VR-Digital-Final-Med

Digital Edition

2016 • Issue 1.2 • Trauma & Träume: Pain and Dreams in Art & Literature
Editors-in-Chief
Alex Raz
Palak Patel
Archives
Ronald Patkus
Nick Barone
Morgan Strunsky
Arts
Mary-Kay Lombino
Sofía Benitez
Catherine Lucey
Fiction
M Mark
Jocelyn Hassel
Abigail Johnson
Non-Fiction
Hua Hsu
Arshy Azizi
Christian Prince
Digital Media
Michael Joyce
Martin Man
Esteban Uribe
Poetry
Molly McGlennen
Michaela Coplen
Dylan Manning
Reviews
Farisa Khalid
Will Garner
Maggie Jeffers
Advisory Board
Mark Amodio
Andrew Ashton
Sophia Siddique Harvey
Paul Kane
David Means
VSR Liaisons
Ethan Cohen
Jacqueline Krass
Design
A.J. Cincotta-Eichenfield
Zach Bokhour
Web Design
Jeff Macaluso
Paul Younger
Copy Editor
Ashley Pecorelli
Media and Marketing
Jack Conway
Kayla Schwab
Printer
J.S. McCarthy Printers
Cover: Dana Harel, Only for the Left Hand 2
Copyright © 2016 Vassar Review
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Acknowledgments
A large thanks to our contributors and to the following individuals and bodies for
their support and advice in shaping the revival of the Vassar Review:
Janet Allison, Marie Ausanio, Joe Bolander, Francine Brown, Megg Brown, Jonathan
Chenette, Steve Dahnert, Susan DeKrey, Robert DeMaria, Judith Dollenmayer, Julia
Fishman, Joanna Gill, Catharine Bond Hill, Jeffrey Kosmacher, Daniel Lasecki, Amy
Laughlin, Alison Mateer, James Mundy, Dana Nalbandian, Elizabeth Nogrady, Sara
Marie Ortiz, Emilia Petrarca, Thomas Porcello, Elizabeth Randolph, Andrew Raz,
Daria Robbins, Dean Rogers, Matthew Schultz, Ronald Sharp, Bryan Swarthout, Lisa
Tessler, Julia VanDevelder, and Margaret Vetare.
The Dean of Faculty’s Office, the English Majors’ Committee, the Frances Lehman
Loeb Art Center, the Office of the President, Vassar College Archives & Special
Collections Library, Vassar College Communications, Vassar College English
Department, and Vassar College Libraries.

TRAUMA & TRÄUME
Pain and Dreams in Art & Literature
Digital Edition
2016

Coral Pereda, Sexteto (Bad Girls Don’t Like Good Girls)........................................................................................2
Toisha Tucker, After Jacob’s Room, Part I......................................................................................................4
Monika Cassel, Girl with Washing and Blossoms, May 1948...................................................................................7
Gabriela Molano, Portal.........................................................................................................................8
Dana Harel, When They Were Kings 9..........................................................................................................10
Kimberly Blaeser, Rattle........................................................................................................................11
Julia Randall, Wild Berry, Blush Pink, Blueberry..............................................................................................12
Lisa Cohen, Four Short Memoirs...............................................................................................................14
Suzie Martinez, Moments before the wake...................................................................................................18
Núria Farré, El Sueño de Abraxas, Catarsis..................................................................................................22
Nozomi Saito, Edna and I.....................................................................................................................25
Christopher Gonzalez, Not a Problem, Nope, Not a Concern................................................................................29
Andre Rubin, Leviathan Rising, Wormhole III.................................................................................................34
Johanna Winters, Serotonin Vision Quest, The Decoy, The Accomplice, The Sidekick, The Skeptic.......................................36
Allison Pearl, Keeping Distance...............................................................................................................38
Dana Harel, Only for the Left Hand 2.........................................................................................................39
Toisha Tucker, After Jacob’s Room, Part II..................................................................................................40
Shuangshuang Huo, All in Pieces............................................................................................................44
Penelope Luksic, It is the anniversary of.......... .........................................................................................45
Carolyn Guinzio, Places I Have Lived..........................................................................................................47
Piotr Paziński, “Our Warsaw,” from The Boarding House, translated by Tusia Dabrowska.........................................50
Phyllis Trout, Benedict’s Bardo #19...........................................................................................................54
Catherine Chalmers, War.....................................................................................................................56
Joe Bueter, Your Rest..........................................................................................................................58
Zeenyooneen, foxconn.tv.....................................................................................................................59
Alex Hovet, Counter-Charge..................................................................................................................60
Luma Jasim, War Metaphor, Spyker Massacre................................................................................................61
Dean Rader, Self-Portrait in Place............................................................................................................64
Mert Keskin (Haydiroket), Untitled............................................................................................................66
Jordan Strafer, pink binds of motherdaughterhood..........................................................................................68
Teresa Braun, Mother-Father-Daughters-Soil-Cotton-Pig-Sausage-Babies................................................................69
Julia Randall, Pulled Orange Crush...........................................................................................................70
Núria Farré, The Exquisite Pain...............................................................................................................72
Peter LaBerge, At Jiangzicui Station: Taipei, Taiwan (2014).................................................................................73
Dean Rader, Self-Portrait With Reader.......................................................................................................74
Gabriela Molano, Entre el Pasado y Futuro..................................................................................................75
Toisha Tucker, After Jacob’s Room, Part III...................................................................................................76
Dana Harel, Only for the Left Hand 3...........................................................................................................80
Jesse Peters, All This...........................................................................................................................82
Bridget Leslie, Bypass, Death, White..........................................................................................................83
Matt, 20: On Black Being and Magic..........................................................................................................86
Charles Matson Lume, no pardon for this (for Charles Wright) Infiltrate (for Muriel Rukeyser)...........................................91
Matthew Shenoda, Our Returning............................................................................................................93
Liona Robyn, P.D.A............................................................................................................................94
Shan Goshorn, Educational Genocide, Hearts of our Women................................................................................96
Jane Haladay, Memorial Day: Rosebud Reservation, Lakota Nation, South Dakota.......................................................97
Vassar Review Archives.......................................................................................................................98
Elizabeth Bishop, Some Dreams They Forgot...............................................................................................100
Ethel Livingston, And I Will Know............................................................................................................101
Matt Kendall, A Wondrous City of Floating Clouds: Review...............................................................................102
Farisa Khalid, The Burning Brush: Review..................................................................................................107
Artist Captions.....................................................................................................................................110
Contributors.................................................................................................................................112

What began as an idea three years ago is now a reality, and we’re excited to say: Here is something different.
The Vassar Review of 2016 is the reimagining of the journal that opened in 1927 and disbanded in 1993. During this
period the Review published many distinguished writers, including Vassar undergraduates Muriel Rukeyser and
Elizabeth Bishop (but not before she had founded a short-lived rival publication, Con Spirito, with Mary McCarthy).
Now, in the same spirit of the original Vassar Review, we have aimed for a dynamic mix of new and established
writers assembled by an editorial board that comprises students and faculty. In developing our organization, we
were conscious of our undergraduate peers, and looked to fashion a truly liberal educational model, with student
involvement at every point in the process since beginning in our English Major’s Committee. With crucial help from
the college, this vision—or revision—has been realized.
That the Vassar Review, despite years of flourishing, had faltered gave us pause. Many journals come and go. And
given the abundant number of literary journals at present and the wide variety of their content, how might we carve
out a distinctive place? What will distinguish our journal from others?
With those questions in mind, we set out to create an international literary journal that was open to all types of
texts, broadly defined. This necessitated establishing both a print and a digital edition for each issue to allow for a
multiplicity of media. Each edition is designed around the genres it best accommodates. When we chose Trauma
and Träume for our initial theme, we believed it would elicit a diversity of material; we wanted to make room for it
regardless of format. Literature, we believe, is an ever-expanding realm.
We’re proud to say our contributors’ works include poetry, prose, nonfiction, painting, drawing, photography,
installation, video, film, prints, basket-weaving, collage, and the .gif. From here on out, we are a space for these works,
and will continue to publish literature that confronts, uproots, and inspires.
Each one of these contributors has a unique lived-experience that informs and embodies their work and this
conversation on dreams, repression, surreality and trauma. The conjunction of their views constitutes this issue,
which moves between black humor, earnestness, regret, fear, personal and societal traumas, and calls for joy,
empathy, endurance, and perseverance. Our goal was to create a narrative journey for our readers in the hope that by
the end, they, too, might find something of solace.
Here, we believe, is the opportunity that only a journal with a history can hope to achieve. The Vassar Review has its
own story, and this is about taking it forward. We’re in the sweet spot between old and new, a revival, that on one
hand is a matter of finesse, and then on the other is an opportunity to reflect and change before diving in again. The
new we hope for is a sound jolt, a change or charge that is representative of our institution today, which aims to reawaken
and reinterpret tired ideas for the contemporary scene, and move past the past when necessary.
Our thanks to staff, mentors, peers, and all our supporters.
And Paul Kane, for your enduring confidence.
We hope you enjoy the digital edition of the Vassar Review,
Alex Raz and Palak Patel
Editors-in-Chief
1

2

Sexteto (Bad Girls Don’t Like Good Girls)
Coral Pereda
“Sexteto” interweaves two parallel stories about loss, underlining the physical and emotional
consequences of the end of a relationship, and talking about human moments in which unreality
manifests itself through physical symptoms. Through textural and microscopic footage shot
in Super 8 film and in HD video, the imagery fluctuates from repulsive to attractive in order to
create a conversation between the scientific and the emotional. The sonic aspect of the video
suggests moments of dizziness and lightheadedness, and adds a sense of urgency to the images.
In “Sexteto,” text becomes more of a visual tool than a linguistic one. The story is narrated through
captions that dominate the screen and go beyond the idea of translation.
3

After Jacob’s Room
Toisha Tucker
4

PART I:
OF ALL THE THINGS
JACOB LOVED, HERE IS
HIS SHEEP’S HEAD
5

PART I
A lamb had been born in the middle of the night at the
end of the second week of lambing season; it was the
first to slide from its mother’s body, left unattended on
the ground of the shed in the slick sac of its birth as
the shepherd shifted and pulled two more bodies free.
Within the hour, it had wedged itself between
two others to nurse from its mother’s body.
Two years later, that lamb was led to slaughter as a sheep.
*
“Sheep’s head stew” was written on the board as the
special of the day. Steaming bowls were served with a
crusty wedge of bread and half-full glasses of water
to workers crammed onto benches inside a tavern. The
last of the large pot was served late in the afternoon,
the remnants tossed out back onto the garbage pile.
The sheep’s head skull remained intact, the meat boiled
away, the bone darkened by spices and the eyes gone,
having had been pulled out between the chef’s fat
fingers and enjoyed as a mid-morning snack.
En route to the landfill, the skull fell off the garbage lorry
and tumbled down a cliff’s edge to the seaside below.
*
If the jaw had not been loose, Jacob would have lost
every bit of his prize: the sun-bleached skull of a
sheep’s head. But the jaw had been loose and it was
all he could get. His fingers tightened, teeth biting into
skin. He ignored the pain of his mother’s fingers digging
into his arm as she towed him and his brother Archer
away from the beach.
Jacob looked back and caught an image of the
remaining skull, its mouth permanently gaping and
overflowing with sand.
*
Jacob Flanders’ room at Cambridge was fitting for a
man (a boy, really) of his station. That was to say it
was not very grand. He had brought with him a small
wooden trunk, several books, a painting of the seascape
in Cornwall, and his sheep’s jaw. All had quickly found
a place in his quarters. The jaw was first installed on his
windowsill but later moved to his desk, where it served
a better purpose as a paperweight.
*
His continental tour had done well for his health, if
not for his spirit. He had fallen in love with a married
woman; his affections had been spurned. Jacob lay on
his bed in brown leather shoes, shirt, and trousers. His
jacket hung from the back of his desk chair, where he’d
tossed it before reaching for the sheep’s jaw. His hands
had never been so striking against the yellowed bone.
His fingers traced the bumpy contour of teeth, pausing
to tap a molar as if notarizing his decision. Yes, he would
fight in the war. It was the right thing to do. Yes.
*
“What am I to do with this, Mr. Bonamy, the jaw of a
sheep? And what of these?”
Mrs. Flanders held out a pair of Jacob’s old shoes.
Part II begins on page 40.
6

Girl with Washing and Blossoms, May 1948
Monika Cassel
Morgenstund’ hat Gold im Mund.
It’s hard work: pump, clothes pushed and lifted in cold water,
rinsed and drained, then centrifuged.
And yet she smiles and looks up for approval,
eyes alive, the braids around her head a perfect straw-gold circle.
She takes the basket to the washing-line by the corner of the house;
behind her, beehive-stacks of kindling round their domes
into the spring sunlight – one high, one diminished
by the stoves it’s fed this long, cold winter.
And then the cherry blossoms –
their wealth and light distracts us as she labors on.
We look up into the crown and richness of that great tree, rose-whiting all
the sky; we watch the bees buzz honey
from every flower. She breathes soap-blossom air as she stirs
and lifts and wrings and hangs a shirt, and hangs a shirt again.
Shake the bedding, shake the tree,
remove the bread, good girl, before the oven burns it.
Shake the hunger from your bones by scraping every rationed spoonful
into this string of meager broken years.
Shake away the nights of bombs and planes, the tales
adults won’t tell you. Shake the feathers from your dreams:
or are they also lean? You wash and hang and iron with ready hands
and fervent smile, virtue-anointed, gold-gifted: coins tumble
with your every word, the songs you sing of men who reign
on coachmen’s seats, of girls at flowered windows.
You work. We watch to lose ourselves in all your busy dreams –
– not snow or soldiers, but of cherry petals as we gaze with you
into the almost-summer sky.
7

Gabriela Molano, Portal

Dana Harel, When They Were Kings 9

Rattle
Kimberly Blaeser
I fold the ghost of paper of peace and friendship
gently as if words could break,
tuck it final and binding inside my muklaks
hidden now beneath my feet.
Feet, windows of the soul,
souls lost in that history,
history a banquet
without enough chairs.
I take the pemmican, treaty whiskey,
the pipe. Still sacred.
I relative of all X marks,
fold the ghost of paper obligatory upon the Indians.
Thin stick syllables of deceit
the second clause of the second article,
voices of spine and serif
hereunto set their hands and affixed their seals.
Blood smear of hollow promises
this dream paper inked
or etched like scars on skin
redskin. Hereby ceded.
Forget the treaty—privilege of hunting,
fishing, and gathering the wild rice—
old history they tell me:
excepting the reservations made and described.
In their ears trees don’t rattle
rattle haunted with copper longing.
The folded paper, ghost of folded life:
pursuits of civilized—a sheaf in capture code.
11

Julia Randall, clockwise from left: Wild Berry; Blush Pink; Blueberry

Four Short Memoirs
Lisa Cohen
Babies Given Up for Dead Who
Struggle Toward National Life
In the beginning was Babe Didriksen—all of those sports, and such a
euphonious name. Babe got her start by leaping over neighborhood
hedges. Now, I know that I have been bent by the biographies I read
when I was 10. They were all ten then, too: Babe was always running
when she was my age; Amelia Earhart was pretending to fly (with the
first snow, she’d slide down a low roof off her house); little Abe Lincoln
was reading by firelight and thinking about justice. Lives as the crow
flies, whose logic left no room for a shiver of doubt.
But what if as a child you abandon your life’s calling? Does the crow
drop dead? Start flying in endless circles, like a plane the control tower
has forgotten?
Once on “The Twilight Zone” a plane began to land at JFK. It was
Idlewild back then, 1961. At that juncture for no apparent reason the
crew lost contact with the control tower. So they circled over Queens.
The passengers became disgruntled—they were stuck in midair, almost
home, had trains to catch, and so on; there were people down there
waiting for them with open arms, all dressed up, etc. They adjusted
their seatbelts, tried not to show their mounting concern. Still they
circled. Suddenly a stewardess looked out a window and saw the 1939
World’s Fair—in full swing. They all looked out the window. And at that
moment they knew: that where they were, they hadn’t even been born.
The end.
14

Forgery and Uttering
As a child, she carried herself like a person. As a child, she
carried off a piece of fine cambric, which being missed by the
shopkeeper, he pursued and took her with said goods upon
her—the two women having in the meantime made their
escape. Too bad.
When she was taken before the Justice and examined, she
confessed she was put upon it by her mother, one of the
abovesaid women. Some time later, the girl was picked up for
conduct Idle and Disorderly. The mother not.
On a later occasion, she was try’d for keeping a disorderly house
and found guilty by the jury. She was, as usual, very outrageous
upon being taken, and beat not only the Constables but the Justice,
so they were forced to tie her hands together and with much
difficulty got her to prison.
While in prison, she spent two days in Solitary Confinement
for her Insolence, as she never could keep her mouth shut, but
upon release was again arrested for Having no proper means of
subsistence.
She did present a petition to the Justices by the hand of her
sister, who did stand up for her, which writing acknowledged
her insolent behaviour and prayed that she might be admitted
to bail, but the Justices instead of granting the request sent a
Warrant of Detainer to the Keeper of said Gaol.
On this past Monday, she made her escape from prison in
man’s cloaths, but yesterday the officers took in the fellow who
gave her the cloaths, and according to his directions she was
retaken—since which they have clapt a clog to one of her legs
by way of precaution. Which will teach her.
At last report, she had received two terms of six months with
light labour for two counts of Forgery and Uttering.
15

