The Sketchbook

Spring 2014St. Anthony Hall

The Sketchbook

Spring 2014St. Anthony Hall

2

Here we are, again. At the end and the beginning. I’ve missed you. I’ll miss this. This is for you, Kappa. For all of you; for all you’ve done; for all you will do. For all you are and all you say you are. For all you think you are and all you know you aren’t. Consider this a love letter; paper and ink like stone arches, like warmth. This is the castle I’ve built for us. Please do come in.

Sara Overstreet, K’13Co-Editor

Kappa has taught me a lot this year about how to be human. How to trust, how to think, how to articulate those thoughts, how to empathize, how to cooperate, how to be complex and how to appreciate complexity. Sadly, I am still not wise enough to impart the same crucial lessons to you, dear reader. So, I figured I would do the next best thing - compile a collection of Kappa’s lovely insights and sentiments and pass it on to you, so you too may enjoy what has been my privilege to enjoy for the last year. Here’s hoping you learn something new.

Nick Anderson, K’13Co-Editor

3

Didyma, Temple of Apollo

Amtrak Northeast Regional 86

Portici

Desert Senses - 5 Haikus

I Am the Walking Rain

Wild Flower

Didyma, Temple of Apollo

Gambling It All - The Story of Lilah Hart

Stereo Paint

Column Chromatography

Staying In

Prose and Cons

STP

Explain

Stop

Was Loved

Delirium @ 5 a.m.

The Weekend in 4 Collages

Staff Credits (The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past)

Why Birds Fly South

Catullus CI - Catullus 101

On the Nature of Optimism

Jordan

Inhale

The Useless Ruminations, Vol. 1

Untitled

Table of ContentsLaura Leddy

Tariq Adely

Kat Boorstein

Dylan Felt

Dylan Felt

Dylan Felt

Laura Leddy

Jessica Terry

Alexandra Urban

David Reich

Hollis Jenkins

Simon Henriques

Dana Schwartz

Max Ladow

Max Ladow

Nick Morley

Mary Woodard

Ernesto Renda

Paul Backus

Nick Anderson

Eleanor Walsh

Maya Manning

Rachel Wolf

Sara Overstreet

Benjamin Barsky

Ari Beller

Cover

4

5

6

7

7

8

9

12

12

13

14

14

16

17

18

23

23

24

27

29

30

31

32

33

34

4

In the City of Brotherly Love,warmth is what we’re all about.The air smells with ironfrom the factory. We raised the highway to crownthe collision & to watch thelive wires crossing. _ _ _ _ _

Your axiom - that time is the onlylimit – is half accurate. We point tothe city, to the iron & metal lines trespassing the air around you, to the oil black patches & locust red smellsand we watch the children liveout a contemporary drama. _ _ _ _ _

It’s not easy to watchcontemporary drama. location: here, city, factoryElenore (15), Alma (7), Locust (6)1000 highway childrentrespassing with that crossing guard,live wire collision,the state was accurate & advanced only once, smell of oil,iron, & metal from air.

No shock we’re brotherly around youyou’re all about love& one fire saleavailable outletblack, red patch linesdeliver warmthcheck out nowhalf crownunder limit Axiom: time is order.Point raised: We do what’s what.Deal?

Amtrak: Northeast Regional 86 - March 28th 2014 Tariq Adely, K’11

A set of poems based on Oulipian constraints, the following poems only utilize words seen from the window of an Am-trak train. They are a collection of billboard snippets, train track graffiti, and faded traffic signs. The first two pieces in the series are created using a selection of words from the journey while the final poem utilizes all the words and phrases collected on the trip from Wilmington, DE to Providence, RI. Words are not used more than the times they appeared and the poems have only been supplemented with basic punctuation (periods, colons, parentheticals, etc.).

5

PorticiKat Boorstein, K’13

The portici stretch on for many miles in Bologna, more than anywhere else in the world. 900 years ago, one by one, porticos began to stretch their stony roofs out over the unpaved footpaths running alongside the city’s rising structures and plant their columns firmly in the dust, multiplying over centuries until they had created a might yet permeable boundary between that which wheels beside them and those who walk below. Some are wide enough for groups of 10 to stroll side-by-side, while others necessitate a traffic pattern that is almost single-file, but everywhere, they guar-antee that no Bolognese head, on that one day a month that it happens to drizzle, will be touched by the rain. These structures would be beautiful, except that all of them but those in the most affluent city center shopping district have become chipped of their stone and marble cobbling and detailed with poorly crafted graffiti. Perhaps all of the money was spent centuries ago on the building of these marvels, and now it has run out when the time has come for renovation. Of those who whizz by the portici each day on their daily commute, a vast number are riders of that practical and devilish vrooming steed, the Vespa. Bolognese professionals who ride Vespas travel quickly, but they play by the rules of the law, fastening buckles and keeping their hair close-cropped in order avoid helmet-hair in the workplace. The real traffic offenders, however, keep their locks long so they will stream back from beneath their helmets, accentuating the speed at which they can, and will, run you over if you stumble a step too far off the curb of the portico. Despite the impressively ample pedestrian street light signage provided by the city, only the most astute Bolognesi have figured out how to begin crossing the street just before the “walk” light appears, that age-old, universal, city-slicker premonition. That’s because the traffic lights meant for cars are blocked on each side by black blinders, effectively preventing pedestrians from seeing them change – forcing everyone to trust in the sturdy system and stay in their proper place. Now that is urban planning at its finest. Bolognese bicyclists (of whom there must be thousands) have won the privilege of riding in the streets; yet when they do, they seem to think that they are allowed to ignore all stoplights, lane demarcations, and other basic traffic signals. Motor vehicle accidents may be the most dangerous roadway peril in Bologna, but it is difficult to believe that reckless bicycle crashes are not the most common. Nevertheless, the cycles are a delight to see, typically quaint, brightly painted, with fresh market groceries or pairs of small dogs perched charmingly in their oversized wicker baskets. A delightful number of Bolognese dogs can always be seen prancing the streets with their well-disciplined owners. These curly-eared puppies brave the weather each day without fail (except in case of rain), their tails ever wagging, to fill the streets with that delightful promenade which cre-ates waves of Bolognese smiles as its members pass. All in the line of duty. Bolognesi are at their most pleasant in the early morning, from approximately 7 to 9 am. If a person chooses this interval to pick up his daily croissant for breakfast, the restaurant’s owner will wave “ciao” to him, and the brunette behind the counter will always provide service with a smile. The most aggressive panhandlers will not yet have awoken from their odd-hour slumber, and pe-destrians, though never pleasant, may move over on the sidewalk if he makes it clear that he really needs to pass. At 9, as businesspeople finish their commutes and the rush of the tourist day begins, many Bolognesi trade their smiles for masks of gruff indifference that bear striking resemblance to the chipped portici floors beneath their feet. This process of urban decay occurs each afternoon

6

without fail, but unlike the city’s structures, its people are rebuilt again by morning. In the south of Bologna, just outside of the old city walls, lie “the hills,” stunning natural nesting points in which graffittied walls give way to the comfortable drives and flower gardens of Bologna’s affluent class. On the map, the transition between the two areas seems quite distinct, as if the walls, when they were built, had conquered the land and ordered the hills to stop rolling at their feet. In reality, however, now that the walls have been felled and replaced with highways, the transition is almost undetectably gradual – you have only to wander a little too far south of your destination and you will find yourself, hours later, wondering how you didn’t reach the top of that hill 20 feet ago where you thought it would be. Those who embark on the pilgrimage through the city’s longest portico to reach the top of the tallest hill, however, will find the Sanctuary of the Blessed Virgin. This basilica was built as a splendid house for the city’s paint-and-canvas guardian, the Madonna di San Luca, who stands gentle watch over Bologna, her humble millennium-old pa-tron. Those who gaze off the sanctuary’s steps and over the portico will be rewarded with a far-off glimpse of a city so spectacular that it seems infinitely worth guarding.

