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.

by Frances Wang ’12

Your charisma precedes you, even in death—
grey feather webs of your wing still raised, a passing greeting to
the distant sky and the flies.
But your legs jut distressingly, like fishing hooks
twisted under tangled crosscurrent waves,
Coriolus of questionable intent and ambition.

Was it misunderstanding that dropped you on dirt packed flat?
Did you choose to leave the artifice of altitude? Plummeting
until the sinews holding together the words of your wings could not lift you above
the violent logic of flight.
Was gravity too much for your bones, shards?

Thin air, frictionless against remiges. You slipped
between the molecules in the high clouds.

from the English Honor’s Thesis, Clockwork, by Mary Rockwell ’11

MAPPED

As soon as Spring gave in, the air conditioning
was busted. So we rolled down the windows
of my ‘85 Mercedes—blew steam instead.

In Burlington summer launches without proof,
given the loss of watches, the freedom of a route
that leads straight out of town, directions

scrawled on a paper napkin on my lap.
Why plan anything when given such a nice list
of what to expect, how to expect where to go.

When your purpose is to be purposeless
you can expect Monday to be as free as Sunday,
certainly can expect moments to be as free

as soft‐serve ice cream, bought from the convenience
store for nothing but the price of my own name,
which the owner already knows by heart.

Everyone always seems to know things
I do not tell them, but surely gossip is not gossip
if it’s true: people only talk about what they want

to believe about the people who always leave.
My heart turns over those days too many times,
plays them like board games against my logical mind,

pays too much mind to another time, the past—
the type of light touch that lingers in a rush.
Nothing ever does stay long enough.

We never wanted to feel young then,

never think we are that young now.

—–

—–

NOMADS

Catching slimy snails in red plastic pails,
my brothers and sisters and I spent summers
on the far edge of Kennebunk beach.

We searched beneath the smooth underbellies
of salty rocks, scoured the shallow water, spinning
in tidal pools, much warmer than the ocean.

The busiest intersections and lanes revealed
where the crustaceans had traveled—I imagined
stuck in traffic on their routes to work, or visiting friends

who stayed in different neighborhoods down shore.
We stayed until the beach emptied, our pails full.
Never worried that there might be nothing

left in Maine one day. Nothing for us to find.
We carry our home, carry it on our backs.

—–

—–

VISITORS

When my sister takes my hand, I follow
along the curb of the littered sidewalk, jump
whenever the concrete breaks for pavement.

We dodge the shifting shadows of curious customers
who crash into crowded shops. Why would we go inside
when we trust shopkeepers must keep their custom

of selling porcelain ashtrays shaped like California,
plastic snow globes that storm winter weather
over the same sun‐soaked Bay we visited yesterday.

Chinatown is always Chinatown, no matter what
town we have found ourselves in. No matter how many
years and miles have worked their way between us.

This time, only we seem different—
tourists of our own home, the new home,
a home made apart from any familiar place.

To cross the sidewalk, we leap from stripe to stripe.
Children again, with no place to go.

by Tyler Bradford ’14

Alice keeps the lyrics locked in a box under the bed
Hidden from view.
On their first night together,
He changed the shape of her flesh:
A love out of lust.
Then, face went pale: he mishandled the secret.
Alice feels small against the night
Torn photographs taped on the wall
A cigarette next to the bed.
Alice has never been to this world,
But now she knows it exists,
The others are cynics.
Exposed, the world rushes in:
Lights, sounds, and smoke.
But Alice does not know this is a borrowed world,
And now he wants it back.
So Alice must return to her old world,
If she can find it.

by Mitchell Jacobs ’14

With woven veins
our teacher walked through the woods
and showed us nests and knots in maple trees
until the end of her life—
she lay down and died

in a clearing.
Four dirt paths there open
into a diamond of smooth-leaved clover
bordered by interlocked
ferns reaching.

