell me how makeup can make a real impact
on appearance.
“If I find out during consultation that a girl is getting photographed, then I’m
going to use matte makeup, not anything shiny or glossy,” she says. “Otherwise, it’ll
look like she’s really sweaty in the photo. I’ve also had girls come in who are getting
job interviews, and they want to look professional. Not like a little girl, but not
sexy, either.”
After Elaine and her client determine the appropriate look for an event, Elaine
cleans her client’s face, tones it, and moisturizes it. Toning means applying foundation with a brush to even out the skin tone and help the rest of the makeup stay
on better. Concealer is also applied to mask small blemishes. Elaine squeezes a
dollop of light brown concealer on a dark spot on the back of her hand and rubs it
in to demonstrate, and the imperfection blends into the skin surrounding it. After
applying foundation and concealer, Elaine usually works on the eyes first and then
the lips. Wondering how much a girl’s face can change with makeup, I ask Elaine if
she also knows how to make a person’s eyes look larger.
“Shaping the eyebrows can make the eyes look bigger,” she says. “If I put eyeliner really fine on the top of the eye and leave the bottom alone, that sometimes
works to bring the eyes out. Fake eyelashes help, too.”
Elaine senses my wonderment at the power of makeup, and she offers her own
theory as to what it all means.
“I think it’s part of our culture for women to put on makeup,” she says. “We
don’t have those colors tropical birds have, so we use makeup. I guess it’s a mating
kind of thing.” She makes a slight frown. “Of course, there are also some women
who don’t use any makeup and don’t see why they would ever have to.”
According to Selling Beauty by historian Morag Martin, critics of cosmetics
have been around for a long time. The Greeks and the Romans and, later on,
the fathers of the Catholic Church, from Tertullian to St. Jerome, all denounced
makeup as unnatural or as a form of artifice. By the late 17th century, however,
wearing makeup became common among the French aristocracy and members of
the French court. Like the wearing of actual masks, wearing makeup “had the power to establish social distance and mystery,” which were “essential to the practices
of sexual and political intrigue.” While writers and painters satirized the vanity
associated with makeup, they did not do so seriously because “enhanced titillation
for the male viewer was this vanity’s ultimate outcome.” Men were fascinated by
the image of a woman putting on makeup because they imagined the act was done
out of a desire to be desired. It was the sheer willingness to seduce men that men
found irresistible. Even when the Enlightenment came and championed “natural
beauty” for women, Martin argues that there was no paradigm shift. Critics of fashion paradoxically believed that natural beauty needed to be taught, that conscious
training could create unconscious beauty. Women were to “aspire to a childlike
innocence, hiding from the viewer its artificial constructs.” The new aesthetic of
beauty “stressed transparency, yet it expected these ideals to be expressed through
the traditional means of deception.”
La Jolie states in its mission that beauty is not “just about vanity” or “frivolous
indulgence.” The salon claims its treatments are “endearing, sincere, and come
straight from the heart” and that its employees “take great pride in being day-makers.” The altruism of the statement seems profound. If beauty is a lie, maybe beauty
service is genuine. La Jolie tries to match its clients with stylists of similar age and
personality. Elaine says that during bridal makeup sessions, for example, someone younger would be in charge of the bride while she might be in charge of the
mother of the bride. This kind of matching is understandable; establishing trusting
relationships is paramount in such an intimate business. How many people in your
life get to touch your hair or your face? I get the chance to speak to a few customers who emphasize the interpersonal nature of going to a salon. Jennifer Rye, who
recently moved from Florida to New Jersey, tells me that getting her hair colored
meant that she “wanted someone who really knows what they’re doing.” Kristen
Covono, another customer, says that what she likes most about La Jolie is that “the
girl who does my hair doesn’t force conversation.”
“In other places, people feel like they always need to be talking,” she says. “It’s
like ‘How are you?’ and then I say ‘good’ and then we sort of go back and forth and
keep updating each other. It’s not like that here.”
To provide the best service to their clients, stylists at La Jolie also continually
take classes to update their skills and keep up with fashion trends. Sherri Reed, a
hair stylist who has been working in the salon for three years, talks about La Jolie’s
“continual education” program that employees take advantage of to stay à la mode.
“There are classes every Wednesday morning in the salon, mostly for apprentices, but once in while, for everyone,” she says. “The employers also really encourage
us to study in other places. People are going all time.”
Melannie Chelton, a Premier Hair Stylist, says that once she got on the floor,
Fall 2012  39
La Jolie paid for her and another girl to go to London to take classes there.
“Not all salons can do this,” she says. “Classes are very expensive, anywhere
from $1,600 to $1,700, and La Jolie pays for it all.”
I later found myself understanding why La Jolie cares so much about continual education. After learning so much about makeup and perms, I (incorrectly)
thought I was ready for a few online cosmetology quizzes. The questions were all
multiple choice:
Which of the following is an example of a straight shape used in section
ing the hair?
A. Oval
B. Oblong
C. Triangle
D. Circle
The only thing that suggested straightness to me was oblong. I picked oblong.
Wrong; the answer was triangle.
You can determine the ideal eyebrow shape for your client with:
A. A stencil
B. A ruler
C. 3 lines
D. 2 lines
There’s an ideal eyebrow shape? I picked stencil. Wrong again; three lines. At
the end of both the perm quiz and the makeup quiz, I received a message: “You did
not pass. For more practice, take the quiz again.”
The combination of technical expertise and interpersonal skills that stylists use
to do their jobs is impressive. Ivor Hughes, a Master Stylist with diamond earrings
and the attitude and the forehead of a serene Buddhist monk, tells me in a clipped
British accent about how he abandoned his plans to become a lawyer while attending college in America.
“I got into it and wasn’t very interested. My parents were in London, so they
couldn’t do too much about it,” he says, chuckling. “Then I got married and the
kids started coming. Let’s just say I was able to ease myself out of that one.”
I note how interesting his career shift is and confess that I don’t really know
what I want to do in life. Ivor says “that’s good” and tells me, “If life gives you
something, just take it.” It’s advice I’ve heard before, but it feels good to hear it
again.
Ivor and the other stylists’ willingness to share their life stories and aspirations
struck me as particularly genuine. Having no problems talking about themselves,
they naturally invite your confidence and trust. In his relaxed and easygoing
way, Ivor tells me to come in sometime to get a haircut. He points lovingly at
my “cowlicks” and mentions something about “getting that girl.” The argument
makes sense; after all, everyone desires to be desired, not just women. Shallow or
profound, it is what makes fashion, the tension between self and perception, an
essential characteristic of humanity. When I left La Jolie later that evening, the
fashion industry suddenly seemed more real to me than ever before.
Fall 2012  41
Daniel Feinberg
Natural Disasters
This story starts where it ends: with me sitting in an oversized computer chair
boosted high enough that my feet don’t reach the floor, and I’m staring at a computer screen. I’d prefer you not think of it this way.
I was a priest, named Hermia, blessed with the powers of healing and restoration, but battling a shadowy past as the illegitimate daughter of a high-ranking
clergyman. I know her past because I created her. Hermia is as real as I want her
to be. She is my World of Warcraft character, certainly, but nonetheless, I know her.
And I knew her two loyal comrades, as well. The first, a warrior named Ebes, had
dark skin and a vicious beard, but served well as a bodyguard. The mischievous
rogue, Ltpink (pronounced Lieutenant Pink, but we had taken to calling him “L.T.
Pink”), led our adventures, mostly because he would run ahead and Ebes and I –
Ebes and Hermia – would struggle to keep up.
I did not, however, really know these comrades. To me they were Ebes and
Ltpink. We got to know each other through the game, typing messages, but when
I closed my eyes, I couldn’t imagine that anything except a pink-haired gnome sat
behind a computer, controlling Ltpink.
Ebes had just forged an Arcanite Reaper and asked for me to heal him while
he tested it out. We were, at t his point far from master fighters, but we taught
each other. Ltpink asked to tag along, but ultimately took the lead, running from
ogre to ogre, while I struggled to keep him alive. As the priest, I was responsible
for Ltpink; if he had died, it would have been my fault. Their lives were in my
hands.
There was always a peculiar dissonance, making friends in the game. Before
freeing Marshal Windsor from a Blackrock prison (the Blackrock Dwarves had
become a threat, aligning themselves with Nefarian, the black dragon prince), we
would talk about our lives. Ltpink was wealthy; he took tennis lessons in his own
backyard and went to private school. He was thrilled when he broke his collarbone
and didn’t have to play tennis anymore. He came online and told us the good
news immediately.
[Ltpink]: This means I can play more!
[Hermia]: I guess that’s a positive.
[Ltpink]: Let’s go do a Zul’Farrak run. I have to kill Shadowpriest Sezz’ziz.
[Hermia]: Okay let’s do it. Ebes, you in?
Ebes was the quiet one. I guess I still don’t know much about him. He
seemed to enjoy our company and always chose to tag along. We all shared where
we lived: Ltpink from California, Ebes from Louisiana, and me from New Jersey.
The game, and their friendship, became an incredible release. We leveled up
together and I came to expect them to be online when I logged in after a long day.
One day, Ltpink wasn’t blazing the trail, instead lagging behind Ebes.
[Hermia]: Is everything alright, LT?
[Ltpink]: My girlfriend broke up with me today. I just didn’t see it coming.
[Hermia]: I’m just impressed you had one.
