Spring 2010

Echoes

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barnardechoes@gmail.com

StaffEditor-in-Chief Layout Editor

Managing Editor

Treasurer

Director of Fundraising

Assistant Directors of Fundraising

Assistant Art Editor

Copy Editors

Caroline Blehart Kate Welsh

Morgan Davies Madeline SmithShay Cornelius

Alyssa Kahn

Daliya Poulos

Julie BodenmannEva Saavedra

Abigail ArnoldNatalie Korman

Cecille d Laurentis

Art Editors

Shruti Sehgal

Echoes is the official literary magazine of Barnard College.

Table of Contents

Notes on Beautiful Places | Alice WadeOn Last Night | Jessica L. JohnsonTending | Joyce NgFrance | Kate WelshUntitled | Eleanora BershadskayaPiranha |Alice WadeResurrecting | Joyce NgFledgling | Morgan DaviesThe Revolution Ate Me Whole | Madeline SmithAmsterdam Avenue 1949 | Patricia Hickerson

My Brother’s 21st | Emily DrinkerBorghese Gardens | Asiya Khaki Ode to the Blue Koi | Tracy SagalowGolden Bird | Leslie KoyamaForsyth Street from Underneath the Manhattan Bridge | Yuan YuanCover Art: Brooklyn Bridge at Sunrise | Morgan Davies

Writing

Art

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NOtes on Beautiful PlacesAlice Wade

There are no signs to name this townas I pass through justheavy drapes in shattered windows concealing walls from invisible inhabitantsbrick walls onto which (lettered all in blue)someone’s painted“HERE.”

There are no peoplein these streetsno footsteps on pavementnone to have held the brushbut a man onthe roof of a gutted warehouse

and he is not the authornor am I.

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On Last NightJessica L. Johnson

It throbs, you knowmy ear, as it extends its lobe, cartilage, skinand curves out to the morningtrying with great effortto hear your heart,as filtered through your skin.

The air is as darkas hard plastic nets that house speakers.I wonder if we are inside of one now—my walls,the backs and sides of it,my windows emitting sound. I imagine we are the musicthat could overwhelm thumpingcar radios, on Saturday nightson my strip of Broadway.

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Our bodies throb with sounds.Blood plays electricity to our hearts.We have enough energy to emita song worth remembering.Muscles play the pipes to organs of silence

and I miss you. Our lips fusing and flowingplaying staccato to limbs,shoving sheets, grasping for each otherstriking the necessary notes of skin to boom love. Volume. Passion. Increasesublime. Deafening. Closerto silence, to the unexplainable each time you touch me I feel your particular blare of breath-shaking vibrations.

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Tending

Joyce NgShe outlived him by the ten digits on my hands.Some other reality. What is the scene?Tenfold years, each creasing lighter,so light you couldn’t starch it.To my mind she died the same year he did.Like the leap year in which he went under.I only ever count the leaps,lessening the years he’s gone away,lessening too for my father, the vacuous,frigid emptiness,eerie silence of being physically absentboth times it happened.The idea that we are a number counted on, counted for, drawn, pulled, luck, end.Fate is a figure I do not comprehend.

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On my old school coat I stencil stars for him and for her andwith the remaining cut-out fabricI keep my own father warm.Warming him, from the silence, cutting grass.

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FraNCEKate Welsh

Day 1, Sunday:

Andrea and I are sitting in our Eurail seats, flipping like maniacs through Rick Steves’ French phrasebook and a tattered dictionary, quizzing each other as the green of the countryside whips past our windows. “How do you say ‘grapes’?” Andrea asks. “Les raisins, oui?” “Right.” “What do they call raisins, then?” I grab for the dictionary.

We’ve been at this for hours already, in bursts: waiting for our flight in Toronto, on the plane over Greenland, in the train station at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris. We try to soak up words and phrases like linguistic sponges, but only some of it stays. Three more hours, two more hours, we chant to ourselves, just a few more hours and we’ll be in Hyères.