My brother left
our highland house and yard,
moved to the city and up and up
the corporate ranks—
retired to the most

spacious flat in town.
A composer said once
that his favorite note was the rest
because in its duration
you could recall

all the others.
Together we roam across each other,
the curves and crevices which slip
always toward an emptiness.
After enlightenment

the Buddha slept.
When they have hewn a lifetime
of sandstone in the crazing canyon wall,
the rapids return softly
to the magnetism of the sea.

from the English Honor’s Thesis, Stereoscopy, by Sophie Novack ’11

A look inside

your brain: a railway.
Tunnels twisting,
freight cars slow around
the bends, cargo too heavy
for your trains to carry.
Signals lost between stations,
tracks weakened, cars veering off course
with the weight of information.
Too much traffic.
What I say to you I know
will never reach its final destination
—my words will crash
into the skeletons of trains
that line and block the tunnels, words trapped
and suffocated in the debris of lost cargo.
Tomorrow you won’t recover
what I said or even who I am.
I think how you used to make believe
your mother’s mind ran more smoothly,
how my mother tries now
to push messages through yours
—it seems all our tracks must cross eventually.
I wait for your broken ones
to derail me.

—–

—–

yo-yo

you balance me

too close to leave

too far to stay

not enough to wind me up

not enough to unravel me

each time I want to go

you work your tricks

pull me back

keep me

hanging

go ahead and break me

so I can be done with you

—–

—–

Ghost

Your absence leaves
an imprint of you, the same
in shape and sentiment,
altered though in reality.
Around me your specter looms,
a better version of you.
He leaves me to long
for you in flesh, to want
your body next to mine,
to wish I desired you
when you were here,
fought harder to keep you.
He tricks me—possessing
only the best of you,
erasing moments
that make me want to forget you,
blurring your details, making me
resurrect you in my life again.
You haunt me.
What pain can do
to memory, changing you
into something I’d be foolish to lose.
How loss can make a person
so appealing.

by Scott McKnight ’11

I am a bear trap
snapped shut
and empty. For a year,
I have held my tongue
in my steel mouth, glinting
with missed opportunity.
Tense and fanatical,
I dream of that bear and
grind my teeth in my sleep.
Pry me open, hunter,
or God, or
better yet –
break my jaw,
clapped shut this foggy year
in the midnight ivy. Or,
move me to a spot of shade
less lonely than this.
There must be another trap
on this bright lightning mountain
for me to snap to
in toothy embrace – a
forever’s kiss in the ivy,
to hold till our springs wear out
and the winds bury us.

by Scott McKnight ’11

I lost my silver watch in the brackish water
that slowswirls in the inlet of your sea.
I plunged my hesitant hands into the dark,
cold silt for half an hour, my hands clawing
in the muck like a pair of crabs.  For a moment,
a fox appeared on the hill behind me, perched,
and I felt ashamed — a greedy ape in the mud.

But have you seen the fires in Texas?
My cows were a kind of kindling for the roar
of the black, acrid smoke that hung thick
over the lowing pasture — their silver
bells lost in a swirl of inky billows.
There are no foxes there. They abandoned dreams
of watches and cattle long before America
and keep their silver in their tail plumes that rise,
swirling, lost in the foggy hillsides.

from the English Honor’s Thesis, The New Ascetic, by Jessica Stein ’11

Like Mole and Mr. Toad

1
When I emerge from my hole in the woods,
I feel a bit like Mole meeting Mr. Toad
for the first time, his gleaming, reckless
unapologetic physicality
swatting Mole
square in his dusty nose—
confident in the struggling current,
Toad’s careless grin tossed to Mole like a hot potato.
Mole and I wish to be just as buoyant,
while instead I shriek about
our only pastime: “Cleaning house!
Cleaning house!” or else peep “oh
dear” and falter into the river.

2
Everyone is telling you
you look nice today,
but you don’t.
You are pale and paranoid,
at large in your gray matter,
overworried and adding to-dos,
having lost at least an hour somewhere
on the clock: who knows
when you pull yourself out
again where you will be,
at lunch or in a conversation
you don’t remember getting to—
only snow melting in your eyes
recalls your struggle against the wind
and what you might have said in defense:
“I should be hibernating, time isn’t right
in the winter.”

3
Oh to be Toad
blind calm in the crowded streets,
no panicked dogma at the recognition of a face,
overexcited and tripping over
hellos
into the water
like a shocked noodle.