[Ebes]: I’ve beent here man, it never makes sense right when it happens, but
just keep your head up, keep your mind off it, and you’ll clear up and it’ll fil into
the puzzle.
It felt good to be there for another person, but that was about all we said.
Ltpink cheered up after a while and we explored the Sunken Temple in the Swamp
of Sorrows. It was a challenge just to find the place, obscured by trees, deep in
Horde territory. The temple was dedicated to the Blood God, Hakar, a dangerous enemy of the free peoples of Azeroth. Skulls lined the walls, remnants of the
sacrifices made I the name of Hakkar. Ltpink was, of course, the first to swim
into the ruins, and Hermia agreed to accompany him on the condition that Ebes
would stay close. Our quest was to prevent the summoning of Eranikus, a powerful green dragon, but as we delved deeper into the temple we discovered that the
summoning had already begun, and a Shade of Eranikus, and ephemeral physical
form, stood before us. Ebes charged in bravely and we defeated the spirit. Ebes
had learned from a young age to be brave in the face of dragons: he was raised in
Theramore Isle, a human stronghold and a trading port in Kalimdor surrounded
by Dustwallow Marsh, a breeding ground for the Black Dragonflight.
We used to sit around Ironforge and dream of becoming stronger. One day
we hoped to bring the fight to the Black Dragonflight, to slay Onyxia, the broodmother.
[Ltpink]: I wish we had more time.
[Hermia]: Wouldn’t it be nice if we didn’t have to worry about reality?
[Ltpink]: We would be so strong if we could play all day.
[Ebes]: We’re getting stronger, just be patient.
Fall 2012  43
I quickly became obsessed with killing Onyxia. Lifeblood, a veteran night-elf
priest, told me all about the dragon princess, how she sits in her lair, slumbering,
waiting to be challenged. Lifeblood was a real person, too, and I must have looked
insane, overzealously questioning him simply because he had been to Onyxia’s Lair
before. Maybe he still remembers me, though I suppose he wouldn’t. I began to
play more and with more purpose. Hermia became increasingly determined to
prove her worth, to hang the severed head of Onyxia outside the gates of her home
city of Stormwind, recruiting Ebes and Ltpink to help her in her effort. I remember the frustration that Hermia felt when she discovered that Onyxia had been
masquerading as a court magician in Stormwind, right under the nose of the High
King. I was determined not to let her make fools of us the second time.
Ebes, Ltpink, and Hermia joined a guild together – a group of Alliance
soldiers, warlocks, mages, and warriors, all dedicated to bringing down Onyxia
and (maybe someday) even her brother, Nefarian. We proudly wore our Socius’s
crest and swore our allegiance to the guild. Still, we relied mostly on each other,
plowing through thousands of undead soldiers just to get stronger. Ebes would
charge into the fight and distract our enemies while I kept him alive with heals.
Ltpink would sneak around and stab them in the back until we left them dead in
our wake. In retrospect it seems pointless, the endless chasing of skeletons, as we
marched across the Plaguelands in a small and relentless army of three.
The thing is, we didn’t really know each other. We were three inseparable best
friends who were almost as separate as could be. We referred to each other just by
our characters’ names and never thought twice. I couldn’t talk to them outside of
the game.
When hurricane Katrina made landfall, I chose not to pay attention. For
the week prior, I had been fascinated by its size, its speed, its sheer power. It was
sublime and overwhelming, and I didn’t want to accept that it could have very real
consequences. World of Warcraft didn’t have weather until Patch 1.10, and even
then it didn’t matter much. I just couldn’t’ wrap my head around Katrina.
I never really had to wrap my head around it because Warcraft was unchanged.
I had a week until school started again and I was determined to train as much as
possible. I wanted Onyxia dead by Christmas. Ltpink and I were online every day,
killing orcs mostly, waiting for Ebes so we could move to more substantial targets.
It was the beginning of the school year, so it made sense for Ebes not to be around.
We didn’t think anything of it and continued to kill orcs, even paying a visit to the
Gurubashi Arena in Stranglethorn Vale to test our mettle against other champions.
It took a week and a half of this for us to snap out of our online pseudo-reality.
Ltpink and I had just lost a fight against a group of Horde members, other
players of the opposing faction. We were walking our spirits back to our bodies to
be resurrected (this is how you could keep playing after you died).
[Hermia]: If we had Ebes, we’d crush those guys.
[Ltpink]: Where is he? Did he quit without telling us? Is he that busy with
school?
[Ltpink]: There’s a fucking mountain between our corpse and the graveyard,
damnit.
[Hermia]: Was Ebes from New Orleans?
[Ltpink]: Oh shit! Yeah.
[Hermia]: Fuck, pink. Ebes is from New Orleans.
We didn’t talk much for the rest of the day. After a few more tries to fight the
Horde and a few more times walking our spirits back to our bodies, we gave up trying to stay alive and stepped away from the game for the night, frustrated with the
battle we couldn’t win.
I took a weeklong break from the game for the start of school. I tried to focus
on my life, but I’d sit in class drawing maps of Onyxia’s lair and planning where
everyone would have to stand to avoid being burnt when sh e breathed fire. When
I came back, Ltpink was annoyed that his partners, his comrades, had abandoned
him.
[Hermia]: Don’t be a brat. Ebes could be dead. Besides I’ve been busy with
school. Don’t you also have to deal with that?
I said it at first to guilt Ltpink into calming down, but as I read the words on
my screen I realized it could be true.
[Hermia]: Damn. What if.
There was still no response from Ltpink.
[Hermia]: I still can’t imagine him without seeing a kid swinging a giant axe. We should do something for him.
Ltpink didn’t have anything to say, and I felt strange continuing my routine
online, so I took the night off. I returned the next day utterly defeated and hopeless. I had convinced myself of the worst.
Ltpink had an idea: he suggested we buy Ebes a present, spend some gold
at the Auction House and let him know we’re worried about him. He figures it
would be good to show Ebes we were worried once he came back. I thought it
was a great idea. My gold was precious, but the sacrifice made it feel like the right
thing to do. We pooled our gold together to buy a pricy Darkweave Cloak, which
provided bonuses to Defense and Armor. We mailed the cloak to Ebes.
Thing slowly returned to normal, and the cloak sat in Ebes’s mailbox. We
eventually accepted fighting as a duo and developed a new strategy, still with the
ambitious goal of dragon-slaying. Our guild had started its first raids into Molten
Core, less dangerous than Onyxia’s Lair, but still a huge step forward from the typiFall 2012  45
cal challenge. Our progress was slow, but Hermia was certainly determined. We
made our first attempt at Onyxia two weeks later, with forty of us amassing inside
her lair. But we struggled to even defeat her guards and turned back, defeated and
hyperaware of our own overactive ambitions.
We returned to Molten Core and spent the next two weeks moving forward,
defeating new monsters and journeying deeper, all in preparation. I even began
to form the priceless priest staff, Benediction, in another one of Hermia’s ambitious plots. We ventured back to Onyxia’s Lair, making the perilous trip across the
ocean. This time, we made it to the broodmother herself and stood before her as
she slept. We discussed our strategy. But, before we could charge, Ebes came back.
There was no hero’s welcome or parade throught he streets of Stormwind, just
a simple message: “[Ebes] has come online.” This was followed by a rush of relief,
as though forgetting how worried I had been never meant I’d stopped worrying. I
suppose I really had been hoping for his return every day.
I messaged him immediately but found myself completely speechless. I needed
to convey exactly how I felt.
[Hermia]: !
[Ebes]: I have no roof. I am on the computer, and there is no roof. I just see sky.
I couldn’t help but laugh. I don’t think he ever realized that we would worry,
or maybe even that we were real people.
[Ebes]: What the fuck is this cloak?
[Hermia]: We thought you were dead. Ltpink was going to resell it in a week.
I saw no reason not to be totally honest with him. I was too relieved to be
concerned.
[Ebes]: What good would this do if I died? Why would I want this?
[Hermia]: We cared. That’s all.
And then I really realized there was no reason not to be totally honest with
him.
[Hermia]: My name is Daniel.
[Ebes]: I’m Robby.
[Ltpink]: I think I prefer Ltpink.
Once in a while, a few zombies rise from the dead and march on major cities,
but really, there are no natural disasters in World of Warcraft. We have to learn to
deal with them from somewhere else.
Vicky Gan
The Brief Life
The average film measures thirty-five millimeters wide and ten thousand feet
long. Each individual frame is roughly half the size of a postage stamp. Perforations called sprocket holes line either edge of the stock, forming two columns that
flank the body of the film like train tracks. Running the entire length of the reel,
these perforations mesh with the teeth of a projector’s sprocket wheel to guide the
film through its rotation. Thirty-five millimeter film zips by at a rate of twenty-four
frames per second—too fast for the moviegoer to notice the spaces in between, fast
enough for him to see continuity.
It’s this mechanical, incongruously mundane process that produces the
tableaux now ingrained in a nation’s collective cinematic unconscious—two men
dissolving into the beginnings of a beautiful friendship, four friends skipping down
a yellow brick road, one snow globe tumbling out of a dead man’s hand. Individual
frames capture minutiae, each incremental change in an object’s position. Seen in
sequence, those moments suddenly, fantastically, transform into a whole greater
than the sum of its parts: a story. Cinema in this sense is sleight of hand, and the
viewer is indispensable to the trick. If a film screened in a forest and no one was
around to watch it, it wouldn’t be a film at all. It would be nothing more than a
collection of stills, arranged in a strip of acetate or nitrate or polyester plastic, black
as an adder from a distance but dully fuscous when examined in the light. It’s the
human eye that makes sense of an otherwise lifeless series of images and constructs
a narrative out of a million little pieces. From this angle, it’s the viewer, not the
director, who makes the movie.
