Two Poems by Vera Caldwell

Diagrams of Knots

                                                                          My eyes are lopsided like used tea bags

                                                      and my fingernails are picked into grey, upturned crescents

                                           by the time the sun has set.

                                   I reach into my deep blue sheets to find:

                          what-ifs like diagrams of knots,

                    abandoned requests for wisdom I don’t have,

              acres of misspoken wit,

          an elaborately constructed fantasy

      in which things are infinitely vibrant

   seem warped as if through a reflection

  in a mall fountain—I am haunted.

 In the light of this paraphernalia,

 I cannot sufficiently engage

 in anything of use.

   I recline in the yellow lamplight

     like a tiger head rug,

       conscious that my mouth hangs open,

           issuing myself correctives

                 that turn over every minute like paperwork

                        boring my eyes into the pictures on the walls

                               as if I could find some respite in them

                                        and hazily marveling

                                              at how I’ve ever been able to handle

                                                                                               the morning.

 

Evening With West Texas and Alzheimer’s

 

Oma stirs her melted ice cream,

spills a little on her plastic placemat:

 

Daddy, Lolly, and I got these bowls in Alpine at a tiny store just down the road from our house, during a stormy afternoon, when the sky had turned purple and the trees were trembling. We’d just taken the Thunderbird for a drive around the mountain and we wanted to do something special. Daddy saw these bowls and loved the blue enamel. I put the bag between my feet for the drive home, as the rain was starting, and they began to shine in such a beautiful way, with many different colors, that at first I worried the enamel was made of some sort of poison. I’ve never seen them shine like that again. Daddy said the altitude was so high and the atmosphere so thin that we got more radiation from the sun than other places, that it must have touched the bowls somehow that day.

 

with shaky hands she picks up the blue bowl from Costco

puts it by the sink

and disappears out the front door

to sweep the driveway for the fourth time that day

a few minutes later, we see her looking up at the dark sky

broom forgotten loosely hanging from her hand

her figure now smaller and shrouded by trees

 

Vera Caldwell is a sophomore at Houston’s High School for the Performing and Visual Arts. As well as writing, she plays guitar and composes songs in her band, Nobody’s Daughter. Some of her favorite writers include Mikhail Bulgakov, Stanislaw Lem, Patti Smith, Ocean Vuong, and Fleur Jaeggy.

Art by Sherry Huang

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Perfect Case of OCD

For a while, OCD wasn’t just a disease, it was my disease. No one else was allowed to claim it, because if other people suffered like I did, It was basically like I never suffered at all. Quite a selfish thought, really, but OCD is a very self-absorbed disease, seeking all one’s available attention until there isn’t any left to give.

In fourth grade, I had to whisper the names of every student in my class (in alphabetical order) to no audience other than my humidifier and the radiator (which stopped and started in reluctant applause at my incredible memory). If I failed to recall a classmate, I couldn’t fall asleep. It simply wasn’t feasible. I would shut my eyes and listen to the heavy lull of the radiator, but my fists would clench and the fallow colors creeping through the cracks between my curtains, the hapless four A.M. light, would settle atop my eyelids. But sleep would not come.

In sixth grade, I chewed each bite thirty times in each cheek, for I thoroughly believed, even one bite short of my perfect number, I might fail to digest the meal entirely. It would settle in my stomach like a rock and plop itself there, an eternal resident of my digestive system. I knew it was a foolish thought, and I kept it to myself. But I believed it nonetheless.

In eighth grade, I cried because I knew something wasn’t right. Nothing was ever right. But I was never sure what. Breath taut, like a shrinking elastic. Four in, seven out. Harsh beams of light filtered through my sterile shades; the four strips of white that shone on the sliver of the floor between the bed and the wall were the same every day. Four was a bad number, so I avoided them. One foot on the cold hardwood, another, until they were side by side, toe to toe. Three sips of water. Gulp, gulp, gulp. Cup back down. Center it, good. Every morning was the same, and I liked it this way.

It was also in eighth grade that I developed my x-ray vision. It was a Tuesday when Max Jacobs threw up in the middle of first period. Mrs. Peterson was explaining the importance of special right triangles and he started coughing. He didn’t even bother aiming for the sink or a trash can, it blanketed his desk like a cocoon, spilling over into his open backpack.

“Oh, dear,” began Mrs. Peterson, but I didn’t stay to listen to the remainder of her sentence. I pulled on my sweatshirt and hurdled over an empty chair to reach the door before any of his germs spread to my open lips. I saw things nobody else could, the bacteria floating through the air, crawling along the carpet, clinging to the bottoms of my shoes, sinking into the raw skin on my palms. I despised the nurse’s office. It was the most germ-ridden room in the entire school. They were everywhere in there: in the bathroom where countless stomach ache cases had thrown up, on the armrests of the benches where the cold cases rested their sweatshirts after they’d coughed in their sleeve. I avoided this hell hole at all costs. But I didn’t know where else to go. I perched myself on the table as I hyperventilated. I had never breathed so fast before, but I didn’t have time to be impressed with this new skill, for the nurse was rubbing my back with her hand, the same hand that had rubbed hundreds of other backs that same very week. I tore away and shoved my hands in my pockets where they wouldn’t touch anything else, held my breath so I wouldn’t have to breathe the infested air. By the time I couldn’t hold my breath any longer, she was dialing the number on my emergency contact sheet. I breathed into the hood of my sweatshirt and waited.

When I got home, I stood under the bathroom’s judging light. I scrubbed the antibacterial soap into the bleeding canyons on the backs of my hands, cracked from a combination of over washing and the biting winter air. I used only the hot water until the skin beneath my fingernails turned purple like the bath toy my mom used to give me that changed color in the pink bubble bath steam. I clenched the skin of my cheeks in my molars until my eyes watered and counted to one hundred. A solid number. A safe number.

“What are you doing?” My dad flicked off the faucet. I was just relieved that I didn’t have to touch it. Hands suspended in the air, water dripping onto my socks, I whispered, “Washing my hands.”