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Day 4, Wednesday:

I didn’t know that palm trees and pine trees could exist so harmoniously, that cobblestoned alleyways could be so labyrinthine, or that skies could be so blue. I haven’t seen a cloud – not even a wisp – since we arrived. Every morning, after I wake up Andrea and we get dressed, we stumble down the stairs and have brioche with Nutella for breakfast. We laugh with Nathalie about the fact that even after practicing, neither one of us can successfully pronounce yaourt – yoghurt – with-out stumbling in the tangle of vowels. When we go to our class in the morning, there are cliques of different students, all from different countries around the world. We play the guessing game at break time, try-ing to identify the language and jumbles of words that fall off the other students’ tongues. During class, we talk about the conjugation of “-er verbs” as easily as we talk about Barack Obama; the proper placement of adjectives as openly as the banalisation of sex.

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It’s the honesty that I love. The frankness. No one hides anything. Even though we’re American, Thierry tells us without worry that he couldn’t hate Bush more. If Nathalie and Thierry argue, or if their grown son Florian stops by and is tired and moody, it’s okay. They argue and they love each other. They’re unapologetic and it makes me wish the entire world lived and loved as they do. Everyone wraps their arms around their loved ones’ waists and shoulders. If you love someone, you’re close to them, physically and mentally. There is no discreet kissing, no coy handholding. Handshakes are firmer. They grip your palm, squeeze your shoulder. You know that people are listening to you because they look you in the eye and say Oui? and Ah, bon! and Non! Vraiment? in all the right places. When you bump into people on the street, there are no Oh! Excusez-moi’s. For a wonderful dinner, there aren’t any formal merci beaucoups. It’s as if the American version of common courtesy is an understood fact.

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Day 9, Monday:

In the afternoons, after le déjeuner, we wander. We traipse through smooth, cobble-stoned streets, only wide enough for little mopeds. We move under strings of laundry and open painted shutters. There are fluffy gray cats and strangely dainty bursts of graffiti. There are hidden away restaurants and art galleries, open markets and gelato stands. We find modest churches with round windows and marble plazas with modern fountains. On the way back home, we go to the bakery down the street and buy two baguettes. Translating rapid-fire numbers isn’t so hard anymore, and we can count euros as quickly as dollars. If we time it right, we arrive at the bakery right when they take out fresh baguettes. When we ask for deux baguettes, s’il vous plait, they grab two loaves, wrap them up in paper, and hand them to us. They’re so warm still they nearly sear our fingertips but it doesn’t matter. We carry them under our arms, fancy ourselves des filles françaises, and break off the very end. As if you could resist, at that point.

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Day 10, Tuesday:

With Nathalie’s question posed as “Do you mind going over to meet my mom? She wants to see you and feed you cake,” how could we refuse? We drove up hill after hill to reach their house and stepped out of the car only to have our cheeks kissed and shoul-ders squeezed. She had never seen American girls before, and was positively gleeful as she pushed us towards conversation and a lemon tart on the back terrace. We were asked question after question about our lives. When I told them I played soccer, Nathalie’s dad ran inside to find pictures from the days when he had played. After-wards, with as much lemon tart as we could handle pushed on to our plates by Nathalie’s mother, Nathalie’s dad took us around his garden, puffing out his chest when he pointed out the wall he had built by himself and the flourishing ferns he had planted. We left with more kisses on the cheek from Nathalie’s mom, a strong handshake from Nathalie’s dad, and little porcelain crèche figures – a drummer for Andrea, a shepherd for me – tucked safely in our pockets to remember them by.

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Day 12, Thursday:

We used the adjective “gorgeous” so many times today, it doesn’t sound like a real word anymore. This morning, we hopped on un bateau that carried us across the water to Porquerolles, an island off the coast. Bright blue sky, shimmering water, perfect green trees. When we got off the boat, we were handed to the dock and walked with the masses towards the solid ground of the village. Even armed with Nathalie’s precisely penned directions, we decided to just go. So we followed unofficial looking signs promising that le moulin à vent – the windmill – was up ahead. As we walked along the gravel path, there were olive groves: graceful, silvery green, wise. It seemed hard to think of olive trees in any terms other than Athena. The windmill stands watch over the entire island. When Andrea and I stood under it, we looked to our right and saw how much we had left to explore. So we went straight to-wards the other side, towards Fort Ste. Agathe, whose crumbling stones seem as wise as the olive trees. We wandered around it, stuck our heads over walls and walked down ancient stairs. But then we saw the beach. We walked down switchback paths, towards the market and what we hoped was the beach. In the village, we bought some sort of sandwich and fresh looking peaches and apricots. And – again with the unofficial-looking signs – we followed a path that looked like it could go towards our beach. Luckily, we guessed right, and we ended up in a spot right before the sand curves. The water was clear, turquoise, beautiful. There was that breeze that you can only feel by the sea, that one that cuts softly through metallic sunrays.