From another angle, it’s the photon. Film photography boils down to the interaction of energetic units of light with the layers of chemicals in a strip of film. Like
the prototypical chemist, a cinematographer concocts an ideal mixture of light and
color in which to set the intended scene. Every time the shutter opens, the camera captures the light reflected off the objects within its scope. Photons strike the
exposed film, engaging photosensitive silver-halide grains in the emulsion layers.
The grains change imperceptibly to form a latent image—“latent” because it is only
Fall 2012  47
the shadow of a still and cannot be discerned until the film is developed. In the
darkroom, the grains turn to pure silver and that shadow is itself converted into
another shadow, a negative image consisting of darkened regions in the spots that
received the most light. It is only after shining a light on this intermediate product—by making a negative of a negative—that the initial flash of inspiration yields
the positive image an audience sees in the theater.
This is a roundabout way to tell a story, hinged as it is on the reconciliation
of opposites; but then, film is no stranger to contradiction. Its emulsion layers are
held together by gelatin—the same nondescript powder that molds the primarycolored Jell-O packs in children’s bag lunches, that lends the common, cloying
marshmallow its characteristic gumminess, that congeals a dinner party aspic. The
same gelatin that is extracted from the bones and hides of cattle is the stuff of
which blockbusters are made.
These chemicals are the great equalizers of film. Even the grandest of epics,
the most sumptuous of panoramas, is scarcely the thickness of a thumbnail. To
film people is to relegate them to the fenced-in aspect ratio of two dimensions. It
should be reductive—but it isn’t. Like a globe flattened in the pages of an atlas and
scored with roads and rivers and ridges, a film generates new applications for its
beholder and charts new paths to discovery.
This dynamic quality of film comes from its human element; cinematography
is a largely collaborative act. Production assistants scurry across a set with props,
scripts, and cups of coffee; gaffers assemble lighting for the next shot; cameramen
maneuver their equipment on dollies; actors mill about, hair and make-up in
tow, as they wait for the magic word. The film at that stage exists only in the form
of “rushes” and “dailies”—raw footage, mere parts of a whole. It is in the editing
room, when the director is alone with the film for the first time, that where the
story emerges in its final form.
Before digital cameras and Final Cut Pro, the editing process was a hands-on
affair. Serpentine strips of film were wrapped around the eight motorized spools of
a flatbed Moviola. The film could be sped up, slowed down, rewound, and played
back on a screen as it was fed through the intricate network of rollers. Editors quite
literally cut a film, snipping off a frame here and adding a shot there, aided only
by the practical expedients of scissors, markers, and transparent tape. There was
no magic in the cutting room—no feats of computer-generated or green-screened
fancy—but what existed before: a pattern of blacks and whites (and sometimes magentas, cyans, and yellows) chemically etched onto the surface of the film. Editing
was messy business, and the film got scratched, smudged, and otherwise mangled
in the process.
But no real damage is done in the editing room; editors use duplicates called
work prints to make their cuts. The really fragile part of film is the raw material
itself. The first films were made on a base of cellulose nitrate, which, in addition to
producing images of unparalleled luminosity, degrades easily and ignites occasionally. The nitrate-fueled explosion at the climax of Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious
Basterds was true to life in this sense, if in no other; nitrate film was implicated in
at least seventy-five fires between 1896 and 1993. Concerns over nitrate flammability led to the adoption of cellulose acetate as the industry standard, but acetate
turned out to be only slightly more stable. Today, almost all films are made on a
safe polyester base.
Some argue that they are “safe” not only in their chemical composition; film
purists mourn the loss of the characteristic clarity and sparkle of the old nitrate
form. One can still see the exquisite volatility of the substance in the decades-old
detritus of those early prints. Because of its high silver content, nitrate film warps
and conforms to its latent image over time and glows with a blue, ghostlike iridescence. Acetate too decays into a specter of accidental elegance. In a process called
channeling, the emulsion layer separates from the acetate base and leaves a silvery
cobweb of lingering connections, an eloquent death pang.
This deterioration is going on constantly in film archives around the world.
Preservationists can forestall the inevitable with duplication and climate control,
but they cannot cheat filmic death any more than they can cheat their own. Film is
the only art of human invention, and we, somewhat vainly, inscribed our mortality
in its frames. What survives from each reel is not the film itself but the shadow of
its former brilliance—the moving picture we have projected for ourselves, the film
made in our image.
Fall 2012  49

thesis 5, OIL ON PANEL
Joanne Chong
Matthew Brailas
1844: after a savage beating he wakens to
the ghosts
Still early enough that stars buzz like flies across the New England
sky but fading and JOHN MURRAY SPEAR struggles to rise from
a crater of pink and white shrapnel, blood and bone, teeth and
fragments of teeth shining already with the calcified white of fossils
and these he slips into his pocket.
In a few hours someone will think to bury him and will go to the
ditch and find him lying like a smashed bird and this man who not
twelve hours before was kicking and cursing and spitting with the rest
of the mob but now made timid by aloneness will lift him into big
arms and carry him to a hospital.
There the doctors will reset his bones and a nurse will steal his
cufflinks and after several months he will gasp deeply and suddenly
like the gush of air when a window is punctured in a space shuttle
and the tiny bodies within pulled as though by wire into a bright and
immolating void and his eyes will roll open and he will know them.
Matthew Brailas
When My Brother Was Three a Dog Bit
Out His Eye: I Follow These Memories Like
Blood in Snow
He does not remember but being afraid and flashes. Wild teeth.
Blood antlering down the armoire. The dog sleeping peacefully: this
was the first life Chris’s took. Still a zipper of indentations around his
left eye.
Another story: in high school Chris meets Ben: sullen boy who
smokes hookah and sniffs Ritalin. Slouches down the boulevards
at night pricking other boys with his dad’s knife. One day, in an
ongoing war, whips a shower rod into dad’s face and pops it open like
a grapefruit. Violent as heartbeat the sirens pounding the walls. Chris
and Ben don’t talk anymore. Ben sells pot to fifteen year olds and
hates them.
Last one. 2006 Chris leaves for college. Here he is fed through
the furnace of his days but without struggle. Here we see his anger
balloon into something caustic, hungry as cancer. Here we see his
faith or failure of faith grow big and black and mournful as whale
song or the death of stars. First inkling of “thirst,” first “bad habit.”
Liquor bottles accumulating in his closet. Comes back four years later,
pinched, sheared. Doesn’t want to talk about it.
Fall 2012  53
Capella Yee
The Wedding Train, DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPH
Matthew Brailas
Brother Triptych
Portrait of Chris: I
He is often
beautiful.
In Port Aransas
I was scared
of the ocean
but he flung himself
like comet turning
and turning through
the sheets of salt.
Jellyfish bobbing
like Chinese lanterns.
Now standing by
his bed I think of him
like this
untouched shining.
Portrait of Chris: II
Dragged by the razor
nets of those years.
Satelliting
between two great
gravities (brother
Fall 2012  55
and brother).
This was before
Chris’s folding
when his took his swollen
heart (squeezed
against rib)
and creased it
once and again.
And again. Little
pulsing grape.
Small enough now
to fit into a pocket
a mouth
a cup
stayed there.
Portrait of Chris: III
Few photos of him always
in the back faceless
under a mass
of hair
or sunglasses.
I am jamming
these stills together
spinning them
like a zoetrope
rings around me
bright as a
torch my memories
and praying for some
explanation
some whole artifact:
to force him back
(like a puppet or cut-out horse)
into motion.
Matthew Brailas
The Prophet John Murray Spear in Lynn,
Massachusetts
Begin in the marshes. Left the herons
right the herons packed
like teeth into the salt pans.
Watch the long white
necks harpoon into water
shrapnel-glare off scales or
the quieter moments. Though
monogamous females with impotent mates
will seek gratification elsewhere.
Farther from the water. Now the pin oaks
the itching ropes of poison sumac
now the snow owls the odorless bones
they expel. Swallows swollen with bayberry.
Coyotes thin as knives slashing
through the undergrowth. Wild dogs.
Now the first rows of houses
bellying out of the soil. Hard
and knuckle-purple.
Streetlights dark
with shells of insects.
Fall 2012  57
Called “City of Sin.”
“City of Firsts.” First American tulip
wet stem sucking at the air
like a throat. First American
iron works blast furnace dance hall.
Young men staggering home.
Filling the ditches. Go up. The soft hills.
John Murray Spear and his squalling
soul. He sits himself down.
Warm as light-bulbs the earth.
Waking Dreams, DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPH
Jocelyn Chuang
Lizzie Martin
Too Small Yet
The new volunteer, Anna, came while we were at school. We knew she had
arrived because we could see from the bus that the window of the fourth floor guest
room was open, and as we ran through the gate, we saw her face there, pale as a
ghost. She had that kind of yellow hair that all the volunteers had, especially the
German ones. That was the day that we had the kittens.
Suchita had found kittens once before, in the same spot behind the home under
the fig tree in the backyard. She had rescued these, and we looked up at her with
wide eyes as she told us that we had to protect them from the monsoon weather, as
well as from their mother.
“She will get hungry, and then she will kill them,” she told us, setting her jaw
just like she did when Muskan borrowed her Walkman without asking. “She will
kill them.”