—–

—–

An intricate joy

Everything is built from little pieces,
from littler pieces, from pieces
of varying size
that tangle like yarn
in Elmer’s glue.

A year is stacked
in months, blocked in
days, dark with hours—
weeks wiring through
the frame, uneven,
shifting, shuttling
deadlines and celebrations
down its chute.

A novel has swollen channels
of chapters, feeding off
wet plains of paragraphs,
and swift tributaries
of sentences, which draw
from ponds and pools of words,
to whisk lettered leaves
in a river to the brain.

A seed is a bomb
of biology.
A threatening cloud
of an organism.
Huddled coils clench
each other with
contained explosion.
Between their linked hands,
acidic instructions
roil outward
impatiently.

The metaphor fits
every compound from
the sum of the universe
to its subatomic components.
How loving is growth!
To build each possibility
with infinite care,
to let infinity assemble itself
without condition,
to bear us infinitely forth.

from the English Honor’s Thesis, Litter, by Audrey Gradzewicz ’11

Litter

I will not snap their necks. The man says
it has to be done, there are too many. He says
it is easy. Just one hard crack against the counter,
and when he comes home from work,
he will burn the kittens in the barrel with the newspapers.
He tells me they are too young to feel,
but I imagine blood, the terrible hiss of air snaking
through windpipes only half-severed.
I lack the stomach, mix some milk
with some crushed pills from the bathroom cabinet.
I am as careful as a mother, and as I empty
a bottle of poison into each blind mouth,
I envision myself as the kind one,
every kitten’s death a mercy I’ve doled out.
I place their bodies in a corner
so I do not see them choke.

—–

The Shooting

The way the man sprawled
across too much sidewalk,
he looked like a squid
or an octopus. Just the spillover
from a bar fight, the police
told us, claiming the man was dead
even as he landed facedown
in our small yard. An isolated
incident, they said, calming
my hysterical mother as I stood
beneath the porch light counting
those impossible limbs to four,
and did not believe it.

—-

Supper

It’s clever how they kill, the bodies
decomposing in rose gardens, the teeth
removed—no dental record,
no trace. The way they target
the ones no one cares about, the ones
who are nobody’s daughter, nobody’s son.
Methods both subtle and brutal, but see
how beautiful it all is, how intricate.
It’s so easy to take a life, the neck
snapped, a vial of poison. Your smile
is deadly when you tell me this, the TV blaring
with the macabre stories you like, the bones
of your dinner cracking in your mouth.
I turn to watch the ghostly faces.

from the English Honor’s Thesis, Something Leads Him Down, by Uyi Agho ’11

He contemplates his loss

November was long,
after his wife died. That day,
the Doctor
put on his loafers and
walked outside.
It was snowing
but he wasn’t cold
and he wanted to be cold.

Alone he is unknown as the bare branches
and unrecognized as a lover long gone,
frozen puddle-reflections startle him
as he shuffles with hands in trouser-pockets,
he does not know that man on the other side.

In stride he thinks
he resembles the sky
as the sun wanes,
a smudge dark
as it creeps toward
evening.
He drowns stars
in his solitude.

As he walks beside an old river,
he likes to imagine himself slipping through
the thin layer of silver sleet, where the surface blurs
and he sees her eyes peering through.
Where he smiles before the glass freezes over,
the corners of his lips falling with the snow.

He knows that he
will dread
the morning,
when it comes,
waking alone
with memories
and forgetfulness
settling over his mind
in a thick dust.

Tonight, he weeps at the river
that was alive last summer.
Only now is he surprised by its death,
slow water trapped beneath stiff ice.
Just now he recalls when it ran, clear and lively.

—–

—–

Lost

The day he gave her the journal
he found her in the bedroom
unlike her self.
She said she wanted to write
things down.

Dante,
she had called
in a voice that put him on edge,
she was curled on her side
on top of the covers,
her eyes wide,
her body unmoving.

I had the dream again
she said,
of the dogs.

The hell-hounds were here,
down by the bed.
I could hear them panting.

—–

—–

Returning

In Boston, it is fast,
the city people
crowd in and out
and leave you
behind clutching
belongings
and your mind.