Alphabetism
1
In the main brain of the autodidact were clarities abundant. She
thought: Must I drive far to witness even one fleshy episode? For in
that generation, homo sapiens was of uncertain use and infrequent
loveliness, preferring to find joy in smashing others, so literal was its
collective mind. Nowhere was there room for memory, madeleineborne
or otherwise. Not one of those odd, pellucid, quondom niceties
remained. Instead, haunted by extreme refractions of the past, few
would speak their trouble—zilch—preferring to run wild and when
hurt rely upon a viscous unguent claiming healing properties.
2
In X, Y, and Zee, with Elizabeth Taylor and Suzannah York, a wild and
urgent sense of the viciousness of certain joys prevails. Girls together
are a lie, it says with a high-pitched whine, the equation cannot stand.
They will refract each other and themselves, pellucid yet so odd. One
feeds the other sweets, bonbons of bitchery. The other dangles grapes,
lowers a cliché down into a receptive mouth. (“Shall I peel you an
orange?”) A certain blank didacticism: “A girl has to be quite grown up
to be expelled for kissing a nun.” “There’s nothing to tell.” It’s just not
nice. We know eventually they’ll long to kill each other, or themselves.
And countless other episodes.
3
Driving my auto one day toward the place where I was being paid for
my didacticism, I found myself tuned to predictions of the end. (I’m
saying it is God’s design!) But there is so much feminine beauty in the
world, I thought; I’m not prepared for the apocalypse. And these men
of the radio are so literal about the bible. (I’m saying it’s a lot like Eve!) And
why are there so many men of the bible on this particular road? But
then one of them read out the entire book of Ruth—the quintessential
love story, the origins of the marriage vows, and all of that. Wherever
you go, your people are mine, no xenophobia, and various restatements
of these thoughts. It was a story since it was so odd, or old, or else it
was a fact. Ruth also spent a night or two smoothing viscous unguent
onto Boaz’s feet while he still slept.
16

The Fundamental Problem
of The Archive
The librarian says she loves me, she’s always dreaming of me, I’m
buoyant and can jump high.
The librarian says she loves me, I am involved in subplots, I tame the dog
with mango.
The librarian says she loves me, the word for assets fails me, the subway
has a lap pool.
The librarian says she loves me, some dignitaries land here, I lecture
without singing.
The librarian says she loves me, she’s always dreaming of me. The things
that she could show me, things no one else has seen.
17

Moments before the wake
Susie Martinez
1
my body is
a border
the hyphen between Mexican and American
my tongue razor-sharp, jagged teeth
my mouth barb-wired shut
words trying to climb
over
two worlds bridged
unsteady rocking
winds shifting
begging for a balance
too brown for
the ivory tower
too white for
aztlán
I am somewhere and nowhere at the same time
with nothing to claim
as my own
or
I am someone and no one at the same time
with no one to claim
as my own.
2
43 boys – no, men
my mama says they were teachers-to-be
they wore white shirts, disheveled collars
gray slacks, the creases ironed out
i can hear their mothers silently pleading
against them growing up
18

43 bodies – no, corpses
who dug the ditch?
who thought the grave was large enough?
who lowered their remains?
did they press bloody hands together and whispered a prayer?
43 families – no, mourners
my mama took me to a wake once
[when i was old enough]
we crowded around a closed casket
hands grazing the wood, a final goodbye
but what do you say if the caskets are empty?
[when did i grow up?]
3
years ago we sat under a blazing sun
as the elders mapped out the ties in the municipal government
drinking pepsi-cola out of cups with Enrique Peña Nieto’s face
as we watched the army trucks roll down the dirt streets
years later we sat in the living room
a few bottles of corona littered the floor
my uncles argued about
politics, patria, and promesas falsas
telenovelas and reality shows
son lo mismo
they asked me
had it been worth it? to leave your home
and not even recognize yourself when you come back?
they answered
we’re proud of your degree
the degree is stained
with blood or sweat, it’s all the same
the chorus of the corrido sings
como te voy a olvidar?
quizas, quizas
19

4
one to forty three seems like a short distance
english finds a way to cut corners
in spanish, you’d say uno a cuarenta y tres
that’s cuarenta y tres
y dos
y uno
y
uno dos tres cuatro cinco seis siete ocho nueve diez once doce trece catorce quince dieciséis diecisiete dieciocho
diecinueve veinte veintiuno veintidos veintitres veinticuarto veinticinco veintiseis veintisiete veintiocho veintinueve
treinta treinta y uno treinta y dos treinta y tres treinta y cuatro treinta y cinco treinta y seis treinta y siete treinta y
ocho treinta y nueve
y
cuarenta
cuarenta y uno
cuarenta y dos
cuarenta y tres
y
the school teacher shouts
manos a la obra!
5
we planned the vigil in less than two days
we went to a hardware store
nail and hammer to planks
splints into skin
we crowded on the lower floor of the building
crosses lined along the walls
calling out names
20

putting a face to a cross
43 crosses adorned with flowers and hashtag
a 44th one wrapped in a green, white and red bandera
[Mexico is dying, too]
we dug holes into a manicured lawn
buildings & grounds refused to give us a shovel
northeast winter winds hounding on our ears and hands
the shovels are not enough our fingers are now the shovels
we arrange the crosses into a crescent shape
[my aunt took me stargazing in el pueblo,
said we would always be
bajo la misma luna]
vigil-goers wander between crosses
there are more crosses than people attending
then, more bodies alive than dead
we light each other’s candles
huddle for warmth
dive into the cups of ponche
5
The story goes, La Llorona lost her children, drowned them
So she drowned herself too
Either in her own sorrow or in the same river her children died,
I can’t recall.
Mami would tuck us in at night,
“Ten cuidado, or she’s gonna come for you”
I think I found her in the back of my throat
& it burns when I try to swallow
I do not know where to lay the flowers tonight
My fingers tremble over the rosary beads
But we will place a glass of water by the window sill
And remember to blow out the candles lest
this temple burns down too
21

Núria Farré, El Sueño de Abraxas

Núria Farré, Catarsis

Edna and I
Nozomi Saito
And she swam, out and out, farther and farther, until she couldn’t
swim any more.
When I was fifteen, we read The Awakening for English class. I
may have been a bad reader, misunderstanding the purpose of the
last scene, but Edna Pontellier’s suicide by drowning resonated with
me. Something about her deliberation as she swims out, further and
further, ignoring the ache and fatigue of her arms and limbs, her will to
escape toward that always out of reach yet alluring place of liberation
conveyed to me a sense of triumph. Propelled by her despair, Edna
swims willfully to her death. Over twelve years later, there are days
when I think fondly and empathetically of Edna. Clichés like “drowning
in sorrow” only too accurately describe the urge to give in to the
warmth of death. I can feel the painful air in me, distorting my face,
my cranium, my arms and chest, pushing pushing pushing out, and if I
close my eyes, I can feel the darkness rushing up and past me as I sink
slowly. How many times I have wished I could submit to that urge, to
drown and enter the world of darkness.
But of course, I never will because it would crush my mother, and
she has worked too hard to give me the life I have, here in America,
here as her daughter, for me to squander it away with a selfish act. I
call it selfish only because in my situation, it would be. I am an only
child, her sole hope, and I have already seen the aftereffects of suicide
on her. Her sister and her brother, out of a family of six. Two too many.
There are other things that run in my family besides suicidal urges,
such as against-the-grain women and wanderlust. When I look at
myself, I try to pick apart what is learned and what is inherited.
Recent research into epigenetic inheritance has shown the possibility
that experiences that cause stress in an individual can lead to the
production of genetic tags that can be passed down. The genetic
25

26
tags produced in response to trauma, for example, can pass down,
appearing on the same gene in the next generation, even if the child
has not experienced the trauma. The genetic inheritance of these
trauma tags occurs between parent and child, and possibly even from
grandparent to grandchild.
My grandmother, my mother’s mother, was clearly a woman against
the grain and full of wanderlust. She wore flashy colors and Western
style clothes and dyed her hair red, much to the horror of other
Okinawan mothers in the 1960s, with their modest brown and blue
kimonos and their undyed hair. On a recent trip to Japan, one of my
mother’s cousins, who hasn’t seen my grandmother in forty years, told
me, “I remember your grandmother. She was…glamorous.” When I was
fifteen and stayed with my grandmother while I was taking a threeday
course on driver preparation, she gave me two gifts: a red tube top
and a tiara. “These used to be mine,” she said.
My mother recalls how embarrassing it was to have this flashy
woman coming to school to pick her up. My mother is, in turn,
conservative in dress and propriety. She wears earth toned turtlenecks
and dyes her hair a natural black. She cares about clothes only to the
extent of looking professional for her work as a financial analyst,
because unlike my grandmother, who always remained a stay-at-home
mother, my mother, after moving to America, underwent years of
studying English at community college and later business at university,
until she ultimately earned an MBA. I can’t see her buying a tiara
unless it was for some sort of investment, and then only if she had
already done a thorough cost analysis. But my mother was against the
grain in her own way. When she learned of my father’s philandering,
she decided to leave him, rather than stay with him and work it out,
even though she was married to him in a time when divorce was
not common in Japan. Throughout their marriage, she had stayed
against-the-grain, choosing to maintain a job and her own separate
source of income, unlike many Japanese housewives. Upon completing

the divorce, my mother took me and moved to America, where my
grandmother was already living, in the nest of the Rockies. She was the
same age as her own mother had been when she left Japan for America.
This cycle is what makes me think that I must have inherited my
wanderlust. I used to think it was because of having moved at a young
age that made me restless, but now I wonder if it really is a trait of
the women in my family. Ever since I was young, I always wanted to
travel. And not just travel to hotels or camp sites in other countries,
but really move around, settle in one place but never for too long. I
think the world is much too large and overflowing with an abundance
of potentially fascinating cultures to settle in one place forever. Some
people might think of it as running away, or they might say, “the grass
is greener on the other side,” but I’m not trying to be someone else or
chasing anything in particular. I just want to experience.
So is one a reaction against one’s parent(s), destined to become one’s
parent, a genetic reproduction, or a puppet of learned behavior?
When my grandmother was done with her first husband and
his philandering, she divorced him, just as her own daughter would
twenty-seven years later, the same age as I am now. During that
process, my grandmother met her future second husband, and taking
her youngest son with her, she moved to America. She entrusted my
mother, then eight years old, with an envelope. Inside was a letter
expressing her farewell and some money. She did not see my mother
for another thirteen years.
My mother says because of this, she grew up knowing she would
never abandon or give up her children, that she would sacrifice what
she had to in order to keep her children with her. And she never has
given up. When she divorced my father and moved to America, I was
bundled along with her. It was my father who did the abandoning,
cutting off all communication with us when I was ten. It took until I
was the age my mother was when she was reconciled with her mother
for me to accept that my father’s abandonment had nothing to do
27

28
with me. The years in between were an emotional time, what I now
sardonically refer to as my years of “teenage angst,” which is a flippant
way for me to avoid talking about the anguish, self-loathing, fury and
recklessness that ensued as a result of his leaving.
But some part of me understands my grandmother’s leaving and
maybe my father too. When I read Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, and
really listened to Laura Brown, I realized, “That’s me.” Like Mrs. Brown,
like Edna Pontellier, I am not a mother-woman. I know if I ever had
kids, I would reach a point when it would all be too much, and I would
have to leave. It’s a horrible thing to say, but knowing that, I know I
will never have kids. I will never inflict on someone what my father’s
abandonment caused me to feel. But I also am not one to stay.
When I think of children, their need to have a parent’s love,
dinners around a table, the up and downs of childhood, the angst of
adolescence, and all the suffocating accoutrements of familial life, I
know I can’t live like that. As Edna says, I can sacrifice the nonessential,
but I could never sacrifice myself.

Not a Problem,
Nope, Not a Concern
Christopher Gonzalez
In the weeks leading up to our son’s birth I hadn’t slept much, and
I spent those restless nights staring at Julia’s expanding stomach in
the darkness, praying peaceful dreams would await me on the other
side of exhaustion. I tried to map out an ideal dream: the three of us
walking through a scenic park in autumn, Julia stopping to set the
baby on top of a slide slippery with morning dew. I would kneel in the
mulch and wait to receive him in my fatherly arms. Though I knew
this picturesque moment of father, mother, and son to be a cliché from
someone else’s life, I could not conjure it up for myself. Every morning I
woke with no recollection of such a dream, not even a warm aftertaste.
*
As the due date approached I would devote entire afternoons to pacing
back and forth near the foot of our bed, gripping the carpet between
my toes with every step. “What’s got you so worried?” Julia asked late
one night. On her belly she balanced a small plate of green grapes.
She had been flipping through a catalogue of baby clothes, name-brand
items we couldn’t afford on her substitute teacher salary or the money I
earned installing drywall. But it wasn’t the money that worried me. With
a blanket pulled up to my chin, I asked her, “Aren’t you afraid we’ll fail?”
“Well, not exactly,” she said. “The fear comes in waves. Like last
29

week I told my sister I could take Veronica to pick up some supplies
for her school project. She had to build a solar system model. Pretty
standard stuff. We went to the Pat Catan’s about fifteen minutes from
here—you know the one—and as we were walking through the aisles
I had this moment when everything faded away and suddenly it was
six years in the future and I was shopping for school supplies with our
son! Can you even imagine? I’ll be a mess the day he learns to crawl
and there I was preparing him for the first grade!” She adjusted the
pillows supporting her back, which caused a grape to roll over the
lip of her plate and plop down into the sheets, abandoned. “We get
the book bag, the notebooks, the pencils and crayons and the colored
pencils and the many folders that will probably go to waste. But I can’t
for the life of me find those erasable red pens. We do at least three laps
around the store before heading to a second and third store, round and
round the city we go in search of this pen, turning up empty-handed
every time. Why do these pens exist at all? The whole purpose of a red
pen is to mark, to stain and slash, to leave a trail of permanency. An
erasable red pen is a fucking oxymoron. So we give up.”
“That’s not like you,” I said, resting my head on her belly.
“Anyway, we get to the first day of school. You and I are getting him
situated at his desk; all around us other parents are doing the same
with their kids, unloading plastic Walmart bags and laying out the
various products in the gut of their desks. And it’s so apparent that I
screwed up, because every single one of them has a pack of erasable
red pens. And I swear the other parents can see it on our faces, and
they know that I’m a terrible mother, that I failed my child who will
now have to grow up always a step behind.”
“Because of a red pen?” I said.
“You see how insane it is.”
“School shopping hadn’t even occurred to me.”
“But my point is that no matter what doubts you have rattling around
in that thick head of yours”—she swatted me on the forehead—“we’re
going to be just fine.”
*
30

At a cookout I was called to join the fathers in a semi-circle around the
grill while Julia was lured into the shade with other mothers. She still
had about two months left before her due date, but we appreciated
the early membership to this club. The drippy humidity in the air
would have made for an excellent day in the middle of August, but
it was the end of September and the heaviness of the heat left me
feeling unsettled. Adding to my discomfort was the depthless chatter:
conversation about sports, new cars, and one father expressing woe
over being switched from one big-name account to another big-name
account at his nondescript job. I swayed in the heat and sipped from an
icy beer because there were no water bottles stored near the grill, and
hoped I would get by with an occasional nod of my head. It was clear I
had entered an unspoken-of hierarchy when one of the men who had
been a father for over a decade, and who was not the owner of the
house, stepped up to the grill. We were given the privilege of watching
him handle the various cuts of meat, decide when they were ready
to be flipped, add a dash of salt or sprinkle of garlic powder, and hold
power over which burgers remained cheese-less.
Behind us kids were screaming around the pool area. On the long
diving board the spatula-wielding father’s son made several halfhearted
bounces before throwing his weight into a final hop; he flew
maybe a foot in the air and plunged into the water, splashing a younger
boy who sat on the lip of the pool. All of the other adults applauded
the diver’s athleticism, which was, admittedly, fantastic, but no one
else noticed the younger boy, who violently screamed and shook,
his arms swallowed by water wings. He was the youngest of the
kids, and so I knew his father to be the man whose face was cracked
from an inadequate amount of sleep. This tired man kneeled down to
whisper something in the boy’s ears, but the boy continued flailing
about, disturbed for reasons beyond our scope as adults, and his father
responded by slapping his hand.
31

I don’t recall ever being slapped on the hand. It would be untruthful
to say my father never got physical with me—how else to describe his
yanking me by the shirt collar when his eyes were bloodshot from too
much wine?—but for the most part he preferred the act of humiliation,
name-calling, belittling, any opportunity to shame me for existing.
My mind, like a sad ghost forced to haunt the same domain day in
and day out, circles back to the time he told me to get out of his car
and stand in an empty movie theater parking lot to finish an ice cream
cone I had purchased after the comedy we’d watched together. He
had wiped down and vacuumed the car’s interior that afternoon, but
I wasn’t holding the ice cream over the mat where my feet rested. I
kept my hand tucked close to my chest so that if any drippings were to
trickle down my arm they would splatter on my shirt, yet he perceived
my decision to buy the ice cream as foolish, a fatty choice that would
inconvenience him. I stood outside, alone. A family walked by me, their
heads cocked awkwardly in my direction, and at one point the father
told his youngest daughter to look away from me, I was nothing to see.
I still feel the intensity of that moment rise up within me, sometimes
unexpectedly or after an argument with Julia over such trifles as the
baby’s first pair of booties or which cartoon should be featured on his
new sheets. It’s there, collecting poisonous rage at the base of my fist,
and I’m fraught with a desire to hit, to hurt, to harm. Instead I remove
myself from the situation, maybe hide in another room, and wait it out.
In the time it takes for me to calm down, I’m overcome by loneliness
similar to what I felt in the parking lot, or what that little boy must have
felt in a corner of the yard, not crying or talking, perhaps too careful of
taking more breaths than necessary in the presence of his father.
*
We were in a room filled with breathing. Julia reclined into me, as the
mothers were told to do, and I struggled with an ache in my lower
back. “One, two three, hee, hee, hoo,” the instructor counted, exhaling
until the vein in her neck puckered blue-green. The partners were
instructed to be a source of comfort, so, thinking I would give Julia
32

a massage, I squeezed down on her shoulders with my fingers and
pressed with my palms, but after a few seconds of this motion she
writhed. “Gabe, stop. You’re hurting me.” I released my grip and tried to
hover for the rest of the session.
That night I didn’t sleep again, but instead of staring into Julia’s belly
I traced the swirling patterns in our textured ceiling with my gaze,
searching for some kind of fortune, as I might in the bottom of a tea
mug. Maybe, I thought, I will need to wear protective gear, oven mitts
duct-taped to my hand, so that I can hold my son or hug my wife for
a moment without causing damage. Or maybe in family portraits, I’ll
stand off to the side, and future generations will look back on me as the
man who kept his distance.
33

Andre Rubin, above: Leviathan Rising; at right: Wormhole III

Johanna Winters, at left: Serotonin Vision Quest; clockwise from top left: The Decoy; The Accomplice; The Sidekick; The Skeptic