TasteThe desert is aBlanket salty water willNever quench your thirst

SmellCracked throat dry tinglesThe air is heavy with dustAnd will not relent

SightDefinitions ofLines and shadows to projectAngles of the sun

TouchLet the sand collapseBeneath my fingers, I pushThrough the red-gold cloud

SoundA far distant humThe earth slowly shifts and sighsAnd falls back to sleep

Desert Senses: Five HaikusDylan Felt, K’13

7

I know the rains will come to walkwhen the house begins to smelllike riverbanks in the late afternoon;when the sky is filledwith the sound of arroyos,and the golden greyof lonely clouds

but my father, who has seen the rainmore times that Iknows it will begin to walkwhen he goes outsideto water the garden

when I was young, I thoughthis joke was so funny thatI still go outside to laughwhen I see walking rains –to soak myselfin the smell of riverbanks,in the sound of arroyos,in the golden grey of lonely cloudsthat are come and gone so quickly thatI forgetwhat it was liketo live at home.

I am theWalking Rain

The rose bloomed slowly over cattle fields during the day, butby night, when it believed we were sleeping it thought to teach us all that love burned bright lights in the forest.

named Encebado for where it grew by the daytime, 4th of Julyits petals gave the backdrop to Russian Olive trees.

Our ocean is sage brush brittle yet beautiful and the rose, jealous took that beauty for its ownas it floated towards usthrough the waves.

Take the rose, you brown-fog summer days.My skin is too dryto grow over what you left me, your juniper scars.

Dylan Felt, K’13

Wildflower

8

Laura Leddy, K’10

Aydin Province,Turkey

Didyma,Temple of Apollo

9

Lilah Hart, professional card shark, received her first card at age sixteen. “It was an ideal card for me,” she told me. “A High Rate of Card Receival. Honestly, it was a dream come true.” Unsurprisingly, Lilah turned the card in. She decided selling or playing the card wasn’t quite as valuable as the investment it offered. Not long afterward, she began finding cards in all kinds of nooks in her life. At least once a month, and often more frequently, a little wooden rectangle with careful wording would sneak into Lilah’s every day routine. “I was so happy,” she reminisced. “My parents are both Nantek sharks. They have a crazy collection. When I was little, there were framed cards in every room of the house, some in weird languages, some dating back to the 1500’s. It was so nice to finally have cards of my own. To join the family business, you know, but without relying on my parents’ cards.” Joshua and Morgan Hart, Lilah’s parents, have one of the most extensive card collections of any private household. Their trophies are displayed throughout their humble suburban home in San Diego. They have spent their whole lives dealing in cards. Their rarest antique is Thy Herd Increased by Two, estimated to have appeared circa 1512. Cards are a part of life for everyone. There are few people who don’t dream of finding the perfect card on their pillow after a long day, of the ease and instant gratification a card can bring. But for card sharks, cards are not a part of life. They are life. “I grew up living and breathing cards,” Lilah said. “There was no, ‘You could be a lawyer or an en-gineer.’ There was just cards.” Lilah was always encouraged to save cards rather that sell them or use them. She only ever turned in two cards when she was young, A Delicious Feast and A Sunny Day. But she says now that it was proba-bly a mistake. “Cards are just more useful as part of a deck,” she explained. “Or as goods to sell. The card doesn’t create the feast or the sun, it just aligns things so that the feast or the sun happens. My ‘Delicious Feast’ turned out to be a meal my mom ordered from my favorite restaurant. It’s not like it appeared out of nowhere. It came into my life naturally. That’s how the cards work. But people want what they want now, which is why most cards get turned in.” Lilah had a full deck of her own cards by the time she was 18 and legally allowed to gamble cards in Nantek. She started out in small gambling corners, measuring her deck against local competitors’ stacks at the Tek tables. While her cards were not especially highly rated, her skill in the game helped her get far. Nantek, perhaps the oldest game in the world, pits one deck of cards against another. Naek Unit-ed has standardized the rules nationally and sets the ratings that reflect the rarity and value of each card. Players may only have up to fifteen cards in their decks. The cards used for the game are paper represen-tations of the cards owned by the player, which are submitted to the dealer to be held. The point of the game is eliminate your opponent’s cards while leaving some left for yourself. Each round, a player receives points equivalent to the sum of the ratings of her leftover cards. The first player to 200 points wins the game. “Doubles and triples are best at eliminating tough cards,” Lilah said. “A double of ‘A Sunny Day’ will beat a single of any other card, even a really rare one. But any cards you can find doubles of are pretty low rating, and higher ratings beat lower ones. And some cards work in important combinations. You gotta

Gambling It All: The Story of Lilah HartKendra Gilhooey

10know the combinations to figure out what tricks your opponent will be using.” “The ratings change over time, too,” she added. “If a card gets more common, Naek sets the rating lower, meaning you could be a pro player and have your whole deck devalued in a single night. You gotta invest in the cards that will be rare for a long time.” When gambling is involved, the winning player often receives the two worst cards or the second best card of her opponent. In high stakes games, the best card of the deck is put on the line. Lilah opted out of going to college and went straight into professional gambling. She sold cards she had won from Nantek to pay for expenses. “I was making enough as it was without a college degree. And I loved it, loved the risk of the game, loved not knowing which of my cards I would draw next. At one point, I bet my best three cards against An Ideal Kiss, and I won. Once you have a valuable card like that, you can get into real games.”There is always risk, though, Lilah clarified, which is why she recommends always keeping a few good cards out of the game as backups in case you face a string of losses. By the time Lilah was 22, she was a well-known card shark. But that wasn’t enough for the gam-bling prodigy. She wanted to play a truly high stakes game, to get another professional across the table. She met some famous sharks such as Rick Martinez and Wilma “Billie” Walker. She wanted to play against her heroes, but she didn’t have the right cards. “You can’t play against a real shark without a great card. Something like A Beautiful New House or Somewhat Lasting Contentment. Something real.” Lilah found a local auction for A Dream Job, a highly sought after card. She bid almost her whole collection but lost the auction to a wealthy collector. “I felt stuck, like I had all these cards and all these strategies but I couldn’t break the final barrier into the real card world. I tried to get an investor, but I was considered too young and risky.” Then Lilah’s whole world changed. One night after a full day at the Tek tables, Lilah arrived home to find a card she didn’t know existed. Sitting on her dining room table was a rectangle of wood that would change her life forever. It read, Love. Lilah had found the jackpot of the card world. The news got out to the card community, and sud-denly this young shark had reporters tripping over themselves to get an interview, to find out what she was going to do with an amazing card like that. “It was all, ‘Are you going to use it? Are you going to sell it?’ No one thought for a minute I would gamble with that kind of card. I had insane cash offers for it, and oh, I was tempted. I was tempted.” But Lilah chose not to sell the card. She chose not to use it either. “It was too vague,” Lilah explained. “People get all jazzed up over nothing sometimes. The cards are never specific, and ‘Love’ could have meant anything from a loving relationship to a loving puppy. The biggest risk would have been to turn that card in. There was no way.” Lilah went on to mention that even had the card given her true love, that it would not create an individual. “The cards don’t alter the world. They just help things along, you know? I figured, if love is out there for me, it’s out there already. If turning in the card means the person of my dreams pops into my life, then they already exist. I didn’t think I needed a card to find that person.” Instead, Lilah wanted to become one of the greats. She wanted to compete with the best of the best and make her name in the shark world, even if it meant risking her greatest possession. “At the end of the day, I’m a gambler!” she told me, laughing. Lilah arranged her highest stakes game ever, playing against another young shark, Ethan “Fry Cook” Cooper, 28, from Chicago. “Ethan was like, way over my head. He’d been playing real games since he was twelve.”Cooper made a name for himself before he was old enough to gamble legally. He left an abusive home