Suddenly, I found myself in a cold office. All the laminated degrees, they meant nothing to me, but they must have meant something to my parents, for it made them trust this man with my care for hours at a time, even though they hardly knew him. I was told his name was Dr. Clump, and that was all I really knew about him, besides the fact that he graduated with a PHD from Brown. It haunted me that he knew so much about me, yet I knew so little about him, and I was determined to find out more. All I knew was what I could see, and I never liked that, because there were always things lurking beneath the surface. I knew he leaned back in his chair as he talked, and his stomach protruded over his thick black belt, landing on top of his desk. I knew a diet coke left a wet ring on top of a textbook sized, “A Comprehensive Guide to Adolescent OCD” Perhaps he was going on a diet, a rather unsuccessful one, I presumed. I knew he closed his eyes while he talked, inspiring me to coin the nickname later when I described the session to my parents: Closed-eyed Clump. His desk lacked any photographs of his wife, kids, even a dog. There were only generic framed pictures that it was clear he didn’t take, a fall leaf, a droplet of water on a brick, they seemed meaningless, and they were hung crooked on his wall. I wondered if he had done it like that on purpose, because surely no grown man could manage to accidentally center a photo that poorly.

I sought solace in the small octagonal window behind him, the sky blue, grey, black, orange, depending on the time of day I was dragged to this stifling room, always cold in the summer and warm in the winter. I loved the drive home from his office, from the city, buildings stacked neatly side by side, precisely planted shrubbery, because I knew I didn’t have to stare past his ugly glasses into curious, prying eyes for at least another week. But I loathed the ride there, the car-seat fabric stretching between my white knuckles, rolling the window up and down because I couldn’t get it just right.

During one of our earlier sessions, I noticed his computer had adopted a new screensaver: polar bears. It changed about every thirty seconds or so, and each depiction of the animal featured a new pose, one leaning against a rock, one sitting cross-legged, one standing on its heels begging for fish, one resting on its back, its stomach stretching out over its legs. Then and there, I decided my shrink quite resembled this arctic species, but his most accurate likeness was certainly the last image on the slideshow.

“Do you know why I chose the polar bears?”

I shook my head.

“Now that I brought it up, and you’re staring at them, you can’t stop thinking about them, can you?”

I shook my head again. This was our usual routine. He would say something he thought to be profound or groundbreaking and smile to himself at his own genius while I either nodded or shook my head, depending on what I deemed appropriate.

“It’s like OCD. As much as you try to stop yourself from thinking about your compulsions, they will never go away. You have to stop trying to make them go away, and they will.” This seemed extremely counterproductive. Wasn’t his entire job to cure me? Not to make up reasons why I wasn’t yet cured. I realized how unfair this entire thing was. Why me? Dr. Clump told me I had the perfect case of OCD, but he also said nothing was perfect. He was full of contradictions. It comforted me, knowing that something about me was perfect, just right: my OCD. That meant there were other people like me, probably a lot. And as I watched the sinking orange beyond the car windshield, past the puzzle of buildings, while my dad whistled his usual backing out of a therapist’s driveway tune, I thought about this idea. I thought about it quite often. Nothing is perfect. What exactly did that mean? I had heard things described as perfect before, so how was it possible that perfection didn’t exist? It was August when I realized he was right. During one of our dimmer, lamp-lit sessions over the winter, he told me to go kayaking. I was watching sleet blanket a telephone wire through the octagon as he described the ripples in the water that stem from the rivulets dripping off the paddle. How they appear unflawed at first glance, the rings all equal lengths from each other, separating slowly until they sink into the black depths, continuing far into the distance.

“But,” he had said, “even one of the most seemingly perfect sights in nature is still not entirely perfect. A boat could drive by, disrupting the pattern. And this is essentially what OCD is. Something disrupts the pattern and it upsets us.” This sounded like something a bearded man with horn-rimmed glasses framed by Brown degrees would say, but it was also one of the moments when I was most fond of my therapist. It was a very therapist thing to say, and I liked that. I liked that it was expected, but I still wasn’t sure how that piece of advice could fix me. Come summer, though, I did as he told me. As soon as I stepped into the boat, I immediately became ill-at-ease. It tilted with the shifting wake, I never liked being off balance. Water soaked through my shorts, prickling the skin on my thighs. My breathing began to tighten again. 7,4,7,4. I watched the sky warm to a pale red reflecting in the water on the ripples. It’s true. They aren’t perfect, but they’re still beautiful. Exposure therapy, a term Clump liked to throw around a lot; I knew it was important for me to get better, but I kept putting it off. Getting better, it seemed hard, far away, the future you imagine on the hopeful edge of sleep, but in the back of your mind know will never find its way into reality. I dipped my fingers into the cool pink water, sweet on my chipped fingernails. I let them stay there for a solid amount of time. I didn’t count, just waited for my fingers to grow numb as I stared at my rosy reflection in the lake water. I tried to remember the second part of what Clump had said. As he was finishing his sentiment, I remembered, I was watching a cardinal flick ice from the telephone wire,

“Even if something disrupts the pattern, don’t let it upset you. Nothing’s perfect, and that’s okay.”

Lily Oldershaw is a sophomore in high school who enjoys writing based both on her own experiences and creating worlds from her imagination. She hopes readers of her work will think about the world differently and take a piece of it with them into their everyday life. When she isn’t writing, Lily can often be found doing yoga, watching interviews on Youtube of interesting people, and trying to shorten the pile of “To Be Read” books on her desk.
Visual Art by Anastasia James 
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The Symbolism behind Driving into an Underpass on the Garden State Parkway

One time, while driving home from a Tuesday grocery trip at the Little India produce market, you wiped the last fragment of boiled spaghetti away from your lips with a Chipotle napkin and said that only things that bluntly resemble the form of humans can have symbolism. Take the trees, you said, and see how their branches jut out like frozen twizzlers from the lean figure-eight waist — it all looks distinctly like the silhouette of a human body. This is why there are so many poems littered with metaphors about trees. And look ahead at the chipped brick underpass, you said, there is no symbolism in this thing, no blunt resemblance to humankind, just a loaf of carved brick designed to spare our Chevy truck from the humming Jersey rain for a few seconds. Pay no heed to the underpass, pay heed to the trees, you said. 

Now I don’t understand what this Garden State underpass has done to you to be named the most un-symbolic thing on the planet, but, then again, I don’t get a lot of things. For example, how did we two people, one a believer and the other an atheist, find ourselves together in the midst of a wedding. We announced our commitment to each other somewhere in the local mango fields, property of a fruit farmer who was not invited to our ceremony. I did not fancy stealing another man’s oxygen and trespassing like this, but you said that it did no harm, and so we exchanged rings on another man’s property unbeknownst to that man. 