Last time, she said, she woke up the next morning and ran outside with a saucer
of milk to find that the kittens had been torn apart, their limbs strewn through the
garden. She didn’t tell us that she had thrown up before getting on the school bus,
but we all remembered, and we all knew that she didn’t drink milk anymore, even
when Sheetal’s big sister Neelam put sugar in it to make our afternoon snack seem
like a special occasion.
We marveled at the kittens, covering their ears so they wouldn’t hear the story.
We sang them Bollywood songs, moving their little paws so that it looked like they
were dancing. We had never held anything so precious so close to us before; we sat
up straight and breathed more carefully when we had our turns holding them. Suchi
sat on the steps above us, watching over the edge of her English textbook.
Anna the volunteer was German, like we guessed. We knew how this was going
to work. We’d seen enough foreigners come and go enough times to remember how
it always went.
It was monsoon season. That was the worst time for this; we knew that. It was
the worst time because the heat made the foreigners sleepy all the time, and they
didn’t like to sweat. She was no different – on her first afternoon here, we found her
asleep in the shade on the concrete floor of the tuition room. Foreigners like her,
they always forgot to oil their hair, or they didn’t know that they should, and then
when they washed it, it stayed wet for days because it was humid, and then they were
surprised when it smelled like the moldy square of steel wool that was next to the
sink in the kitchen. We laughed every time. Our braids swung past our faces, and the
scent made our mouths taste like coconut.
They never knew most things, these foreigners. They acted like they were smarter
than we were, like their toilet paper and their hand sanitizing gel protected them
from whatever was wrong with us. They didn’t know that our lives weren’t this way
because we didn’t wash our hands well. Our lives were this way because God had
forgotten us. And soon enough, the foreigners would forget us, too.
“We need a box and some cloth,” Suchita told us, and we pushed a desk under
the storage cabinet so Sheetal, who had grown maybe five inches that summer, could
climb up and steal one of the sheets that they kept for when new girls came. Suchi
settled the kittens into the box from her last pair of school shoes, and we crowded
into a tuition room to watch over them while she did her geography homework.
“The white one is mine.”
“He’s mine!”
“He’s a girl.”
“You don’t know that.”
Suchi told us to be quiet or leave, so we went back to watching the two kittens in
silence. The grey one was smaller, and we worried about him when he began mewing
frantically.
“We should feed them, Suchi didi.”
She didn’t know how; we tried offering them bread and a bowl of milk, but
they just poked their noses around in the cardboard box with their eyes shut. We
laughed. Suchi dipped a finger in the milk and pressed it to the grey one’s mouth,
but he pulled away. She tried doing the same thing with the corner of her t-shirt, but
that didn’t work either.
“They’re not hungry,” she said.
Most of us lived there for a long time. Papiya came most recently; she was still
too new to talk to about anything before this. She didn’t talk much anyway, and
we didn’t try too hard with her because she had such bad lice that some strands of
her hair were white with nits; we didn’t want to catch them. The rest of us, though,
we could talk about a life before this one, but we didn’t like to. Only Asmani told
stories, mostly on nights like the night we had the kittens, when the air was thick
Fall 2012  61
and unbreathable with heat and we were all lying awake as sweat dripped across our
cheeks and into our ears or pooled behind our knees and under our backs.
“In the other orphanage,” she began, “it wasn’t like this. It’s a government
home, and they are different. They don’t like children there. They like us here, at
least a little bit. Here we go to school. We eat vegetables, usually. We drink milk.
There, there was only rice.”
“I like rice.”
“Ey, moti, I’m talking. We all know you like rice too much. Shut up, na?” said
Asmani.
Jyoti got called fat all the time because the Hindi word rhymed with her name,
but she still got hurt and sullen every time one of us said it. She breathed deeply,
pretending to sleep. “There were wolves outside,” Asmani continued, her voice lower this time. “We
could hear them howling.”
“There are wolves here, too, and the kittens wouldn’t have been safe from them,
either.”
“We know, Suchi. We know. You saved them.”
“I’m just saying.”
“There were wolves, I said. There were wolves, and when we looked outside
through the cracks in the walls—there were no windows—we could see their eyes
glowing. They could smell us—we didn’t smell good, you know, because there wasn’t
any soap, and they could smell us, and they wanted to eat us. And then we would put
newspaper in the cracks to keep them out, but the room would fill with our breath
and there wouldn’t be any—kya nam?—oxygen. And we would fall asleep without
breathing, watching their claws scratch at the cracks and hearing their teeth snap.
And then when we woke up, they would have eaten the newspaper out of the cracks,
and all we would find would be soggy, chewed-up scraps of it in the street.”
Sonal, who was eleven but still hung a damp mattress over the balcony every
morning because she wet the bed, whimpered. Suchi thought it was one of the
kittens, which we had kept in the box under the window outside because Aunty, who
cooked and cleaned and had teeth like the windows of the building across the street,
all knocked out in turns, found the box in the tuition room while we were washing
up after dinner and told us if they were inside tomorrow morning, she would beat
all of us until next Saturday. We always listened to Aunty, eventually. We had to.
Sometimes, if we were really bad, she wouldn’t give us our packets of shampoo for
the week, and then everyone would lean away from us in class and they’d stare and
whisper, and we’d know that they’d know—or they’d remember—that we lived in an
orphanage and don’t matter as much as they do to anyone.
“But that wasn’t so bad. We didn’t believe the wolves would get us, anyway.
Their teeth were sharp, but we would have chased them out. We were wild, too. We
didn’t go to school. There was a playground across the street, but we only went when
there was going to be an adoption. This one morning, a woman came because she
wanted to adopt one of us small girls. We got new dresses that day. We didn’t get
to keep them. Then the woman came back the next week, and we got to wear the
dresses again. I knew they’d take that dress from me that night, too, but I didn’t let
them. It was monsoon season then, like now, and I found the biggest puddle in the
world right there in the middle of the road and sat down in it on the way home. That
yellow dress was so dirty you wouldn’t know it was the same dress. I wasn’t allowed
to eat dinner for the whole month – but the dress was mine. I washed it so carefully
that it was almost perfect, and everyone wanted to be my friend. Even that woman,
she wanted to adopt me most of all because I was the most beautiful and the most
talented and the most interesting and kind. She really wanted to have me as her
daughter. She just couldn’t. It was so sad for her, you know.”
Asmani’s stories always ended like this, just as we fell asleep.
“It was so sad for her.”
The next morning, three of us went out to check on the kittens. Suchi woke up
late, so she ran to catch the bus, shouting about offering them milk as it pulled away.
We peered inside to see the white one with a paw stretched across his motionless
brother, mewling wildly, his eyes open and his ears back. Papiya pried the grey kitten
from beneath him, and we didn’t know what to think of its stiff body in her dark
palm, its paws folded against its chest. We passed it around. We shook it. We patted
its head, we turned it upside down. We blew on its nose. It didn’t wake up.
“Go to school.” Anna took the kittens from us. We protested; she didn’t listen.
Her blue eyes were lit with the sun, and we could see them flashing from the bus
window as we pulled away.
We were restless all day with worry that whatever happened to the grey one
would happen to his brother. The bus ride home was so noisy that most of us got
headaches.
“I hope my kitten is still alive.”
“That one is mine.”
“Who asked you? You don’t even know which kitten is which.”
“You think I can’t see?”
“You won’t be able to after I hit you in the eye!”
“Hoi, hoi! You think you’re tough.”
“Bas! Enough. I don’t want to hear your voice.”
When we get home from school, Anna was sitting on the steps, her jeans rolled
Fall 2012  63
up and her chin on her knees. Her hair was slipping out of a hair tie and sticking to
her cheeks; she was smaller than most of the volunteers who had come before her,
and we couldn’t see her over one another when we ran up the stairs and tugged on
her clothes, whining for answers. We knew the other kitten was dead, and the box
was empty when we checked. Neetu, who was old enough to know better, wandered
around telling us that someone killed them both, but we never listened to her
because her one eye didn’t open all the way and made us nervous. Besides, Anna
said she was wrong.
Aunty shouted at us, on and on about how and why the kittens were dead. She
said we shouldn’t have brought them inside. She said they smelled like us with her
eyes squinted up, and she put her fingers together in front of her and made a gesture
like she was throwing aside something she didn’t want to be touching. They smelled
like you, she said. No mother cat wants babies who smell like you. They were too
small yet, she said. They needed a mother. They were too small yet to be without a
mother.
We knew Aunty didn’t understand, but Anna did – we saw how her eyes filled
with tears when Aunty finished shouting, and Anna stayed with us on the porch as
the sun began to set. She didn’t say anything, but she rubbed Suchi’s back while she
cried into a dishtowel. She held small Aarti, whose thumb was in her mouth. She let
Asmani tell a story about an orchard in Kolkata that we all knew she invented on the
spot, and she kissed the top of Sonal’s head when she whimpered. Most surprising
of all was Papiya, who sat next to her wordlessly long after the rest of us went in to
wash our faces and eat dinner. They sat out there until it was time to come in and
lock the doors for the night, their matching shadows still in front of the flickering
streetlamp on the corner.
Ben Koons
In Chastity Repose
I.
I never want to stop kissing you
when I love you, I want to kiss you
when hungry, to kiss your mouth
when thirsty, your lips
bored, your temple
tired, brow.