11at the age of 15 and worked as a cook in a local diner to pay for rent and food, hence the nickname “Fry Cook”. During weekend nights, he would sneak into a gambling corner nearby to play Nantek. “He was unstoppable,” Neal Kirby, 42, an old friend of Cooper told me. “When I saw this scrawny little kid taking down some tough competitors without batting an eye, I knew I had found something spe-cial. I invested in him when he turned 18, bought him some great cards and paid a few months’ rent. My investment paid off within a year. ” Lilah flew to Chicago to meet Cooper in a duel. She spent a few days warming up in low stakes games and researching her opponent. Then she and Cooper squared off over a Tek table. “I was cocky,” Lilah admitted. “I had lost so few games, and I thought I had Cooper’s deck figured out. But he changed it up on me. Six new cards in his deck. He took a huge risk. He wanted my card real bad.” Cooper had also researched Lilah’s deck and strategy, so none of her tricks caught him off guard. The game was close, but in the end, Cooper took it. “I was shell shocked,” Lilah reported. “It was like, what just happened? I try my first high stakes game, and I lose right out the door. I couldn’t believe it.” Afterward came the turnover. The dealer gave back the two decks, but Lilah’s Love card went to Cooper. But Cooper had no intention of adding the invaluable card to his deck. “He used it right then and there, right in front of me! Just lifted his hand and turned it in. Just like that. The most valuable card I’ve ever seen, and it’s gone.” Cooper didn’t leave it at that. He invited Lilah to stay in Chicago for a tournament, and offered to cover her expenses. “I wasn’t going to argue,” she said, shrugging. “Chicago has some killer card corners.” The tournament was medium stakes, and Cooper had to put away his best cards to compete. The maximum rating for a card in a medium stakes game is 16. By the end, Lilah placed second in the tourna-ment, while Cooper placed fourth. “Of course I could beat him when it didn’t count,” she laughed. “But the tournament wasn’t just a silly fun time. I got really close to Ethan. He’s been through a lot, and I think he’s wiser for it. We hit it off so well, and I just kept extending my trip after the tourna-ment.” When Lilah finally returned to San Diego, Cooper went with her. Two months later, they were living together in an apartment not far from the best Nantek spots. “It just felt right from the beginning,” she told me, smiling. “I like to say he was the easiest bet I ever made.” Lilah Hart and Ethan Cooper are to be married next spring. They have decided that stakes-free Nantek games will be a central part of their reception. “I think it’s funny,” Lilah told me. “In a way, the card did bring me love. But not because I used it. And not because he used it, either. I’m not sure the card did anything. We’d already met. Maybe it just helped us see what was already there.”

Kendra Gilhooey has been writing for the San Diego Informer for over three years. She has written features on such local celebrities as Isabella Vazquez and Ronald Kemp.

Written by Jessica Terry, K’11

12

flaming circus city popping dropslopsidedly dancing in the microscopic wind merge into the had-been isolation an apex concealed of unforeseen adventure colors dazed marble balloons twirl into streamers boiled not curdledswirling summersaults flying orbs bouncing suspended fleeing home

Stereo PaintAlexandra Urban, K’12

Column ChromatographyDavid Reich, K’14

I shredded smooth the story into shards of ink and paper,Dusty powdery scraps,Dissolved them in hexanes,Poured them through a thin glass tube, syringe-like, warm, packed dense with my retinas and the essential dregs of my cortex.I discarded as waste the solvent,And saw the fractions clear.

13

G G/F# emI don’t claim to be perfect A7 C D GBut just this once I’ll sing a song and hear applause and think I deserve it G/F# emI’m full up on bein’ empty A7 C D Allow me to present me as I’m staring at the wall and my muse ain’t callin F CAll in all i’m in the same place I’ve always been A7 C DJust waiting on the pavement to move

(Chords repeat)(Chorus)We’re staying in tonightSend word to the barman he can’t charm us like a boy and his guitar canWe’re gonna be alrightHeaven help us, if we’re selfish, call us back when we’re not distractedIn fact, all our phones have gone darkCause the future can’t get to us here

I don’t breathe cause I need toI don’t believe you, I can hold it, I’ll be blue until I’m olderMy heart beats cause I make itStill haven’t found a way to break it, but if you’re trying, let me know if you figure out why andSilence is silver behind noiseAnd I’m looking up at them from bronze

(Chorus 2)We’re staying in tonightSend word to the barman he can’t charm us like a boy and his guitar canWe’re gonna be alrightHeaven help us, since we’re selfish, get us back when we’re not distractedIn fact, all our hearts have gone darkCause the present can’t touch us in here

Staying InHollis Jenkins, K’14

14

It began with a few walk-ins at Health Services complaining about stiff fingers, and one or two students with a leg that wouldn’t work first thing in the morning. It’s stress, the nurses said. And too much time typing on your laptops. Take a walk. Stretch more. Take an aspirin if it hurts. None of them took aspirin because, of course, this was the rare sort of plague that never hurt at all. Unlike government regimes and sporting events, the start and end dates for a plague can rarely be determined without highly contentious debate. Most historians however, will agree that the first public appearance of a symptom occurred during the Introduction to Political Thought lecture on the first Tuesday after Halloween1, when Megan Mulaney raised her hand to ask a ques-tion on the Voting Rights Act and couldn’t put it down.Professor Robs acknowledged her hand with a nod. “’I take questions at the end of lecture,” said Professor Robs. “Put your hand down right now. This is a lecture with over 200 students. What are you thinking?” said Professor Robs’ tone. Megan tried to put her hand down. She pulled her shoulders back and rotated her torso. She yanked at her wrist with her other hand and poked at the inside of her elbow. In the end, the

Prose and ConsSimon Henriques, K’12

He was a swindler, and he did so beautifully, eloquently deceiving anybody who’d listen and a good few who wouldn’t. He stared people in the face and lied, and they lapped it right up, their reality rewritten with fantastical untruths. They barely needed any cajoling to fall for his falsehoods, and he reveled in his hoaxes. He was an author.