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We ate lunch first. Maybe because of the extra bite of salt air, I’d never eaten any-thing that tasted so good. The sandwich? Amazing. The apricots? Wonderful. But the peaches. There are no words. Andrea and I laughed when we bit into them. They were that good. We debated going back to get more, but what if that ruined it? What if we could only have peaches that good once? And why had these peaches become our fixa-tion when an entire sea was there in front of us? So, after gnawing the peaches down to their very pits, we started swimming. The water was so cold, our arms and shoulders exploded in goosebumps, but we kept going, swimming far enough out to stand on the sandbar, and paused in something beyond awe. Maybe the salt air had altered something besides our taste buds. Our feet were scraped every time we walked in because of the sharp rocks. Our bouts with goosebumps were practically violent. We were almost out of sunscreen. Standing on the sandbar, though, shivering and joyous, Andrea threw her arms in the air and declared, “I live a per-fect, cold life.” On Porquerolles, truer words were never spoken.

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Day 14, Saturday:

We’re packed. Suitcases are in the hallway downstairs. Andrea’s made sandwiches, hoping to come close to the perfection of the ones from Porquerolles. We’ve packed part of another baguette, too. Just plain. We’ve decided that we have to savor this one. Just this morning, we were at the beach again. We had a quiet picnic, all of us wanting to think more than chatter. With Thierry’s expertise, Andrea and I take off with snorkel gear, looking at the seagrass that Theirry told us is the lungs of the entire ocean, at little slippery fish, at massive red rocks. We swam farther away from shore than we prob-ably should have, maybe hoping to escape from the inevitability of the train headed towards Paris too soon. We’ve started to begin sentences with “Remember when…” and “When we come back someday…” because it makes it more real. Makes it less the idyll it’s become in our journals, and more of what we lived everyday for two weeks. How are we supposed to leave now? we ask ourselves. We were just getting started. Maybe, though, we don’t ever have to leave. Maybe, a little piece of us — not physi-cally of course, but mentally — emotionally, even — can be stuck with the salt marshes and flamingos. In the cobblestoned, graffiti dusted, moped-wide streets. On the ends of ba-guettes. In kisses on the cheek. On the Porquerolles sandbar. In falling in love with France.

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UNTITLEDEleonora Bershadskaya! The | wedges | of | space | between | slabs | of | concrete | have | become | a | kind | of | sanctuary. | I |

walk | atop | the | lines | on | the | sidewalk | as | a | contortionist | would | walk | a | tightrope | and | I |

cannot | willingly | remove | myself. | I | have | become | so | attached | to | these | comfortable | grooves |

that | my | body | guides | itself | along | the | cracks | while | my | eyes | mist | over | the | vanishing |

point | in | the | horizon. | I am consistent | and | the | world | is | anything | but. | Cars | motion | past |

me | like | unremitting | brush | strokes | of | red, | green, | black, | white, | gray | tempera | paint, | but | I

| am | an unchanging blot | of | acrylic | on | the | road. | Traffic | lights | illuminate | my | horizon, | but |

their | capricious | colors | never | linger | for | long. | Winds | blow | and | scatter | unwelcome | goose |

bumps | across | my | body, | lift | weightless | objects | from | beneath | my | step, | and | beg | for | silent |

recognition | of | the | universe, | but | I | remain | detached | and | on | foot. | The | hum| of |

meaningless | dialogues | and | lasting | bonds | shifts | in | and | out | of | earshot, | but | amasses | into | a

| muffled | fog | over | my | head. | I | feel | stationary | atop | these | narrow | fractures, | and | I | do

| not | know | that | I | want | to | feel | otherwise.

!