To kiss you on going out
on your coming in
to kiss your whole body
to kiss you where it tickles
until you’re ashamed of your body
and again so you’re without shame
When I want you, I want to kiss you
when I have a cold, your nose
when hungry, to kiss your belly
when thirsty, your eyes
bored, your mind
tired, brow.
To kiss you until my lips crack
until my throat parches
until I can’t breathe
so much thirst from kissing
Fall 2012  65
until I die
until my body is a wrung-out sponge.
II.
That I am a toad made prince
by forbearance in affection,
I will in chastity rest
until noble lips may grace yours.
My Mother, OIL ON CANVAS
Genevieve Irwin
Ben Koons
Mid-Afternoon Bowfishing
I.
We snuck into the canyon behind your house
and threw worms and hooks into streams
flowing past stone dams then went to a pond that reeked
of scum surrounded by Japanese honeysuckles
and shot arrows with lines at fish and bullfrogs
while sweat dripped along my denim.
Texas sun licked my light hair and bites
of rampant mosquitoes stretched along my arms.
Beautyberries lined the trails of this canyon valley,
but their purple blooms waited for late summer and fall.
Sitting on the dock, I hooked and cast
while you shouted, “Turtle!”
II.
When I spot the turtle, I hold the bow taut, and fire
and despite all the near misses
before and the rock-glancing shots
I’ve made, I strike the turtle and pull the line.
Limp thing but twitching
life still like it can’t give up—my friend fishing
cringes, saying, hope’s a desperate thing.
Fall 2012  69
Misha Semenov (translator)
All That Had Filled My Soul
by Nikolay Zabolotsky
All that had filled my soul felt as if it’d been lost again,
And I lay in the grass, wearied by boredom and grief.
And the wondrous body of a flower rose up above me,
And a grasshopper, miniature guardsman, kept watch on a leaf.
Then I took out my thickly-bound volume and opened it,
To the first page—the engraving of a plant, an inky old picture.
Was it the truth of that flower, or its implicit falsehoods,
That reached out from the book, dark and dead, to nature?
And the flower looked at its reflection with wonder,
As if trying to grasp this stranger’s great wisdom and skill.
And then a thought arose, flowed through it, sent tremors through
the leaves,
A movement never known before, an inexplicable power of will.
And the grasshopper raised up its trumpet, and nature awoke all at
once
And the sad creature sang praise to the mind and to thought.
And the flower’s likeness stirred in my old book,
So that my heart stirred too and edged toward it.
1936
Capella Yee
Antares, DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPH
Misha Semenov (translator)
The Fish Market
by Nikolay Zabolotsky
Forgetting now the treachery of men,
We enter quite a different realm…
Here the pink sturgeon’s body,
The most magnificent of sturgeons,
Hung limply, arms extended, soggy,
Its tail clinging to a rusty hook.
While under it a chum’s flesh glowed,
The eels, plump sausages, sprawled
In hickory-smoked laziness and splendor,
Sent up plumes of smoke, their knees bowed under,
And in their midst, like a yellow tusk,
The king salmon shone on a dish.
Oh pompous despot of the belly,
The god and ruler of intestines,
Mysterious guide and master of the soul,
Architriclinus of thoughts!
I want you! Give yourself up to me!
Let me gorge on you till I burst!
My mouth is trembling, all ablaze,
My kidneys tremble like Hottentot youths.
My stomach, tense with passion,
Oozes out rivulets of starving juice,
Stretches its bulk out like a dragon,
And then once more contracts with all its might;
Thickening saliva swirls and grumbles in my mouth,
My jaw’s locked tight, teeth grind on teeth…
I want you! Give yourself up to me!
And everywhere the tin cans’ thunder,
The roar of whitefish leaping in their tubs.
And knives, protruding out from wounds,
Jingle and rattle back and forth.
The fish pond burns with underwater light,
Where on the other side of the glass wall
The bream swim, seized by delirium,
Hallucinations, melancholy,
Doubts, jealousy, alarm and doom…
And death above them, like a hawker,
Shows off its bronze harpoon.
The scales read “Pater Noster”
Two weights, peacefully resting on the dish,
Alone determine life’s course,
And the door rings, and the fish thrash,
And gills breathe in reverse.
1928
Fall 2012  73
Ana Istrate
excavation, Satie
you want somebody to bring you a mirror. you have tired
of combing your hair before a stone. that is not to say
you have tired of these ruins, but you want a glass among
the battlements. sometimes a man asks you for your language.
you must give him a word, at least. there is no way else.
you find it easy to brush one word from his face. it is often
heavy on the skin, like wind. that is what you have been missing.
lavender fields. a thicket there. every day it is possible to become
a druid, with six keys hanging from your neck and marble rings,
saying softly, not enough, not enough.
Ana Istrate
marble bust covered at stair bottom
i did not expect canvas:
or wrinkles of a secret
over the whole: torso, chest, head,
eyes, hair, ears, nape—plinth
and a rope to tie it off, knotted
about the two shoulders like a general mark.
that was it—the stigmata that made it
memory’s toy, the companion
of no release. would you have known
what to say to this covered man and to his
accidental clothing. as when entering a chapel
and seeing a dolorous pieta, i held my own
on seeing the faceless mask.
i could write it, but
i couldn’t see.
Fall 2012  75
Isolation, DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPH
Lauren Hui Fen Ling Brown
Ana Istrate
the land keeps you
if it is somewhere, i mean that carved grace
of forty rains, a body staring to
the sky, then figure there might appear
a widowed tree root
whispering the name of a face,
i really don’t know anymore.
suppose summer really came to stay—
a far better gamble than winter—
then each caress is guarantee,
and so each losing. the things i did
or didn’t do are meant to signify
the scars of cheeks, the red
of psalms sung on hunger, the hunger
of a singing one. if it is somewhere,
i mean that carved grace of forty rains,
there is a field where one can lie
awash. but lay it to me. is it something
to be known or nothing.
is it a body or a sky.
Fall 2012  77
Ana Istrate
the midnight darkness of Mr Dagley
was nowhere less than he wanted it to be—
his house was full of morning books
and evening magazines where women winked
their astral faces at his fatal brow—
and instead of a kitchen window, doors—
instead of a curtain, the blinds—
instead of bedroom, Mr Dagley,
wrapping his photo-books in the burnt paper
of yesterday’s fire
Lauren Prastien
Vacation
While on vacation, Harper had developed a habit of running her thumb over
the four lines that partitioned her arm like gradations on a measuring cup. When
she first carved them, her hand had trembled upon drawing the final one and
left a fleck of a cut beneath it. It looked like an exclamation point. Her arm was
punctuated, declarative.
She wrote the whole thing off as a mistake. There had been tests, acronyms
that Harper did not completely understand, the sinking feeling of mortality without
heredity. She had suddenly felt hollow and anatomical. Her body had a new presence,
but an empty one, like a seat-filler at an award show. She was just there, she realized.
Just there until she wasn’t. Gum on a shoe. Air in an oboe. A wayward spark from
some greater flame.
She became, for a week or two, vaguely Buddhist. She considered adopting a
child from a country with locusts. She consulted a second doctor. She got the same
results. She drank Popov out of a paper bag on the Brooklyn Bridge and vomited wet
and heavy into the Hudson.
She was thirty-two and without a lifeline. She was free, accountable to no one,
responsible for no one. And while she was tethered to nothing, she felt adrift.
On a few occasions, she contemplated telling her mother. But, after dialing the
fifth number, she would allow her wrist to go slack and the phone to drop back onto
the receiver with a lethargic clunk. It would be exciting and terribly romantic to have
a secret, she concluded. And so Harper and her family’s usual silence continued in a
dull mechanical hum as she carried the mistake with a smugness that quickly eroded
into salty remorse. She was rubbed raw.
On trains, she smiled and waved at small children in the hope that her
friendliness would somehow profoundly affect them. She wanted to go out knowing
she had done something for someone young and impressionable and full of fresh
germs. For a while, she entertained the idea of becoming a saint or some other holy
fruitless figure.
The drafts she sent to her editor became erratic and strange. Six pages about a
lamp watching a couple have respective affairs. Summer camp from the perspective
Fall 2012  79
of a marshmallow. There was once a lull in contact and then seven stories, all sent at
once, all a page in length, following a flightless bird named Berta.
In college, her writing had shown remarkable promise. “You see the world in
a strange and beautiful way, and, sometimes, you allow us see it that way, too,” a
professor had written at the bottom of one of her assignments. Three months out,
her first short story found its way to print. A novel, featuring the story as a chapter,
emerged a year later and was picked up as a major motion picture. Her name blinked
silently through the credits, but otherwise went unmentioned. Now, the book was
sold with a glossy screen capture from the movie on the cover, rather than the original
drawing of a dead cat sprawled prone across a Listerine background. The new cover,
in the words of her publisher, had more curb appeal.
The decade that followed was peppered with stillborn narratives that tipped
from esoteric into simply incomplete. For a few years, she hosted a seminar at a small
arts conservatory in which her students had maybe seen the movie but had never
paused to read her work. During the fall before the mistake, she had sent off a draft
of a second novel to her old professor, who responded in one word, scribbled on the
title page in black ink: bizarre.
The magic was gone, the carriage a gourd, the horsemen mice, the talent just
luck. Her mind was raked barren. Every single idea she had conceived since she was
six, it seemed, had wandered into her first novel. She’d scraped every piece of viable
material out of her experience.