Keeping Distance
Allison Pearl
I was too young to know, and I craved a hopeless closeness
that the water-sunken earth couldn’t bestow.
The slanted shade pressed out a depth of hedge, while below,
the endless velvet petals and lamb’s ears I pressed
in my palms were a maddening, heartsick test:
holding each one, I could not bear to choose
if I preferred crushing it to a dense, wet bruise
or if prolonging its softness pleased me best.
How to shade or blur this skin away,
pull the brush tighter over myself and cover my limbs—
where down hair on my restless legs still held rims
of slanting sun. Twigs snap and clothes fray,
a hasty hand slips down the bias of a stone. The cut sings
out and I hum all through myself a flowering pang.
Tears, hotter than blood or air, roll down then hang
on my cheek as I sob over the miserable, silly state of things.
I scramble up and out, into hot, unbidden arms from indoors,
but something would not stop seeping deeper in and in—
what I had sought without now burned and blushed within.
That was when I first felt it: the sting of wanting and getting more.
So now I do my best to keep my distance, letting the far stay afar,
and desire is tempered: wanting only blurs further inward.
Growing up I’m getting better, though sometimes it’s still hard
to leave a softness alone— but I know we must, graceless handlers
that we are.
Annual Vassar Student Review / VR Contest Winner: 2nd Prize
38

Dana Harel, Only for the Left Hand 2

PART II:
OF ALL THE WAYS JACOB
COULD HAVE DIED,
HERE ARE TWO
Toisha Tucker
40

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie,
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
- Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae,
“In Flanders Fields”
41

PART II
We tried not to hate him. No one wants to hate their
own countryman, especially not a man who volunteered
to fight for England in this war. But the day he joined
our regiment was the day he conscripted us all to
certain death. At least, that is what we decided. We
were superstitious men, and we knew the poem. It was
too much. He could not be anything but bad luck with
that omen of a last name, though we admit he had the
endearing handsomeness of youth that made it difficult
to maintain our disassociation.
*
We spent four weeks in training, learning to dig and
crawl while blanks were fired over our heads and blasts
were set off so close that clouds of dirt spit upon us. It
rained almost constantly. An incident during the first
week of training assured us our worries over Jacob
Flanders were well founded. We watched as his shovel
slipped from his hands and toppled to the ground. He
fell into the mud, slid down the artificial slope and curled
his body tight, his hands latched around his legs as he
rocked himself back and forth. And worse, he cried.
It was difficult for each of us to see a man so taken by
fear and futility. We hated him for the reminder.
*
Yes, we were certain that Jacob Flanders’ presence
among us ensured our future demise in the muddy
trenches of Flanders Fields. But as fate would decree,
that is not how it would happen. No, we did not die
among the blood red poppies of Flanders Field, nor did
he. Instead, Jacob died at sea. Ours was the last troopship
to leave that day. The trip to Belgium was not a long one,
but we were restless and tired. Many of us tried to sleep
and those who could not roamed the decks. We sighted
the U-boat too late to do anything about the torpedo
it fired at the troopship’s hull. There was commotion
everywhere. All of us scrambled to the upper decks
towards the lifeboats, unsure of what else to do, but not
wanting to die inside the ship. The torpedo had missed
its target, but our return fire had not missed them. Many
of us stood and watched the small U-boat engulf with
flames and sink into the sea. It was the first instance of
death that we would witness. Only an hour would pass
before we would see the second. The roll call was one
short: Jacob Flanders. We searched the ship and the sea,
but Jacob Flanders remained unaccounted for. It was
Second Lieutenant Byron who found the body. We found
Byron bent over outside the loo dry heaving above a
thin puddle of vomit. Inside, hung from the ceiling by his
belt, was Jacob Flanders. There was no note. There was
little surprise from most of the men in our regiment, and
admittedly perhaps a bit of relief that he would not be
coming with us.
42

*
Jacob’s death was not as he’d imagined it would be.
He’d imagined he would die in the rain, face down in
the sticky brown mud of a foreign soil. He’d thought it
would happen as he gripped his gun in fear, crouched
between the gaping walls of endless trenches. There
would have been an explosion and rapid gunfire. He’d
have immediately known he had been hit. He would
have slumped forward, his gun trapped beneath his
body, helmet awry. Sometimes, he had even imagined
his death might come from the bullet of a compatriot.
The men there, the relationships, were nothing like
what he’d had at Cambridge or even back at home in
Cornwall–nothing like dear Bonamy. Jacob could not
blame them; he resented them as much as they resented
him. As much as he resented how utterly foolish it was
to come fight in the war. He did not, however, have to
imagine why he would die. He knew it was because of
the foolishness of actions arisen from unrequited love.
*
Jacob’s actual death was an accident. He was not out in
the field. It was not raining. It was a rare sunny day and
he was in the tents that served as barracks. He sat on
his cot cleaning his gun. The handling of his weapon
had never been natural for him. The sound of it firing
at such close proximity shocked him more than the
searing pain of the bullet lodging itself into his abdomen.
He reflexively grabbed at the barrel of the gun as it fell
forward, his fingers never gained purchase. He heard
screams and felt the wetness cover his hands, held
pressed against the wound, and then the medics pulled
his body onto a stretcher and attempted to stanch the
blood. His head tilted to the side and his eyes gazed down
towards his hands, which were covered with his blood.
*
He remembered the red of the poppies from a postcard
he sent home to his mother, Pray for me if you wish. He
remembered thinking what it might have been like
to have fought in a field of those red poppies. (They
transferred him to an operating table. Cut open his
clothes and administered a shot of morphine.) He
remembered the smoothness of her chapped lips. (The
surgeon widened the entry wound with several slices of
his scalpel and repaired what he could.) He remembered
his rooms in London and the ram’s head carved above
the door. (There was no crushed metal bullet to ping
against the basin, swirling around the edges before
it settled in a pool of blood. The bullet had gone clear
through his body and was lodged in the metal girders
holding up the tent barracks.) He remembered a few
lines from Donne. (They could not get the bleeding
under control). He remembered the beach and the waves
and all the years between, until he could not remember
anymore. (They covered his body in a white sheet.)
Part III begins on page 74
43

All in Pieces
Shuangshuang Huo
Shuangshuang Huo’s “All in Pieces” is an installation that grabs tweets online in real
time and projects them onto a set of mirror pieces whilst emitting each character as
a sound frequency. The light reflected from mirror shards simulates the scattering
and distortion of information, addressing the difficulty in reconstructing meaning
from the contemporary excess of media. At once disorienting and dreamlike, the
viewer is immersed in the shattered and fragmentary experience of contemporary
digital life.
44

It is the anniversary of
Penelope Luksic
It is the anniversary of
never minding
it:
an ending
or perhaps
the beginning
of my morning benediction.
Under the sheets
pressed together
tectonic palms, fingers
straight, laced,
very small
tied with slinky threaded
moments
airily. Breath
in which i open my mouth to say we will meet again
in a bottomed-out boat.
Maybe next time,
it’s always then they all say
it’ll come around
the mountain is bigger
next time
Once,
i saw a map and the mountain is bigger, see
if i lay my hand upon its gritty face
it is bigger than my whole thumb.
45

in which i press church-steeple palms reddened
cold red like the outside air
never minding, i remember
a straight-laced look will guide you toward the home you know
Travel widely, over
big mountains and
we will meet in some place.
a scraped-pulp trunk, cedar-smelling of the driveway.
Maybe on a bus, in a video store, jaywalking.
that day
gone but not remembering how? it was
a quick quick upper cut, through
and ahead. Forward
thinking, as a matter of fact,
is.
About hindsight: i once told a friend that twenty-twenty would
never come.
But here! we’re approaching! hindsight! take cover! ring the alarms!
in a wild unrelenting deluge i will be buried in a bottomed-out boat
along with you, my tremulating heart!
46

Places I Have Lived
Carolyn Guinzio
Excerpted from the sequence “Places I
Have Lived,” Guinzio’s works explore the
disorienting experience of virtually revisiting
the past. Manipulating Google Earth images,
the artist presents the shock of seeing the
result of gentrification and decay without
experiencing it. In the end, confronting this
gap between memory and reality leads to
the realization that there is no “result,” but
only a process.
Excerpts from the sequence:
Places I Have Lived
Suffering Is Its Own Reward
To Keep It From Getting Scorched
Everyone Pulled Their Groceries In A
Two-Wheeled Cart
The Calls Were Being Forwarded From Here
Did The Searchlights Keep You Up Last Night?
There Has To Be More Than One Way Out
Above: Suffering Is Its Own Reward
At right: Everyone Pulled Their Groceries In A Two-Wheeled Cart
47

48
Carolyn Guinzio, top: To Keep It From Getting Scorched; bottom: Did The Searchlights Wake You Up Last Night?

Carolyn Guinzio, top: The Calls Were Being Forwarded From Here; bottom: There Has To Be More Than One Way Out
49

Our Warsaw
From The Boarding House
Piotr Paziński
Translated by Tusia Dabrowska
The package from Ms. Tecia was heavy, as if filled with stones and not old photographs. I
threw the contents on the table and started to organize them like a game of solitaire.
Here’s a small portrait of my grandma in a Hashomer Hatzair 1 uniform; the stamp says
atelier Dager on Dzika 3, the year 1925. This is before she met Szymon, and later Jurek.
Then with my Aunt, “Artistic Photography Salon of Halina Skowronska Rafaek, Warsaw,
Tlomackie 1. Tel. 504-22.” And then with Uncle Zorach, in Krasinski Square. Above their
heads, cobbler Jan Kilinski is triumphantly waving a saber. The picture was taken in 1938,
before they escaped via Vladivostok, Shanghai, and Yokohama to America and later to Erec,
Israel. Six years of wandering, six spins of the Earth around the Sun to wait through Hitler,
who during this time turned their city into a desert of debris. Next, Uncle Szulim, “Photo
Djana, ul. Ś-to Jerska 13”; he’s in our house, on the ground floor, right by the gate. Great
grandfather Jeruchim also had his picture taken there. He didn’t have to go far, just down the
stairs, because my great grandpa never had time, only a few minutes between his Hebrew
lessons, between one page or another of his commentary on Szulchan Aruch, which I have
never read, though its title, undoubtedly important, was inscribed next to half a dozen other
books on my grandpa’s tombstone, made from a light Jerusalem stone.
Then, the grandmas: one of them on a chain ladder, somewhere near the Zawrat mountain
pass, in pantaloons and solid boots with crampons. The picture had an inscription for
Grandpa written in soft pencil, March 1939. Maybe it was a trip they took together? Or
maybe it was the time they went on a long trip with Mr. Leon and Jurek, when they went up
into the Tatry mountains, the last summer before the war? They carried these photos across
a large swath of land: from Warsaw to Luck, from Luck to Kiev, from Kiev to Tashkent. And
earlier, they sailed down the Volga River, or Dniepr, who knows, there is no way to check it
now. Anyway, it was then that Grandma and Grandpa locked themselves for a moment in
a sailor’s cabin, and later, already in Uzbekistan, my grandma gave birth to my mom on the
floor of a mud hut. That’s where my mom had her first picture taken. She is staring curiously
into the camera, dressed in a frilled dress of cretonne, as if wearing hand-me-downs from a
much older sister. The next photo is of the two of them together—my mom is sitting on my
1 The Young Guard, a Socialist–Zionist, secular Jewish youth movement founded in 1913 in Galicia, Austria-
Hungary, and its political arm in the Yishuv in the pre-1948 British Mandate of Palestine.
50

grandma’s lap, above them a portrait of my grandpa whom they would never see again.
When they were finally allowed to leave Tashkent, my grandpa left his work with
Strojbat 2 and went to the Sielc town, and from there to Lenino, where he was killed by a
stray bullet during the Battle of the Brotherhood-of-Arms, second lieutenant in a beautiful
uniform, as beautiful as the Oka river. They wrote poems about him and he became a hero,
though he died right in the beginning. He even had a cargo ship named after him, and when
I was a kid, I thought we could take it to America, me—my grandpa’s grandson—and the
sailors saluting on deck, but I never sailed and the ship was probably scrapped. So I had to
settle for a collection of medals locked in red cases upholstered in red plushy fabric, with
an eagle on the lid. They were sitting in a cabinet next to the miniature rotunda made of
grey plastic that had fitted glass in the middle with a picture of the monument honoring
those who died in the battle of Lenino, a monument that looked like a helmet abandoned in
mud. And the only portrait of Grandpa, which he had signed for Grandma when he was
going to fight on the front with the Germans, enlarged and encased in glass, hung above the
sideboard in the dining room—so Grandma could show him with great pride to all guests,
whether they cared about my grandpa’s portrait or not.
No photographs of Grandpa, but there are plenty of Szymon. Here my grandma and
Szymon stroll down Nalewki Street. There are a few versions of this photograph, as if
someone decided to follow the pair on all their dates. Cabs race down the street, you can hear
the horses’ hooves rhythmically hitting the cobblestone. Young trees don’t give shade, so the
signs on the storefronts gleam. Umbrella sellers, hat sellers, furniture repair, right behind the
gate, 3rd floor. Pudgy advertising columns shine with their steel pot helmets, and the crosiers
at the top shoot into the sky. My grandma and Szymon walk arm in arm in the middle of the
trottoir, toque next to hat, as a young couple should. Only their outfits change: Grandma’s
white dress from the picture taken in the summer switches to a tight, dark, fall overcoat, and
Szymon’s loose-fitting jacket turns into a double-breasted topcoat with a wide collar, the kind
that nobody wears anymore. Passersby step out of their way, and in one picture, a fat man
follows my grandma’s petite body with a covetous look.
Szymon is Uncle Szymon, because he never married Grandma, but later they remained
good friends. Though he died when I was still very young, I remember him pretty well. He
had a hoarse voice, and he laughed very loudly when Mr. Leon (the two had known each
other since their school days) was telling a new joke. And when he was not laughing, he was
talking about politics; that’s because at Uncle Motia’s on Friends Avenue, everybody talked
about politics as if there were no other reasonable topics to discuss over an afternoon snack.
I really enjoyed these conversations. I could listen endlessly to the fights between Uncle
2 Soviet labor battalion
51

Szymon, Grandma, and Uncle Motia—who is good, who is bad at the office, who is a pig and
who is just an idiot, who is getting support from the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and who,
thanks to this, will get a promotion soon, or who may have his party card taken away even
sooner. And what does it mean that Trybuna 3 has not mentioned it.
Uncle Szymon yelled and Uncle Motia tried to calm him down by explaining to him why he
was wrong. Mr. Leon, if he was present, always sided with Uncle Szymon, and my grandma
mostly sided with Uncle Motia, who would finally be so agitated by everything Mr. Leon
said (he always spoke so fast, as if there was a fire!) that he would bring the latest issue of
Polityka Magazine for everyone to see what Rakowski 4 wrote, because if Trybuna was not
writing about it that’s because someone upstairs gave a command. Then, finally, Ms. Lena
would speak, and then Uncle Marek, who didn’t often speak, but when he did speak, could
yell even louder than uncle Szymon. Hence, I was never bored, and only once, by accident,
I pulled off of the table the tablecloth with the whole dinner on it, and a bowl of fried beets
landed on Mr. Bialer’s pants. I started crying and Ms. Lena was getting upset that a few drops
of plum kompot fell on her two-piece dress suit, but thankfully Mr. Bialer was not angry and
he said that it was not a big deal and there was no need to talk about it anymore, after all,
the boy didn’t do it on purpose, worse things can happen. It’s a good thing that Ms. Hanka
was not there, because, since she didn’t like kids, she would have gotten really upset, and Mr.
Bialer, whom I liked very much, promised he would one day show me his medals that he got
as a guerrilla fighter against the Nazis, and the aunt who was with Uncle Motia right away
brought an apple pie, the best in the world, because my aunt baked amazing apple pies and in
general was the best chef, not like my grandma, who had many talents, but who could burn
mace cakes even on a low heat.
They didn’t want to talk to me about the time before the war. But I learned anyway that
back then when he dated my grandma, Uncle Szymon lived on Nowolipie, or on Peacock
Street, or another street of the Jewish district named after a bird. Somewhere there, one or
two blocks away, since he’d worked in his father’s woodshop since he was young—a place
long gone from the map, shrubbery grows there now, or maybe there is an edifice there of
glass and aluminum. In a picture older than the ones from their walks, taken in July of 1930,
he and my grandma stand in front of it: my grandma in a trench-coat, and Uncle Szymon
in pants from tzayg with his head not covered because Uncle Szymon was from the kind
of house where the young ones, after reading a lot progressive literature, were beginning
to ignore their religion a little and would forget to say the Amidah three times a day even
3 One of the largest newspapers in communist Poland
4 A Polish communist politician, historian and journalist who served as the seventh and final First Secretary of
the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers’ Party between 1989 and 1990.
52

though it was an immemorial tradition of every pious Jew. On the other hand, Szymon was
scared of his father, who was known as the noble Reb Tojwie, because Reb Tojwie was very
well respected in the whole northern district, and his family and his woodshop were well
known, and he had regular contractors for his wood. To avoid hurting Reb Tojwie’s business,
his son would not dare to openly break shabbat Saturday, so when he had a sudden urge to
smoke, he would go far away to a different part of the city.
That photograph of Szymon and Grandma in front of Tojwie’s woodshop was taken
clandestinely. The young ones like each other. Maybe we will need a chuppah? They didn’t
need it, as it happens, but the picture is still here. On the back, the handwritten note in pencil
is almost effaced: “This photograph is completely random. Bronia did not give it to me, but I
stole it. I don’t have any other photographs. Grunia.” Did Grunia later give it to Ms. Tecia, with
whom she was best friends since Free Polish University? And Ms. Tecia packed it into her
box? Maybe Uncle Motia or Abrasz (the one who moved to Rostov) stored the photographs?
I should have asked. Now there is no one left to ask. Too late. Before, it was too early, or I
was too young. It’s boring with old people. Not pestered, they take this knowledge with
them. Time does not know reversing, and traces of the past scatter fast, like ash in the wind
spreading toward the corners of the invisible world. Like the memory of Grunia, the oldest
sister, who was killed, leaving two, maybe three photographs—the only proof that she had
ever existed. From Aunt Grunia—though do I have the right to call her my aunt, since, as
it happened, I was never to meet her, and she, when they were killing her, could not know
that one day I would appear here connected to her by blood? In one of the photographs (the
year 1933) she resembles the philosopher Simone Weil: metal frames on a pointed nose, hair
pinned into a bob. In the next picture, taken in an atelier and framed, Aunt Grunia is sitting
in a masculine tailcoat, her tie knotted the way a good mathematics teacher would. Is it from
Luck, where they lived with Motia, or is it already from Lvov, where everything had its end?
The trail ends right after the Germans entered, June 30, 1941. Followed by a three-day
pogrom in the Jewish districts, when the Nazis and the Banderivtsi 5 chased people and
rounded them up, arrests and executions. They wrote about it in books, many saw it with
their own eyes, but a picture cannot be stitched from so many unknowns. Did she die in the
street, or did they drag her into a gateway, where it was more convenient to murder? From
a German bullet or a Ukrainian whip? Or maybe they executed her the next day, during
the massacre in Brygadniki? Nobody will ever know the truth about her last moments. A
photographer was not present there with Aunt Grunia. I see her the only way I can, like in a
silent movie: she is walking or rather running into an unknown Lvov street, in the direction
of the train station. Maybe luck will be with her and she can catch a train to the Lucko town,
5 Members of the Revolutionary Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUNR), led by Stepan Bandera.
53

