by Lizzie Short ’12

Little light bottles

For medicine once, now for sun

A fish-shaped bottle, a turquoise one, bright blue

A light-refracting disk, so that our kitchen can be painted

In all the moving colors in the morning.

 

It is night now.

My mother and I in my parents’ big bed

Watching a PBS programme

Of Peter, Paul, and Mary

By lamplight.

 

My mother, so thin and small, in her classic post-9pm repose;

Hair: slightly damp. A glass of white wine

And her nightly dose of PBS.

 

My mother, with her pert chin jutting against her navy pajama shirt

Sings along

With Peter, Paul, and Mary.

“This song came out when I was thirteen.”

 

My eyes burn with hot salt as I think of

My dear, skinny, little thirteen-year-old mother

Listening to Peter, Paul and Mary on the radio

In the kitchen of her Cambridge apartment

A kitchen without light bottles or rainbows

A kitchen two streets down

From her best friend, Janie Quinn.

 

by Maddie Lesser ’13

 

The things she was first: “ANN ROGOLSKY”

etched on an old mandolin in faded child scratch.

 

And last: cigarettes hidden under the armoire,

the only time she’d ever yelled at us.

 

But mainly the middle: Ella in black and white

above her bed, drowsy, lusty, crooning

to the piano man.  Astrology charts

for her husband, my father, my sister’s

first lover.  Rows of strange wax men,

kneeling or laughing, half-melted

by the Florida sun.

 

But it was like being in the fifth grade,

secretly digging in the mulch for weeks

only to find that our dinosaur

was the discarded chicken bones

from the teacher’s lunch.

 

They were her things.

She wasn’t there.

by Sam Ross ’12

 

Memorabilia mash-up mountains –

Whose fountain of youth have you found?

 

Only antiques truly appreciate

eachother,

Especially underground, where

 [by the sound]

They’re the only ones

around.

 

It’s a little like

A billion bits of photographs,

Snapshots of places

torn from the past

And all stitched together

Like a back-alley skin graft.

 

It’s a 1920’s speak-easy poster

Plastered on Intel’s Pentium Processor

 

It fell outside the tourist’s guide this time.

 

It’s whale-oil lamps

Buried deep in gutters

 

Whose petroleum sputters

Are as long-lost

As lovers, so

 

we forget that we will be buried.

by Julia Danford ’13

 

 “Hey, loser

Come climb up

My fire

Escape,

Like before.

 

Come on up, light me up.

Let me burn for you.

Don’t let me

Down.”

 

Yeah –

I’ve spent enough time on your fire escape

To know how to use

One.

by Fran Wang ’12

 

From Latin, proprius: one’s own. The unconscious perception of movement and

spatial orientation.

-American Heritage Medical

Dictionary

 

They say that dogs are soulless.

Mine sleeps on his side and skitters after rabbits

or some such, the limbs of his own knowing stretch

and convulse, propelling him bound for bound

as he turns on the linoleum,

pinned and pivoted around his heart on the floor.

 

I, too, have chased and been chased.

I have run ragged and woke

thrashing, cold in the sudden

rediscovery of orientation

in the space you and I used to share.

We are both in love, I think,

with distance.

 

In each human there exists

a secret memory of the ocean,

fluid spirals in the chambers of the ear.

It is here I perceive our component places

and angles and the space between us,

the inclination to face each other,

give chase like some darting rabbit.

We brush by each other in the space

of seven hours apart,

me perceiving you as you perceive me—

it is the order of one’s own,

stretched to fit two.

We anchor ourselves to opposite ends of the horizon,

focusing too intently upon waking

to hear what we ask of each other.

I go unanswered for now, like a good question.

 

Brooklyn Equinox

 

Chapped and barbed, my winter skin,

and yours, pale spring,

we walk, shadows dragging through puddles.

Channeled winds push the sun down smooth glass faces.

 

Dusk, the energy of a city stirs.

Our breath catches charge and sparks,

hurtling one hand down the next, electricity

of taxi cabs and subway tracks jumping gaps

between our matching stride, pacing the Brooklyn Bridge like a comet

stretched over East River.

 

Nightfall, and our orbit is lit—

 

binary stars that spin gravity like thread.

 

We laugh in ellipses along dirty streets,

our sounds trail below, catching the tops of neon signs and

we float along, combing our hands through numbered streets.

 

by Daegwon Chae ’15

 

My mother once reminded me that my first word was apple,

and to this day, I believe it to be the simplest of fruits.

Like all things, it is cyclic, as if it never began—

start with a seed, end with a seed, nothing in between.

 

To this day, I believe that the simplest of fruits

is nothing more than an idea, a primeval notion that

starts with a seed, ends with a seed, nothing in between.

There’s no room for life, no mysteries circling its core.

 

This is nothing more than an idea, a primeval notion,

but if apple is just a word, star is just a dot in the sky.

There’s no room for life, no mysteries circling its core,

just a never-ending rain of promises, of melted ideas.

 

Apple is just a word, and star is just a dot in the sky,

but in the winter, snowflakes are real. I touched them,

felt the never-ending rain of promises, of melted ideas

rest on my hand. They were cold, and that’s how I learned

 

that in the winter, snowflakes are real. I touched them.

Since then, I’ve outgrown memories, forgotten how snowflakes felt

resting on my hand. They were cold, and that’s how I learned.

Now, I know to wear gloves on merry-go-rounds in the winter.

 

Since I’ve outgrown memories and forgotten how snowflakes felt,

my mother reminded me that my first word was apple,

and now I know. I wore gloves on a merry-go-round in the winter,

which, like all things, is cyclic. As if it never began.

 

by Becca Rothfeld ’14

 

One day you were

no longer you. You’d

swallowed yourself in the deep

of your sleep and escaped

through the door in the side of

your gut. By the time I awoke,

already too late, I noticed

the violate window agape,

long curtains contorted with

unbidden breeze, the covers

drawn back on the bed’s naked

thigh. There hadn’t been time

for notes or goodbyes, just

enough to collect what you thought

you might need, your books and

your socks, a couple of shirts, old letters

addressed to a self days away.

 

Strangers in the kitchen are

scrambling eggs. Interred in

the tub I am turning taps cold,

my fingers all wrinkling like rot-ripened

fruit. I plead with your captors

for your safe return. What have they done

with your voice, with your hands? And where

is there room for the greens of your eyes?

No prison could house all these

transient selves, no ransom recover

the bulk of your being, the someone

who shuddered in my sleepy holding

and howled at my partings, demanding

I stay. On the day of

betrayal I’ll unbuild my bearings,

find my clothing too big and mirrors all

distortive, the shelves lined with books that

I’ve never purchased, and myself

coyly kidnapped: we’ve all been replaced.