In a world of journalists, reporters, and essayists, he was an outlaw. He stood on sidewalks, daring people to approach, and mothers pulled their children to the other side of the street, warning them not to be tempted by this writer of fiction. They spat out the final word, revel-ing in its consonants, as though it were a grievous insult, and to them it all but was. Fiction.His pockets were full of coins, trinkets, scraps, lint. Another man would have emptied them out into the trash, but he wasn’t another man. He was him, and in every piece of junk he saw another inspiration. Muses hid everywhere, and he knew to listen for their whispers.

So he kept on spinning tales from his post on the corner, pushing the line of the law. Anyway, the policemen were too amused to stop him.

STPDana Schwartz, K’12

15

1 With the notable exception of Dr. Brenda Urlehn-Flask at Columbia University who maintains the controversial and widely panned belief that the plague actually did not infect the student body until the Theta Christmas Mixer on December 5th.

2 It should be noted that while the plague was incapacitating the six-time champion team of the Greek Week Olympics, the Brown Daily Herald had just premiered week 2 of their 12-week investigative series on neo-Nazi activity on campus: They Must Be Around Here Somewhere.

only progress she could manage was in tilting her body forward until her stiff arm bore an unfor-tunate resemblance to a Hitler salute. (This being a political science class, Megan Mulaney’s inad-vertent sieg heil, thought by many around her to be a controversial political statement, became the catalyst for the Brown Daily Herald’s infamous 12-week investigative series on neo-Nazi activity on campus.) By the time Megan reached Health Services, the entire right side of her body had gone com-pletely rigid. “Looks to be paralysis on the right side of her body,” the doctor concluded when the nurse asked what was wrong, and although he had not determined what was wrong at all, him being a doc-tor (and a quite handsome one at that), she accepted his diagnosis and put Megan Mulaney in a bed upstairs to rest it off with a cup of Gatorade. “Electrolytes,” the doctor said knowingly as he handed it to her. Within two weeks, half of Delta Tau had lost all mobility in their legs. Within three, the en-tire house was bedridden2, with the exception of Aaron Weitzman, a computer science concentrator from Chicago who seemed completely unharmed. “Cardiothoracic,” the doctor said with a nod when he examined the one healthy Delta Tau brother. “Just as I suspected. Very cardiothoracic.” Aaron Weitz-man had been among the first to identify the Delta Tau Outbreak when he walked in on his roommate and his roommate’s girlfriend, both with arms outstretched like Frankenstein monsters, desperately trying to embrace. Coincidentally, Aaron Weitzman had also been sitting two seats away from Megan Mulaney in Political Thought on the Tuesday after Halloween. Before she raised her hand, he had spent the larger part of the lecture fantasizing about asking her to borrow a pen. Had the President of the University been able to move his fingers, he would have emailed the student body to cancel classes temporarily, but with no message sent or received, school continued on as best it could. Attendance was sparse, and of those students that could hobble to class, a vast majority had at least one limb that stuck out like a tree branch at an inconvenient angle. Most classes were taught on the floor to accommodate those students with stiffened knees that couldn’t be bent into desks. Had the Dean of Students been able to answer his phone, he would have been immediately consumed by an endless series of screeching and terrified parents but fortunately, he soon lacked the mobility to make it into his office at all. Aaron Weitzman, computer science concentrator from Chicago, seemed to be the only one of his friends who was completely unaffected by the plague, and he knew exactly why. He knew why he could move freely while the cool boys in his dorm groaned from their beds, trying to open Netflix on their laptops like Romero zombies. He knew why his roommate and his roommate’s girlfriend were stuck laying like two-by-fours next to each other on a twin-size bed, asking repeatedly what the other was thinking. Aaron Weitzman knew why the plague had claimed so many students on campus and left the lucky (lucky?) few wandering lonely and confused, intensely aware of the gift of flexible joints. Aaron Weitzman had figured it out after the first week, but there was no way he would tell a living soul. He would rather just pretend, stumbling around like his limbs had gone stiff too, than tell anyone that he was a virgin.

16

ExplainMax Ladow, K’12

You are going to ask: and where are the lilacs?and the poppy-petalled metaphysics?and the rain repeatedly spatteringits words and drilling them fullof apertures and birds?I’ll tell you all the news.

I lived in a suburb,a suburb of Madrid, with bells,and clocks, and trees.

From there you could look outover Castille’s dry face:a leather ocean.My house was calledthe house of flowers, because in every crannygeraniums burst: it wasa good-looking housewith its dogs and children.Remember, Raul?Eh, Rafel? Federico, do you rememberfrom under the groundmy balconies on whichthe light of June drowned flowers in your mouth?Brother, my brother!Everythingloud with big voices, the salt of merchandises,pile-ups of palpitating bread,the stalls of my suburb of Arguelles with its statuelike a drained inkwell in a swirl of hake:oil flowed into spoons,a deep bayingof feet and hands swelled in the streets,metres, litres, the sharpmeasure of life,stacked-up fish,the texture of roofs with a cold sun in whichthe weather vane falters,the fine, frenzied ivory of potatoes,wave on wave of tomatoes rolling down the sea.

17

And one morning all that was burning,one morning the bonfiresleapt out of the earthdevouring human beings --and from then on fire,gunpowder from then on,and from then on blood.Bandits with planes and Moors,bandits with finger-rings and duchesses,bandits with black friars spattering blessingscame through the sky to kill childrenand the blood of children ran through the streetswithout fuss, like children’s blood.

Jackals that the jackals would despise,stones that the dry thistle would bite on and spit out,vipers that the vipers would abominate!

Face to face with you I have seen the bloodof Spain tower like a tideto drown you in one waveof pride and knives!

Treacherousgenerals:see my dead house,look at broken Spain :from every house burning metal flowsinstead of flowers,from every socket of SpainSpain emergesand from every dead child a rifle with eyes,and from every crime bullets are bornwhich will one day findthe bull’s eye of your hearts.

And you’ll ask: why doesn’t his poetryspeak of dreams and leavesand the great volcanoes of his native land?

Come and see the blood in the streets.Come and seeThe blood in the streets.Come and see the bloodIn the streets!