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PiranhaAlice Wade

My brother once told methat if you drop a cow in the Orinocothe water turns redand the bones come out stripped of flesh.

When he disappearedbeneath the glassy surfaceof a quiet lakethere was no bloodonly my reflectiondisturbed by rippleswhere a pine needle fell.

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Ode

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ResurrectingJoyce Ng

The monks appeared only as pamphlets on a standat the entrance of the church.I had mistaken Dominican for Jesuitbut turned in the pew anyway. Tourists exempt from service wound around the Model Manger and loitered,waiting for a split-second to get the perfect take,lights framing baby Jesus twinkling red: green: white. I could not dislodge my knees from the wornfraying kneeling pads wedged between pews set to last lifetimes.I knelt, counting dozens of cycles of color,clasping my palms together.

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FledglingsMorgan Davies

[…] Anyway it is dreadfully boring here all alone with nobody to talk to but Mother. She is rather far from ideal company, you know, or anyway we are too similar to get on well at all. When are you coming to visit me, old chap? I know you can’t possibly stand Connecticut, of all places, for much longer than a month and a half; it’s a wretched state if I ever saw one (not that I have really seen it, I freely admit). Why ever did your parents decide to raise you some-place so unbearably dull? Anytime you want a little something more cosmopolitan, remember…

Cheers, Charlie (Charles Julius Sutherland, II, esq., et cetera)

---

July 7, 1940

Dear Charlie,

Will come first week of August.

Fondest,

Merritt (Clark, i.e. the only one)

P.S. Old chap?

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“My dear,” he drawled, “am I to believe you’ve actually taken the subway?” “It’s cheap,” I told him, and he let out an exaggerated, long-suffering sigh, murmur-ing, “Terrible, terrible.” “You really do sound ridiculous,” I told him, easily, as I lifted my suitcase up the stairs at the front of the building. “Tally-ho, old chap, all of that.” Charlie shrugged and waved his hand airily as the porter opened the door, stepping with a casual entitlement that I did not feel into the marble- and gilt-encrusted lobby of his building. He nodded absently in the general direction of the front desk and made his way around the large statues that looked to me as though they had probably been in vogue five or six years previously, and beneath the worryingly bottom-heavy chandeliers, until he had reached the elevator bank. Trailing behind him I attempted to fend off the advances of nu-merous bellhops – and why were there bellhops, I wondered, in an apartment building, even one like this – and tried to keep myself from staring at the ceilings, which seemed arched almost to the point of arrogance, needlessly tall. I was reminded, suddenly and strongly, of the building my father had worked in when he had still worked in the city, a tall and flashing thing with golden deco designs on the inside that I had solemnly and after much crane-necked contemplation named ‘the building with the ceiling way up high.’ The elevator operator murmured something polite to Charlie as he entered and gave me a look of pity as I caught up, holding my suitcase protectively in front of me.

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Charlie and his mother lived on the twelfth floor, the entire twelfth floor, and I sup-posed I shouldn’t have been surprised that the elevator opened directly into their foyer but I was surprised by it, startled by the long muted mirrors along the walls and the garish pieces of art displayed prominently in front of them. They seemed garish to me, anyway, but I didn’t know anything about modern art so I imagined there must have been something about them that I was missing. I made sure not to get too close to any of them. I liked the windows at the end of the hall better than any of the decorations; they were wide and looked out on the trees of the Park, still today in the stagnancy and humidity of summer. “Well, old boy,” he asked, “what do you think?” “I think you’re going to get annoying even to yourself sometime soon,” I said hon-estly, and he snorted in a way that was entirely unaffected, and I let myself smile a little. The guest bedroom (or was it bedrooms?), he told me, was on the North Wing of the apartment – I deliberately said nothing about the absurdity of designating wings in an apart-ment, even a large one – which was closer to where his mother slept than to where he did. As a general precaution he advised me to stay in bed until at least ten in the morning and to avoid the large kitchen and dining room on the same hallway. “I,” he said, “have got a more manageable space over here, and she only uses it in the evenings if she needs a drink before the cook is finished with the meal. You’ll have to have that, by the way, with us in the big dining room, which I can assure you will be positively nightmarish if it’s only half as bad for you as it is for me, but at least Marcia makes a truly fine steak. Other than that I generally try to stay out of her way – Mother’s – which is easy during the week when she’s off doing