The T speeds,
a bullet, with the fast
ones, not you,
you sit under the plastic
awn with the bloated posters
of missing children
and victims of abuse
and wait
for the next one
knowing
it is your first day
back
and you are already late.

by Nook Harquail ’14

I admit that, in the night, I stole
Into your room, plucked a
Hair from your pillow and
Sent it —midnight airmail— to a
Lab in Tanzania. I’m sorry, but
I just had to know the sequence of
Your soul.

They say you
Can’t curl your
Tongue, but you

Can wiggle your ears;
That you hate
Apples, fancy

Goulash
Grudgingly;
That you

Can’t quite believe
That there’s life
After death.

They say: you make
A mean omelette, but
That your

Galantines
Chaud-froid
Congeal, every

Time. You’re
Good
At

T
A
G

Cause you’ve
An
Antelope’s speed (

That’s your
Argentinian blood,
Apparently.)

And you
Care so much it
Aches:

About
The starving in
Africa;

About the penguins
Global warming’s
Going to melt;

About the
Children on the
Corner selling lemonade;

About the scantily-
Clad models in
The magazines — You’ll

Always take
The penultimate
Cookie, leaving

The last for me; You’ll
Chase a stranger’s
Gecko all

Through town
To return it
To his arms.

They say evolution’s
Grown your
Third toe

A quarter
Cm longer
Than the average —

And that’s just
The first page,
There’s another

Thousand, if you
Care to take a
Gander.

by Sophia Golvach ’11

The Bayou City never dawns-
It yawns and spits back the reflection of streetlamps
to the murky sky then relaxes into
100 degree days, hoping for
hurricanes to turn off the lights,
so to breathe damp swarms of mosquitoes
into the houses that have forgotten
the swamp.

Dispossessed palm trees quiver adrift
in human humidity, trapping stray breezes
slender harbingers–the scant shade of perpetual noon.
Automatic garage doors open,
Soon after the gaudy, violent dawn of diesel-exhaust yellows
Loosing their clients, sweat-stained already, onto I-10,
Toward the grumbling skyline.

Galveston’s dead
And the righteous dead of Bolivar
Are marching on the Astrodome,
Seeking Katrina and haggling with
Rita, though Beaumont looks on in graves’ silence:
Water-logged gypsies that “rode ‘er out” one last time—
Sitting in lawnchairs in trailers with rootbeer,
Stubbornly toeing the rising tide.

Slumbering giant,
Ungraceful city looped
round snoring storage centers and Super Targets.
Your humdrum amorphous humming
Pervading el calor lleno de cansancio;
Hymns to your great commodity ENERGY
roaring from every tail-pipe.
You are too tired to bother with me.

by Olivia Sacks ’10

—————————————————–
The night we climbed out through the dunes,
—————briny and chilled under the sulking crescent,
you were ocean,
——ebullient as buoyancy itself,
————————stars in your eyes sold separately.
——————————–We flicked the porch light on
and mosquitoes communed by the bulbs.
—————Furrowing our brows at the sprawling night,
——–we curled into towels, damp on sea-grey planks.

————–The moon threw back his light upon dewy blades of grass
and thick air made garden of the soil, drawing
mushrooms from mud.
———————–The fact of night’s dark
———————–unwittingly defied, our illuminated holdings
——dimmed the stars, but our eyes still reached
for familiar constellations, to dot the i’s of identity
——-and make cross of memory,
—————like board games of corkboard at Seven,
——————————-wrapping nails with rubber bands,
attempting to recall
———————-a more perfect geometry.

The summer pilgrimage to sea ends
——–yearly when we can round up to January.
———————Snow shrouds sand and sea stiffens,
icicle pins icicle against icicle.

You are hospital gowned and IV fluid now,
———————–but I will remember you as summer:
——————————-tied together in string bikinis, not stitches.
———————-Your compass, tossed into the sea,
————————————-washes up sunset on shoreline.

———————Inside my pocket, the bible
from which you once rolled cigarettes.
———–I search around the blanks for answers, lost
————————–in the syncopated drop of the morphine drip.