StopMax Ladow, K’12

18

Joseph Grause watched the halftrack trundle away from the burnt cave of a bombed-out garage on the edge of town. He held it in his gaze until it was no more than a dust-spewing mite against the next line of pines. Draped in camouflage and mud behind Joseph was another halftrack, the same model as the other. It held seven of Joseph’s troops, all holding their breath, crouched low in its belly. They were deserters of a sort, on a stop that had not been commanded by anyone but Joseph. Instructions were a premium, to be grasped at if given. Father Germany had grown broken of late. “Clear,” Joseph whispered. The troops slinked over the sides and clattered to the garage floor in their combat gear, clothed in patchworks of found clothing, German and Soviet alike. They wouldn’t have passed as a single unit of any nation save one of anarchists, appearing little more than ragged boys and homeless men that had happened upon helmets and machine guns. A man with a beard the color of dead pineneedles and driver’s goggles on stepped out into the warming morning light and watched the dust trail dissipate. He turned back to Joseph. “Who was it, leutnant? Volksgrenadiers?” “No, Kretz. They were SS.” “Shit.” Kretz picked off his leather driving gloves and slapped them into one of his coat pock-ets. The arms of the coat were rolled up to the elbows, his forearms thin as high branches and dark with grease. “They would have fucked us up something fierce.” Joseph spat and walked past Kretz into what remained of main street. “Set up a fire and make some coffee. I’m going to find my wife.” Kretz gave a mock salute with a middle finger and smiled. “Jawohl!” He walked past him to the others, who turned slow and with arched backs to his footsteps. “You heard him! Break out the pots. Find some deadwood, dry as can be.” A soldier with a face withered like birch bark tossed his helmet and pack on the gravel and lowered himself out of the halftrack. He wiped off the front of his uniform. “Which pot did Gunner shit in again?” he asked. Kretz took a pair of dice out his pocket. “Whoever calls the number closest to the roll has to smell them all.” Groans and shouts of numbers echoed out onto the cobblestone street and off the crumpled one-story long farmhouse across the road and there it disturbed a flock of pigeons who coo’d all at once, raising up as a great fluttering sheet. Joseph watched them flutter over him and walked quick beneath their shade before they settled one house over, watching him go from the tops of the charred skeletons of raf-ters as they cleaned themselves. He neared the center of town. Ten or twelve men and women, hunched and old and dressed in their Sunday best, milled and swirled around the square, weaving between craters and pausing at piles of lost possessions, teapots, brooms, reams of papers. They collected what they wished from a pile and then as if in a slow dance moved to the next, paused, moved, paused, moved, each with their own cadence and shuffle. Joseph didn’t expect any better though the sight still pulled at his shoulders and dragged at the corners of his eyes. He walked closer and one of the women, gaunt, froze.

Was LovedNicholas Morely, K’11

19 “Joseph? Herr Grause?” “Hello, Anabelle.” Anabelle moved closer to him. Her face was flat and her eyes were sunk back in her skull and the rest of her was covered in a blue cowl. She spoke slow and stuttering and purposeful. “Gott im himmel, what are you doing here? They’ll kill you if you’re found.” “I’m here to find my wife.” “To what, leave?” Joseph said nothing and looked at the crowd behind her. Anabelle turned and pointed. “Next block down, the two-story gray square place. Your house was bombed three weeks ago. We saved what we could and put her up in the Bruns’ old house.” “And the Bruns?” “All dead.” Joseph reached into his pocket and produced a small fold of Soviet rubles. “Thank you.” For a moment Anabelle was silent and looked as if she were about to speak but didn’t. Joseph held his breath and hers was slow, a line of steady steam like a gear-jammed locomotive as she stared at the money. Her head bowed for a moment and came back up. She looked behind her, then behind Joseph. With-out speaking she took the rubles from his hand and walked back to the crowd, rigid and stern in her gait. Joseph thumbed the rest of the stack in his pocket and watched her go. Ill-gotten gains for an ill people, his people. He watched the waltz of the well-dressed elderly in the wreckage and craters for a little while more, then moved on. The Bruns’ house was at the edge of town, out of the range the bombing raids aimed for. It had still crumbled like the earth and sky had conspired to grind it back into their respective elements, whole stacks of shingles in piles around its sides and its foundation half-sunk in mud. It struck Joseph as no dif-ferent than the homes he had seen in the east. Windows blown out. Paint flaked and falling like leaves. He took off his helmet and let it dangle by the rim from his fingers. The door opened. A short woman with a sooty face and loose brown hair curling in toward her neck in a long orange dress looked out to him. She held a frying pan. He raised a hand. She put the pan aside somewhere in the unseen indoors and began to walk outside toward him. Joseph shifted his weight and held his helmet over his belly and waited. The planeless sky crawled behind the house. When the woman came close he saw it was Marie and smiled though she did not. She came closer. “Marie,” he said. She slapped him hard across the cheek and tackled him to the mud and cobblestone. He gasped. “Marie,” he said, and she took him by the cuff of his jacket, her knees closed in tight to the sides of his ribs as she brought his face to hers. Her teeth gritted and she breathed hoarse and warm through them. “Ingrid is dead.” Joseph felt spittle hit his forehead. “What?” “Our child.” Her mouth gnashed noiselessly and her eyes were closed and her nose pushed against his cheek. “Our child is dead.” He could feel the vibrations of the words move through his flesh. “Oh god,” he said. Marie’s face furrowed and her grip loosened on Joseph and he fell back to the mud which splashed them both. Marie heaved atop him and looked up and whispered, “She’s dead, she’s dead, she’s dead.” Joseph looked up, too. The sky and the air smelled of thunder and rain. His face began to wrench out of his control and for the first time in months he wept, at first sounding like a cough, and then he let himself into it like a hacking fit. Their tears fell in the dirt.Marie stood up and walked back to the house in a hunch. Joseph watched her go and laid his bare head

20back into the muck. He waited as if to let the iron stew of the sky take him away, for a bomber to come, for artillery to strike, for a knife to jab under his ribcage, for a bullet to crack through his skull, for the ends he knew best. None of these happened. The mud crept up his bare neck. He stood, his uniform soaked through, the rifle on his back swinging with new heft. He picked up his helmet from the ground and staggered and then ran his way to the open door of the Bruns’ gray box of a house.Joseph stopped at the doorway. Inside was cold. The room he darkened was a kitchen around a shattered half of a dining table with two-by-fours for legs. There were unwashed pans stacked in the sink and co-agulated stew in a tin bowl on the counter. A fireplace sat choked with half-burnt Reichsmarks and books and old shingles. Two windows above the sink boarded up with heavy wood leaked parallel sheets of dust-touched light from their corners. Marie walked in from another room, eyes on the floor. She picked up the bowl of stew. Joseph straightened his back and walked to the table. There were two metal containers for seats and he pulled one out. It ground against the wooden floor. “Sit,” he said, and he pointed to it. “Let’s sit and let’s talk.” She pulled a spoon from a sink and began to eat the stew with the care and caution of a farmyard animal. She looked at him as one would a predator. “Please,” he said. “Please speak.” She raised her head up and smiled. Her frayed hair bounced with it. “About what? What’s to say?” “You. There’s you.” Joseph’s shoulders sagged and he put his hands on the table. “I’m happy you’re okay.” “Happy?” “I mean relieved. There are so many dead.” “I know.” She took another spoonful to her mouth. “And here you are, when so many have died without you. And here I am, with that weight kept to myself.” Joseph’s face went red. “Yourself ? You?” His palm smacked his chest. “I have weight. I am here against, goddamn,” he hit his fist against the table. “Direct orders from the top. The very top. I could be shot by anyone in this shit-wreck and no one would blink.” Marie began to laugh. Joseph pointed. Spots of mud from his arm spotted the tabletop. “You fucking listen to me.” She kept laughing. Her mouth was wide and her teeth were yellow and her nose flared like a bull’s. “It’s funny,” she said. “I just had the thought that I wouldn’t even care. I wouldn’t even blink.” Joseph stood straight again and Marie’s laugh turned into a cough, doubling her over. The bowl and stew slopped onto the floor. Joseph walked around the table and held her and she fell into his chest. His muddy arms wrapped tight around her. He could feel the muscles of her back spasm around her lungs. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” Marie had her eyes closed. “I don’t know why I’m saying this. I don’t know why I’m feeling this. I don’t know what to do and I haven’t for months. You’ve been gone for months and you never replied to my letters.” “I never got them.” “Liar.” “No. We’ve lost more ground than you know.” Marie’s crying ebbed and she straightened her neck and looked at Joseph and then turned and looked at the window shooting light lines at them and nestled her cheek against Joseph’s hair-pricked neck. Joseph moved his hands over her back. The fabric was fuzzy to the touch, with patches of soot dried in the weave. “You feel like a cloud,” Joseph whispered. Marie forced a pained smile. “I feel insane. I think I have lost more than I can bear.”