The mangoes of the tree we stood under decorated the tufts of leaves like hairpins and your soft fingers did not hesitate to plunder a fruit from this tree for your lips to bite into, water syrup forming rivers through the lace of your gentle fingers like poetry. I was stunned when you did this. The fruit, mango, was nothing more than a complicated collection of particles to you, but I saw clearly that it was a child of the tree and the property of a man we both didn’t know. In the taxi your brother paid for, I pressed you for a reason as to why plundering the forbidden fruit was the arch for sharing my life with you and you said that it was just a mango, that it didn’t matter, that we shouldn’t fight on our wedding day. 

But our first night together, we fought anyway, this time with pieces of hips and elbows for the first right to the bathroom sink and, in the end, we had to share, like children. In between toothbrushes and shaving cream, with mouth foaming with listerine, dental floss, and toothpaste, I turned to you and said that I would love to be a liquefied mango, or any fruit for that matter, because it would be nice to be able to just disappear down the sink drain sometimes. Except, the part about being a liquefied mango is important because it would be quite horrid to flow down the drain like regular bathroom water. And you spat out a puddle of Colgate toothpaste into the sink and told me that you didn’t understand how mangos could possibly matter. I must have looked crazed to you, defending an eaten mango and then announcing that I want to be a liquified mango. But I didn’t want to tire you with my theory about the universe so what I said, instead, is that I guess what I mean is that I want an overripe mango for breakfast. 

Then dawned the days when you used to bike to Chinatown every morning, through dim sum palaces and dumpling dens, to buy a pound of fresh mangos for me, wearing nothing but husky trousers and that oversized gray Santa Cruz hoodie you once left on the couch and missed a flight to retrieve. And even though you never bothered to fix that brake lever, even New York City traffic didn’t keep you from your bike. Thinking of you one day as you had gone, I came to the conclusion that your Santa Cruz hoodie and your bike spend more time together than your lungs do with air. I wondered what a love letter from your Santa Cruz hoodie to your bicycle would sound like, maybe something like this: 

 

     Dear Bob the bicycle, 

I fell in love with the perfect curves of your tires that carry your full lust. I can fit into any space you allow me to. I wish for our dust to dance together like charcoal at the end of each day, when you’ve tired yourself and return from the dirt and grime of the winding streets.

Love, 

Your Santa Cruz hoodie 

 

I thought the love letter was quite clever, but when I gave it to you, you said that I have this unsettling tendency to pay attention to things that don’t matter, like bicycles, sweatshirts, and pigeons. Stealing a mango from a plastic grocery bag, you said that the rooster windbreaker with a missing “W” and the Chinese minimalists shopping for vegan tofu in China Town don’t matter in the grand scheme of life and the universe. So the next morning, I really tried to not think of the symbolism behind your tongue pushing water through the tube of your throat after 59 push-ups in the foyer, or the meaning behind a person who cuts an apple pie with the knife tilted up at 90, instead of a flat 180 degrees angle, or the symbolism behind the strange way in which you eat spaghetti and meatballs because you, My Lord, are the only living being who can get drunk off of dipping spaghetti, like nachos, into a tomato sauce with eggplant and zucchini. Now the truth of the matter is that I tried to pay no heed to the underlying symbolism of things for about two days, before rolling over and accepting defeat and the fact that cheesecake somehow represents the birth of a child. (A cheesecake is heavy and burdensome on the stomach, buttery, satisfying like the feeling one has after birthing a newborn, but touch the crust, and it crumbles to reveal a world of sin.) 

But you never got how these things could possibly matter because you never cared about the mango from the tree that did not belong to you, or the rooster windbreaker with the missing “W,” or the Chinese minimalists. You don’t remember the three people who always stood leaning on the tar hill cascading around the price pole for diesel in that gas station that bordered our flat. You don’t remember what the moon looked like, crescent or full, that night we built a cardboard airplane out of the cereal boxes in our pantry. That night, I told you that the reason our marriage collapsed was because of the mango and you laughed and asked again how mangos could possibly matter. The truth is that if you had cared about the mango, then the walls of the world would have leaned closer to you, given pieces of itself to you, and held you like honey with the gentlest of arms and lips. 

But the world and its things obviously never mattered to My Lord, you, who never hesitated to plunder and pluck the forbidden fruit and drink the soul of the mango leaves that were summoned to protect you and I, the paired pigeons, from the rest of the world. The people vomited sins and you spat back in the name of the holy Scripture. I am bitter. I wish that the fruit farmer had awoken our marriage night and thrown us both, like Adam and his beloved Eve, with the complementary threats and curses, to the cumbersome paved streets for drinking his property’s air. 

Now if we’re going back to the underpass, My Lord, there is lots of symbolism behind that Garden State underpass. The underpass broke the slaps of the rain as we drove underneath and somewhere in between, I grew up. That underpass is a symbol for our marriage, above all things. We drove Ferraris and Mercedes through each other as if we were somehow able to still stand even with an arching hole simmered through our pooling belly buttons. As we ate the fruits and beets, the things of this world fell from our throats through our bellies and out, though the difference is that I tasted it and you shoved it down your throat. You are like the underpass. You don’t stop to think about the cars and trunks that pass through you. You stand and assert your strength and courage by pushing something as gentle as rain away. The truth is that no one will care when that Garden State Parkway underpass is torn down one day and built into a better, stronger underpass, and the underpass knows that and maybe that’s why it’s so bitter. The underpass breathes, My Lord, just like the mangos breathe. The world beyond our bubble breathes, full inhales and exhales, drunk on the taste of air. It carries lessons and meaning and that’s why something as prosperous as mangos matter to the overarching scheme of the universe. 

 

Zoha Arif is a 16-year-old high school student studying computer science and programming at the Academy for Information Technology. She currently lives in New Jersey and enjoys spilling her strangest ideas into her works of fiction in her free time. She is also an editor for her school newspaper, Polyphony Lit, and E&GJ Press.

Visual arts by Ordy Chen

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Green and Gold

The story opens like this: a small suburban town, incredibly picturesque scenery, high expectations and even higher taxes. A teenage girl mingles with her friends in the hallway in the few sacred minutes before class begins. She looks like the average Chappaqua student. She sounds like the average Chappaqua student. She is one, isn’t she?

Mm, not so much. Before Chappaqua there was Eastchester with its white picket fences and lovely neighbors, where she and her parents piled into a rented single-bedroom, single-bathroom multi-family house for four years. Before Eastchester was the Bronx, a tall apartment with a view of the city skyline from the top floor and piles of rotting garbage from the bottom, where they stayed on the fourth floor for a few years until a drunk man was shot to death in the bar behind their building, after which her parents deemed it high time to move out. Before the Bronx was South Side Chicago, notoriously dangerous, not particularly pleasant either, especially not the grimy studio apartment (demolished a few years after they moved) that she can only remember from photo albums—but her first home nonetheless.