Phyllis Trout, Benedict’s Bardo #19

that is if trains in those days of the last judgment are even departing from Lvov. And she is
running in a plaid two-piece suit with a satchel where she keeps her grade book or a roll of
revolutionary pamphlets. Her heels hit the sidewalk faster and faster, her bob falls apart as
she runs, and her shoulder bag gets caught in the flying tails of a light summer coat thrown
over one shoulder as Grunia tries to find her way in a crowd of people like her, caught in a
trap, dashing in all directions, no chance to escape.
There is one more photograph of Uncle Szymon, also in the street, I think it’s Kupecka,
because it’s a dead end and also because it was close to Reb Tojwie’s woodshop. I’ve stared
at it a lot, but there are no street numbers. The sidewalk is more crowded than Nalewki:
Street sellers call out to their clients to see their booths, drivers maneuver their wagons,
raising waves of dirt, the stores flap linen awnings. And a smiling Szymon is walking
briskly with a bundle of newspapers in his hand. Behind him a Yeshiva Bachor, lost in his
thoughts, walks proudly in his iron-pressed gabardine, reading from an open book. In the
front, a young gentleman in a suit and a hat and round glasses on his nose. Where and how
will this bespectacled man end up? And the young man in gabardine, the halal butcher, a
bearded man sitting on a stoop, an elegant lady wearing a hat decorated by a single feather,
a passerby with a plaid scarf, the fat guy with a thick card folder under his arm who sent a
covetous glance to my grandma in the Nalewki district?
Our whole Warsaw! Did they do it here, or did they take them to Treblinka? Like our
neighbors on Swietojerska; like the whole Rabinowicz family who lived on Panska Street,
the relatives who owned a warehouse with goods right on Targowa Street, in the front; like
Szymon’s mother and father, his brother Szlame, his sisters Ryfka and Malka, cousin Jurek
and his wife Hala with their little Herszel, who was supposed to start public school when
the war started. Which of them survived, taken in by good people, or because there was not
enough room on the train, or for some other unfathomable reason, for example, thanks to an
intervention from our indolent Maker, who could no longer tolerate the butchery and decided
to act, or due to a failure on the Devil’s part, who for fun or, worried about his own wellbeing,
left a few souls in the world as a souvenir? Or maybe it was just a coincidence of events that
allowed them to walk out, to bear witness, to scream and lament, to never forget, or to forget
forever and yet to remember—from generation to generation, till the end, till the last breath,
or maybe even just one day longer.
That’s all that is left of the former world.
55

Catherine Chalmers, War (series)

Your Rest
Joe Bueter
You missed it. That hurricane,
with a name like a pet; that hurricane
spun your orange tree around its knuckles
like a pen. In a minute the tree and its myth-lite fruit
were dropped across the street for the lizards.
Because when you sleep, you take sound in,
eat it as the meal your dreams serve—
my mind once sent up a pie of bees.
Your suspension into sleep is usually mended
of birch bark: never complete, never
strung as syrup. But with more ruckus,
more rupture of fair weather, the wider
you step sideways into subconsciousness:
that hurricane of your youth, this summer’s
earthquake lost at the wrong coast.
Phenomenon of bones that rest
when the raw earth, raw wind
reveal themselves. So that the readied mind can
coil worry around itself in the aftermath
when you spin about the dreamed sudden deaths
of close ones, close bones that scatter upright
in the locked moment of calamity.
58

foxconn.tv
Zeenyooneen
In “foxconn.tv,” Zeenyooneen gives us a tour to Foxconn CEO, Terry Guo’s
dream. The dream mixes utopian and dystopian fantasies, and the science fiction
imaginations of the West with the contemporary reality of Chinese electronic
manufacturing industries. The virtual tour is a dizzying, claustrophobic exploration
of the traumas of globalization. As the tour loops upon itself, we are left with the
impression that this virtual nightmare is inescapable.
59

Counter-Charge
Alex Hovet
Leisure Suit Larry, a raunchy, text-based, video game series by Sierra studios, was one
of the first successful adult-themed game franchises. In “Counter-Charge,” Hovet
juxtaposes bell hooks’ meditations on love and Freudian psychology to turn Larry,
the eponymous hero of the video game, into a tragic misogynist hero whose desires
are continually repressed by the limits of the gameplay. By framing the video game
in video art, Hovet highlights the retro aesthetics of the game and its colonialist
undertones.
60

War Metaphor
Luma Jasim
“Through my life in Iraq I experienced three wars, first the Iran-Iraq war
1980-1988, the Gulf War 1990-1991 (imposed sanctions lasted for more than 10
years), and then the American invasion 2003” (Author’s Note)
61

Spyker Massacre
Jasim’s works refuse to be categorized as painting or photography. The mixed media nature reflects
the content of the images, which inhabit the place between the familiar and the unfamiliar, the
land of dreams. In an era where images of human atrocities are ubiquitous, Jasim’s pictures react
against the insensitivity by altering the “commonplace” into disturbing semi-representational forms
seeped with emotional content. Jasim takes on the challenge of representing a trauma that has been
saturated by the media.
62

Digital study for how the image is going to look.
Creating the image out of Google photos of Assyrian lions, and placing them in the existing image.
Transferring it to canvas by hand and continuing the painting and drawing
process on top with ink, tar, tissues, shellac, and charcoal.
63

Self-Portrait in Place
Dean Rader
The news this morning
announced that Ramadi
had fallen to ISIS
and that the president
did not have a plan
to push them back
into the Anbar province,
though I have a plan
to ride my bicycle
down to the beach,
where I will stand
with my feet in
water the temperature
of most corpses
and look out over
the shapeless ocean—
its waves shifting from
one color to the next,
this moment the shade
of an old bruise—
toward Japan,
which I imagine I see
across the map of
motion, that mystical
country which has
almost completely
ridden itself of guns,
like the one the boy
used to shoot nine
people who gathered
to worship a man whose
skin history tells us
was the same color
as theirs, that mystical
man who may have walked
the streets of Ramadi in
those missing years
between his youth and
his destiny, which is
to say, who knows
how many of the slain
he raised in those streets,
64

or pulled up out
of night into the
long daylight of the
not-yet-lived,
birthed back
into the skin of suffering,
or how many he dipped
into the waters that
emptied into the
Gulf of Oman and
walked on their tiny
feet of waves into the
Arabian Sea before
making their way
across the world
to the South Carolina
coast and into Charlotte
before working
their way around
to San Francisco,
on the far end
of the other
side of that mythical
continent, perhaps
even where I am
standing, the water’s
color like a bullet, and I
wonder if all life is
somehow loaded into
the chamber of a rifle,
the long tunnel of
darkness before us
our birthright and even
our destiny, all of it
as close to the hammer
as the width of these
lines, themselves an
inheritance of something
I am only now
beginning to understand,
like an insurrection
that no one saw,
not even the people
in it, not even the man
with his hand on the trigger.
65

Untitled
Mert Keskin (Haydiroket)
“Untitled” juxtaposes the religious symbol of penance and sanctity, the Virgin Mary,
with a modern image of failure, the prompt to choose a different name for a file. In
an unstable collage, the images, modern and historical, parody the compassionate
pain of Jesus by replacing the Madonna’s child with a melodramatic request to title
an image with “miserable.” The composition suggests a retro nostalgia for a distant,
or recent past where images held more potential for exploitation.
66

67

pink binds of motherdaughterhood
Jordan Strafer
“pink binds of motherdaughterhood” is one of a series of works by Strafer featuring
Tzvia Skolnick, an embodiment of herself and her deceased mother. Tzvia is a
manifestation of the Kabbalistic concept of a reincarnated soul existing inside of
another—ibbur, a Hebrew term which can be translated as ‘impregnate’. Tzivia
mixes the colour pink from milk substitute and stage blood whilst bound by a
telephone cord—a dated, adult substitute for an umbilical cord. On the right, a
smaller video shows slap rites, representing a family ritual where a mother must
slap her daughter across the face when she first menstruates.
68

Mother-Father-Daughters-Soil-
Cotton-Pig-Sausage-Babies
Teresa Braun
Braun’s work draws from her Mennonite background to tell stories about sacrifice,
ritual, and farm labour together with slaughter and rebirth. “Mother-Father-
Daughters-Soil-Cotton-Pig-Sausage-Babies” presents the foundational fable of
a cottonwood tree planted by the Mother over the graves of the Father and two
Daughters. The spirit-seeds of the Tree are ingested by a Pig who is butchered,
unbutchered, and eaten by the Mother as a sacrificial act of mourning, sustenance,
and procreation.
69

Julia Randall, Pulled Orange Crush
Julia Randall, Pulled Orange Crush

Núria Farré, The Exquisite Pain

At Jiangzicui Station
Taipei, Taiwan
Peter LaBerge
When Camphor trees are split, they take
the outside into their roots. The train
breathes without sunlight, the patient
skin of bark. On went the body, on went
this tapered light. What the police
couldn’t touch is the skin giving
itself to me like cloth. I listened
with care to what was split open. The men
emptied first. The women unspooled.
The knife was so beautiful. How could I let it
float forever on the surface of the skin?
73

Self-Portrait With Reader
Dean Rader
I want to begin by letting you know
that the title is no lie, even though
this poem is not quite a portrait of
reader and writer. It’s really a love
letter to the not-yet-known from the soonto-be-forgotten,
which the author is
supposed to be, like stars on a warm June
day. But what I need to tell you is this:
wherever you are, turn to the person
sitting next to you—whether you are on
a bus, in class, in a car, in heaven—
and say, Lovely Stranger, you appear in
the last lines of a poem written to
the good and grave world. Now, what will you do?
74

Gabriela Molano, Entre el Pasado y Futuro

PART III:
OF ALL THE THINGS
JACOB LEFT BEHIND,
HERE ARE JACOB’S SHOES
Toisha Tucker

Part III
There were several boxes to inventory.
Elizabeth was as methodical as ever; the clothing would
be last. She started with the books. Two full boxes,
carried over, stacked at the bookshelves, prices marked
in the upper right hand corner of the cover pages with
her compact script. She placed the most interesting
titles in the space she had cleared. The rest were
stacked in perfect piles on the floor. A few were set
aside to read.
She never enjoyed rummaging through personal
effects. Herself a childless widow, having endured
the sifting of her husband’s effects had seemed more
than sufficient for a lifetime. Since the war, most of
the donations were from families of dead soldiers.
Young men. Elizabeth found determining prices for the
accoutrements of their lives morbid and distasteful.
There was barely half a box left to inventory. She
finished quickly and was putting brass blazer buttons
in the display box at the register when the front bell
tinkled.
*
Elizabeth paused thoughtfully and surveyed the
shop window. She had last changed the display five
months ago. Perhaps there would be something in the
remaining inventory she could use.
Suits, waistcoats, trousers, blazers, neckties, shirts,
socks, and shoes. No hats. No undergarments. No
outerwear. Most were well-worn, but decent. The
brown leather Derbys would look dashing in the
window. They would need to be polished.
*
Her apron fit tight about her waist. A square of cloth
was on the floor beside her chair. Elizabeth placed the
shoes in her lap, dusted them both, removed the laces
and replaced the left shoe on the cloth. The young man
(a Mr. Bonamy?) who had dropped off the boxes had
referred to his friend as Jacob Flanders. She applied
a thick layer of brown, waxy polish, her right hand
stuffed inside, a makeshift shoe form. The horsehair
of the shine brush, stiff and dense—it had pricked her
fingers as her hand grappled beside her chair—made
a shwashing sound as she rubbed in the polish. She
remembered how the young man’s hands had paused
above these very shoes. Her thoughts soon drifted to
the houndstooth suit that had been in the shop for a few
months as she absently rotated the leather. They would
pair well.
She switched shoes, repeated her actions on the left,
before reaching for more wax and the cotton cloth to
give luster to the heel and toe.
*
The midsummer days were still long enough to allow
her to work in the window. She had left the white shirt
on the mannequin, and buttoned the houndstooth
jacket over it. She adjusted the paisley tie and stepped
back, decided that everything was in order and turned
the body around towards the street. Elizabeth gave the
shoes one final rub, and tugged at the bow of the laces—
ensuring the rigidity of their ellipses. Her pale hand
clasped them together, reached into the window display,
and placed them perfectly beneath the trouser hems.
77

*
Elliot did not know what to do in London. He had been
here before, several times, in fact, including the day his
infantry shipped out to Belgium. There had been times
as he huddled in the muddy trenches that he thought he
would not make it back home. Elliot had made countless
mental lists of all the things he would do if he did. Now,
he was here and he could not recall a single one. Well,
he had remembered that he wanted a pint and he had
immediately sought out the pub at the train station, on
the house, they had said, God bless you.
*
It did not occur to Elliot that he wanted to buy a suit,
until he saw the houndstooth displayed in the charity
shop window. It was dashing above the brown leather
Derbys and paisley socks. Seeing his reflection in the
glass, he realized he didn’t want to return home as
Second Lieutenant Elliot Smith. He wanted to return as
they remembered him, a son and a brother. Whole. He
didn’t want the first thing his family noticed to be the
pinned sleeve of his uniform with its perfectly creased
fold etching the air just above where his lower arm
should have been.
Elliot had first seen the Royal Army advert while
apprenticing in a butcher’s shop, his hands had paused
as they wrapped some loin chops with a sheet from The
Daily Mail. There had been something sticky and strange
about the words ‘World War.’ They were hard to speak
and even more so to understand. He had been thinking
about them a lot and about joining the British forces. He
was the first from his town to enlist.
Now, he had returned home, well he had returned to
London. He still had a few hours before his train departed
Victoria Station. One more glance at the suit and he went
into the shop, a bell tinkled overhead signaling the
saleswoman of his entrance. She gave him the look he
had come to know as Poor Dear, but you have done it for
England, no? God save you and God save the Queen.
*
Everything fit except the shoes, which pinched Elliot’s
toes and compressed his arch. The shoes were too tight
and narrow and he felt jolts in his shins as he attempted
a few steps around the small shop. He thought maybe
they would do just for this one time. But they would not
do. He was not ready to endure more pain.
*
The bell tinkled as Elliot exited the shop. He paused and
checked his reflection in the glass. The suit was a good
fit and it was not as bad as he had imagined paired with
his army issued combat boots. He was brought from his
thoughts by the distant chimes of Big Ben. It was noon.
Perhaps he could find a pub with a good stew. It had
been a while since he had had a good stew.
There was nothing particularly striking about the shoes.
They were in the window display of a charity shop, placed
beneath a tweed suit. They were Derbys made from brown
leather. Some attempt had been made to polish them,
though it remained evident that they were well-worn. The
laces were tied and tucked neatly under the tongue. A pair
of paisley socks were placed inside the shoe openings and
artfully draped along the back of each heel.
If interested, an inquiry into the shoes’ provenance
78

could be made. It would reveal that they were donated
by Mrs. Flanders after her son’s death in the war, and
that they had one previous owner, Jacob Flanders; that
is, of course, if one was ignoring the cow.
The new owner would never know Jacob had been
handsome and destined for a greatness that he would
have fulfilled with sufficient mediocrity. Nor that his
good friend Bonamy’s hands had lingered over those
very shoes after he placed the box, the last of several,
on the floor of the charity shop. Nor that Bonamy had
considered taking them, they were, after all his size.
Bonamy briefly thought perhaps Clara would see him
wearing the shoes and think of him anew. But then he
was overcome with anguish that Clara would only love
him then because she was reminded of Jacob—because
of his shoes, Jacob’s shoes.
He chose instead as his memento a small volume of
Donne’s poetry.
*
The war seemed as though it was meant to last forever.
Everything was so different from before and that which
remained unchanged was abnormal in its familiarity.
That is how we come to find Mrs. Emily Chambers
stopped in front of the charity shop window staring at
Jacob’s shoes.
extravagance of purchasing new clothes and not war
bonds.
The post had delivered her bimonthly letter yesterday,
John’s slanted hand, the ally flags and the stamp of the
Queen (God save her and God save England!) enclosing
three shillings and brief missives. Things were going
well. They were still alive. They sent their love.
The bell tinkled lightly as she entered the shop. She
looked around at the other offerings and decided
against them. A pale hand pulled the shoes from the
window, leaving behind the paisley socks.
Emily decided the shoes would do. They were only two
pence, but not the socks and not the suit. Joseph could
wear his brother’s Sunday suit. It would be okay for the
suit to be ill fitting. Maybe she could pin it for a better
fit. But she did not want him wearing oversized shoes.
Her eldest son and their father had enlisted to fight on
behalf of England. They had left everything behind,
but Joseph had never had the stature of his father’s
side of the family. Presently, Mrs. Chambers found
herself needing to purchase her son an outfit for his
commencement ceremony. She did it in spite of the
signs warning her against the bad taste and unpatriotic
79