“I never really fancied you a writer anyway,” her landlady offered one afternoon
across the foyer. When Harper had first moved in, the woman had explained that
she, too, was an author—the kind whose paperbacks could be found next to the
potato chips and magazines at convenience stores and train stations under the name
Lilith Silver. “You just don’t have obsessions. If you really need an outlet, maybe you
should try macramé, stop trying to force yourself to write books.” She, on the other
hand, had just finished her thirteenth novel: My Years Beneath the Sultan.
Jim called. He’d edited her first book and forced her to change the setting over
from New York City to a small town in Iowa because, in his words, there were enough
stories already about young white people living in Manhattan. Back then, he’d been
amused by her peculiarities: her reclusiveness, her uncomfortable sense of humor,
her tendency to drink a bit too much and make inappropriate observations about
the people she kept company with. Now, Harper felt Jim wasn’t sure if the month of
bizarre submissions was part of some strange joke or a sincere cry for help.
“Do you mind telling me what I’m reading?” he spat into the phone, “because I
have no idea what the hell I’m reading right now.”
“It’s an experiment in short fiction. I’m doing Hemingway.”
Jim snorted. “Nobody’s ever done Hemingway like this. Especially not
Hemingway. Unless you mean you’re doing Hemingway by writing a piece of shit
you don’t believe in to get some money.”
“I believe in Berta the flightless bird,” Harper insisted, “She’ll be like Updike’s
Rabbit.”
Jim’s laughter crackled through the receiver. He was one of those people with
a genuinely insincere laugh, a golf course chuckle. “Rabbit’s not an actual rabbit.”
“Well, Berta’s not an actual bird.”
When March rolled around, she rediscovered the snooze button. Staying in bed
until noon became a fabulous prelude to wandering around her apartment in her
underwear. When she was hungry, she pulled on some sweatpants and a coat to
sneak up to the convenience store to buy canned essentials or to the Mexican place
up the block for tacos or huevos rancheros. She showered around four-thirty, was
dressed by five, and was out at the tapas bar by five-thirty.
If she went home with someone, it was usually back to his place. The night an
accountant had plied her with enough tequila to take him to her apartment, she
attributed the clothes, papers, and orange rinds scattered on her floor to a break-in.
Nights alone were spent watching movies like Muriel’s Wedding or House of
Wax while eating multigrain bread covered in Nutella, which quickly turned into
straight spoonfuls of Nutella. She started to develop dishes comprised of only the
things she enjoyed and only the things she could prepare in under half an hour.
Macaroni and bacon Parmesan. Baked bean casserole. Fish taco-themed pizza bagels.
Two eggs, sunny-side up, on a grilled cheese sandwich. Food that oozed and dripped
irreverently when she bit into it.
She considered for a while the possibility of writing a memoir in a vain effort to
create something genetically identical to outlive her. For a week, her walls became
spackled with post-it notes in clusters. Some referred to specific anecdotes, such
as “first short story – Granta – 2002,” and others to random ideas for artistic
significance: “eyes like mustard seeds,” “people to cattle,” “every day was like
Christmas except days with Charlie.” To see her life organized and epitomized only
emphasized its brevity, only drew her back to the mistake.
And so attributing the lines she carved to error and writing them off as a
mistake felt cyclical and complete. It was literary. Her life had become thematically
consistent.
She had made a sincere effort, but by the fourth movement of the knife against
her arm, she had felt something swell up inside her. Woozy and remorseful, she
picked up the phone and explained herself. “You don’t need to make a fuss and
come out here. Just tell me how to make the bleeding stop.”
For the first ten minutes of the drive home, Jim didn’t say much beyond sighing
and muttering the occasional “well, then.” He was wearing the brown suit he’d worn
to her first signing, but Harper figured it was a coincidence. His tie had a coffee stain
that peeked out from the knot he’d attempted to hide it beneath.
He hadn’t spoken in a complete sentence until Harper went to turn the radio on
to fill the tension that settled between and around them like gelatin. She’d read once
Fall 2012  81
that in a pool full of grape Jell-O, people would drown. She didn’t totally understand
the science of it.
“Do you want to tell me what that was about?” Jim blocked her hand with his
own, stretching his fingers across the radio dials and CD slot as if silencing it. “So,
what, were you drinking or something?”
In all the years that Jim had worked for her and for all the times she had
gotten drunk around him, Harper had never slept with him. Once, she had tried—
sloppily—after a dinner. “They say you’re supposed to be touched seven times a day,”
she insisted when he escorted her back from his car to her door that night, “do you
realize that I don’t get touched that much most months? How often don’t people
touch each other?” He had ignored her sentimentality, changed her into her pajamas
and tucked her in. She was surprised he hadn’t gone for anything, but maybe the fact
that he had a wife had something to do with it.
Harper looked up from the dashboard. “Nah.”
“So you really wanted to?”
“If I really wanted to,” Harper began as she peeled his hand from the dials to
turn on the radio. “I wouldn’t have called for help.” She settled back in her seat
as Bruce Springsteen belted out the final chorus of “Dancing in the Dark.” Her
bandaged arm draped across her thigh, and she closed her eyes and dipped her head
back against the headrest, as if meditating.
“So then why did you call?”
Harper shrugged. “Realized it was a Monday. Didn’t want to miss Dance Moms.”
She chuckled. Jim was unamused. “I just made a mistake, is all.”
In light of this, she started seeing a specialist, who referred her to a group.
Wednesday nights were spent around a table covered in peppermints and candles,
looking at worksheets on skills. The first was mindfulness, the second was distress
tolerance, the third, emotion regulation. Every week, she and the other women—
they said it was more common in women—had to write down observations and share
them.
Harper thought most of it was shit.
“I realized I was being judgmental of myself the other day while I was trying
to finish up my pastels,” the art student who always sat to Harper’s right recalled
in one meeting. Every week, she lit one of the candles in the middle of the table
depending on whose scent she identified with that particular evening. That night,
it was pumpkin spice. Harper was not sure how anyone not on mescaline could
personally identify with pumpkin spice. “I need to stop comparing myself to Degas.”
The leader, a chubby woman who wore a lot of thick knits in nursery colors,
seemed to find any kind of personal flaw somehow excusable in a chickenshit
sort of way. Degas girl was “ambitious.” The woman who coped with any sort of
abandonment by sitting down to Amazon.com with a bottle of wine and her credit
card was “in a process of learning self-control.” The paranoia one woman experienced
about her brother and sister-in-law plotting against her was “not an irrational feeling
because it was her own feeling.”
The skills, too, were catered to coddle. They were instructed to focus on one task
at a time: to only eat when eating, to only walk when walking. When attempting this
on a baloney sandwich one afternoon, Harper found that to focus her entire mind
on the sandwich was just unappetizing. They were taught to consider doing laundry
or washing the dishes to be accomplishments because, in the leader’s words, “they
didn’t have to do it.” They were encouraged to take small, personal vacations from
adult life: twenty minutes with their head under a blanket, an evening spent in bed
eating chocolates, an afternoon curled up in a chair slowly chewing on a piece of
milk toast.
“Not to be rude,” Harper interjected when they went over vacations, “but taking
extended hiatuses from the real world is sort of how I wound up here in the first
place.”
The leader set her handout down. “Vacations look different for everyone.
If you’re generally unproductive, a vacation can be a productive thing. What’s
something productive you do for fun that isn’t work?”
Harper shrugged.
“Well, now, I think you need a hobby,” The other woman concluded.
When pressed to think about it, Harper could not remember the last time she’d
had a hobby besides recreational drug use and calling up exes to gripe about feelings.
Writing had become a career. Journaling required a sort of sincere commitment that
she had never been able to muster up, even during her childhood.
She considered something outdoorsy, to combat the Nutella-induced duck fat.
The Kakiat Mountains were just across the Tap and she weighed the benefits of
hiking. It was relatively inexpensive to go about doing, she could be alone if she so
desired, and she wouldn’t really need lessons as long as she stayed on trails.
She took the train to New Jersey and began shopping at an outdoors store. After
picking up the essentials, she took one hike through Kakiat Park and afterwards
continued to visit the store to pick up more equipment she wasn’t going to use: first
aid kits, portable stoves, waterproofing spray. The staff started to recognize her. Her
paper trail, at least, had a hobby.
In the outdoors store in Jersey, she met Gus. He helped her lace up the boots
she was trying on. He had a chinstrap and kept a Red Bull buried in one of the
capacious pockets of his work vest. Up close, he smelled like beef jerky. From a
distance, he appeared Cro-Magnon. Harper pinned him to be about twenty-eight.
“What happened to your arm?” Gus had asked as Harper tried walking back and
forth in the Timberlands he’d put her in.
She traced her thumb down the lines, the white scars raised like speed bumps
to her reply. “I was mauled by a bear. But, it’s okay, I use it to measure things in
cubits,” she bent her elbow and straightened her forearm as if it were a protractor.
Fall 2012  83
“Not really. Kitchen accident.” He looked like the kind of person she would need
to clarify jokes for.
“Gotcha,” he reached into a pocket of his vest and fished out a business card.
“I’m Angus, like the beef. But I prefer Gus.”
Harper took the card and tucked it into her back pocket. She reached out to
shake his hand. “June Harper. I just sort of go by Harper.”
A week later, she took the train back and met him at a pizzeria near his home.
Out of his uniform, he relegated himself to flannel and khakis. Without the bulk of
the vest, Harper noticed that his right side was larger than his left.
“I fish,” he explained, “competitively. I’m a competitive fisherman.”
“I didn’t realize people could compete at that.” Harper bit into a slice and felt
the cheese burn the roof of her mouth.