Before that before and even before that, if you really dig deep enough, you’d trace her life tree down through its suburban trunk, into its roots buried in sketchy South Side Chicago soil, through the Americas and across the horizon of the Atlantic.

The real story opens like this: a big city, street lamps blurring together under the ink of night. A 25-year-old newlywed waiting for the 8:15 PM bus calls this city her home, the only home she’s ever known.

She’s a planner and has been one for her whole life. She knows what she’s doing, what she’s capable of, what she wants in life. This city is her childhood and her youth. This life is comfort and familiarity and convention guaranteed to lead to stability.

Above the streetlamp, a sliver of moon hovers, just enough for its beams to skim the dots of drifting snow. The wind warns of an impending storm, tugging at the end of her ponytail and swirling the tip into a brush dipped in the gold of the streetlight glow, ready to paint her future. She looks around herself at the streets she could navigate with her eyes closed, the people she’s loved her entire life, the home she’s slowly built for herself.

Yet she knows there’s more. Her husband just left to study abroad in Illinois. She wants to support him there, and maybe she should. But how can she not think about all of the impossibilities? If she leaves her home, will she ever come back? What about her mother and father and brother? Will she make it in a country whose language she can barely speak, whose culture is entirely foreign, whose location is halfway across the planet? How does she survive financially, socially? Emotionally?

The moon brightens and brightens, fans out across the sky. Hours pass and the snow comes softer, everything rhyming with the word “go”. She thinks again of the impossibilities, and then of the possibilities. The promise of spring, glowing green and gold.

And then she rushes toward it with every ounce of energy she has.

She first works as a minimum-wage fast-food server at a Chinese place in downtown Chicago. She comes home every night nauseous from the sickening smell of oil soaked into her clothes and her hair, hands burned and blistered from the frying pan. For now, no other stores will take her with her poor English. So she studies hard.

Half a year later, a friend introduces her to the owner of a Japanese restaurant a few blocks east and she lands a job immediately. The restaurant is nice, somewhere she might have chosen to dine with a few friends on a Friday night if she were back home. She carries a secret snack stash of edamame beans in the left pocket of her apron and a pocket-size dictionary in the other—here, she relies much more on English. She gets tips now, and a few months later, she and her husband save up enough money to buy a bed frame to go with their mattress.

Because she adores children, her third job is babysitting. It pays well and she grows close to several of the families she works with. She has her very own baby to babysit a year later: her daughter, born on a chilly November morning as twilight surrenders to dawn. Shortly after, her husband receives a job offer in the Bronx, so they say goodbye to their friends (surprised by how sad they are to go), then on a foggy weekend begin their drive to New York City.

The sunsets from the balcony of their new apartment blanket the entire city until only tiny glittering lights are left dotting the skyline across the pier, countless specks of light, countless dreams and wishes. Their room is close to the ground floor so on windy days she gets a whiff of the garbage piles on the streets, but it’s nothing compared to the fast-food place she used to work at. Days bleed into weeks. She upgrades her pocket-size dictionary to a handheld electronic one that she buys from a Dollar Tree two blocks down.

She takes her daughter to the library near their apartment and explains to the librarians in what broken English she can muster that she’s going back to school soon, that she’ll be busy but can’t afford a nanny, asks if it’s okay to maybe drop her daughter off on the weekends. And so it’s between the beanbag chairs and lime green leather couches with the help of the librarians that her daughter learns how to sound English letters out, how to put them into mysterious bundles called words, how to read—and god, after she learns how to read, there’s really no stopping it. She sees the way her daughter falls in love with the adrenaline rush of a plot twist, the desperate itch of a cliffhanger, the way the page opens up doors to worlds and people that don’t even exist in this dimension of the universe.

Outside of those library walls, weeks blur into months, months into years. She’s back in school for her master’s degree: classes in the morning, interning in the afternoon, work in the evening, homework deep into the night as the sky blackens and blackens then pales again, hinting at dawn. A few hours of sleep. Repeat.

Seven hundred sunsets and sunrises later, she receives her diploma and a New York State teaching certificate and an indescribable feeling of warmth. Her daughter is growing up. When she lands a second interview for the first time, she buys herself a laptop to replace the battered electronic dictionary that she barely even needs anymore, switches out her flip-phone for the newest Nokia. They move out to the suburbs into a good school district that’s two hours away, but she takes up the offer at the Brooklyn elementary school anyway when they tell her she’s hired. It’s the first call she gets on her smartphone and she saves the number into her contacts with shaking hands.

Sure, she’d like to sleep past 5 AM and not commute for four hours a day, but she loves teaching more, and she loves her daughter the most. The sun blazes and blazes, pans out across the sky. The glow of spring is here.

My mother’s story is one in 37 million. Most of those voices remain unheard, memories buried, some families even separated at the border of two countries. In so many ways, my mom was lucky for being admitted legally, for being with her loved ones from the very beginning, for being able, after all these years, to pass on her story to her daughter, who will pass it on to the world. Because stories like her mother’s deserve to be told.

To make the choice she did meant that she viewed the world in a way I can’t even begin to wrap my mind around. She saw her life through a lens larger than herself, far larger, and I’m eternally grateful for that lens and for her unrelenting dedication, for not only her sacrifices, but also the mindset she instills in me by simply existing.

Her decisions have shaped me more than anything else has. I moved around a lot as a kid. It’s ingrained in who I am. From a young age, I learned to say hello and goodbye to people, because chances were I wouldn’t get another chance if I passed this one. I learned that home is where the heart is, that my family would always be my sun, unfailingly there for me every morning to keep me alive and warm. I learned that my friends are just asteroids orbiting in my life, just like I’m an asteroid in theirs. One day they’ll spin off into the abyss and new ones will come, and that’s okay. Everything I have in my tiny universe is temporary, but that’s kind of the beauty of it, isn’t it?

I’m writing this on my porch steps right now. It’s getting dark and I should probably head back before the mosquitoes get to me. But the moon is almost out in the same Chicago sky I was born under a decade and a half ago, and its faint outline greets me, a lullaby of dulcet silver against rich velvet on a hazy summer night. And if I just give myself a minute, if I’m still enough, I might hear the faint jingle of the New York City ice cream truck accompanied by an orchestra of sirens and honks. A breeze might bring a whiff of that citrus-flavored candy my mom used to buy for me on her way home from work, and I might just feel the tickle of grass in my small picket-fenced backyard in suburban Eastchester. Even with my eyes closed, I can imagine so vividly the roses that climb up my neighbor’s trellis here in Chappaqua, where the stars are brighter than city lights; I’ll picture the sunflowers and little dandelion seeds choreographed by the wind, and I’ll know, truly, that I owe everything to her.