80

Dana Harel, Only for the Left Hand 3

All This
Jesse Peters
In all this damn rain
and slanted light
things become powerful.
Like old white churches
through wet pines,
behind vague graves.
Or your tracks
on the wet grass
after you have gone.
Even just the going itself
is different somehow.
If you were here
I would tell it to you this time.
I would tell you about that night.
That particularly wet night
when I walked across a campus
to a hospital room.
And she simply said,
“I am so thankful you came back.”
And I kissed her and held her hand
and slept in a chair
like everyone does.
I talked to the nurses in the middle of the night
and told her that it was ok,
and wiped her head with a thin wet cloth.
They could not know what she needed.
Not on that night.
That last night
when she said simply
“I’m so glad you came back.”
And through this fog,
somewhere behind these churches
and all these graves,
when the tracks have finally disappeared,
I believe I could finally tell it all.
82

Bypass
Bridget Leslie
Bridget Leslie describes her work as “ mimicry of my father’s cardiac catheter exam that resulted
in the accidental destruction of his artery, which in turn resulted in multiple cardiac surgeries,
coma, and neuropathy. Leaving the once great athlete as an invalid, and my family in a state of
numb disaster. This video was a way for me to process his bodily experience with an object familiar,
but functioning differently for the both of us—tights.” Leslie recreates the traumatic event and
accompanies it with distorted sounds from the hospital, invoking the experience of anesthesia. The
accompanying text-based work crafts moments from the memory of the accident, both from the
artist’s and her father’s perspective, into powerful poetical forms.
83

Death, White
Eczema
Menu’s
Overstuffed purses
4 Australian passports
Underwear hung on the edge of a laundry basket
Unfolded clothes
Urine
Filth
Dirty salmon tiles
Frozen food
Coffee
Everything on wheels
Crumbled Magazines
Waiting rooms
Upholstered couches
Subtitles
Snow
I-40
Lake Hefner
Oxygen Tanks
Hospices
Orange
Yellow
White
Blue
Teddy Bears
Magnets
Train sounds
Scrubs and slippers
Codes
That feeling of a strand of hair on skin that you cant find
When someone lifts the hair from the back of your neck
Goosebumps
Styrofoam
Waiting for sleep
Fearing the morning
Cell phone vibrations
Blood Pressure
Tightness
Vinyl
Synthetics
PINK
That hospital smell
Shower stalls
Toilets
Warmed blankets
Who slept in these?
Dishes
90’s radio in the distance
Beeping, Beeping
No silence
Plastic insides
Esophagus
Medications
Cafeteria Cake at 3am
The happiness of the metal tray
Cups of pills
Foreign
Nutrition shakes
Flipping for bed sores
Adjustments
Church
Chapels
Last rites
Chevrolet Tahoe
Cat Shit
Cat Litter
Locked doors
84

Waiting room at clinic
Fire
Cup of Tea
Pneumonia
Biscuit
Procedure Table
Assistant
Repetition of simplicity
Home in no time
No White recollection.
No doctor
Gail
Mom
Business as usual
55 years
Strange arrival
Waiting
30 minutes
Beeping
Cinema
Darkened
Ushers
Torches
Get out
Program
Mathematical formula
More efficient computer model
Accurate
Timeless
No colors
Waking up
Going to be okay
Josephine bent over bed
Timeless
Thought procedure
no pain
Uncomfortable because of small bed
Tried speaking
Oxygen
Only mom
hazy
Sudden awareness
Bad
No memories
Monitors
Woke up every hour
Taking temperatures
Room changed constantly
Different time and place
comfort in Josephine
Hid things
No straight answers
Needed Watch
Bodenhamer
Efficiency
Male and female nurses endless parade
Nice to me
Remembering death around me
Alarms- code blue
Balloons like heads
White board
Measurements
Meals on wheels
White visits
Mullins coming, speaking
Showering for the first time
Clean for once
Bum hanging out
Hospital beds
211
third floor doctor
wheelchair
motion at last
pushed around
sliding into chairs
flopping
Freedom
iv
gowns
circuits
Physical therapy
Force fed
Build up endurance
Eat everything
Discarded chocolate
Anointing
Nigerian Priest
Daily visits
Pete Visits
Taken care of everything
Head of school
Is he out of hospital yet?
Boren Card.
Benjamin Button
Valkyrie
Dyanna about school and paying the bill.
Luke and Bridget
Cakes
Looking out the door.
Close but far
Normal things, coffees.
Couldn’t move.
Bordom.
More bordem.
Movies.
House Hunters
Questions
Psychiatrist.
Tall, young,
Three reasons, all male.
85

20: On Black
Being and Magic
Matt
For a dear companion who was my creative, moral conduit
bringing me joy in a time of loneliness.
Context: I am in a friend’s dorm room sitting on her big,
blue-black, inflatable couch, two glasses of wine in. I am
listening to a song on repeat, as I usually do in order to
ground and sustain my writing process, this time opting
for “My Need” by Janet. 1
My love, my need, tonight
I feel so tight
My love, my need, tonight
Just how I like
I met Janet as a kid watching Nutty Professor II: The
Klumps. My cousin and I (well, mostly myself) would
watch the “Doesn’t Really Matter” music video on repeat.
Fast forward the VHS tape through the film to the music video
at the end. Play, rewind, play, rewind, play, rewind. I was
attracted to the anime-inspired art direction; the levitating
3D platform on which she danced, surrounded by video
screens in what looked like a futuristic Best Buy; the cute,
cozy, minimalist apartment where she magically woke
up like dih, offering a sweet smile to the small electronic
dog rolling about the floor (a dog which I imagined was
mine after receiving a similar dog one Christmas); and her
impeccably choreographed flow, which I have practiced
many times in many mirrors.
But I really met Janet in the summer of 2014, living on
College Avenue down the street from Vassar. I randomly
decided to check out more of her music one night and
discovered the contagiously horny, harmonious groove
of 1993’s janet., and the emotive and devastatingly
complicated beauty of The Velvet Rope. Janet was my
introduction to non-binarism, a truer, franker, more deeply
investigated queerness and intentional movement away
from a preset gay Black male identification and into the
gender, or lack thereof, that I interrogated and developed
the following autumn. Janet introduced me to my own
velvet rope, my erotic, my Femme.
I selected “My Need” on this night because I needed
something relatively simple and upbeat to write to,
nothing that would force me to get up and tipsily dance,
and nothing or too emotionally strenuous. Feeling down,
the song’s rapid rimshot and symbols flirting with Janet’s
longing croon gave me a pleasantly productive pick-meup.
I had just watched 2 a production of Lacunae, an
experimental play produced by two Black students as
their senior thesis for the Drama Department. One of
the creators stated in the playbook that Lacunae sought
to discuss “the panopticon” and the police brutality that
Black Women endure, to “bring the truth into the light.”
The other creator wrote that his Black Mother tells him
to always think of her before making decisions that he is
nervous about, and he hopes that his Mother is proud and
that viewers will be able to find truth in the production.
I reserved two tickets, one for myself and an Asian
friend who first did not attend dinner and later did not
attend the play without prompt explanation. This is now
the second time that my non-Black friends failed to
surface in support of Black art, the first being my acting
in an Ebony Theatre Ensemble production last spring. I
am beginning to wonder whether Black art is actually
of value to these friends or whether “Black” is merely
a fixation or façade of consciousness for them. At the
moment of writing this, I am leaning towards the latter. 3
As I entered the Powerhouse Theatre, I crept through
the crowd of waiting consumers to check in and retrieve a
playbook. I briefly went to the gender neutral restroom to
blow my nose for the umpteenth time that day. As I pulled
the scruffy toilet paper away from my nose, I noticed
spots of blood resulting from the dryness of the recently
shitty weather of Poughkeepsie. The Vassar plague is
relentless.
1 As I edit this essay for publication, I am listening to D’Angelo’s
Voodoo album. D’Angelo is an incomprehensibly talented and sexy
Black man with an ultra-soulful disposition.
2 Friday, October 23, 2015.
3 Months later, while editing this for the Review, my worries have
digressed but not entirely.
86

The scenic design, a collaborative effort by the
ensemble, was simple and dynamic: Long white curtains
framed the four corners of the black box theatre, and over
the center of the stage hovered white curtains shaped
into a cube which later in the play served as screens
displaying the names and photos (or captions reading “no
photos available”) of Black Women (both cis and Trans)
who fell victim to civilian and police brutality. The stage
itself, ground-level, was a gleaming white, which viewers
were explicitly instructed by white student-ushers not
to walk on but to rather walk along the perimeter of the
stage to find their seats. A lone tree, also white, with
rather creepily sprawling branches hung from within the
curtain cube like a lynching site.
*
This essay is about the erotic — my erotic and the erotics
of other Black Queer Femmes. I have been thinking a
great deal about the erotic this semester, the deep place
of knowledge that Audre Lorde says is within us all.
The erotic is the leashed wildness of our souls. Hell,
as I’ve said in class once, it is soul itself, and it is our
souls; our, assumingly, is Black Women and Femmes
whose identities, personalities, cultures, struggles,
and sexinesses have been historically and routinely
suppressed. As I said in a literature reflection when I
was initially exposed to this idea of the erotic, the erotic
is my Black Queerness and Femmeness — when I
stopped cutting my hair, abandoned pronouns, allowed
myself to explore aesthetic more freely, and made the
decision to move toward Femme. It was only natural.
In an introduction to the seminal collection of written
works by radical Women of Color, This Bridge Called My
Back, Cherrie Moraga says, “Sometimes for me ‘that deep
place of knowledge’ Audre refers to seems like an endless
reservoir of pain, where I must continually unravel the
damage done to me,” the pain that Lorde implores us to
reach deep within ourselves, touch, and “see whose face it
wears.”
Prior to attending this play, I was in quite a funk, the
cause of which I was struggling to identify. This play gave
me my answer: I used to feel hypervisible on campus but
I now feel invisible. This experimental production was a
conduit to reach deep inside myself and touch my pain,
identify those/that who/which damaged and veiled me,
and locate, feel, unravel, and entertain/exercise my erotic,
the continuation of a process that Janet gave me the tools
to initiate.
$$$
Let’s just pretend
That we have no more tomorrow
Can we make love
Like it’s our last time, baby?
Scene, “For Aiyana”: Aiyana is 7. Her grandmother
plays with her, wrapping a veil around her arms and
head, running and dancing, joyously reminiscing on the
days when Aiyana was younger. She is now a big girl,
her grandmother says, to the delight of Aiyana who is
then wrapped in the white veil and put to bed by her
grandmother. She does not wake again. The ensemble
turns Aiyana’s body over to face the sky, covers her face
in the white veil, lifts her lifeless body, and carries her
backstage as another performer gently grabs the veil and
lets it seamlessly snake from her body, proceeding into
the next scene, “Earthbound”.
Aiyana Stanley-Jones was a seven-year-old Black Girl
shot and killed by Officer Joseph Weekley on May 16, 2010
in my hometown, Detroit, Michigan. Aiyana did not die
very far from my childhood church, All People Church
of God on East Canfield Street, the neighborhood where
my great aunt’s house once stood, which I once visited
with my Mom and Nana only to find a mound of bricks
and a few of Aunt Phil’s scattered possessions. My Mom
and Nana assumed that this was another instance where
wealthy scammers in the city commit arson on vacant
homes in order to begin rebuilding and gentrifying the
neighborhood for rent and sale. Detroit has become so
famous for violence that it is has become mythologized,
like Compton or “Chi-Raq”. Officer Weekley underwent
two mistrials; the prosecutors promised that there would
not be a third. Aiyana is an unwilling martyr. I worry for
my cousin, Anaya, also 7.
A later scene, “For Renisha”: Renisha is looking for help.
She is desperate and thinks that she might be sick and in
need of hospital intervention. She cries for help in search
of someone, anyone, who might lend her a hand. She
wanders and wanders, and cries and cries, and eventually
is met by a curious man whose arms are projected toward
her head. The white veil reappears, erected between the
two. Renisha, unlike the curious man, cannot see beyond
87

the veil. The curious man jerks his arms and she falls. He
then stands over her body, lowers himself face to face,
guides his rigid arms toward her head, and jerks again.
Renisha McBride, 19, was murdered by Theodore Wafer at
about 5 a.m. on November 2, 2013, in Dearborn Heights,
Michigan, a nearby suburb of Detroit, after crashing her
car and knocking on Wafer’s nearby front door pleading
for help. Wafer shot her through the screen door. I worry
for my sister whose husband is quick to aggravation. I
pray that my sister, and my infant niece, never have to
suffer the physical or psychological consequences of his
fragile masculinity. I worry for my Mother and Nana. I
worry for myself during my frequent travels.
$$$
Let’s not get too
Soft and gentle with it cuz I
Am not feeling
In no mood to play around
Nicole R. Fleetwood in her book Troubling Vision offers
a thorough examination of the visibility of the Black body
and an analysis of Janet’s 2004 Super Bowl performance,
explaining that the Black body, particularly the Black
Woman’s body, is “simultaneously invisible and always
visible, as underexposed and always exposed” (111).
Fleetwood quotes psychoanalytic theorist Kaja Silverman,
stating, “...What is determinative for each of us is not
how we see or would like to see ourselves, but how we
are perceived by the cultural gaze” (123). Following,
under the guise of white supremacy, our existence is
for consumption: Janet was consumed at and by the
Super Bowl, “the largest televisual event annually,” and
was consumed and discarded by Justin, a white boy
“who is a generation younger than Jackson and grew up
studying the moves of the Jackson family and other Black
musicians,” resulting in her total silencing, blacklisting,
and erasure following the controversy (128).
Janet’s Super Bowl performance fell on the eve of the
release of her album Damita Jo, on which she unveils the
many personalities that “live inside [her].” Fleetwood
offers the notion that “excess flesh is not necessarily
a liberatory enactment … and does not destabilize the
dominant gaze or its system of visibility. Instead, it
refracts the gaze back upon itself” (112). The Black
Woman’s erotic is a public spectacle for the white
heteropatriarchal consumerist gaze, and self-liberation is
really delusion, fostered and controlled by corporations
that encourage a public schizophrenia that convinces her
that she is both free and enslaved. Eventually, she “goes
too far” and is damned and erased. “It’s a familiar trope
in American culture — the oversexed black woman, now
willing to whip her tit out on national television to sell
some records,” says Carla Williams, quoted by Fleetwood.
Was Janet oversharing by expressing her “need?”
Janet’s performance of racialized sexuality,
“while titillating, threatens the social fabric of white
heteronormativity and public decency” (131). The
“victims,” the audience (the normative subjects) share a
“positive attachment to sameness” which was disrupted
by the victimizer, Janet. Fleetwood goes on to quote Sarah
Ahmed’s theory of affective economies: “The ordinary or
normative subject is reproduced as the injured party: the
one ‘hurt’ or even damaged by the ‘invasion’ of others. The
bodies of others are hence transformed into ‘the hated’
through a discourse of pain.”
*
Two days following the performance, the cast and
crew invited students to participate in a talk-back in
the ALANA Center, a private space for Students of
Color to convene on campus. One performer extensively
shared her thoughts on her discomfort in performing
before white audience members. There was an unsaid
understanding between the cast, crew, and Black
audience members that the message that the producers
were attempting to deliver was not for them. We were not
the ones who needed education. (Or perhaps we did —
someone mentioned that there were high school students
in the audience who probably did not know what they
were preparing to watch.) Two students said that, before
the play, they felt invisible on campus as Black Women
and Femmes; afterward, they became hypervisible in two
ways: they felt confident in their skin and expression as
Femmes and felt uncomfortable (and mourned) by white
people approaching them with praise for their onstage
courage to unveil their pain, congratulating them on a
brilliant, passionate performance, and offering awkward
half-smiles and nods in passing as acknowledgement of
88

their Black existences.
For your consideration: “...The context of mass culture
and the ways in which visual spectacle is manufactured
and widely distributed muddies issues of intentionality”
(126). The Black Women and Femmes who created and
performed Lacunae were so hungry for visibility that
they unintentionally became hypervisible, like Janet had.
However, the crime that they committed was one of
fostering white guilt. Rather than outwardly demanding
an apology from the performers who made them feel
so confronted and uncomfortable, white viewers,
intentionality aside (fuck white intentionality — instead
of always “meaning well,” just do well for once), flipped
whiteness on itself and made these Black Women and
Femmes feel confronted and uncomfortable, and rather
than apologizing to white viewers, these Black Women
and Femmes had to apologize to themselves and Black
Women and Femmes in the audience.
I asked a white queer non-binary friend who attended
the play the night before how they liked it. They said
that it was both painful and beautiful to watch, but that
didn’t really give me a clue as to what to expect. When
I attended the play, it once again became clear that my
experience of Black pain and beauty are totally unique
to what white people perceive. I interpreted the play as a
desperate plea to acknowledge misogynoir and to incite
some duty to stop being racist, misogynistic, queerphobic,
transphobic/antagonistic, and every other -ist under
the sun. I texted the white friend after the performance,
“Fuck.” They asked if I was okay and said to let them know
if I needed anything. I thought, what the fuck could you
offer me? What could the white audience give the Black
cast and crew whose blood poured onstage? I don’t know
what I expect or want from them but what I need, they
likely don’t have.
For Black viewers, especially Women and Femmes,
it was to say, “I see you and you are not alone.” Perhaps
it was a time to be reminded of the pain that we never
forget but bury in order to deal with our daily obligations,
obligations that include constant resistance of reminders
of our marginalization. But to perform a reminder is
to forcibly confront our pain, this time in the presence
of our oppressors. Are we to confront ourselves in the
presence of our oppressors or is confrontation and
healing to be a private affair? What would the play
look like if it were produced in the same vein as Ebony
Theatre Ensemble performances — in the ALANA Center
where the audience self-selects as primarily Viewers of
Color, mostly Black? What if the performance, like the
scene “Celebration” near the end of the play in which the
ensemble happily dances about the stage, unabashedly
honoring themselves, was just joy? What if, as one friend
suggested, we produced an adaptation of The Wiz?
$$$
Won’t make excuses
I just want you inside, baby
We don’t need to
Talk about no promises
Two of the final scenes, “I Hope You’re Listening” and
“The Pledge,” featured the full ensemble telling the stories
of a multitude of Black Women who flash across the
overhead curtain screens, singing, stomping, and clapping
Janelle Monae’s “Hell You Talmbout (Say Their Names).”
The ensemble approaches the audience. They yell and cry
in fury, demanding that the audience say these Women’s
names. To my seated section, one performer bellowed, “I
just said a whole bunch of em – name one!” It is in these
moments that I often feel guilty that I cannot keep up with
the ever-growing list of names of murdered Black people.
I remember when Mike Brown was killed. I had not
yet changed my pronouns. I read the news on my laptop,
glued to my living room couch on College Ave. I watched
the footage and observed, inhaled, the photos of Brown’s
lifeless body in the street, blood spewing from his
cranium onto the gravel. I imagined myself, perceived as a
Black man.
Yesterday, 4 I met with a group of students at a
workshop discussing how to combat and engage in
thoughtful dialogue about bias incidents on campus.
During one exercise, I told a white girl that I was afraid to
leave my house for a few days. It was a nightly ritual to
lie in bed and seal my eyes to my balcony door, awaiting
a white man to run from behind my garage, climb my fire
escape, storm onto my balcony, burst through my door,
and eliminate me. After the exercise, we discussed what
it was like to hear someone’s story. The white girl said
4 Thursday, October 22, 2015.
89