He liked Kenny Chesney, Brad Paisley, and Toby Keith: the Heinz salsa of
country music. He could talk for hours with zeal and gusto about things like baits
and tackles. He used phrases like “for all intensive purposes” and “irregardless.” He
had not read a book since high school.
He lived in his older sister’s basement. The first time they got intimate, on his
couch, Harper noticed his dog watching them from the corner, slack-mouthed and
invested.
“It’s probably a mistake,” Harper admitted on the phone to Jim, “It’s such a
waste of time. He’s so simple. He’s from Jersey, for God’s sake. He thinks Jonathan
Franzen is a brand of wine.”
She could hear Jim wince through the phone. “That might be all right, though.
Maybe he’s not a waste of time, maybe you need simple right now.”
“I guess it’ll kind of be like a vacation.”
“There you go.”
And so Harper found a hobby. She took a day before their dates at her place
to pick up her floor and cram it into a garbage bag to make her home presentable.
After Gus would leave, she preserved the encounter. The sheets stayed on the bed,
newspapers and clothing piled on the floor over time like offerings until the day
came that he would return.
She became comfortable. She was on vacation, she thought to herself, she had
found a big slice of milk toast, she had put her head under the covers. She could
retreat from the real world into a world where “irregardless” was a word and people
didn’t have to think too hard or too much or too often or about anything too heavy.
“You know,” Gus said one day in bed, “when I think of you, in my head, I think
of you as my girlfriend.”
Harper checked her watch. “Okay.”
It had been an acknowledgement instead of consent, but Harper knew Gus had
read it differently. And while he forgot to introduce her in social situations, leaving
her to smile uncomfortably beside him like an escort, she had become his partner.
She was suddenly attached. The vacation was extended.
He hated her writing. It had too many metaphors. It was too sad. It made
him feel unclean. He wanted to know why she didn’t write about something more
uplifting. He was upset that she never wrote about him. Harper amused herself with
the fact that in her memoir, he would probably get about a paragraph.
“I’ve been thinking maybe I should write something,” Gus said one night
after suggesting that perhaps Harper’s new protagonist needed a more functional
relationship. “Maybe about my parents’ divorce. I think that’s new. I think people
would like to hear about that.”
It was during moments like these that Harper could step outside of her body
and laugh at the cruel joke she had been playing on herself for months.
Saturdays, they had dinner in New Jersey with his sister and her kids. Gus’s sister
worked for a rehabilitation center providing counseling and Harper sat, in smug
amusement, as she glided through their evenings without revealing the termites in
her foundation. Sometimes, she fantasized that his sister would suddenly figure out
something was horribly wrong, lean across the table, and shout out a diagnosis.
But, somehow, Harper passed. She was sane, maybe a little quirky, but even.
She washed dishes and made idle conversation. She started being included in family
photos. She wore a lot of skirts and pashmina, crocheted hats, and long cardigans
to cover the fact that her ulnar artery had been chopped to pieces like the “Join, or
Die” snake. She gave serious consideration to the art of macramé. Her writing began
to include more moral lessons and fewer metaphors. She felt like she was sinking
into something, like she was drowning in grape Jell-O.
“I was thinking,” Gus said over dinner one day, “if we wanted to have children
or something . . .”
Harper set her fork down. “I can’t have children.” She cleared her throat, “I
found out earlier this year. I had a pregnancy scare and then my doctor said that
I’d actually never had to worry about that. I don’t know; it’s got to do with all these
hormones.”
Gus was silent for a moment before he exclaimed, “Well, I wish you would have
let me know this sooner. Could’ve bought a freaking canoe with all the money on
condoms . . .”
It was then that Harper realized that she could not spend her whole life on
vacation eating milk toast. Eventually, the bill comes, the scale tips, the seasons
change. The real world you escaped recedes into the horizon until vacation becomes
reality, with all its weight and pulleys.
The next morning Gus’s sister drove Harper to the train station to return to the
city for a talk she’d been asked to introduce another one of Jim’s writers at. She had
not read the book yet; she hadn’t even read the paper in weeks. Harper had to ask
for a twenty to get her ticket when the machine refused her card.
“Keep the change,” Gus’s sister insisted, “just use it to buy your next ticket here.”
Fall 2012  85
Harper knew she would not be back; she’d stayed too long at the fair. On
the ride back into the city, she ran her thumb over the four lines on her arm.
Speed bumps. Then an exclamation point. Things were punctuated, declarative.
End of paragraph.
Untitled, BLACK AND WHITE FILM
Jocelyn Chuang
Jessica Ma
Love
It stalks you as you push through airport terminals,
pick out strawberries at the market,
sprint on the treadmill – a leopard slinking
beneath the splinters of your bedroom floorboards.
You try to leash it to the fence, tell it stay;
quell it with honeyed rhetoric; feed it
blueberry muffins; full-auto fire at it; bite it
with your tongue; thrust
the muzzle of your pistol deep
down into its throat,
rubbing molten shrapnel against lungs –
anything to strangle the air out of it,
wrestle it back into Pandora’s box,
fold it – gently – into the papery creases of your mind.
Last night I tried the anesthesia.
But the oil rose and spilled over
and the spotted beast dragged itself
out of the gilt safe and
the corners of my eyes kept shrieking
like a gallon of sharks.
Dixon Li
Portrait of the Farm as a Young Poem
Framing words is often constraining, at once
a trimming, and a plotting, like gardening: planting
something in the ground so it might lie
safe and full. A garden its own scribe
writing neat rows of corn, scripts
growing out and in like a circle.
The ears of scripts listen and encircle
the frame of the garden. Once
seeds of thoughts, they record transcripts
of movement and thinking, dwelling and implanting.
The revolutions of day inscribe
a certain meaning to the words that lie
like rows of corn in the garden. They imply
that the seasons of reaping and reading, are a circle
in which one can even describe
the sound of seconds, dripping. Once,
the Mayans reserved planting
maize for royalty, rituals as manuscripts
of genesis. To read manuscripts
one must suspend looking, eating, living, the words supply
a steady stream of knowing, supplanting
the worlds outside the garden. Impenetrable circle
of “once
upon a time” a scribe
Fall 2012  89
did not exist and did not scribe
this story (which has no scripts);
everything is organic. And just this once,
the artifice of fiction doesn’t lie:
man came from a maize crop circle,
the same crops in which one, in planting,
might see birthing and the interplanting
of autobiography. To describe
is to use sayings in a circle
outside of yourself, squeezing immensity to fit scripts,
drips of words slipped out in reply,
everybody thinking all at once.
Being human is a circle of scripts
planting history and becoming its own scribe.
Compression is the lie of becoming everything at once.
Evan Coles
Still
Long after the pines
shivered in the midnight mind
and the passersby, sojurners
of cool,
melted the permafrost
in gin,
stilling the sounds
of cracking ice,
a short time after
the roads came in,
we contemplated
the populated night,
the loneliness,
drunk and sitting on
the level
once-were-hills
flicking burning
papers from our
fingers
tasting the seed
and the grit,
and I asked the holler questions of theosophy.
What have they seen that we haven’t?
What might we know because of them?
Fall 2012  91
It replied,
“What have they seen that we haven’t?”
“What might we know because of them?”
Untitled, BLACK AND WHITE FILM
Jocelyn Chuang
TZ Horton
song to suburbia
getting to know you, speaking in silence
those nights (mornings), the hum of your
rough roads beneath the wheels of my car,
crude hope exuding from the neon orange
light of the liquor shop. Your laconic smile,
the curves of the tollway, an amber glow.
And the days—your wide, sun-drenched streets,
asphalt, the color of the worn-down denim of my
jeans; settling into the warmth of the rugose
faux-leather seat in my humble Jetta—
the regular miracle that I-35 leads to LBJ
to the Dallas North Tollway, to her; is it you,
perhaps, that I love more—lonely together?
Jiayan Yu
Verbatim
Your hands are still those of a scholar.
They are spare and worn
and cup a novel as if it were a vase.
I remember the man in my mother’s photo album—
tall, lean, dark-eyed. A world-weary gentleman
who drinks poetry like water from clear, deep pools.
In your sleep you breathe a thousand stories—
the sharp intake, the gust of wind that flings me
into a childhood of dizzying hutongs and revolutions,
the waning light of paper lanterns, the crackled cry
of rebels, the stark eruption of firecrackers
against vast, starless nights
—all of it a patchwork of glances and shimmers gleaned
from bedtime stories and half-forgotten hymns.
What parts of yourself have you surrendered?
Your father’s quiet laughter? The colors
of your new bride’s bouquet?
And more: your mother’s scarred hands.
Two wars. Every daughter
you wept and prayed over.
All the words you ever wrote.
When will the echoes of your poetry
slip from your lips to remind you
of all that you have lost?
When will you unfold your trembling hands,
Fall 2012  95
stretch out each gnarled finger
and show me their tips,
still stained by red-book dye?
Untitled, INK
Kathryn Rose

Contributors
Genevieve Bentz ’13 is a senior in the English and European Cultural Studies departments from Stonington, CT. She paints in acrylic and pastel.
Michael Brashear ’15 is from Somerset, Kentucky. He can’t stop laughing and is
generally disliked for not letting anyone in on the joke.
Evan Coles ’15 is an expectant religion major from both Princeton, NJ and San
Francisco, CA. He has a penchant for film and poetry. One day he wants to be a
dangerous person and not just dream in those dusty recesses.