21 Joseph held her tighter. “I’m so sorry.” “You should be. The whole army should be. The Fuhrer should be.” “You know I’m not the whole army. You know I’m not the Fuhrer.” “And Ingrid. Oh god.” “I know. I know Marie. I know.” Marie tried to make a sound but her mouth acted like an open wound, quiet, in shifting unhinged silent shrieks. Joseph lifted his chin atop her forehead. He could smell her below the salt. “The war will end soon and we need to talk about what we’re doing.” Marie heaved against him. “You know what the Soviets are doing.” She nodded slow and soundless. “The Hitler youth have been dropping, ah, pamphlets. About what happened in Nummersdorf.” She took her head from his chest and looked at him like a barren blank. “They had a picture of a woman crucified to a barn.” Marie closed her eyes and Joseph closed his and they touched their dirty foreheads together. Joseph pulled from the back of his head swirls of warped pictures. Boys in school uniforms with their eyes out dangling. Mothers and sisters nude, contorted, legs inverted and snapped. Pieces of meat flung far from craters that cannot be construed as bodies. Flattened corpses. Rot smells, death smells. The whisper of killer winter and the gouged-wide cry of spring. Men drowned in mud. Tanks drowned, too, sunk whole for none to see. Planes aflame and sputtering with their pilots dead or asleep at the controls and pirouetting loud and drawing with slow deliberate gravity wide black cuts across the sky with engine fires. Bricks and shards of bricks, bone and shards of bone. The wine shade of tired eyes, irises held pin-point with morphine. Dead boys in piles burnt and their stink of gasoline that soaked into his clothes. The churn and ash and shouts and cries of factories of slaves. He slouched. Marie’s skull was stuffed with the still-swelling corpse of her three-and-a-half year old daughter and her laughter, her weeping, the soft stink of her short unwashed hair, the crinkled dried lips wrapping around stale bread they had let the rain soften, her fingers the size of hummingbirds tight around Marie’s weathered calloused hands, how she would ask Marie to put her on the sink to look out the slits of the windows to try to glimpse other children, her eyes as she died, frantic and clawing at her mother’s dress while Marie stuffed dishrags into the gash of fat and intestines and Marie calling out to the empty vast ruined moonscape outside and Marie saying It’s alright, it’ll be alright, you’ll stop hurting, the hurting will end, the hurting will end, the hurting will end, but it continued in herself, Marie knew, that remainder of potential, the weight of a tiny life poised to succeed her that she hefted into a two-foot uneven grave in her adopted backyard. Marie opened her eyes and touched Joseph’s cheek. He straightened up with eyebrows wide up, asking. “You should see her,” Marie answered. The mound blended with the scattered rubble from the roof. Wooden shingles nailed together in a cross marked it. Joseph and Marie stood just outside the Bruns’ house’s backdoor. It creaked in the wind and rattled on its hinges. Tufts of yellow-green grass had begun to grow around the house perimeter and these it barely touched the tops of, swept them gently like an old hand passing over child’s hair. Joseph looked at the mound. He tossed his helmet with his left hand and reached the palm of his right to the air. Marie looked at it, then him. “Please,” Joseph said, and she enclosed it in both of her own and pulled herself toward him and he pulled her too as she moved, pulled her around to her side so that he caught her, an enfolding twirl with her back resting on his chest and his arms crossed under her shoulders, the two of them watching the cross in the ground and the storming sky and the valley beyond the edge of the hill that the house sat on, the crooked ad hoc outhouses and the criss-cross roads pummeled into odd

22piles of cobblestones like frayed veins out from their town, the trees not yet touched by flame or bombs shadowing the dark-green land and its jagged flow. Joseph laid his head on hers and Marie stared out, eyes heavy with memory, of ghosts shifting and flitting against the landscape, cars driving up the road, cows and sheep loudly in pasture, schoolchildren bobbing in groups as passerby laughed and farmers sicked their dogs out to the herds, everything alive and pulsing, everything, if not light, then a degree closer to light than what held them now by the throat. “They’ll burn it all,” she said. Her face creased downward into worry. “Take what they want. First our army and then theirs.” “Yes.” Joseph lifted his head. “The nation’s forfeit.” “What do you plan to do?” “I have skills as a soldier so I intend to soldier.” He swallowed. “I’ll do what I can against the Rus-sians, try to get as many people west and come with them and surrender to the Americans.” “Can you get in trouble? Are you in trouble?” “We’ve already abandoned our command so trouble with them is far down on the list of our prob-lems.” Marie didn’t speak right away. She wrapped her arms harder around his. “I don’t want you to.” “I want to.” “I am selfish.” “You are. I am, too. I want my country.” “This country? What is your country?” Joseph thought and did not know. He wondered at the coming of a Germany without a Nazi party, without a Hitler, and it seemed ludicrous. “Though our country’s children yet live,” he thought aloud. “Your country. Not our country. Yours. I will leave.” “Do it soon.” “I’ll do it tomorrow.” “I’m going to ask my men if any want to leave, to give them the option. I’ll ask if any want to join you.” “For protection?” “There are more than Russians raping and killing here.” Marie lifted Joseph’s arms from around her and walked to the mound and kneeled. She creased the ends of her dress as she did, laid her hands on her thighs, and whispered: “You are safe. I’ll keep you here.” She put one hand on her left breast. “I’ll still read to you and I hope you’ll hear me. I’ll think it, too, so you’ll hear it if you hear just thoughts and not normal people speaking. So you certainly will hear it, either way. Because right here’s where I’ll keep you.” She patted the chest again. “Right there. Safe. I’ll keep you.” She wanted to cry but could not so she fell forward and began to kiss the mound, again, again, her fingers curling at the dirt as she did but not digging, only contracting like pale drowned spiders as her whole tor-so raised and fell while the thin cross of wood shingles shivered besides.Joseph watched her and felt away, as if watching himself watch her prostrate before their daughter’s grave, and he took a degree of comfort in this distance where no emotion could yet reach, and in knowing that watching was all that he could do, would do, could have done. He knew it was a temporary comfort, though, passing through a cloud before the fall, the parachuteless tailspin he so often dreamt of and flew.

23

I’ve lost my touch – I think – Scrambling for wordsin dark crevices –in musky boxes – is harder than I remember

words used to flow like waterfrom a tapfrom my mindpast my lipsto spill – unrestrained –onto paper

Maybe – it’s like riding a bikeAnd the Mind never truly forgets –Maybe – practice is requiredWhen the Body is better rested

Delirium @ 5 a.m.Mary Woodard, K’14

The Weekend in 4 CollagesErnesto Renda, RISD

Mixed media on corkboard.