that she had tried to identify a similar situation in her
own life in order to contextualize my feelings, which she
found that she was unable to do. Another white girl said
that that’s just it – you cannot compare your experiences
to something that you have never endured and the
only thing that you can do when hearing someone is
acknowledge and respect their lived experience as their
own without attempting to reflect on and identify an
equivalent. 5
90
$$$
I need you, like the flowers need the rain
I need you, like the blues needs the pain
Like the stars need the night, I need you
Like the waves need the sea
I receive daily Christian words of wisdom via text on
my phone. This spring, one said, “Access is a powerful
tool. Don’t give it to just anyone. And once it’s violated,
revoke it quickly. Guard your peace at all cost.” My peace
is my erotic. Be careful of who you invite into your erotic
— it is not to be shared with everyone. But what do we
do with the shared erotic that we revoked? Do we try
again with the same tactic or do we try something new?
WWJD: What would Janet do? Janet tried again with
two studio albums, a greatest hits collection, two
tours, three films, and a book (not that these tactics
did not work, if they should even be called tactics).
She eventually left the public eye, married a Qatari
billionaire and relocated from the U.S., reconnected with
longtime partners Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, and
released a star album and tour in 2015. Janet cannot be
erased. Unbreakable is a pop record reminiscing on her
brother, thanking fans for their unfailing support, and
encouraging listeners through the hurt that the world is
experiencing in this moment in time. But the composition
of the album mostly brings joy to her listeners. I can’t help
5 Recalling how the performers were mourned by white people, it
might be useful here to consider Freud’s concept of the process
of identification as cannibalism: Black culture and struggle are
equally adored and feared by white people. Whiteness seeks to
kill those who natively embody Black culture and seeks to possess
Blackness (both culture and struggle) for themselves as a form of
remorse and fantasy. Black people are magical and never truly die,
right?
but to stop and dance, or at least imagine myself dancing,
to “Dammn Baby” or to feel lifted by “Black Eagle.” Even
now, as I reflect on my own simultaneous invisibility and
hypervisibility at Vassar and elsewhere, my mind goes
to the heavy influence that The Velvet Rope has on me,
particularly on my unapologetically magical Black hair.
My hair is sometimes my only source of vitality, the only
visible marker keeping me alive and apparent.
I’m now thinking about our own visibility and our
futures. Javon Johnson in his essay “Black Joy in the Time
of Ferguson” tells us that on the night of Mike Brown’s
death, he fell asleep listening to classic Black singers
because he “wanted to be happy and Black.” Johnson
also gives a nod to Danez Smith’s poem “Dinosaurs in
the Hood” in which Smith wants to make a movie about
dinosaurs...and that’s it — not a movie that positions a
troubled Black boy as another stereotype in a plot of
destruction, and not a movie that is about or causes
Black pain. In this movie, Cicely Tyson delivers a speech
(or two), Viola Davis saves the town by stabbing the
dinosaur in the neck with a Black Power fist afro pick,
and “nobody kills the Black boy and nobody kills the
Black boy and nobody kills the Black boy for once.” It’s
just a movie.
The erotic has endless interpretations and we are
called by God and connected throughout the universe
to manifest representations of our erotics. Black people
need other Black people to make movies about dinosaurs,
music to satisfy our cravings for soul at the end of a long
day, and hairstyles that polish our glow when we are
weary. We need Black people to bring other Black people
joy in the millennial era, a frightening era that has us
afraid to leave our homes yet zealous to take action. It is
important in this time to entertain and exercise the erotic
more than ever before because the erotic is our sanity
and keeps us alive and apparent.
Originally written December, 2015
Annual Vassar Student Review / VR Contest Winner: 1st Prize

Charles Matson Lume, no pardon for this (for Charles Wright)

Charles Matson Lume, Infiltrate (for Muriel Rukeyser)

Our Returning
Matthew Shenoda
We’ve come this far
only to find that what we’ve known
no one cares to remember.
Not the murder of the Coptic monk in Texas
vanished & abandoned in some backwoods marsh.
Not the priest who collected his bones
wrapped & buried them where rivers once ran.
Not the deaths of the campesinos
blood lingering in the furrows of our lettuce.
Not the children who stitch their dreams
in the pockets of our clothing.
We have forgotten our own names
only to be reminded by the echoes in the canyon.
The way of the earth
is to wither and return back to itself
and we too will go this way.
But we are not like the earth,
we will not return back to ourselves.
Perhaps we return inside memory
to a time before ourselves.
We have been granted a map to the headwaters
if only we can learn to read & wade
read & wade.
93

P.D.A
Liona Robyn
When we
You and I
Walk down the street
Your street
Hand in hand
Side by side
They stare
People that is
At our odd
Selves that is
I wonder why
That is
I remember that day
In your street
We walked by a man
Preaching
Talking about the sins of two cities
Sodom and Gomorrah
You cracked a joke
Before we passed him
We laughed and laughed
I reached in
To give you a kiss
On the lips
You took it gladly
It was a slight peck
And smiled at me
Gaily
And then you heard
‘BURNED IN FIRE AND BRIMSTONE’
and a cold stiffness
settled within you
94

It parted you from me
As we passed Him
And
remained
Till the end of your street.
Then a woman
Went by us
Slipped on the wet pavement
And stumbled into you
Held onto you for support
And pushed you into me
I held you close and firm
To stop this train wreck
From falling all together
You caught my eyes
1…2…3 second stare
and kissed me
French style
95

Shan Goshorn, top: Educational Genocide: The Legacy of the Carlisle Indian Boarding School; bottom: Hearts of our Women

Memorial Day: Rosebud Reservation,
Lakota Nation, South Dakota
Jane Haladay
(for ECV)
“It’s an intimate gathering,” he says
as we park on the side of the dirt road
next to St. Francis cemetery.
“This is how we honor our ancestors.”
I understand him.
Didn’t I just hear him tell me
driving here from Valentine that
he won’t do sweats with whites?
“You have to understand
it isn’t personal,” he told me.
And it isn’t. And I do.
He took the keys so
I can’t roll down the window.
When I open the door for air,
the sound of the drum
and Lakota singing floats
toward me in the wind
that ripples colored ribbons
on the graves, makes dazzling
plastic pinwheels with metallic
designs sparkle for the ones
gone on before. Motion
and shimmer, people
walking by carrying plates
of food: elders, children,
families, teens in pairs or
alone. One brown mother dog
and her fat black pup.
Now the mission bells
begin an awful clanging,
drowning out the drum.
I can’t hear Lakota voices.
Sitting with my only-English
thoughts in his car that he bought
from the St. Francis priest, I think
“That’s it” of the Catholic bells
oppressing Lakota songs.
“There it is, all over again, still.”
And yet beyond the bells,
before bells ever existed here,
still the people. Still the songs.
They are there, just down the road.
Out of my hearing now,
but still singing.
And they will be remembered.
97

Cover from the Spring 1968 edition of the Vassar Review; Photo by Eric Lindbloom

From the Archives
Ronald Patkus, Morgan Strunsky, and Nicholas Barone, Archives Co-Editors
Dreams are revelatory mechanisms for coping with
pain, and as such they can serve as evocative forces in
art and literature. Two featured poems from the Vassar
Review archives, “Some Dreams They Forgot” and “And
I Will Know,” function as testaments to the journal’s
theme while engaging with modern artistic exegesis.
We chose these pieces because of their connection to
the new compositions selected for this edition of the
Vassar Review, particularly to Joe Bueter’s “Your Rest.”
Former Poet Laureate of the United States Elizabeth
Bishop’s “Some Dreams They Forgot” was originally
printed in the 1933 Christmas edition of the Vassar
Review. Bishop wrote the piece during her senior
year at Vassar. The sonnet serves as a traditionally
structured analysis on the familiar, yet illusive, nature
of dreams. Bishop’s usage of natural imagery evokes
the transience and ephemerality of dreams and
subsequent sentiments of loss.
Ethel Livingston’s “And I Will Know” was originally
published in the 1968 spring edition of the Review.
Syntactically fragmented, “And I Will Know” serves as
a departure from the more traditional style seen in the
Bishop sonnet. However, thematically, all three pieces
resonate with the artistic investigation of dreams and
psychological and physical trauma. “Your Rest” by Joe
Bueter, through content and form, is a paragon of this
resonance. These shifts in poetic conventions over time
contribute to a sense of reformative continuity while
elucidating the ways in which writers grapple with
these persistent and charged motifs.
Similar to Bueter’s “Your Rest,” “And I Will Know”
utilizes perceptual imagery to evoke the sensual
power of dreams and its relation with subjective
experience. While psychological pain and its physical
manifestations have an overt presence in “And I Will
Know,” “Your Rest” deals with subjectivity from
the perspective of consciousness while explicating
the chaotic and painful implications of reverie.
“Some Dreams They Forgot” uses nature imagery to
underscore the instability and anxiety that surrounds
loss and transience in dreams. Figurative language in
these poems serves to connect the temporal with the
ethereal.
Furthermore, external forces (in particular, weather
in “Your Rest” and general audio-visual sensations in
“And I Will Know”) thrust chaos and disorder within
the dreamlike images of each poem. Narrative mode
is vital to such developments. “And I Will Know” uses
first-person perspective and “Your Rest” maintains
the second-person, varying the degrees of textual
intimacy. Divergently, “Some Dreams They Forgot”
employs third-person perspective to maintain a
narrative distance.
The selected works illuminate the transcendent and
revelatory power of dreams and its relationship with
humanity’s coping with pain. As more perspectives
are added to the ever-expanding amalgam of human
knowledge, these themes continue to be qualified,
challenged, subverted, and epitomized in literature and
art. Here, they function as both legacy and forecast,
reconciling the nuances of past and present and their
effects on artistic interpretation and representation.
Images Courtesy of Vassar College Archives
& Special Collections Library
99

Elizabeth Bishop, Some Dreams They Forgot. Originally printed in Christmas 1933 issue

Ethel Livingston, And I Will Know. Photo by Nancy
Bialler. Originally printed in Spring 1968 issue

A Wondrous City of Floating Clouds:
New translations of Evgenii Baratynskii
Review by Matthew Kendall
Baratynskii, Evgenii trans. Rawley Grau: A Science Not For the Earth:
Selected Poems and Letters of Yevgeny Baratynsky. Ugly Duckling Presse, 2015.
It’s difficult to imagine the significance of dreams
before Freud: After The Interpretation of Dreams,
the stuff of sleep became raw material for the
curious (or arguably, for the prying). This isn’t to
suggest that Freud singlehandedly reached the
conclusion that dreams had a direct connection to
our lived experience. In 19th century literature, for
example, dreams could be prophetic, and they often
revealed the deeper feelings or desires that their
heroes harbored. The case in Russia is particularly
illustrative, where dreams offered a temporary route
into the mind of a novel’s hero. Yet this is a path that
Evgenii Baratynskii’s poem “Disillusionment,” blocked
decades before Freud:
My pain is blind — do not augment it,
Say not a word about the past,
And, solicitous friend, do not
Disturb the sick man when he’s dozing.
I sleep — and I find slumber pleasant;
Forget the dreams that are no more,
For in my soul you will awaken
mere agitation, but not love.
Like for Hamlet, deathly sleep is a potential exit from
life’s tribulations in Baratynskii’s poetry — it is respite
from the clawing pressures that lurk outside of
one’s bedroom. In his Russian, this withdrawal from
the world has a name: “usyplenie,” which translator
Rawley Grau renders the word interchangeably
as “slumber” or “doze” in a few of Baratynskii’s
most famous poems, including “Disillusionment,”
“Epilogue,” and “Autumn.” All of them appear in his
new translations of Baratynskii’s work, A Science Not
For The Earth. Outside of Russia, Baratynskii remains
one of the lesser-known and more confounding poets
of the first half of Russia’s nineteenth-century. For
many readers, Aleksander Pushkin’s airy genius more
commonly represents the Russian 1820s and 30s
than the challenging, moody poems of Baratynskii’s
catalog. Grau’s volume is immense, but it will make
Baratynskii more accessible: the book compiles
poems, letters, biographical annotations, and an
authoritative introduction. For the lover of ideas
or meditations on existence, Baratynskii is a must.
When rendering these poems into English, Grau
defers to ideas over mellifluousness, and he attempts
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to pose Baratynskii’s difficult conjectures directly
to his reader. He is mostly successful: The poet’s
characteristic musing on the distinction between
thought and feeling is made consistently lucid,
and readers will find Baratynskii’s emotional rigor
remarkable.
Though under-appreciated during his lifetime,
Baratynskii flourished a century later. Joseph
Brodsky once called Baratynskii’s elegy, “Zapustenie,”
better than anything Pushkin wrote. The statement
warrants a quick gloss: with such a comparison,
Brodsky means to call it the greatest poem in
Russian. Grau translates the title as “Left to Ruin,”
rendering idiomatic an abstract noun which means
both “desolation” and “disrepair.” Here, Baratynskii
echoes Hamlet once more when, while wandering the
now-empty estate of his childhood, the poet reunites
with the spirit of his long-dead father:
Long has it been since I heard any mention of him,
a distant grave has taken his dust,
my memory has not preserved for me his face,
but his accessible spirit is living still;
here, a friend of reverie and nature,
I recognize him utterly:
As inspiration he is stirring inside of me,
He commands me to praise the woods and dells and
waters;
He prophesies for me, convincingly, a land
Where I will inherit a termless spring,
Where I will see no traces of deterioration,
Where, in the sweet shade of groves that never
decay,
By streams that never run dry,
I’ll meet the shade I hold as sacred.
This poem reads quite strangely in English, but only
because it is that much more strange in Russian;
while mildly more sonorous, “accessible spirit”
and “termless spring” are quite uncommon in
either language (“accessible spirit” is much less of
a mouthful and even alliterative, pronounced duhov-nee
dukh). Grau’s courageous translation loses
the mystique of these moments in the original,
but maintains their necessary call for pause. The
poet’s fascination with seeing time in space, a kind
of philosophical deep ecology, runs throughout
his poetry, but most striking here is the idea that
salvation comes from outside, specifically from
nature. Neither in dreams nor in waking life can he
reach paradise alone. Yet the shade who may hold
the keys — a deceased father, for example — is
fuzzy in our minds, impermanent and unreliable in
our memory, present somewhere else in the space
that we call the world. It’s a gorgeous idea, which
Grau maintains, but unfortunately alters by turning
Baratynskii’s concise, abstract title into a phrase:
what was once a proposition is now a description.
Baratynskii was not only interested in the dead.
He had a relationship with his antipode, Pushkin,
which Grau has catalogued in a most remarkable
contribution to English readers — over half of
Baratynskii’s surviving letters are translated
and impressively annotated at the end of the
volume. When writing to Pushkin, Baratynskii’s
characteristic, morose veil seemingly lifts. He jokes,
writes openly and passionately, and one gets the
feeling that these two men truly understood one
another. Although Baratynskii was always second to
Pushkin, this does not affect his admiration for his
friend. At times, Pushkin even becomes an obsession:
“[Delvig (a mutual friend and poet)] talked a lot about
you; among other things, he passed on something
you had said, and it made me a little sad. You had
told him: “Baratynsky and I aren’t writing each other
these days, or else I would have let him know,” and so
on.
Is it really true, Pushkin, that after becoming even
closer friends in Moscow than we were before, we
have since grown more distant to each other?”
But it is never clear that his eagerness to renew vows
came from a particularly positive rapport. After the
two spent some time together in the following spring,
he writes to the poet Viazemskii:
“Somehow nothing comes from [Pushkin and me]; we’re
like two mathematical lines. A third line is essential to
compose any sort of figure, and you were it.”
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It’s unclear if Baratynskii’s metaphor points to mutual
respect or insurmountable alienation (Pushkin’s
responses are not included). Baratynskii would later
receive mention in Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, but
through Grau’s dutiful translations of the letters,
we learn later that it was a work about which
Baratynskii expressed misgivings. It is also unclear
if his scorn is sincere, or if it is born from angst over
the critics who maligned him: Early critics of Russian
Realism at best turned a blind eye to Baratynskii,
and at worst damningly labeled him irrelevant with
regards to social questions.
Baratynskii’s letters leave little question that he
was what we would now call depressed. At the age
of 15, he found himself at the center of a scandal
after an officer caught him stealing several hundred
rubles while he was enrolled in the military academy.
Expelled and isolated, after a few years he enlisted in
the army, and he was soon posted to Finland. This is
where he produced some of his first poems, which
expressed fascination with the Finnish landscape
and its lingering connection to his Russian homeland,
at once both distant and nearby. Judging from his
letters, youth was one of the worst experiences of his
life.
Yet his poems cultivate a different persona: we see
that his lyrical “I” treasured time abroad, which came
with the benefits of nearby St. Petersburg, only some
200 miles away. Looking back in an untitled poem
from the 1830s, he confirms that Finland provoked
his fascination with emptiness, hopelessness, and the
destruction that time leaves in its wake:
My artless pencil has set down
a quick sketch of your austere form,
O cliffs of melancholy Finland […]
This is where, hopeless, I wandered once,
where railing at fate I laid aside
what belief I had in happiness.
Grau’s translation of the poem sheds the concise,
iambic rhythm that Baratynskii had perfected by
this later point in his career, but which already fell
on deaf ears – Russia’s readers turned away from
poetry in the 1830s, and were dazzled instead
by newer, more stylish prose. The seemingly
radiant embrace of misery in his Finland poem is
uncommonly contemporary, as is his attraction to
the pale calculations of science, from which Grau
takes the volume’s title. His cold, optical dissection of
a friend’s corpse in “The Skull” (Hamlet again) pits
advancements in medical science against existential
horror:
It still bore bits of hair; I could detect
On it the slow advance of decomposition.
A horrid sight! How powerful its effect
Upon the thinking heir of such destruction!
It’s an admirable translation, but Grau succeeds
most in creating a clear delivery of the poem’s literal
meaning. Grau leaves the rhyme of Baratynskii’s
abstract nouns intact, although the Russian renders
this somewhat more pleasantly than English rhymes
on the suffix “-tion.” It’s an inevitable, understandable
shame that he loses the lightness of the original: it is
Baratynskii at his most uncommonly weightless, a
faint din of Mozart amongst otherwise dense stanzas.
The poet plays powerfully with the consonants l
and n in the original, if at times veering towards a
phonetic heaviness. An added enjambment after
“detect” veers from the original, partly unavoidable,
but still gives this poem a more prosaic feel. What
shocks in these poems isn’t quite their subject matter:
instead, it is Baratynskii’s ability to pack dense ideas
into poetic form, a constant balancing act that he
often pulls off flawlessly.
Baratynskii spent the second half of his life
learning German (he died at 44) so that he could
keep up in an Idealism reading group — perhaps it
was also an attempt to distinguish himself from the
Russian persona that fills his poems. In letters to his
mother (nearly all in French), he signs his name with
various spellings, leading one to wonder if he believes
in the power of translation, or, like in his relationship
with Pushkin, in a conception of languages as parallel
lines. His letters show that he never intended to
translate the ideas of his beloved philosophers into
Russian, a project that would have dovetailed with the
quickly developing Russian literary language; in fact,
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arely do we see Baratynskii include words that were
common to German idealism in his poetry. When
writing to Vasilii Zhukovskii, a premiere translator of
German and English elegies into Russian, he cared
little to ask about Zhukovskii’s craft: Instead, he
exhumed the lingering humiliation after his untimely
theft, and confessed to his significantly older idol that
he had considered suicide “a hundred times.”
Given his imagination and daring inclusion of so
many concepts foreign to poetry into its form, it is not
surprising that Baratynskii later became interested in
the novel’s powerful ability to mix different registers
on one page. At one point, he even tried to write
one, but failed to finish. Baratynskii was curiously
fascinated with early science fiction in Russia, best
represented by the works of Vladimir Odoevskii,
who soon became a close friend. It can be difficult to
imagine a 19th century lyrical poet-turned-science
fiction reader, yet because of the translations’ largely
prosaic feel, a standout poem in this volume is “The
Last Death,” a narrative work that offers prophetic
images of flying machines and, unexpectedly, air
conditioning.
Given his penchant for the fantastic, I am tempted
to follow one of Baratynskii’s remarks in a letter, that
there is “no epoch better or worse than another,” to
make a preposterous series of comparisons. Here it
is: We can understand Baratynskii’s shades better
by noting that they’re wholly different from those of
Stanislaw Lem’s 1961 sci-fi classic, Solaris. By now,
Lem’s plot is widely known thanks to Tarkovksy’s
cinematic adaptation, which Lem himself despised: A
sentient ocean on the planet Solaris infects those who
study it with a malignant curse: The memories they
bury most deeply are projected in front of them. The
result is a remote outpost filled with the living dead.
Living in dreams, then, becomes a nightmare.
To his hero, Chris Kelvin, Lem gifts Rheya, a
stalking love interest from the past. Her skin bears
the scars of a suicidal overdose, jarring stigmata that
erase any of Chris’s idealistic hopes for reconciliation.
Death is never quite death, and other lives are
inconveniently mummified in storage media:
“Shifting my position, I felt the flat shape of the
tape recorder against my hip: Gibarian, his voice
immortalized on the spools of tape. I had forgotten to
resurrect him, to listen to him — the only thing I could
do for him any more.”
Lem’s narration of a tape recorder that imprisons
the deceased scientist astounds in its transformation
of the lifeless into a person, albeit a broken person.
The horrible specters of memory that haunt Solaris
are not those that fill Baratynskii’s elegies, but they
are instead the agony of the repetition complex:
the imperfect object that nevertheless provokes
a memory. Baratynskii’s “Left to Ruin” offered a
similar image with a different conclusion: unleashing
the past clarifies it, and embracing it diminishes its
menace.
The story of Solaris haunted my own dreams
after I recently attended a full retrospective series
of Tarkovsky’s films. Leading up to the screenings,
I’d spent weeks struggling to get sleep after a
personal crisis. More recently, I’ve become addicted
to an eight-hour-long recording, British composer
Max Richter’s lullaby for adults, Sleep. The set-up is
quite simple: play this music while you sleep. It is not
particularly interesting music, but that isn’t really the
point. In their endless lull, Sleep’s piano chords slowly
descend by whole steps, and they are intermittently
interrupted by a single note several octaves higher. It
seems as close to Baratynskii’s ideal form of rest as
one can get — monotonous, predictable, and stable.
I’ve yet to make it through the night to Richter’s
music.
Lem aimed to demonstrate the insurmountable
gap between other worlds and our flawed minds
— for Baratynskii’s poetic persona, this gap existed
already, and it was between people. In the letters, we
see someone disgusted by solipsism, yet his critique
of Rousseau could expose more about discontent with
himself:
“His characters have no physiognomy and although
he says in his Confessions that they appeared vividly
to his imagination, I don’t believe it. Rousseau knew
105