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whatever it is that she does, and is rather more trying on Sundays when she simply never leaves.” I had only seen his mother once before, at the end of the year; she had seemed vivacious even from a distance, red and robust and fear-inspiring despite the hints of silver threaded through her hair. She had come to take Charlie home, which I remembered find-ing strange since he lived so close, and the two of them had disappeared into a cab without a word nearly the moment after she had arrived, leaving me stranded and feeling strangely, momentarily bereft. “In any event,” he said, “she’ll probably try to grill you about what we did all year. Just talk about books, or whatever it is you English majors do.” “What did you do last year except read books?” I asked. “Anyway, I haven’t decided whether to be an English major yet,” I reminded him, and he sniffed. “Really, Merritt, we all know you’re going to spend another three years reading Shakespeare and Chaucer and Byron and come out of school with no job-applicable skills whatsoever and wind up trying to teach – oh, I don’t know, repressed schoolchildren about Shelley or something equally repulsive.” “And you’ll be off trying to convince somebody that all of your classes in impenetra-ble political theory make you a desirable hire,” I said, mildly because I had sensed a kind of fondness buried beneath all of his disdain, and also because both of us knew that I wouldn’t have any trouble getting a job in whatever field I chose with a degree from Columbia, and that he wasn’t going to have to work a single day in his whole goddamn life.

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“All far in the future, old boy,” he said amiably, “far in the future.” “Charlie?” a commanding woman’s voice echoed from the hall. “Where have you gotten to?” He flinched, reflexively. It was not until the fourth day of my visit — only after I had spent three nights in a bed that was far too soft for me in a room that was far more luxurious than anything I had ever seen before, only after three long nights spent watching flickering headlights pass like ghosts along the walls and slowly becoming reacquainted with the pulsing sounds of the city, only then — that Charlie’s mother cornered me in the small kitchen on Charlie’s half (what I had taken to calling Charlie’s half, in my head) of the apartment. He had been right, of course; he was always right: I had gotten up earlier than ten and she had descended. I have over the course of my acquaintance with Charlie Sutherland tried very hard to maintain my own opinions about things. It’s easy to get taken in by people like Charlie, easy to get everything in your head jumbled and confused and easy to convince yourself that your thoughts are your own and not his. I’ve seen Charlie do that to people, and I’ve tried to make sure that he doesn’t do it to me. But I really do think, all on my own, that he was right on about his mother. I had always been awkward with women, old women and young women and anything in-between. Charlie’s mother was no different, except that she was even more difficult for me to handle; she had an almost brutish, animalistic quality that seemed to me to lie solely in the projection of her sex, and she was of such hardy stock that I doubted her age would overtake her for another decade if not more. She needed this; she was in a unique position:

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a woman alone in the world, who should have been out of her depth but who somehow, against all logic, held her own against her male contemporaries. Maybe this trick worked on them, I do not know; it made me feel queasy and out-of-place, and all I wanted the instant she walked in the door was for her to walk back through it, away from me. “Merritt,” she said calmly, and poured herself a cup of coffee. “Good morning, Mrs. Sutherland,” I said politely, and turned back to the newspa-per. “You know Charlie never talks about any of you when he talks about school,” she said without preamble, “only about his studies.” “Well,” I said. “I guess – studies are important, aren’t they?” “Yes, they are,” she said, regarding me with what seemed to be mild amusement. “Or, I should say, they are for most people. They are not for Charlie.” “What do you mean?” I asked. “I mean,” she replied, as if explaining something simple to a particularly slow child, “that Charlie has spent the entirety of his life doing very little but accumulating knowledge, and could probably teach all of your professors up there at Columbia something himself. I am not saying this just because he is my son. You have to have noticed that he hardly needs to exert himself to do well in his classes.” “We don’t talk much about our grades, ma’am,” I said evasively, because everything that she had said was essentially true. “Of course you don’t,” she said. “What I would like you to tell me, Merritt, what I