24

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

44

44

13

17

21

9

5

Koji KondoArr. by Paul Backus

Staff Creditsfrom "The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past"

25

26

Paul Backus, K’10

Listen at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8sdSfEa26o

27

Marriage is funny. I’m a simple guy – I feel like if you love someone, you express that, and if the recipient of your affection reciprocates, then God bless you both. I’ve never really understood mind-games and over-analysis. Affection is something that should be pretty much transparent and genuinely communi-cated. It’s a total mystery, then, how my grandparents ever came to be married. Let alone how they stayed that way for 50 years. From an outsider’s perspective they didn’t get along at all. He snapped at her, and she swatted him and squawked back. They’d bicker around the clock.

Grandma was always the more creative and fanciful of the two, while Grandpa tended to be crotch-ety and stubbornly pragmatic. The friction that would arise when Grandma used to tell her stories made them all the more enjoyable. Her favorite one told why birds fly south for the winter. I heard it so many times over the years that I eventually came to have it memorized, but I still liked hearing her tell it anyway. She’d always start by leaning back in her chair and taking the deep breath, the fresh, ever-circulating air of the world flowing through her dusty old lungs. “The first bird the Earth ever created was named Aalu’Lah. Aalu’Lah was a brave creature, and a proud one. He was the master of his terrain. With his stout bill be could crack his enemies’ bones. With his sharp talons he could rake their flesh. With his wide wings he could blot out the sun, and then all would know that Aalu’Lah was near. Aalu’Lah was the only animal ca-pable of leaving the ground, however, and as such he was the only creature capable of communicating with the Sun. The Sun was a beautiful and gentle spirit, shy and generous. It hurt her that her only friend, Aa-lu’Lah, was such a fierce and barbarous presence in the world she tried so hard to nurture. She would beg and plead with him to be kinder to his fellow creatures, but Aalu’Lah would not listen; he was too obsessed with maintaining his dominion. Eventually, the Sun gave up, and retreated from Aalu’Lah’s homeland. This was the first winter. Now, the animals were frightened that their kind overseer was gone. The plants that had been their food froze and died, the reptiles could not stay warm, and the fish became trapped under thick sheets of ice. It was only after the Sun had gone that Aalu’Lah realized the cost of his pride. Morti-fied, he set off to find the Sun. He found her further south, and after 3 months of bargaining, he managed to convince her to return to his homeland with him. Upon seeing the effects that her absence had had on the land, the Sun, in her kindness, bestowed on each of the plants and animals the means to survive for a time without her warm presence. However, to punish Aalu’Lah for his pride, she did not grant him this gift. She said to Aalu’Lah, ‘If you and your kind wish to survive, you must bear the burden of having to follow me wherever I go.’ And that is why every winter, the birds follow the Sun as she travels south.”

Of course, that’s never the way I heard the story. It was always fragmented, peppered with Grand-pa’s ornery interjections and Grandma’s irritable retorts. “Quit fillin’ that boy’s head with those silly lies! What’s the point? The sun ain’t nothin’ but a big ol’ ball of gas.”

“Hank, who taught you to speak that way to the person who cooks your dinner? Don’t you have anything better to do than stand around and torment me?” Grandpa would shuffle away, shaking his head and snickering, gleeful at the scene he’d caused.

Why Birds Fly SouthNicholas Anderson, K’13

28 It was like that all the time. Every year at Thanksgiving, they’d get into a huge shouting match across the table. They always yelled and flung insults, but I never really got the impression that they were truly angry. It kind of made people uncomfortable, though. I remember when my cousin Gus brought his girlfriend Lynn over one year, and Grandpa decided to go off on how the cranberry sauce was too tart. The evening ended with Grandpa getting tarred and feathered with cranberry sauce and napkins, while a mortified Lynn stared at her empty plate, Gus frantically whispering into her ear. I was the favorite grandchild, though. I’m pretty sure I knew them better than any of my cousins. No one else ever saw the stolen kisses in the kitchen, or the one time Grandpa picked her a flower and put it in her hair, and she slapped his arm, then immediately entwined it with her own. I don’t know what makes marriages work, but for them, it seemed to be the nonstop banter. Go figure.

I was 18 when Grandma died. It was totally unexpected. She was getting old and all, though. You could literally hear her hips creak when she rose out of her old chair, and her hair had turned brittle and so white it was almost transparent and her skin hung on her bones, finally exhausted after decades of holding taut. She just went to sleep one night, for the 10 millionth time, next to Grandpa, and she just nev-er woke up. My friends all tried to convince me I was lucky, and that I didn’t have to see her suffer. I’m not so sure. I feel like if we’d seen this coming, we could have done something to prepare. Grandpa could have done something to prepare.

I went over and visited him a couple days afterward. It hadn’t even been that long, but he already looked different. He’d lost his color as well as any vitality that had remained in that rickety old body. He told me he hadn’t eaten since she died. I teased him, joking that he didn’t know how to survive on his own without someone there to pamper him. He gave me a valiant effort at a smile, but it was like watching a fish try to flop out of a fishing boat: just kind of sad and futile. I realized after I said it that maybe there was more truth to my joke than I’d realized.

The funeral was a quiet affair, but it kind of became her. Everyone there knew Grandma intimately, so emotions ran untapped. Dad’s voice wavered as he delivered the eulogy, and Gus consoled Lynn, his new wife. Grandpa just sat there, though. His body was a prop, a dummy, a stand-in for my real Grandfather, who was worlds away. He didn’t cry a single tear, but his eyes, embedded above dull grey folds of skin, were webbed with red capillaries, and his jaw hung open listlessly.

After her casket was lowered into the ground and everyone dispersed, it was just me and him. I gave his nonresponsive hand a squeeze, and then let it go, where it swung limply by his side for a bit before falling still. I figured I’d best leave him alone for a bit. I’d only taken a few paces away when I felt the air shudder with a flurry of frenzied flaps. I turned to see a flock of birds make their way across the sky, their leader unlike any creature I’d ever seen. It had deep indigo plumage, the blunt bill of a swan, the fatal tal-ons of an eagle, and the sprawling wings of a crane. He led his flock towards the horizon into the setting sun. Something about the moment made me shiver, and I flipped my collar up against the dreary November chill. The birds faded out of view, carrying the spirits of my grandparents with them.

29

Catullus CI - Catullus 101Eleanor Walsh, K’14

Multas per gentes et multa per aequora vectus advenio has miseras, frater, ad inferias,ut te postremo donarem munere mortis et mutam nequiquam alloquerer cinerem,quandoquidem fortuna mihi tete abstulit ipsum, heu miser indigne frater adempte mihi.nunc tamen interea haec, prisco quae more parentum tradita sunt tristi munere ad inferias,accipe fraterno multum manantia fletu, atque in perpetuum, frater, ave atque vale.

Having travelled through many nations and through many seas I come, brother, to these wretched obsequies, that I may present you with the last service of death and speak in vain to your silent ashes, since fortune has carried you yourself away from me, alas poor brother, undeservedly snatched from me. Yet now, meanwhile, receive these funeral offerings,which by the ancient custom of our ancestors are handed down as an unhappy gift, flowing much with brotherly tears, and forever, brother, hail and farewell.