understood — only himself; he observed only himself,
and all his characters are Jean-Jacques, whether
they’re in trousers or skirts.”
In his introduction, Grau writes that the Decembrist
revolt was a turning point in Baratynskii’s career,
when the Tsar’s reaction of strengthening censorship
cast progressive change well beyond reach. It isn’t
directly suggested, but this could be one explanation
for the distrust that fills his thought. Yet it’s somewhat
unlikely in the case of Baratynskii, especially in
comparison to how fundamentally it changed life for
Pushkin, who missed the rebellion that imprisoned
several men for life (many of them his friends) in
one of Russian literature’s greatest ironies — he was
already exiled. On the contrary, Baratynskii was a man
already used to seeing his life change in an instant,
when all of the expectations riding on him were
ruined thanks to a moment of juvenile judgment.
Things ended quite badly for Baratynskii. Despite
the radical disconnect put forward in his poetry, a
most terrible irony is that his unrealized dreams of
poetic fame and his inability to overcome the shame
of a childhood prank clearly took their toll. Desperate
for more routes of escape from the noise of life, it
was rumored that he was increasingly alienated and
numbed by drink in his final years.
Grau’s attention to detail demonstrates an
astounding dedication to this project, and one gets
the sense that it is truly a labor of love for him.
Baratynskii hasn’t received this much attention in
English in years, especially not in such a sizable
volume. But as an inevitable result of their complexity,
the poems do not always shine through in this
translation. The publisher’s choice to include the
original Russian often reminded me of the major
differences between each variant, or worse, made the
English translations seem to lack confidence in their
presentation.
I did find refuge in a poem of Baratynskii’s I
had never read, masterfully rendered into equally
mysterious English, a truly wonderful translation:
Now and then a wondrous city
from floating clouds will coalesce,
but the wind need only touch it
and it’s gone without a trace.
Thus the momentary inventions
of poetic fantasy
vanish at the merest breath of
meaningless activity.
These brilliant lines on impermanence achieve quite
the opposite in their translation nearly 200 years later,
yet they still demand: do not trust what you see as
real, for it will just as clearly drift away. For the singer
of Finland, to write poetry was to cope, but to sleep
without hope and without fear was much sweeter.
106

The Burning Brush
Review by Farisa Khalid
December 2015/January 2016
Munch: Van Gogh, edited by Maite van Dijk, Magne Bruteig, and Leo Jansen; With contributions by Reinhold
Heller, Jill Lloyd, and Uwe M. Schneede (Yale University Press, 2015)
During his short life, Van Gogh did not allow his flame to go out. Fire and
embers were his brushes, during the few years of his life, whilst he burned out
for his art. I have thought, and wished, that in the long term, with more money
at my disposal, like him, I could not let my flame go out, and with a burning
brush paint until the end.
- Edvard Munch, 28 October 1933
The immediate connections between the paintings
of Van Gogh and Edvard Munch are not exactly
revelations. For conventional purposes, their works
fall into separate categories of Post-Impressionism
and Symbolism, but their radical use of color, texture,
and tonality to highlight emotional and psychological
conditions were innovative. Along with Cézanne and
Manet, they pulled painting away from the confines
of documentary realism into levels of psychological
inquiry. So it’s no surprise that at some point,
some enterprising curators would put together an
exhibition comparing their work, with paintings,
drawings, and watercolors, side-by-side, for the eager
art enthusiast to make the necessary associations.
Munch: Van Gogh is precisely one of those exhibitions,
and its catalog, published by Yale University Press,
is the sort of glossy, lush, expertly laid-out book that
one comes to expect from blockbuster art shows. The
exhibition was first shown last year at the Munch
Museum in Oslo. It ended its run at the Van Gogh
Museum in Amsterdam in January 2016.
To the credit of the curators Magne Bruteig
and Maite van Dijk, one of the most accomplished
aspects of the exhibition and its accompanying book,
is the precision and finesse with which paintings and
drawings are paired in relation to their similar overarching
themes. “We think that there’s a kinship,”
notes van Dijk, the curator of the Amsterdam portion
of the exhibition. “We wanted to discuss in some
detail the parallels but also the differences, because
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of course there is a lot of difference.” A significant
part of the difference is that Munch outlived Van
Gogh by nearly half-a-century.
Some of Munch’s work also tended to be more
psycho-sexual in tone and temperament, caught
under the spell of Byron, Baudelaire, Mallarmé and
Poe, as was the fashion for Symbolists in Europe.
But one of the important parts of the show is the
necessary connections made between the two artists
and how Van Gogh continued to inspire Munch.
Van Gogh’s use of color was a key influence. Color,
separated from its utilitarian function as a signifier
of objects, became an emotional conduit to various
states of being.
It was Van Gogh’s influence, his depiction of
the dry heat of Southern France and the toughness
of its people that influenced Munch to render his
native Norway in those luridly bright colors. An 1888
painting of Van Gogh’s, The Yellow House, depicts the
building where he was renting four rooms, along the
Place Lamartine in Arles. Shades of canary yellow
and lemon capture the ochre of the original building.
The cerulean blue of the early night sky sets off the
unearthly glow of the building in the manner of a late
Gothic Italian fresco. The companion painting to The
Yellow House is Munch’s Red Virginia Creeper (1898-
1900). Munch’s cherry red house is a stately middleclass
home in suburban Oslo, possibly belonging to
the family of his lover, Tulla Larsen. From Munch’s
journal entries, we’re led to believe that Larson had a
spark of Strindberg’s Miss Julie in her. The cadmiumlike
red of the house is not a representation of reality
but a manifestation of Munch’s frustration in being
trapped in a thrilling, but suffocating, relationship.
Both paintings offer us some insight into each artist’s
anxiety with the durability of bourgeois power.
The exhibition catalog has an impressive
collection of essays from a variety of Van Gogh and
Munch scholars, with notable essays by Reinhold
Heller, Jill Lloyd, and Magne Bruteig. A particularly
good essay, “The Sower and the Butterfly: On Van
Gogh’s and Munch’s Drawings and Watercolours”
by Magne Bruteig, is an excellent analysis of how
the two artists worked through their respective
processes from drawing with chalk and pencil to
painting with oils. A keen observer of the painting
process would do well to take some time to look at
Munch’s early watercolors, heady in their mauves,
lilacs, and periwinkle blues, and eerily precise in
technique. There is a striking companion set between
the two artists, a pencil and paper drawing that
Munch did in 1882, Old Woman in Churchyard, and a
sketch Van Gogh did in 1883, Churchyard in Winter,
that are curiously similar given that the two artists
did not know of each other and had never met. Yet
European artistic movements often have the ability
to connect disparate artists together in strange ways
across time. The same energy that runs through the
work of Schubert runs through the plays of August
Strindberg and Frank Wedekind and through the
paintings of Van Gogh and Munch. Looking at Van
Gogh and Munch’s blotchy lone figures slumped in a
wintry churchyard, one can almost hear the melody
of “Gute Nächt” from Winterreise/”Winter Journey”
(1827) playing in the background, with its strains of
wistfulness and desolation.
The art historian Jill Lloyd presents us with an
astute discussion of Van Gogh and Munch’s technical
methods and painting environments. The brightness
and luminosity of Provence led to the intensification
of Van Gogh’s palette, while the more moderate and
cool weather of Oslo served as an inspiration for
Munch’s meditations on shades of light and color.
In some ways, Munch’s Starry Night (1893), Despair
(1894), Moonlight (1895), and Young Woman on the
Beach (1896), all cast in hues of blue and purple,
exude the ambivalence of coming to terms with the
promises and disappointments of a new century.
Lloyd’s discussion of how both artists avoided
varnishing their paintings in order to heighten the
luminosity of their colors is important. As a viewer
of paintings, one is more informed to learn that Van
Gogh’s use of ready-mixed oil paints and tinted
papers added to the heightened quality of his work
while Munch’s preference for diluted shades and
watercolor-like washes brought a reflective quality to
his volatile paintings.
Van Gogh’s symbolism was permeated in
nature and the environment, while Munch was
fascinated with the gothic and expressive potential of
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the human form. There is just as much nascent terror
in Van Gogh’s painting of a thick, uncontrolled dense
forest jungle, Undergrowth (1888), as there is with
Munch’s famous Scream or his Vampire series.
One aspect of the work of Van Gogh and
Munch that I had hoped that the curators and
historians might have discussed more was the
similarity in experience they must have shared in
their loosely-aligned but collective world of mid-
Victorian Lutheran repression across the Netherlands
and Scandinavia. Remember that this was the same
milieu from which Ingmar Bergman (1918-2007)
and later, the Austrian filmmaker, Michael Haneke (b.
1942) emerged. To know more about this, we have
to turn to the insightful scholarly work of Patricia
Berman, a professor of Scandinavian art at Wellesley
College, whose insights were strangely left out of this
pivotal exhibition.
In looking again at the various paintings
between the two artists, I’m struck by two selfportraits:
Van Gogh’s Self-Portrait with Grey Felt Hat
(1887-8) and Edvard Munch’s The Night Wanderer
(1923-4). Van Gogh’s self-portrait, the culmination of
his late style, and painted two years before his death,
is a heady, vertiginous glimpse into the neuroses of
the artist. One can see how Van Gogh anticipated
Cézanne and Braque. The conventions of line and
solidity are cast aside into this collective swirl of
composure and despair.
There is a memorably campy scene in an
unmemorably bad Second World War film, The
Night of the Generals (1967) with Peter O’Toole, Tom
Courtenay, and Omar Sharif. The scene is set in
Nazi-occupied Paris. One of the main characters, a
sadistic prostitute-slaying Nazi general, played with
amusing relish by O’Toole, is scouring through the
Paris museums looking for plunder. He picks the
usual pieces that the German generals were known to
like, ancien régime bric-á-brac, Watteaus, Fragonards,
what anyone would now consider to be warlord chic
(these type of works grace mansions everywhere
from Lagos to Lahore and to the poolside Persian
villas of Los Angeles). But then the general turns to a
Van Gogh self-portrait hanging on a nearby wall. He’s
stares at it for a long time, and is transfixed. He nearly
shakes with apoplectic rage. The screenwriters,
Joseph Kessel and Paul Dehn, are going for a broadstroked
Picture of Dorian Gray approach, but they make
their point. These are portraits of pain.
In Munch’s Night Wanderer, painted in 1923,
when he was about sixty, we’re amid empty lonely
rooms with curtain-less windows that let in the dark
blue of a late night, or an early morning. The sitter’s
eyes are hollow and sunken from nights of insomnia,
as he flits about the rooms, floating through an
eternal three-AM of the soul (to paraphrase Scott
Fitzgerald). As a technical exercise, the painting
allowed Munch to display what he could accomplish
in painting by rendering the various shades of natural
light and shadow. This is a haunting, disturbing
painting. It is a painting, not just of a man’s loneliness,
but of futile obsession. The actor Heath Ledger
recreated this similar look when he portrayed the
Joker in Christopher Nolan’s 2008 Batman film, The
Dark Knight. The dark hollows of the eyes, their deep,
empty voids, evoke the image of the skull.
The Munch/Van Gogh catalogue, handsomely
assembled by Yale University Press, is a treat for art
lovers, especially for those who enjoy Van Gogh’s
work, which is practically everyone. The essays
are informative in terms of detailing technical
matters and the mechanical processes of drawing
and painting. The book’s timeline, a side-by-side
comparison of milestones in both Van Gogh’s
and Munch’s lives, is also helpful for highlighting
necessary historical context. Though I would
have liked to see an essay or two with some odd
and arresting rhetorical flourish—the kind of art
historical analysis that comes from historians like
T.J. Clark, Michael Fried, or Simon Schama. Certainly,
the idiosyncratic works of Van Gogh and Munch
welcome unconventional, exciting interpretations.
This safe, astute, “by-the-book” book is an important
work for Van Gogh and Munch scholars, even though
it could do with a bit more bite.
109