On her twentieth wedding anniversary last week, she sat me down as the guests left, pulling out of our driveway one by one as the sun dipped behind the clouds. Tell my story, she said. Tell it to the world, dear. Write something for me.

I will, I promised her. But you’ve got to teach me your secrets first. How did you do it?

And she just laughed, took my hands in her calloused ones. I could see every wrinkle around the corners of her eyes. Sometimes, she said to me, it’s almost as though she can see herself standing at the airport alone, waiting at life’s crossroads, clutching onto a map of fate without any labels and racing down a one-way street that could very well be a dead-end—but racing anyway, because she knew that it would be worth it.

If not for herself, then for her husband. If not for herself, then for her parents and their parents, watching from above. If not for herself, then for her daughter’s life tree and its Chicago roots, for all of its branches that have yet to sprout, for the hope that its leaves, under the warmth of the spring sun, will bud green and gold.

 

16-year-old Zoya Yan is a junior attending Horace Greeley High School in Chappaqua, New York. As a first-generation American, she loves to explore her heritage through her writing. In her spare time, Zoya enjoys reading and napping with a preference for the latter.

Art by Noah Jones

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A Conversation With Peter Twal

Peter Twal is a Jordanian-American electrical engineer, and the author of Our Earliest Tattoos. His poetry collection won the Etel Adnan Poetry Prize (University of Arkansas Press). His poems have appeared in The Believer, Poem-A-Day, Best New Poets, Kenyon Review Online, West Branch, Ninth Letter, Gulf Coast, Quarterly West, and elsewhere. Peter lives in Phoenix, AZ with his wife and newborn son.  

 

Rome Smaoui and Claire Kim sat down to interview Peter about his recent poetry collection Our Earliest Tattoos. After Peter’s poetry masterclass at Idyllwild Arts Academy, the Parallax team had a variety of questions about his work and his sources of inspiration. 

 

Q: When did you get into writing?

 

When did I get into writing? It sounds silly but the first instances of writing for me, I was probably four or five. I used to write little prayers. I grew up in a Catholic home, so that was something that I thought a lot about. And so I wrote little prayers. Probably around when I was in middle school, I got into writing poems for the first time. They were terrible, they were trash poems. I think in a way that we all probably kind of struggle in the beginning when we’re just reaching for things that we’re not sure are even there. It was probably around middle school, but I didn’t really get serious about writing until I was in high school, and then later in college where I kind of had to make a decision about whether I wanted to study engineering or creative writing. Ultimately, I chose engineering, simply because I knew I wanted to do both, and I knew I wouldn’t get an engineering job without an engineering degree–that’s the way that companies work, unfortunately–but I always wanted to go to grad school for writing, and I’m really glad that I did. 

 

Q: Why did you choose science and engineering as a career path instead of writing? Does this ever inspire your writing?

 

So like I was saying, it was part practical. Where I just felt like I wouldn’t be given a shot as an engineer without a degree. And it meant a lot to me to pursue that, because it was a passion to me, as a kid. Just tinkering with things and interacting with the world in that way. So even though I was going for an engineering degree, I was doubting it the whole time. I think it was my sophomore year, and I was getting into courses that were intentionally designed to make you fail—they were really hard classes—but more importantly, I remember my sophomore year, I got a 33 on a circuits exam and I went home distraught because I had never done that poorly on a test, and I told my parents “I’m done, I’m not doing engineering, it’s not for me. I’m going to study writing,” and my parents, in their infinite wisdom said, “Okay… but why don’t you just keep going and see where it takes you. And you can still do poetry in grad school, but just stick with the engineering for a little bit longer.” I think that was a real gift. I ended up learning a lot from engineering and that segues into the writing portion. I don’t think my writing would be what it is without my engineering degree, and my appreciation for math and science, and how things interconnect. I think of circuits, specifically. I try to apply that to my poems, because in circuits you can constantly point to power sources. You can point to moments of resistance. Other elements that hold energy and voltage. That’s how I write; that’s how I try to write, at least. I try to map everything out on the page in the way a circuit looks, maybe. Where I understand what it’s trying to accomplish to the best of my abilities, and then build a plan from there. 

 

Q: Each title in this collection is a lyric from “All my friend s” by LCD Soundsystem, what inspired you to use those lyrics? Other than the titles, where do you see the song appear in the collection? 

It’s a really tough one. In 2012, a couple friends came over, and we spent some time together. We had a really nice evening. My friend, Drew, played that song for me and I loved it; it really struck a chord in me. I thought it was a beautiful song, I thought it encapsulated a moment that I was in really well because the song was all about growing apart from people, and I think I was realizing at that time, a year out of college, that I was growing apart from a lot of my friends. Friends that I cared about. And I took friends for granted. I took for granted how good of friends we were and how it wasn’t necessary to communicate all the time, because I knew they were there, I knew they were my friends. So the further I moved away from home, the more I started to write these poems. I felt like it was something that pulled me back home. It reminded me about a lot of people that I loved, and at the same time it reminded me about the distance between them and I. Last September, my friend Drew died. The person who introduced me to the song. And it was a shock to the system, different from anything I had ever felt. It reminded me of what I loved so much about that song, and what I loved about Drew, and how important it was to me that he was one of the people who introduced me to it. Aside from the lyrics, the way that I see that song appear [in the book] is: I think the book deals with grief; to me it’s a series of elegies to a band that had broken up before I had ever gotten to see them live—but then they got back together and I did see them— It was a series of elegies in the way that I think that song was an elegy to a past life, as well. I was writing elegies for the band, I was writing elegies for the people I love, I was writing elegies for friends that I simply thought were separated from me by distance, and I didn’t realise that it was more than that, that it was only a matter of time before they were gone. I didn’t take full advantage of the time I had with them, maybe in the way that the speaker in the song didn’t take advantage of the time he had with the people in his life. 

 

Q: Why did you choose to write sonnets? What was the process of writing/deconstructing these sonnets? 