But darling, I want to tell you not to worry.
——-The ocean continues lapping, even on nights
——————————————————with no moon,
————————and the doctors, they promise
———to sew you up tight.

Your scars will be traceless as the sea’s,
————–save spoors of shell
(fine as the bread we crumbed to dress the fish we lined that afternoon)
—————and mass graves of starfish and sand dollars
——————————-(turned souvenir as they wash up on shore).

———————For now, as you wait
—————for body to return to mind,
does the nature of human occupancy matter?

——–Blood on the field in the shape of your body.
——–Blond strands careless across the grass.
——–Yourself a salted outline.

——–Dripping trail of ocean traced back to an invented opponent.

——————————————————————————-

by Krista Oehlke ’13

jig-saw

i am all claws in this

white-walled room;

i fold into darkness,

float on the curve

of your jigsaw neck.

versatility

i made you slippers out of teeth, like reeds of clarinet. say “thank you” when your apple lips are calm and collected and russia is free.

today we are perforating holes through spaghetti, even though it is not polite. we’re singing out our own cantos and ripping up our own eyelids until, teeth by teeth, we are seesaws and all-purpose soap: all in one.

i assure you, on the shore, the bird sings YELLOW and we sing RED, and on the shore you’ll claw back into colors, crawl back into fierce colors – or will you?

call them black suns, LSD-induced dreams, and i will remedy the paper star and roll out purple tongues beneath your feet. don’t worry. long live france & long live my bourgeoisie feet.

———

———

by Matthew Ritger ’10

————-

“I have left behind illusion,” I said to myself.
—-“Henceforth I live in a world of three dimensions —
—-with the aid of my five senses.”

———–I have since learned there is no such world.

—————————————--Evelyn Waugh

————–

———/—

—

Sunlight falls, ribs

splay. In the hospital

a coma crawls across

the plastic punctured face

we knew. Who knows

the words for steel

that can splice an opal

tender tibia? A coral brain

under ativan seas, the mind

of the boy we love. This

carrera surface, his

carved skin. Luck

rolled bone dice, rolled

the car seven times.

The whole Atlantic sorrow

in sudden incision. Maybe

I am not very human. I wanted

to paint light on the side

of a house. Sunlight

falls on the snow on rooftops

below the hospital window.

Sunlight fails on the city’s spine

broken back by the ocean

onto the ceiling of this room.

Sunlight is falling up

one side of what was

your brother’s human face.

———

———

——————//

—-

The moon is ripe. Dare you

to drive without headlights

all the way across the bridge

to Mackworth Island: Leap,

and the net becomes blackbirds,

black rags in air, like all

my unwanted prayers —

failing moonlight falling

through the night, into

the belated months you’ve lived

in this hospital, living only

where he lives. Opening

the story of his life in hardcover;

breaking the spine. Each

as if by some new accident,

the nights without sleep come

one on one. Paralysis brothers sleep —

If they can say he’s asleep,

why can’t I pray he dreams?

Dream a colorless beach on the moon,

where we will meet. Dream

we’ve been here all along.

Dream the silent language

brothers know, or hope to know:

See us stone-skipping and

toe-tipping, not kids, but men:

Long lives going on

into the absence of gravity,

float to me laughing. Up here,

a well-skipped stone will go on

infinitely through the absence

of my asking to be forgiven:

A dream I am forgiven.

—

—

—————–///

—

Someone is writing songs

in octaves humans can’t hear.

Someone else keeps carving

his cornfields into sheet music

for the extra-terra spheres.

Summer after summer

as they peal apart

like bells, someone still says

to someone, I love you

as if the words were a spell.

An accident like this has ripped

all meaning from its sockets:

What was a brother has become

an avocado no angel, no

avocado. In the hospital, everyone

prays, but no one sings. Sometimes rain

plays the roof, a distant tambourine;

sometimes late light cymbals the sea.

I believe this avocado knows me

Even if he wakes up and no longer

knows me. If the damage done

is done beyond my recognition,

it doesn’t have to be so different:

We all go around living

our whole lives, with or without

reason to believe it was real.