30

Optimism in not naïve It is not holding your breath wading through the world expecting that your lungs will continue to pull air even as your mouth remains closed expecting that gravity will disappear when you need some weightlessness to lift you to new heights of mindless expectations and childish whimsyIt is not expectant

Optimism is not imagination the world of possibilities one runs to when this world feels too smallIt is not the escape of one fleeing from a reality he cannot stand to seeIt is no escape at all for optimism can cutIt slips through the fingers of cowardsAnd is too fragile to run

Optimism is not blindness refusing to see what stands before youIt is not turning away from now in order to live in a future that will never be

It is none of these things

Optimism is hard and rough around the edgesIt is fragile and ready to break

It is a choiceTo focus on the opportunities the what might bes the good side of people the refreshing feel of rain on your cheekbones rather than your clothes becoming soggyIt is not ignorance everyone knows that wet clothes bring coldsBut warm fires warm cold skin and there is nothing that compares to the feel of clothes fresh from the dryer

Optimism need not be enthusiastic It can be dry and sardonic and feel pain

On the Nature of OptimismMaya Manning, K’11

31

But the world has no valenceIt has no inherent good and badIt means what we decide it meansOptimism is not blindness it is choosing to see beauty in the power of the storm clouds and noting the sun that shines behind themIt is choosing to see reality the way you want it to beIt is choosing to believe that things work out instead of becoming disheartened by what has not yet come to beIt is choosing hope when you could choose despair

And it is not easy

JordanRachel Wolf, Xi’11

32

InhaleSara Overstreet, K’13

morning tattooed herself upon lipsstained with flooding exuberance,heartbreak flowers uncovering voidssubconsciously obscured asan array of twinkling hypnotistspromote scorched lungsbreathing fire across runaway bridges—

red steel and stone collide,like candlelight, like youand I; agressive solitudeof our own magnificent designarrives complacent to spurabsentia of minute handserasing fondness with the tickingbeat of clockwork drums,pounding rivers on staccato moons;

but the sea is cruel,ocean water laps unwaveringlypressing unbridled requests intopalms of couriers desperate to feelglowing precision wrappedaround warm bodies: rainstormsin the deserted highways of our youth,lacking instability to conquerfully the calamity that has befallendry land like bleached bones,

never caressed by the hands ofdestined pride, forever seekingsolemnity’s embrace on rainyafternoons when the warmth shinesthrough the coldhearted demeanor ofa compelled persuasionto entreat prosperity in clouded skiesfrom sand scattered pageswhipped into dunes by your sighs.

33

The Useless Ruminations, Vol. 1Benjamin Barksy, K’13

So often I judge my days as a lump sum, a forgotten jumble of moments muddled togeth-er on the mixing board. Finding the resulting color unsatisfactory, I kept my moods sepa-rate. Here is a picture I painted with the fresh pigments.

The city is too lonely and too crowded. Stepping out of a theater, patrons freeze, empty-minded, filling holes in a growing crowd as dirt slipping into a grave. Sitting in a room lit by a blue clock, however, I long to be smothered by the hats, coats, coughs. I open the closet, hoping for mon-sters, but my new suit, sterile and cheap, folds one arm up to greet me as it slides to the floor.“I just wore you earlier. Fancy dinner, not my scene but I looked alright. That bread was fucking amazing, at least.”

I say this neither in my head nor out loud but I am reminded of bread all the same. Today, chewing the kneaded grain, I felt a sudden struggle to place its flavor as it brushed against my tongue. Not for lack of bread eaten in the past, but lack of attention paid to taste. How much money have I wasted on that most fleeting of senses over the years? I was not left to ponder long; the thought was taken with the bread plates, and the next course was exquisite.

“Just go to sleep when you get sad. Do not write. Do not listen to those sad, beautiful songs.” This I have thought frequently. Night takes away the sun: a basic, universal law which so pro-foundly governs my life. I know tomorrow I will wake up and curse myself for creating. I will rub my eyes and apologize to myself, out loud, for listening to Bon Iver so late. So I am left squeezing out memories like whiteheads and examining them in the dim, laptop light. I cannot leave them to burrow and fester in my pores, blackening at the surface; I must get them out while I can.

I felt pride when I made a foot-long jump over slush-mud next to the sidewalk. I looked in the mirror, the rush of wine reaching my brain as I flicked the bathroom light on, and caught a glimpse of my face in thirty years. I deconstructed my newest nervous tic: slide phone out of pocket, check for blinking light, press side button with thumb, quickly press again, push back into pocket with palm. I experienced empathy for an animated character. Praises were sung after the play’s performance but I could not forget knocking my heels together, glancing at the crowd, a thousand eyes unblinking forward, and thinking, “I’m bored.”

Oy, all of the dirt fell in at once. That’s how it always happens; the neat pile of dirt I’ve dug up all slides in, no rhyme or reason. Guess I’ll need to scrape my way out of this in the morning.

34

UntitledAri Beller, K’13

Head down. I hover in a realm between waking and sleeping. Half in this world and half in another. Am I conscious? The focus that directs my waking thought loosens, slackens, slips. My mind begins to wander in impossible spaces and curved times, the rigidity of reality takes flight. As I surrender unto sleep, somewhere far away, I hear the rain start to fall. The sound trickles in my ears, but I remain dry. I am elsewhere.

I wonder about the rigidity of my experience. I have thought that the focus, the re-strained targeting of my thoughts, is what it means to be conscious. That when I can say to myself “I wish to think about this” I am awake. I have agency. Increasingly uncertain now. Less certain what directs my thoughts, feelings. The inner dialogues circling in my head appear less than ever controlled. I think back about the processes by which I make decisions, the weighing of positives and negatives. I do this consciously? Why do I decide to procrastinate? Why do I decide to put this off ? These desires suddenly overwhelm me and I act. Sometimes. Sometimes I think it through? Maybe. I think I have experienced both these things.

I am locked in a functional existence. I fulfill my tasks. Pursue my goals. An evolution-ary mindset. Survive and reproduce. Somewhere along the way finding meaning and fulfillment sneaks into the program. My mind doesn’t know how to cope. It desperately tries to ascribe significance to everything around it, attach meaning to a thing totally devoid. We have brought these ideas into the world. They perish with us.

There are moments when I forget what I am doing. When I suddenly become aware of the ridiculous ascriptions I have attached phenomena. Why do I leap across the desk to prevent the plug from falling behind it? Why do I care? Why do I wish to avoid the extra work of pick-ing it up? Why am I averse to discomfort? Why does the cold bother me? I crave conversation, company. Divert my paths around the house trying to find people, seeking presence. I seek con-nection, attachment, comfort, support. Arbitrary ascriptions, attached to sensations programmed in my brain to be positive/negative. I think, that in these moments, when I see the great caprice of the whole thing, that I hear my own mind. I am confronted with the overwhelming experi-ence of being conscious. Of by some grand miracle beyond my wildest conception being able, capable of grasping reality, of witnessing, thinking, conceiving, being aware of my existence in a thing. It’s absurdness. It’s bizarreness. Why this way? Why not some other? It doesn’t matter. It is.

It is in these moments, when I stand in silence, removed from the relational objects of the world, that my mind shouts to itself “I am awake. I am awake.”

I awake in the library to the buzzing of my phone on the table. 26 minutes have passed. It is raining.

35

The Sketchbook is the literary magazine affiliated with St. Anthony Hall, Brown’s literary fraternity. It is a semi-annual publication that welcomes submis-sions from all Brown and RISD students as well as

members of any chapter of the Hall.

Submit your work: sketchbook.kappa@gmail.com