 

I think sonnets are one of the earliest forms of poetry that I dabbled in. I started writing them when I was in college, and I just thought that they were so compact and neat. There are obviously the really popular Shakespearean and Petrarchan forms, but there is a long history of people who have tried to take the sonnet form and adapt it to their own style. I felt a calling to do that. So, I wrote all of these poems, and they were all fourteen lines to begin with. I knew that they weren’t sonnets by definition for many other reasons. Sonnets have different formal elements like an “if/then” structure to them, that I liked and enjoyed working with in my poems. So like I was saying, at the core of it, they were all fourteen line poems. When I began the editing process, a lot of those poems got a little longer, and most of them got a little shorter, and probably about half of them ended up being fourteen lines. I wondered if that still meant they were sonnets? I think that kind of got me thinking about form in a new way, because what is it about a form in poetry that says “Yes, you are a sonnet” or “You are a ghazal (غزل)” or any other form? I think there are elements that are maybe more important than others, but I think my poems are now haunted by the sonnet form. To me, that doesn’t make them any less sonnet-like, and even if these poems remember being sonnets at any certain time, I think to a certain extent that still kind of makes them sonnets. As tough as it was to cut away some of the more formal elements that I thought proved that they were sonnets, it kind of opened up a new realm where I felt free to put the form of the sonnet in service of my poems, as opposed to putting my poems in service of the form. 

 

Q: How did you decide on incorporating such unusual characters such as death, God, and the Mars rover? 

 

Going back to growing up in a religious family where—I mean as an Arab— religion is almost part of your identity. It’s something that I still think about, it’s something that I still struggle with, and I am constantly negotiating what I believe with myself. I’m still trying to figure out what my fate is in my life, and what its role is at that given time. So in this book, it was kind of an opportunity for me to work some of that out. It’s easiest for me to understand God and death as concepts when they are brought to my level, which is being that of a human. A human in this current age and being kind of shallow—or mischievious, or needy—the not great things about being a person, that we all kind of do. It was also a chance to poke fun at myself, because in making God or death say something in the book, I was thinking back on things that I had said or done in some fashion. There are only a few instances of that because I think I tried to make God and death way more…bratty. So that was the idea behind that, it was about how I can take these grand concepts and bring them down to my level so that I can understand them a little bit better. As for the Mars rover— aside from my obsession with it at a scientific level— I think I had a few poems in the book where I had essentially tried to make the Mars rover out to be a God figure, where they’re far away and in communication with humanity in some way, but never present. Always watching, always in echo. To me it just seemed like a connection I felt like I had to make between those two characters. 

 

Q: How do you think your poems address modern technology and ideas in relation to timeless poetic themes like love and death? 

 

I guess, thinking about technology, characters are constantly texting in the book. I came into the texting game very late, and I text like a ninety-four year old man because it’s heavily punctuated, so I would text how I would read off from a page and would be like, “Yeah, that sounds like a sentence.” When I tried to put that into the book, it forced me to relax some of those tendencies, those twitches, and how they I guess are related to concepts like love and death. It goes back into bringing it down to a new level that I don’t typically interact with. I think these are very lofty concepts that we think of as hard to understand, but the technology is so embedded in our lives and we don’t find that hard to understand at all. However, when we talk about love or death, it seems like this far-off thing that we can’t really grasp as a larger presence in our lives. 

 

Q: How do you think your poems deal with the idea of permanence vs. impermanence? What made you feel drawn to this concept? 

 

Wow…these are all stunning questions. The poems deal a lot with grief and I think grief is a permanent thing in my life. Whether it would be people in the past and mourning them or people that are soon to pass, like in this book, there are a couple of folks who were really important to me as I was writing these poems. Maybe as I was writing this poem, I was working through this idea of impermanence and letting it go. Memory is something that is permanent, but also impermanent, and it’s constructed by both us and our surroundings. So we have this idea that memory is pure, imperfect, and untouchable, and it’s always not, it’s always tainted. When we make the connection in our minds, we begin to appreciate the parts that are permanent, which are emotions that are attached to the memory. Maybe going back to my point on grief, it’s a different way to understand what we’re taking with us and how we shape ourselves with those things that we take with us. 

 

Q: What is your favorite period of literature, or genre, and why? Are there any other genres you feel particularly drawn to?

 

Favorite genres of literature—definitely poetry! But if we’re talking about periods, when I was in high school, I read a lot of romantics, romantic poems, and I was so struck by them. How vivid the imagery was and how much they felt. I think sentimentality gets that grab in writing or art because it’s perceived as being like weakness, or it’s also an engendered thing, but I love sentimental writings, and I think the romantics were seen as the sentimental group. So back then, I was really struck by that. I haven’t really read much about it since, but that’s probably the group that I still appreciate. 

 

Q: Are you working on any new projects? 

 

So, I read four poems last night at my reading, that were new, and that were not in the book. If I’m being honest, I haven’t written much new stuff for a long time. I don’t know why it has been difficult. I think now within the past years, I moved, started a new job, my partner and I had this new baby, and I think a lot has changed, so a lot of how I moved through my life has changed as well. I typically used to go to one spot at a coffee shop and write. That was how I did it, and I can’t do that anymore, so I’m having a hard time getting back into any form of consistent writing. So, long answer, I don’t think I have any projects right now. I have a lot of poems that are cooking and a few that are finished, but I don’t know at this time if there’s anything more than a stack of poems, pages, and I’m okay with that. I’m okay with letting them sit, spend some time together, and work themselves out to a certain extent. I think every time I come back to them, I start to make new connections, and I think a new project will come out of it eventually, but I can’t say that I have anything other than a few poems at the moment. 

 

Q: When you were writing this collection, did you have a particular target audience in mind? Who do you hope will read this collection? 

 

I think I talked a little bit about this yesterday, about the way I had to relearn what it is to be an Arab body at this current time. As a kid, I let a lot of things go that I took for granted and didn’t think enough about my role in society, the responsibility I had, and what it was to be an Arab. So, when I began to edit this collection, that changed, and I hope now that other folks in my community who maybe grew up in a similar way that I did without realizing how Arabs are being portrayed in popular culture and how they are depicted in the news. I hope other folks, who don’t realize how harmful some of those things are— as I didn’t when I was younger— would encounter this and maybe gain something from it. 

 

Q: What advice would you give to the growing writers and poets?