CATHERINE CHALMERS
United States
War (Series), 2012
Pigment print
30” x 45”
NÚRIA FARRÉ
Spain
Catarsis, 2015
Oil on canvas
46” x 35”
The Exquisite Pain, 2015
Oil on canvas
46” x 35”
El Sueño de Abraxas, 2016
Oil on canvas
46” x 70””
SHAN GOSHORN
Eastern Band Cherokee, USA
Educational Genocide: The Legacy of the Carlisle Indian
Boarding School, 2011
Archival watercolor paper splints first printed with
archival inks, acrylic paint
12” x 20” x 12”
Collection Montclair Art Museum
Hearts of Our Women, 2015
Arches watercolor paper splints printed with
archival inks, acrylic paint, copper foil
Center basket- approx 8” x 8” x 26”
10 smaller baskets - approx 4” x 4” x 4” each
“A Nation is not conquered until the hearts of its women are on
the ground. Then it is finished, no matter how brave its warriors
or how strong its weapons”~ Cheyenne
Collection Autry Museum
DANA HAREL
Israel
Only for the Left Hand 2, 2015
Mixed media on paper
42” x 36”
Only for the Left Hand 3, 2015
Mixed media on paper
72” x 94”
When They Were Kings 9, 2015
Mixed media on paper
17” x 14”
CHARLES MATSON LUME
United States
Infiltrate (for Muriel Rukeyser), 2016
Cellophane, tinting film, plastic
Dimensions variable
110

no pardon for this (for Charles Wright), 2015
Cellophane, proofing paper, automotive window tinting
paper
Dimensions variable
GABRIELA MOLANO
Colombia
Entre el Pasado y Futuro, 2015
120mm film color print
6” x 7”
Portal, 2015
120mm film color print
6” x 7”
JULIA RANDALL
United States
Blueberry, 2012
Colored pencil on paper
26” x 40”
Blush Pink, 2012
Colored pencil on paper
26” x 40”
Pulled Orange Crush, 2013
Colored pencil on paper
22” x 30”
Wild Berry, 2012
Colored pencil on paper
26” x 33”
Wormhole III, 2013
Photomontage collage
Approx. 11” x 14”
PHYLLIS TROUT
United States
Benedict’s Bardo #19
Monotype
30” x 22”
JOHANNA WINTERS
United States
Serotonin Vision Quest, 2015
Intaglio with mixed media
24” x 22”
The Accomplice, 2015
Intaglio
15” x 13”
The Decoy, 2015
Intaglio
15” x 13”
The Sidekick, 2015
Intaglio
15” x 13”
The Skeptic, 2015
Intaglio
15” x 13”
ANDRE RUBIN
United States
Leviathan Rising, 2015
Photomontage collage
Approx. 11” x 14”
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KIMBERLY BLAESER (Anishinaabe) is a
widely published creative writer, photographer, and
scholar. She is a professor of Native American
Literatures and Creative Writing at the University
of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Blaeser has authored three
collections of poetry, most recently, Apprenticed to
Justice, and is the Wisconsin Poet Laureate for 2015-
16. Among her edited volumes is Traces in Blood, Bone,
and Stone: Contemporary Ojibwe Poetry. She is currently
at work on a collection entitled Ancient Light, which
showcases her “picto-poems” and ekphrastic poetry.
TERESA BRAUN is a Canadian visual artist
currently based in Montclair, New Jersey. Her work
has been shown in New York City at Brian Morris
Gallery, Westbeth, Central Booking Art Space, and
Brooklyn Fireproof East, and internationally at The
Plug-In Institute of Contemporary Art (Winnipeg)
and La Petite Mort Gallery (Ottawa). She received her
MFA from Montclair State University in 2015. She
is a founding member of Asylos immersive theater
company and has been an artist in residence at the
Vermont Studio Center.
In 2010 Chalmers received a Guggenheim
Fellowship and in 2015 she was awarded a
Rauschenberg Residency. She lives in New York City.
catherinechalmers.com
MONIKA CASSEL won the 2015 Venture
Poetry Award for her chapbook, Grammar of Passage,
which is forthcoming from flipped eye publishing. Her
poetry has appeared in The Laurel Review and Phoebe
Journal; her translations from German have appeared
or are forthcoming in Poetry Magazine, Michigan
Quarterly Review, Guernica, and Asymptote. She is
Acting Chair of Creative Writing and Literature at New
Mexico School for the Arts in Santa Fe.
LISA COHEN is the author of All We Know: Three
Lives (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), a finalist for the
National Book Critics Circle Award. Her work has also
appeared in the New York Times, BOMB, The Paris Review,
Vogue, Bookforum, and many other publications. She is
the Bennet Associate Professor of English at Wesleyan
University.
JOE BUETER lives and writes in central
Pennsylvania. His poetry has been published in
Confrontation, Southern Humanities Review, Nashville
Review, and Cave Wall, among other journals.
CATHERINE CHALMERS holds a BS in
Engineering from Stanford University and an MFA
in Painting from the Royal College of Art in London.
She has exhibited her artwork around the world, and
two books have been published on her work: FOOD
CHAIN (Aperture 2000) and AMERICAN COCKROACH
(Aperture 2004). Her video “Safari” won Best
Experimental Short at SXSW Film Festival in 2008.
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TUSIA DABROWSKA is a time-based artist,
writer, and translator. Recent projects have been
seen at the Currents Festival (New Mexico, 2012),
Video Guerrilha (Sao Paulo, Brazil, 2012), Museo
Reproducciones (Bilbao, Spain, 2013), Slingshot
(Athens, GA, 2014), CologneOff (Cologne, Germany/
Tel Aviv, Israel, 2014), Loop Discovery (Barcelona,
Spain 2015), TAFNY (NY, NY, 2015), The Great
Wall of Oakland (Oakland, CA, 2016). Her writing/
translation appeared in Nth Position (poetry), The
Forward (translation), and Aish (personal essay). Tusia
is a recipient of the Puffin Foundation Grant (2014),
and an Asylum Arts alumni (2015). She holds degrees
from the New School and NYU. Tusia shares her time
between Warsaw and Brooklyn.

NÚRIA FARRÉ, born in Barcelona in 1992,
started studying art at the Escola Massana at the age
of 15. Seven years later, she graduated from the Fine
Arts program at the Universitat de Barcelona with
an MA in Arts Education and a specialty in painting.
She began exhibiting work in Barcelona in 2012, and
since has shown paintings around Europe, including in
Cologne, Germany and Paris, France. Farré is currently
working as an art teacher in addition to her usual
painting. nuriafarreabejon.com
JANE HALADAY makes her homeplace in
California, the natural lands and urban spaces of which
inform much of her poetry and life writing. Jane holds
a PhD in Native American Studies with an emphasis
in Feminist Theory and Research from the University
of California –Davis, and an MA from the University
of Arizona’s American Indian Studies Program. She
is currently an Associate Professor of American
Indian Studies at the University of North Carolina at
Pembroke.
CHRISTOPHER GONZALEZ is a writer
and graduate of Vassar College, where he won the
2015 Ann E. Imbrie Prize for Excellence in Fiction
Writing. Born in Virginia, raised in Ohio, he currently
lives in Brooklyn and works in book publishing. His
writing has previously appeared in Mash Stories, The
Vignette Review, and Sensa Nostra. He can be followed
@livesinpages. chris-gonzalez.com
SHAN GOSHORN is an Eastern Band
Cherokee multimedia artist and a long-time human
rights activist who chooses the best artistic medium
to express a statement; recently, she taught herself
to weave baskets in the traditional style of her
people, with a unique twist. Weaving splints created
from paper reproductions of treaties, speeches,
photographs, and more, she shows the relevance of
the historical to contemporary native people. This new
genre has created the perfect springboard for the
dialogue she has strived to have with audiences for
over two decades. shangoshorn.net
CAROLYN GUINZIO is a poet and photographer.
Originally from Chicago, she lives in Fayetteville,
Arkansas. Her most recent collection is SPINE (Parlor
Press, 2016). carolynguinzio.tumblr.com
DANA HAREL was born and raised in Tel
Aviv, Israel and currently works in San Francisco,
California. Harel’s drawings explore the mystery of
the human psyche and the drama of physical and
emotional struggles; she’s interested in the moments
where brutality meets fragility, and aggression meets
tenderness. Her drawings are a result of combining
sculpture, photography, and printmaking techniques.
Harel has had numerous solo and group exhibitions in
museums and galleries nationally and internationally.
Her work has been reviewed in the New York Times,
ArtNews, CBS, and Art Practical, just to name a few.
Harel received a BArch degree from the California
College of the Arts. danaharel.net
ALEX HOVET works across screen-based
platforms to question the stability of digital and
physical memory. A graduate of Bennington College,
she is currently an MFA in Photography, Video and
Related Media candidate at School of Visual Arts in
New York City.
SHUANGSHUANG HUO
is a multimedia creator and filmmaker who holds
an MFA from the Design & Technology program at
Parsons School of Design. She studied Film & TV
and minored in Psychology in China where, after
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graduation, she took part in film and TV production
as assistant director, script supervisor, video editor,
videographer, and photographer. She describes herself
as “obsessed with creating engaging experiences
for users and audiences” by “seeking new ways of
expression [and] breaking her own limits.”
LUMA JASIM is an interdisciplinary artist from
Baghdad, Iraq. She received her second Bachelor of
Fine Arts with an emphasis on painting and drawing
from Boise State University in 2013, after receiving
a master’s degree in graphic design from Baghdad
University in 2000. Her art deals with war, violence,
and her experience with immigration. Luma emigrated
from her home country to live in Istanbul, Turkey in
2006. She worked for ten years with graphic design
and animation while in Baghdad and Istanbul, and has
since moved to the United States. Here, she received a
second BFA as well as a full scholarship from Parsons’
New School of Design for a second master’s degree in
Fine Art. She has also completed three solo exhibitions,
nineteen group exhibitions, and one commission.
Recently she has been invited by ATOA (Artists Talk
on Art) to be part of a panel of four artists to talk about
“The Artist’s Role in Society.” Jasim currently lives in
New York City.
MATTHEW KENDALL is a PhD candidate at
UC Berkeley. He writes about Soviet literature, film, and
television.
MERT KESKIN “Working under the pseudonym
Haydiroket, Mert Keskin is one of Tumblr’s resident
GIF editors. Since being exposed to the Atari game
system at the age of 5, Keskin has been drawn to the
digital world much like empty stomachs are drawn
to the delicious lure of pizza, and was part of some
Demoscene groups in the 90s before having his talents
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tapped by the likes of MTV, Converse, and Tumblr.” –
The Creators Project
FARISA KHALID is an art historian with
a background in global health. She specializes in
American and South Asian art, and has written various
essays on film, poetry, literature, public health, and
development. Her work has appeared in PopMatters,
Asymptote, and World Policy Journal.
PETER LABERGE is the author of the chapbook
Hook (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2015), recently included on
the American Library Association’s Over the Rainbow
List. His recent work has appeared in Beloit Poetry
Journal, Best New Poets 2014, Colorado Review, Copper
Nickel, Indiana Review, Iowa Review, Pleiades, and Sixth
Finch, among others. He is the recipient of a fellowship
from the Bucknell University Stadler Center for Poetry,
and the founder and editor-in-chief of The Adroit Journal.
He lives in Philadelphia, where he is an undergraduate
student at the University of Pennsylvania.
BRIDGET LESLIE is a NYC-based artist,
currently in the Parsons MFA program. She graduated
in December 2014 from Sydney University’s College
of the Arts, and is a dual native to both Australia
and the United States. Her practice deals with bodily
estrangement—the hyperawareness that occurs in the
post-ill, through various methods of installation.
PENELOPE LUKSIC writes poetry and
performance texts, with special interest in adaptation
and collaborative playwriting. She edits fiction at
The Offing and sells children’s books in Brooklyn. An
alumna of Vassar College, she received the Beatrice
Daw Brown Prize for Poetry and a degree in English.

CHARLES MATSON LUME is a visual artist
whose art engages in the pas de deux of light and
materials, and his installations have been exhibited at
institutions such as the Irish Museum of Modern Art,
(Dublin, Ireland), Babel Kunst (Trondheim, Norway),
Hunter College (NYC), and the Weisman Art Museum
(Minneapolis, MN). He has received fellowships from
the Bush Foundation, Jerome Foundation, and the
Minnesota State Arts Board. Charles has participated
in artist residencies such as the Kemijärvi Artist
Residency, Kemijärvi, Finland; Nes Artist Residency,
Skagästrond, Iceland; Lademoen Kunstnerverksteder,
Trondheim, Norway; the Irish Museum of Modern
Art, Dublin, Ireland; and the Millay Colony for the
Arts, Austerlitz, New York. Charles lives in Saint Paul,
Minnesota, and his art can be found online at the White
Columns Artist Registry (NYC): registry.whitecolumns.org
MATT is a third-year at Vassar College hailing
from Detroit, Mich., studying Anthropology, Africana
Studies, and Educational Studies. They are interested
in exploring the Black experience on small liberal
arts college campuses across the U.S., as well as the
African Diaspora in the Caribbean, East Asia, and the
Indian Ocean. Outside of studies, in their spare time,
Matt enjoys curating R&B and house music, writing,
dancing, traveling, making graphic art, editing film,
and thinking of new hairstyles and outfits to try out.
(Vassar Student Review Contest Winner)
SUSIE MARTINEZ is a writer from the South
Bronx, New York City. She graduated from Vassar College,
where she studied Urban Studies and Latina/o Studies. Her
favorite place to write is on the 4 train at 2 AM. She tweets
about her thoughts on trauma, healing, diaspora, placemaking,
Latinidad and pro-wrestling here: @bajolamarea.
GABRIELA MOLANO began photographing
her native city in Colombia. The strong social
disparities she witnessed growing up pushed her to
pick up a camera to attempt to understand what was
happening around her. Currently based out of New
York, the young photographer uses her medium to
understand more about the person she is, capturing
small parts of the external world to create her own.
gabrielamolano.com
PIOTR PAZIŃSKI, born in 1973, is the author of
three books: a monograph on James Joyce’s Ulysses; a
subjective guide tracing the footsteps of Joyce’s Dublin;
and the novel Pensjonat (The Boarding House), published
in 2009 by the small Nisza Publishing House. For this
novel, he received the Paszport Polityki, the cultural
award of the Polish publication Polityka. Paziński lives
in Warsaw, where he works as the chief editor of the
Jewish magazine Midrash, and is working on a book of
short stories.
ALLISON PEARL is from Los Angeles,
California, and is a member of the Vassar College Class
of 2016. She studied English while at Vassar and wrote
her senior thesis on the life and poetry of Elizabeth
Bishop.
JESSE PETERS is a professor of English and
American Indian Studies at the University of North
Carolina-Pembroke. He has published in Zone 3, The
Denver Quarterly, Pembroke Magazine, and Owl Eye
Review. Currently, he is working to combine creative
writing and scholarly discourse as he examines issues
of motion and identity. In his spare time, he likes to flyfish
and ride motorcycles.
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DEAN RADER won the 2010 T. S. Eliot Poetry
Prize for Works & Days, and his Landscape Portrait
Figure Form (Omnidawn 2013) was a Barnes & Noble
Best Poetry Book. His poems have appeared in Best
American Poetry, Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, Southern
Review, Zyzzyva, Boston Review, TriQuarterly, and dozens
of others. He won the 2015 Bogin Award from the
Poetry Society of America, and a new collection,
Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry, is forthcoming in 2016
from Copper Canyon.
JULIA RANDALL crafts images that subtly
challenge assumptions about corporeality, desire, and
the natural world. Her hyperrealistic renderings are
at once erotic and humorous, beautiful and repulsive.
The series that includes Wild Berry touches upon the
pleasures and discomforts of being human. Randall
attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and
Sculpture in 1999 and received her MFA from Rutgers
University and her BFA from Washington University
in St. Louis. She lives and works in NYC and in
Connecticut. julia-randall.com
LIONA ROBYN is an artist who uses painting,
photography, and video to explore her conceptual
concerns and who has a writing practice that works
alongside her visual practice. She is interested in
investigating the conception of Western modernism
through a postcolonial lens and deals with
philosophical questions around ontology.
ANDRE RUBIN was born and currently lives in
Philadelphia. He brings his background in philosophy
and law to bear on these unique photomontage
collages he has been making since 2010. Among other
things, his work concerns classical art and architecture
in a postmodern context, and deals specifically with
themes ranging from philosophy of history and time to
the critique of ideology. andrerubin.com & amoseno.org
NAZOMI SAITO is a master’s student of English
literature with a focus on transnational modernisms
and the global Anglophone. She is primarily interested
in how subjectivities and literary form develop
through intercultural relations, as well as how these
developments occur through and against the rise of
the American empire in the twentieth century. She
studies literature to understand the experience of
others, and writes creatively to understand her own.
CORAL PEREDA is a Spanish photographer
and filmmaker. She currently is an MFA candidate
at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She
has a Bachelor’s degree in Communications from
IE University, Spain and a Master’s degree in
Photography and Design from Elisava School of
Design and Engineering, Barcelona, Spain. Pereda has
exhibited work at Galería Mitte, Centro Comercial Las
Arenas, Fundació Vila Casas in Barcelona and at the
Nightingale Cinema and at Defibrillator Performance
Art Gallery in Chicago, Illinois.
MATTHEW SHENODA is the author of the
poetry collections Somewhere Else (winner of the
American Book Award), Seasons of Lotus, Seasons of
Bone and Tahrir Suite (winner of the Arab American
Book Award) and, along with Kwame Dawes, is editor
of the forthcoming Bearden’s Odyssey: Poets Respond to
the Art of Romare Bearden. He is currently Associate
Professor in the Department of Creative Writing at
Columbia College Chicago. matthewshenoda.com
116

PHYLLIS TROUT earned her BFA from Kansas
City Arts Institute, Missouri and exhibits nationally and
internationally. She was a MacDowell Colony fellow in
2001, and teaches at Friends Seminary. phyllistrout.com
TOISHA TUCKER is a conceptual artist and
creative writer. She received her BA in Philosophy and
History with a concentration in English literature from
Cornell University in 2002 and her Post Baccalaureate
in Visual Arts with distinction from UC Berkeley
Extension in 2009. Toisha completed additional
coursework at SAIC in 2010 and in 2013 received her
MFA from the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate
School of Design. She has exhibited in San Francisco,
Philadelphia, Los Angeles, New York, Omaha, and
Verona. She has published works in Cleaver and The
Colors Project. Toisha is Alumni AIR of the Bemis Center
for Contemporary Arts and an Affiliated Fellow of the
American Academy in Rome. She currently resides
in the Northeastern United States with her wife and
several lovely plants. toishatucker.com.
JOHANNA WINTERS playfully considers
ideas about shame, vanity, redemption, disappointment
and ritual in her current work. Through a cast of
impish characters, she crafts inventive stories that
invoke a sense of discomfort and delight. Johanna
Winters received a BA in Studio Art from the
University of Wisconsin-Green Bay in 2007, and
is currently a candidate in the MFA program at the
University of Tennessee-Knoxville. Jojowinters.com
ZEEYOONEEN is a Los Angeles-based artist,
intersectional feminist, and the co-founder of voidLab,
a feminist collective for women, non-binary, gender
nonconforming, trans and queer people to express
individual identities through arts and technologies.
Follow them on Twitter @zeenyooneen.
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