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would appreciate if you told me, is what Charlie does with the rest of his time. With, say, you.” “Oh,” I lied, “just about what everybody else does, I think.” “And that would be?” she asked drily. “Nothing very interesting,” I said stiffly, and hoped that the sweat trickling along the edges of my brow wasn’t noticeable as I returned my blank gaze stubbornly to the paper until she eventually left the room, smiling almost viciously. Then I shivered. she eventually left the room, smiling almost viciously. Then I shivered. Charlie found me later, brooding over the news section of the Times but not reading it. I wanted a cigarette. I had had to quit since I had left school in May; my mother hated the smell. I would start up again in the fall, I knew, but I had told myself not to get back in the habit on this trip, which would last just a week. It would only make the rest of the summer worse. “You want a smoke,” he said from the doorway, leaning against the frame. “And my mother’s gotten to you.” “Yes,” I admitted. “And – yes.” “I told you,” he told me, without venom. “I told you.” “Yes,” I said again. “It’s all right,” he said, almost kindly, except that Charlie was never kind. “I didn’t – tell her anything, if that’s what you’re worried about,” I told him over

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my shoulder. “I know,” he said calmly. “You don’t usually tell anybody much of anything.” And even though it was true and had not been meant as an insult I flushed and curled my hands into fists underneath the table.

That night I found myself suddenly awake, blinking blearily against the darkness, and became aware of the quiet, breathing presence of someone next to the bed. Charlie was sitting there looking at me, with his legs crossed at the knees and his sleeves rolled up to theelbows. “Here,” he said, passing me a carton of cigarettes. “Thanks,” I mumbled, propping myself up to take them. “Come on,” he said, any trace of an affectation long gone, “I know you hate to smoke inside.” So we left my room, padding across the paneled wood floor of the foyer and into a dusty, unused room past Charlie’s on the other side of the apartment that had one large window that slid easily open to reveal a spindly black fire escape. “Go on, then,” Charlie said, holding the curtain aside. Heights did not bother me, and I crossed my legs comfortably against the bars. Charlie came after, carefully closing the window behind him. “You know I’m sorry,” he said abruptly after a few moments of relative silence. “For this whole thing. It doesn’t – I can’t be here. I mean I can’t be here. And I thought – but it doesn’t matter. I’m sorry you’re stuck here for the week.”

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It was not the type of thing that Charlie was prone to saying. I studied him for a mo-ment, all young and angry and miserable, and leaned over on an impulse and pressed my nose and forehead against the space beneath his jawbone for a moment and he slid his arm around my neck, hand dangling down in front of me, our sides collapsed together. “I haven’t got anything to smoke these with,” I murmured, looking out at the flicker-ing lights of the city, visible even from this darkened alley. “Shit,” he whispered. “Sorry.” “S’okay,” I told him. He curled his hand in my sleeve for a moment before moving it into my hair, grip-ping hard and pressing his dry lips against my temple and I knew, or at least I told myself, that this was his way of telling me that he had missed me. He could never have said it. “What do you think it was like,” he asked after a while, “the city, back when we were young? I don’t remember anything, just this apartment and the one before it… my mother never took me anywhere. Not that I would have wanted to be anywhere except New York. “You know, the clubs, the jazz, silent films and everything… back before the crash happened and everybody had so much to worry about all the time. Sometimes I wonder about it. Whether I would have liked it more.” I thought about this for a moment, sitting on the fire escape of the Sutherland Fifth Avenue penthouse with Charlie pressed against me, about people starving in the Dust Bowl and my parents in their small suburban house in Connecticut with the grass cut so evenly by my father every Saturday. “You would’ve hated it,” I said finally. It hardly sounded like