 

I think two things. One, reading is writing. Even if you’re not putting something on the page, but you’re still taking in the work of others, you’re participating in writing in some way and you’re learning. I didn’t think that enough when I was first starting out. I thought writing was me sitting there, putting words down and I didn’t read enough other poets until a poet that was very kind and helped me a lot at LSU (Louisiana State University)—where I was for my undergraduate— shared a quote with me. She said, “The relationship between reading and writing is like eating and shitting.” The other thing is that, even if you’re not reading, writing is always happening. Writing does not necessarily have to be an active thing at all times. If you’re walking around and absorbing the things around you, and taking notes on them, you’re still eventually contributing towards writing. For weeks, I would jot things down that happen around me, whether it would be things that I would see, things that I hear, and I would eventually sit down and think how these pieces fit together, if they do at all. So, there are a lot of different ways to write, and I think in this society that we live in, there is an emphasis on production and producing work no matter what you do, even if it’s not about writing. “You’re only worth on your current output” is a thing that we’re taught, and it’s really terrible. I think writing could push back against that, where you don’t have to be constantly producing poems or stories to be a writer or to be at any given time.

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Two Poems By Ivan Josic

Litany for Humble Birds


i. Tendons warped around the 

     minutes we were emperors of 


ii. palindromic nights. Organs

    of the hour lay vivisected for us &


iii. through grey leather houses we

     carried pigeon skulls decorated


iv. with dust I documented myself 

     let swallows roost along my tongue


v. guiding your blackthorn fingers 

     you plucked sour cherries from 


vi. the base of my neck: lily-stained. 

     Our mouths ran vile with sour spit.


vii. Demand of me my body.

     To the woods to cotton rows 


viii. where we danced in the shadows 

     of giants with eyes like oil slicks &


ix. bristling in pillbug armor 

     I spoke your red name: Tanager.

 

 

In My Dreams I Saw Serpents

Before, I imagined myself in half-states.

     Gears tumbled from the backs of my 

knees. I offered no resistance

ecstasy of the lonely Machine

trill of the dying saint.

 

I wrote poems in clay & heard the 

tick of my heart. An immaculate 

consumption; black bones peeled back 

to their hooks.

 

Listen! Lord Clockwork

     I shook to brass branches. My sword:

the eclipse of my spine. Golden-crowned.

Rain-weary.  I maimed the kitchen tile dragon, 

& took its skin.

 

Ivan Josic is currently a junior at the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts for Creative Writing in Houston. He has been previously published in the Austin Bat Cave Anthology. When not writing, you can find him wandering his neighborhood, where he often finds inspiration for his work.

Visual Art by: Grey Stevenson

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Composition of Columbus

A.
This is a beginning
under the oak trees

where midwestern
boys burned their throats

with their father’s liquor
bottles. Girls came to

kiss at night, leaving cigarette burns
to scatter the ashes of their innocence.

This is a beginning in the quiet town
where we know real architecture

and real sounds of bullets. Both arch
over our heads and we embrace

these strange halos.

B.
This is a resolution
that we’ll leave the soil

where southern twang top
sour songs like syrup.

where everyone knows how to
strum a guitar,

and every girl sings Dolly Parton
for the elementary pageant.

This is a resolution
that we’ll fly to great cities

where skyscrapers make
us feel minuscule.

Magnificent things will seep into our minds,
all the urban ideas and emotions.

A.
This is a return
to the town where she never

thought she belonged. But
mother’s hand grew feeble,

fingers like brittle bird bones.
Father drove off into the

southern night years ago,
gone when the midnight ink

drenched his silverado.

Sarah Nachimson is an emerging writer with only a small scattering of published pieces. She hails from sunny California and is currently a sophomore at Yeshiva University Los Angeles Girls School. She is a reader for Polyphony H.S. and an editor for Siblini Journal. Her writing has been recognized by numerous organizations, including Scholastic, and published in the Los Angeles Times and New York Jewish Week, among other places.

Visual Art by Audrey Carver.

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Blue Eyes

In an old Chinatown classroom

she uncaps dried markers

and folds scratch paper.

I lean forward to see her name,

pinned, crooked, to her shoulder.

Yihua.

That’s a beautiful name, I tell her.

She shakes her head.

You should

call me Charlotte.

 

Six years ago I drew only thin girls

in floral dresses. They

always frowned with

purple lips and porcelain eyes.

Each had a name,

sprouting across the

page in inked plumes:

Anastasia, Evangeline, Coletta.

 

She drops a chewed pencil into my hand.

Can you draw me?

With graphite, I sculpt her eyes,

round as lychee seeds.

Do you want me to color them?

She nods, hand hovering over

a torn box of washable markers.

She picks up a blue pen.

Blue? I say. Are you sure?

She pries open my fist,

an oyster of flesh, and lays the

marker inside, a still-warm pearl.

 

In the bathroom, I hung my drawings,

pencil smearing with soap.

Each morning as I brushed

my teeth with sweet toothpaste

and bent to spit out foam,

I flinched at my reflection.

 

She watches as I uncap the marker,

the plastic click echoing.

I fill each bullet-sized hole

blue.

 

I was lucky.

During my elementary years,

I was surrounded by freckled

dolls packaged in silk bows.

But for ten years, I forgot

the color of my own hair and eyes.

I held only icy marbles in my palms and

and four-syllable names with rolled r’s

that I could not pronounce.

 

She smiles, takes the drawing,

scrawls Charlotte at the bottom,

tucks it into her bag.

 

Bye, I say. When she turns, I drop the

brown marker into her backpack.

 

Keep drawing, Yihua.

 

Visual Art by Heidi Songqian Li.

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Ivy Prison

Perfectly manicured nails claw at ivy wrapped iron
Flawlessly maintained cuticles
Cultivated during hours of never-ending lectures
Perhaps on Proust or Bohr or the Meaning of Life
Peel and crack beneath the institution’s fiery underbelly

What happened to this girl?
Bedroom wallpapered with certificates and honors
More awards of merit than rooms in her expansive high-rise
A violin ―never practiced, never prized
Yet somehow always perfectly performed―
Leaning against a petal-pink window lauding skylines and promise

Her path was paved before she was born
Her conception an unspoken agreement of the creation of a legacy
How effortless her journey must have been
How painfully, obviously, unbelievably simple
A beacon of light illuminating a gold-paved path
How dare she think to complain

So she sits in a prison of her own submissive making
A leader in print, a child in practice
Her mouth sewn shut by years of watching friends and neighbors
Envy the privileged, nauseating life she leads
That she would give anything to escape

Julia Cook was born in Edison, New Jersey and moved to Norwich, Vermont when she was six years old. Now, at fifteen, she is spending a year abroad in Passy, France, nestled in the valley under Mont Blanc, where she is exploring French art, culture, and language. When not writing, Julia enjoys singing, acting, reading, cooking, learning, and playing with any animal in her sight.
Visual art by Heidi Songqian Li. 
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Chance Block

Rosey first heard about the fire after club announcements ended, as all the students filed out from the auditorium toward Chance Block. Some of the freshmen were talking about it, and flowing down the hallway with the vast tide of tired high-schoolers, she caught snippets of their conversation.