Daniel Feinberg ’13 is studying in the Woodrow Wilson School with a certificate in
Information Technology and Society from Marlboro, New Jersey. A lifelong gamer,
he has aspired to both share and legitimize his past experiences through his writing.
The worlds and stories of video games can provide just as rich a background as those
of classic literature. He is also the artistic director of Quipfire! Improv Comedy, proving he does get out sometimes.
Vicky Gan ’13 is majoring in history and pursuing a certificate in American Studies.
She is from Baltimore, Maryland, but likes to pretend she is a New Yorker.
Carter Greenbaum ’12 is from Newport Beach, California. He enjoys rowing, running, the beach, and backpacking across Europe. These poems come from his collection, Dear Hunter.
TZ Horton ’15 proudly hails from Dallas in the great nation of Texas. There he cultivates the land and drinks diabetes-inducing sweet tea. Horton plays the didjeridu
and vuvuzela at professional caliber. Also, you know he likes his chicken fried, a cold
beer on a Friday night, a pair of jeans that fit just right, and the radio up.
Ana Istrate ’13 has one year left of this entire collegiate experiment, but, honestly,
there are far too many confounding variables for it to be considered thesis-worthy.
Still, she assures you none of the results have been falsified. Ana likes crows and
microorganisms. She would also like to take a moment to remind you that life is
beautiful.
Natasha Japanwala ’14 is from Karachi, Pakistan. She is currently studying abroad in
London, one of many cities she will always be desperately in love with.
Fall 2012  99
Ben Koons ’15 is from the weird heart, Austin, of the greatest state, Texas. He is
considering a major in philosophy or classics. He is active in Princeton Evangelical
Fellowship and the Anscombe Society.
Alexander Leaf ’13 is a mathematics major, and also does computer science, music,
and coffee drinking. He enjoys writing poetry, because math papers don’t rhyme.
Dixon Li ’14 is from Salt Lake City, Utah and loves writing about cats and writing
about cats.
Jonathan Lin ’13 is in the East Asian Studies department and from Morris Plains,
New Jersey. He likes playing Ultimate Frisbee, zoning out, and thinking about continental philosophy. According to the Myers-Briggs personality test, he is an INTP.
Lizzie Martin ’14 is from North Carolina. “Too Small Yet” is based on her experiences as a volunteer at an orphanage in northern India.
Lauren Prastien ’13 is a native New Jerseyian majoring in Anthropology with certificates in Theater and Creative Writing. She is involved with Princeton Faith and
Action, Let’s Talk Sex, and Real Action for Reproductive Rights. She has comically
small hands.
Natalie Scholl ’13 is in the Classics department and from the land of lakes and
extreme temperature changes: Minnesota. She enjoys singing folksy songs as she meanders down forest lanes in the dappled sun, staring, and reading English comedies
out loud.
Misha Semenov ’15 is an architecture major from San Francisco pursuing a certificate in literary translation. He especially loves translating all sorts of crazy, gory,
and beautiful poetry and prose from Russian to English. And if he doesn’t say so
himself, there’s definitely something fishy about his submissions for this issue of the
Review . . .
Maia ten Brink ’13 hails from Cape Cod, Massachusetts. She writes and sciences.
Jiayan Yu ’15 is a prospective Woodrow Wilson major. In her spare time, she plays
foosball and mopes over Downton Abbey. She is also from New Jersey, and may
therefore make fun of New Jersey. You may not.
Editorial Staff
Sean Paul Ashley ’13 is a junior from Kingston, Jamaica. He likes Pablo Neruda,
Samuel L. Jackson, Miles Davis, long walks on the beach, long-stem roses, fast cars,
slow horses, and is a TI savage.
Phway Aye ’15 is a freshman from Palmerston North, New Zealand. She enjoys
quoting Anchorman, Pinteresting, and reading Murakami. She is currently the
proud owner of four healthy hobbits—a certain Samwise Gamgee included—each of
whom will be up for adoption in the upcoming months. Please contact the Nass Lit
staff if interested.
Emma Boettcher ’14 is a sophomore from Paoli, PA. An English major, she enjoys
reading everything from Shakespeare to Jeopardy! transcripts.
Matthew Brailas ’14 see Contributors.
John Michael Colón ’15 is a freshman from New Jersey, whose diet at Princeton
has consisted largely of books and Small World Coffee. He has a preference for the
conversation of freaks and dead authors but can make an exception for anybody who
can find him wandering the streets at dawn, starving hysterical naked.
Lolita De Palma ’14 is concentrating in history. She enjoys going on long meaningless
rants and reading badly-written romance novels. She is also a senior writer for The
Daily Princetonian.
Jared Garland ’15 is from Lexington, Massachusetts, and he carries a pistol in one
hand and a pen in the other. When he’s not writing or baking cakes, you can bet
he’s breaking the law.
Glenn Fisher ’15 is a freshman from Bridgewater, New Jersey. If he’s not studying
or wreaking havoc with the Princeton University Band, you can probably find him
banging away on a drum in Woolworth.
Margaret Fox ’13 is a junior concentrating in African history and creative writing.
Her favorite pastimes include people-watching out her fourth floor window and
reading poetry she doesn’t understand. Margaret is an editor for Revisions magazine,
as well as an active member of Princeton Evangelical Fellowship and Kindred Spirit
A Capella.
Fall 2012  101
Ben Goldman ’15 is a freshman from South Brunswick, New Jersey. He eats books
three times a day and drinks at least eight glasses of ink for a balanced diet.
Diana Goodman ’13 is trapped in a binge of reading murder mysteries. Help!
Michael Granovetter ’15 is a freshman from New Jersey, who plans to study
chemistry, applied math, and neuroscience. Sometimes he likes to take a break from
formulas and computations, and so he writes.
Greer Hanshaw ’13 is a junior from Brooklyn, New York. He enjoys the internet,
to which he devotes much of his time, verbose poetry, as epitomized by Poe’s “The
Raven,” open roads and chopped salads.
TZ Horton ’15 see Contributors.
Katie Horvath ’15 is from Colorado, and she is passionate about writing, reading,
español, travel, climbing, the great state of Colorado, making silver jewelry,
anthropology, talking, talking with her hands, being passionate . . . You get the
picture.
Tyler House ’15 is a freshman from Duck, North Carolina thinking about having
a major. When he’s not criticizing other people’s writing, he enjoys watching 30
Rock, the GOP debates, and other well-written comedies with a strong female lead.
Margaret Hua ’15 is a freshman who enjoys reading, writing, listening to music,
photography, yoga and singing. (She wishes she sounded more interesting as well,
but alas . . . ) She is also an expert procrastinator and lazy butt extraordinaire.
Ana Istrate ’13 see Contributors.
Natasha Japanwala ’14 see Contributors.
Ben Koons ’15 see Contributors.
Cameron Langford ’15 is a coffee drinker, list maker, and window-seat connoisseur
from the bustling metropolis of Davidson, North Carolina. As a freshman, she is
very much undecided on her major and has been perhaps a bit too liberal with her
liberal arts education. In her spare time, she binge orders books from Amazon and
prays for the return of Arrested Development.
Isabelle Laurenzi ’15 is a freshman wandering the humanities and is therefore
often lost under a mountainous pile of books. It’s a good place to be lost.
Jonathan Lin ’13 see Contributors.
Lizzie Martin ’14 see Contributors.
Diane Manry ’14 is majoring in molecular biology, and she tries to stave off majorinduced mental instability with a healthy dose of (extracurricular) reading.
Erin McDonough ’14 is concentrating in English. Whenever she has the chance,
she drags friends and strangers alike into art museums and forces art appreciation
upon them, while grimacing at people who use flash photography.
Pallavi Mishra ’15 see Contributors.
Mirabella Mitchell ’13 is a junior majoring in English who hopes to obtain a creative
writing certificate. She tries to fool people into thinking she isn’t from New Jersey by
saying she lives in “the Philadelphia area.”
David Paulk ’15 is from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He lives in a fish tank with the
rest of the varsity swim team, although he occasionally comes out of the water to
attend engineering classes and to visit his friends in Holder Hall. As could be easily
predicted, he spent his summer surrounded by water, mapping the seagrass around
Samos, Greece.
Misha Semenov ’15 see Contributors.
Dipika Sen ’13 is a junior in the Economics department pursuing a certificate in
Sustainable Energy. She is from New York City and always considers the lobster.
Natalie Scholl ’13 see Contributors.
Elizabeth Shoenfelt ’13 is a geosciences major who likes to write poems about
science sometimes (among other things too!).
Stephanie Tam ’13 is concentrating in English, and focusing on the Nassau Literary
Review. She is a fan of psychology, theology, and people, among many other things.
And of course, she likes to write.
Maia ten Brink ’13 see Contributors.
Fall 2012  103
Sam Watters ’15 is from Rome, Georgia, and he is torn between history, politics,
Near Eastern Studies, and the Woodrow Wilson School. He likes antique books,
hats shaped like animals, and owls. Despite saying the word “cat” frequently as an
interjection, he strongly prefers dogs.
Albertine Wang ’14 is in the English department and vicariously lives through the
English people. In almost every way possible.
Helen Yao ’15 is from Staten Island, New York, and she is concentrating in chemical
and biological animals. Her favorite pastimes are reading, writing, and occasionally
reading and writing.

The Nassau Literary Review relies on the generosity of our supporters. If you
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Fall 2012 issue - Nassau Literary Review

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