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my own voice; it was detached from my limber, warm-limbed body pressed up against his. “You… you know yourself, Charlie, you thrive on everybody being miserable and tense and worse off than you are, and you like having something to rail against. Even if you think you’d like the world to be different – even if you really do wish that that were true – I don’t think you… want it, really.” He became very still as I spoke. Later somebody would ask me why I had come back to him, back to the strange crea-ture that he had grown into in my absence, after I had been away for so many long years of war. I was sure that he had had other men, in the intervening time; Charlie’s was not a char-acter concerned with anybody but himself. I saw myself, really, as nothing but a convenience to him. I would tell her, the woman who asked, that he was the only thing I had had to get back to, and it would be the truth but it would also be a lie; because really I was just in love with him, and had been since I was eighteen years old and caught him shamelessly scrutiniz-ing me from across the room at a first-year social event at our college, where the liquor and the smoke were flowing freely. That was before Charlie stopped drinking, and he was pink and flushed and scrawny beneath his blue jacket and he nodded at me deliberately and smirked. And I think it was true then, what I said; it was true because I knew it and because if it hadn’t been then Charlie would have gotten up and left, snarling something foul-mouthed, but instead he just sat next to me, trembling, and said nothing. “It’s okay,” I whispered to him, into his neck, as cars blared by and a dog howled streets away. “I don’t mind.” I didn’t. It didn’t matter. I don’t know if it’s true anymore. War does that to people; it grabs them and mash-

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es them up like clay until you can barely even recognize them as they were before. Sometimes whatever it is that is left inside of me simply aches for him as he was when we were still teenagers: haughty Charlie who didn’t give a shit about anybody and who was still trying on personalities and mannerisms to see which one fit him best. The world was still opening up for him then; for me, too. He’s not like that now. He’s still as arrogant as sin, of course. He’s just grown up tired. He’s grown up so, so tired. Instead I think back fondly to those yellow, crumbling memories like the one on the fire escape the following morning (how we didn’t say anything else to each other that night but fell asleep out there on the fire escape, and were awoken by sharp rays of sunlight coming over the roof of the next building and pigeons picking at Charlie’s straw-colored hair until he started and swore violently at them and almost fell to his death – but didn’t – so we laughed – laughed and laughed about it for what felt like hours), cling to them, the last fragile dreams of innocence that I have left.

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Fors

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Stre

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anha

ttan

Brid

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THe Revolution Ate Me WholeMadeline Smith

The revolution ate me wholeand gave me an apple so that I could eat, too.So I chewed my apple as he chewed meraw, but still warm with lifeblood and whiteblood and I wished that he had used a tenderizer.

One day, I’m sure, the revolution will eat me in two pieces:head first, so that I can see where we’re headed.My head will go down easily, kindly pre-beheaded,but my body might take quite a while to pass.I won’t mind.I’ll have plenty of time.

They blooded the troops on me, those damn revolutionaries.Darts like voices joyless in my ears and bullet holes in my back like newborn stars dripped white light like chalk on the sidewalk.But I didn’t mind.I don’t have much else to do.

39

Spring 2010

To my surprise, I didn’t diethe day the revolution ate me wholebut made a new home right there in his belly.You see, the wetness of stomach walls is kind of nice.Rib bones make better backrests than flat grassand the movement of the inside of his skin as he breathes andswallows and absorbs his food reminds of lifeand it suits me.I’ve never been all that hard to please.

Echoes

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40

Amsterdam Avenue 1949Patricia Hickerson — BC ‘49

neighborhood watch: youon the curb of dirt-scabbed streetscrumbled, streakedmold this into unborn eyessteps of a divine cathedralscaffolding where Uncle Bob fell as a kidscarred his chin for life scratch ‘what is love’ on the wooden john doorcount dark bricks bedded in concreteyour body swollen with flowerseeded, now about to burstsway in elevators, corridors grout-grimedsniff cabbage and onionsbalance the tilt of dumbwaiters at the door Harold buttons up his flydrop into mouse holesrotten egg—run for your life calculate Pinky the bookie

41

Spring 2010

Nat races slips of paperinto canopied candy stores,dig this into your pastfinger the cockroach trail along the mirrorbehind Doc Zipper’s soda fountain (belly drop that morningwas your heart big enough to hold it all?) count the hours night and dayamong the garbage pailsshort walk to the hospitalyou were born there, too, weren’t you?didn’t Daddy call you ‘Sprout’?single weed bends from a sidewalk crack Ruth types the wordscigarettes smoke her crowded cornerat the window Columbia rears monstrousthe lion greedy in its den, trucks and buses rumbledirt scabs patched up, perfect bloom of a babynew decade sprouting—she mewls in the night

Sponsored in part by the Arts Initiative at Columbia University. This funding is made possible through a generous gift from the Gatsby Chartitable Foundation.

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