“In the cafeteria… someone said… fire—”

“UHNUH,” a senior boy grunted, drowning out the freshmen’s chatter.

Rosey put her fingers in her ears. She knew all too well after three weeks that grunts were contagious: first the other senior boys would grunt back, then all at once the hallways and classrooms would burst into a many-layered chorus of grunts, each louder than the next, as the younger boys struggled to prove that they, too, were masculine enough to bellow like angry cavemen.

Rosey walked halfway across campus before she took her fingers out of her ears, sure that Mozart’s Sixth Symphony in Grunt had subsided. Ugh , she thought, remembering the freshmen’s conversation. Probably another fire drill . At least it’ll be during Chance Block.

Nobody, least of all Rosey, understood Chance Block. Held after the final class every three days, the 45-minute period was one of those weird experiments to which private schools lik the Winthrop-Hall Institute for Technical Education (or WHITE, as all their sweaters read) occasionally subjected their students. Its official definition was completely incomprehensible, brimming with hallowed education buzzphrases such as “cooperative learning” and “21st century citizenship.” But as far as Rosey could tell, Chance Block boiled down to an awkward 45 minutes that athletes often missed for games. Since no administrator had the guts to send kids home early, they needed the time to be crucial—while also inconsequential. The only problem was, nobody had yet figured out how to make the period both vitally important and wholly unimportant. Instead, every few weeks the administrators opened up an old Monopoly set, picked a new Chance card—hence the name—and imposed whatever instructions they found on the students.

This week, the administrators pulled a blank card and decided the school would test its most revolutionary idea yet: assigning each teacher to babysit a random group of students who would figure out for themselves how to make the time educational.

Rosey couldn’t remember which of the middle-aged math teachers she had been assigned to (they were all just nerdy white guys in various stages of balding), but she did know that Courtney—the talkative girl from her AP Auctioneering class—was in the same group, so when the crowd thinned out, Rosey approached her.

“Hey, do you know where we’re going for Chance Block?” she asked, tapping Courtney on her shoulder.

“What’d you say?” Courtney said, whirling around to face Rosey. “Sorry. God, I’m so tired—I was up until five a.m. doing the Auctioneering paper. That book took, like, forevvvvver to read.” A five-page paper discussing the eight pound real estate book they’d read was due that day.

“You read it all last night?” Rosey couldn’t believe it. After all, they had been assigned little sections of the book each night for two weeks.

“Yes! I mean, okay, no, but like, Sparknotes takes a while to read, too.”

“Right,” Rosey laughed nervously. “Anyway, do you know where we’re going for Chance Block?”

Courtney giggled. “Of course, silly, I love Mr. Borkus. Follow me.”

As they walked, Rosey remembered that Courtney had announced a club.

“Hey, which club did you say you were starting?” Rosey asked. Everyone started clubs at WHITE, although only two or three of them ever got past the first meeting.

“The Diversity and Inclusivity club! It’s me and a bunch of my friends.”

“Oh,” replied Rosey, grimacing. An all-white diversity club. “Are you into, like, social justice and all that?”

Courtney shrugged. “I mean, enough. Whatever. Gotta get into college somehow.”

When they reached the math room, five or six other students were already there sitting around a large table with blank looks on their faces. There was Harry, the lacrosse player whose voice was usually hoarse from grunting; Samantha, the girl who was always doing homework; and some seniors Rosey didn’t know very well. Courtney sat across the table next to Harry, immediately opening her laptop—a rose gold Macbook—to the Brandy Melville website. Rosey, on the other hand, sat in the nearest empty seat.

While they waited for Mr. Borkus, Rosey watched Courtney’s fingers run absentmindedly through her hair. Maybe I should dye my hair blonde, too , Rosey thought, and straighten it. Her eyes traveled down to Courtney’s neck, where a golden letter C hung from a rose gold chain like an expensive name tag. I could be like her , thought Rosey. She imagined herself with the other girls taking pictures like the ones she always saw on Instagram, all of them in that pose that said “I’m not showing off my ass, but like, did I mention I have an ass?”

A clatter toward the front of the room yanked Rosey from her thoughts: Mr. Borkus had arrived.

“Hey guys, welcome to Chance Block.” Mr. Borkus began in a bored voice. “About half an hour ago a fire started in the cafeteria when a burnt-out teacher tried to panini press his computer. Unfortunately, all the fire extinguishers were crushed in that one experimental art project. Now, the principal said we’re supposed to let you all decide what to do about the fire, okay? He said it’ll be, like, a collaborative, 21st century, student-driven alternative assessment.”

Rosey looked around. Some of the students were on their computers; others were fast asleep. Rosey’s eyes began to feel heavy, too. Mr. Borkus was still talking. “—and so the only rule is you can’t be doing homework.” At this, Samantha’s eyes shot up from her work.

“Sorry, but can I do homework? There’s an Honors Puppetry assignment due tomorrow.” She motioned to two worn socks with frowny faces drawn on. “And did you say fire?”

“Yes!” Mr. Borkus seemed to be realizing how little anyone cared. “Guys! There’s a real fire—not a drill. It’s already spread to this building, so we need to figure out how to extinguish it.” Some students raised their heads, looked around groggily for a moment, then put them back down.

“We could use the water fountains—” offered a quiet boarding student named Tim.

“But can we please do homework?” Courtney interjected. A couple of students nodded in agreement.

“Yeah, why can’t we, like, work on our own stuff? Someone else will put out the fire,” agreed Harry, who, with his whirling mouse and laser-like focus on his computer, was clearly engaged in an epic round of Fortnite. Mr. Borkus looked to be at a loss for words, and an awkward silence fell over the room. Rosey tried to think of something to say, but the vast apathy of her classmates was paralyzing.

No one spoke. Harry was trying to conceal clouds of vapor as he puffed on his Juul. The room started to feel hot, smoke drifting in through the cracked door—or was that just another of Harry’s clouds? Mr. Borkus began to pace frantically, muttering to himself about student-driven death. Rosey was still deciding what to say when tongues of flame came under the door, ready to engulf the classroom.

Hewson Duffy is a 16 year old writer and photographer who attends St. Anne’s Belfield School in Charlottesville, VA. His work has been published in Aerie International and Polyphony Lit. When not writing, he is probably drinking chocolate milk.

Visual arts by Anastasia James. 

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