—–

—-

—-                    -////

—

Because you braided into a bracelet

the necklaces they ripped from his body —

thin sailing cords and a silver

St. Christopher. Because your legs

were cigarettes, because I was a phantom

in a stranger’s flannel. Because

we both were homeless. Because

there are no good reasons: Because the hospital

was at least in a decent neighborhood,

all through the nights we couldn’t sleep

we could walk, would walk. Because

this winter was the coldest in the city’s

history. Because our brothers were both

in that car. Because I could thread your entire arm

through the eye of my forefinger and thumb,

you were so thin. Because your hands

were half the time too shaky to hold

a joint to your own lips, we’d shotgun.

An excuse to kiss maybe, maybe not —

moments always broken off

because the lungs can only take so much.

—

—

—-                   --////

—-

In the waiting room, I try to think of

anagrams, palindromes. Time, emit. War

raw. Star is rats. Imagine enigami.

Dead rats emit their light. You fold worlds

into enigmas: paper swans, paper hearts.

I try venery. Collectives. A rabble

of butterflies, a quiver of cobras.

The siege of herons, the battalion

of falcons; a murder of crows. You

have taken to scribbling in entire pages

with black ink. We call it a night.

Walk the longest way home in the moonlight.

I see you crystal real, reach up to touch my face,

and this all begins to feel like something

I have seen before: It’s either déjà vu

or every night of all these weakened

weeks. In the morning: reporter retroper, we

are in the waiting room. I am writing down

the words that came to mind last night:

to feel like something I have seen before.

You are looking down the hallway

where, around the corner, in another room,

a machine is pumping air into your brother.

Like a wine glass against a baseball bat,

every second opinion, every fourth, every blip

on every monitor, each and every rat star raw

war dead moment of these days shatters

through everything I’ve seen before it.

–

–

—————//// /

—

Watching his body botanize,

an oracle or anyone can see

his skin is the color of ash, his face

the color of dust. Someday

hasn’t come yet, but it will.

So why are there no snowdays

from the hospital? Let’s forgive

this place its desperation, and just go

sledding — Henry how did you

lose your coat, Henry, don’t forget

your hat — When he woke up,

thank God or the doctors and we all

became cranberry avocados

since those were the first words

his new mind came to love, why

was it so hard for everyone to smile?

Mother cried, and cried. She used to say

snow is the sawdust from who knows

whose blade. She used to say snow

filling up the woods would heal

the scars of the paths and roads

we made or took, as we must learn

to accept what we were given.

She says nothing now. Even my mind’s

not mine, anymore. I want so badly

to be good for you. So, say

winter on winter the sawdust

comes falling; I say it’s the sky

he’s sawing: When it falls

like a curtain, someday,

when it comes — Until then,

we will give to each fresh snow

two times the kiss of footprints

to fill. And, if luck leaves us

side by side, looking up

at whatever it is up there —

another world, the unworld,

above x behind x beyond:

Let’s call it cranberry avocado

and go sledding in our own dust.

Words, equations — nothing answers

any of my wonders: Henry is awake,

and light is falling. Multiplied

by snow falling. Divided by

dust, times dust, over time.

—

—

—

—

by Mary Rockwell ’11

———

knock the magpies knock beaks
on our windowpanes morning rains
outside on land grained
inside I lie next to you
we are the sole breathing
bodies in an airless room
a marvel how your spine curves
just as the dirt road out front
later we will try to sit outside
to paint more Madonnas
to make new what has aged
to make true moments entombed
replicas sown of romance we are
unnamed masters of stolen masterpiece:
what we have made is not earnest
there are doors and foreign locks
keys with heavy tassels
there are windows here kept closed
guarding against the clambering birds

———–

———–

by Frances Wang ’12

——–

June—
Summer clouds grow inky and gather over brooding slopes of battlefields.
Like Franklin’s keys and kites in lightening storms,
this petulant tension between you and I crackles.
We pace cool wood floors until our footprints collide
and the saturated strain between us
precipitates into barrages of words and fists.
It is the Battle of Midway
and you are the Imperial Japanese Navy.
In our sullen silent anger that follows, this month becomes the longest month—
the solstice of many years
and we, our child hands and feral eyes,
will not speak until summer comes again.

July—
Somewhere in the arid rim of Egypt,
the Rosetta Stone was resurrected, and you?
You realize you can talk to girls again.
Those years where silence
was our third-wheel are gone and untraceable,
joining Earhart and Electra in the place where vanished things go.
We follow old paths where our bare bony feet have walked before
rediscovering trees that have grown as we have.
You and I have come across the ruins of our years past
as Hiram Bingham came across Machu Pichu
grown wild in the carelessness of forests.
We step in, gingerly as tabby cats
finding old clearings for games, old hilltops for dreams.
This will be the summer of our return.

August—
A concrete wall snakes across the face of Berlin
and I gravitate towards you to be as we once were.
You are fifteen now and you hate me, I think,
this gathered strength of maturity closing me out of your life.
We swam in the river years ago and I wish you would come back with me.
But brother, you are so old. You dream of things greater than yourself
and certainly greater than me, sitting by myself on the river bank.
You, Vesuvius in all your temper, brood when I speak, until your anger
coats me in ash and I am still forever.
So I will just remember when we swam in the rain, diving to the silent cold currents where you smiled and waved.
I turned my face to the clouds and rose with bubbles slowly exhaled in rationed breaths.
Around me, the river splashed up to meet the falling rain
and in the staccato drumming of droplets, I drifted alone.
You, like Houdini in his water cage, have disappeared—
I will wait for you to surface.

——–

——–

by Scott McKnight ’11

——–

An Introduction

I am he:
A cart of apples, rolled tree to tree.
In spring, a sea-witch,
cackling, bathing in my copious pearls.
I am the horizon, encircling
your blue, brown, green irises.
I am the swaddled, coddled chick
and the spurned coin in the gutter.
A stranger, a bag of bones –
dolorous bells, cacophonous din.
I am your boudoir chair:
your “sulking place.”
I spit blood plums.
Edge up to the precipice.
Do you see the pit?
Smell the salty, lavender clouds.
There’s beauty, beauty – be reassured,
I’ve got you.

—–

—–

Neighbor’s Stroke

Awash in vanillas and French powders,
The skirting ethers of this gleaming,
Swirling birdcage breeze easy.

In, out.

Out.

Sanguine blue and marine red
Lights glint quietly through
The sandy cotton ruffles
Knit for my fish-eye window.
Come, closer, and look:
A handful of smocked surgical handymen
Stride serenely circular and slide
From their buoyant submarine
A bleached white bed,
Flat as a puddle.

Rolled to the brim of the lawn,
Its beachy sheets are filled with
A little bird – hair like a snowfall
And glasses large as ponds.
No fanfare, she sits easy as an egg
And floats into the ambulance, a queen.
A glimmer of sea-blues and coral-reds,
And the vision goes.

The milky orchid sighs.
My cloudy cat yawns and
Dozes, back.

——-

—–

Teapots, Death

My porcelain falls.
Shattering cream splinters
- and a booming belly explosion.
—————————————Oh.

Crystal shards fly –
a fistful of knives, flayed
bones from an utter catastrophe.
A clenching disaster. Dionysus
skips along the strand and plucks his dithyramb
ecstatically, as my
sculpted face breaks. Delicate
Noh mask – nose
thrust through eye socket.
——-A glittering of gold
music on my kitchen floor:
A silver lining
worth falling for.

———-

———

by Gwendolyn ’10

—

I borrowed your laptop, idly pursing files.
With the dumb confidence of sisters, I never thought
I’d find anything. I found
this draft, this email draft,
intended for, I could only guess,
your boyfriend. Littered
with squiggly red lines, non-capitalized letters, lacking
punctuation-

i didn’t wanna tell you
i mean im fine now, really, now
it ws before you and i
said no i said i changed my mind
he held me to his desk…
they waited outside and i
wanted to pretend it was normal and
i went on another date but i
coudlnt look at him i
i didn’t wanna tell you

It’s like they say: No one
can tear their eyes away
from a train wreck.
So I rubbernecked your pain
and wondered why
you never told me anything
on your visit last summer when we walked
in the late hot sun up the long slanting hill
wet towels heavy on our necks
and cars whizzing past.

—-

—-