& Vol. 3

Selections from our 2019-2020 Magazine

Elegy to Winter Term

In light of rapidly changing circumstances, we have made the decision to suspend classes immediately. It is no longer viable to finish this term on campus.  – President Will Dudley, Washington and Lee University, March 13, 2020

I read the email out loud

because the weight of his words

flooded through my mouth

grounds me.

I call my mom, 

but hang up 

before it rings. 

I know she’ll try to calm me. 

Tell me everything will be ok.

I don’t want comfort.

I want the raw

fragmented edges

of my grief

to be seen.

All students must depart 

no later than 6:00 p.m. on Wednesday.

We strongly encourage students

 to return home as soon as possible.

His words snuff out

the naive wicks

of my last term.

Wisps of smoke 

quickly fade

as I try to grasp 

the wild chives

of your freshly trimmed

lawn, white pillars soaked

in sunlight, etched

into my twenties

but all my eyes can do is smolder.  

We will hold a virtual Commencement. 

You will receive your diplomas by mail.

I was supposed to smell 

your jasmines blossom in April. 

An aroma so fragrant

it travels to abandoned memories

of hide and seek with distant

cousins in Tunisia, 

where my little sisters now roller skate 

on sanded roads, until

the sun sets 

on a nationwide curfew. 

They were supposed to clap

and cheer for me

as I walked across your

tasseled stage.

Now, I don’t know

when I’ll hold them next.

Uncertainty hurts me. 

I spent your last five days 

cherishing displaced friends.

We emptied kitchens

filled with frozen dinner

and Maruchan ramen

that met premature shelf lives.

We packed boxes

of untouched swimsuits

and neatly folded summer dresses.

We defied six-feet-apart warnings 

as our lips hugged

and our bodies swayed together

under a waning moonlight.

— Mourad Berrached ‘20

Abuelita’s Final Meal

Fireflies dance on wicks and wax illuminate

The gaze of a pale, crusted moon,

Cratered by pockets of blended red, and plucked green. 

The cheese stretches and snaps between my teeth.

A tomato’s tangy blood boils my tongue,

Only faintly, because I hear

Aunt Ely say Grandma loved it here.

The cheese rappels down my throat 

When my dad reminds us that

She didn’t make it obvious.

I stare at my plate and hear her say 

“Why my pizza have the leaves?” with a frown

While my dad’s soup whispers

“Mi sopa esta fría.”

A gentle, silver-tinged note 

Drifts through the gripes,

Its body the mirrored points of a fork

No longer destined for her purse.

Her love sings a hug of crushed roses and bendiciones.

“Te quiero, mijo. I love my family.”

Our forlorn eyes search for the seat

Her olive body once warmed, 

Interrupted

When my cousin asks the waiter for Splenda, 

in her honor.

The table glows with bubbles of laughter.

Glancing down I’m surprised to find 

Polished ceramic winks up at me

Clean, even without crusts grabbed by gnarled fingers;

I know Abuelita smiles down.

—Julian Ramirez ‘21

I Believe in Dirt

I believe

in eating my bananas.

I believe 

in intentional stretching

knee over chest

ankle to butt cheek

one-one-thousand, two-one-thousand.

I believe 

in obsessively counted throw progressions,

from wrist-flips 

to long-range-heat-seeking missiles.

I believe 

in four ibuprofens before the first pitch:

one for the over-stretched bicep

one for the inflamed elbow

one for the over-rotated shoulder

and one just for the hell of it.

I believe 

in slapping the top of the door frame

on my way out of the clubhouse,

partly for good luck

but mostly just because I can.

I believe 

in stutter steps 

an exaggerated hop

and an on-the-run landing 

over freshly poured confectionary boundaries

because that can decide a game before it even gets started.

I believe 

in throwing the first warm-up fly ball twenty feet over the backstop – 

the implantation of fear

to be exploited later.

I believe 

butt slaps are platonic between brothers.

But still

You been squatting lately?

Nice buns.

I believe

I hear the national anthem better

with a hat across my chest.

I believe

that the-bat-barrel-in-grip

knob-on-the-outside-of-the-plate

scraped-to-the-inside-edge

handle-somersaulted-into-calloused-ungloved-hands

can be the difference between an out and a hit.

I believe your first step should always be back.

Then react.

I believe in an extra step off first

Stealing signs on second

And winks at the pitcher on third.

I believe in two in the pinky,

8-4 double plays,

hats pulled down so far on your head

The brim becomes just an extension of your eyebrows.

I believe in dirt.

Its credibility.

The way it works its way 

into and onto my pants like a pinned-on badge

for a stolen base or stolen out.

I believe in four game days 

that make my elbow feel like it could shake right off 

my bicep 

and plop into the same green waves

that I surf as a prize for snagging a would-be hit

inches from its surface.

Grass stains make you look hotter,

walking back to the parking lot

laughing and recapping the game 

to your girlfriend.

I believe in the middle finger, 

breaking up no hitters with bunts,

the disrespect of walking leads

and stealing home to win games

even when the scouts peer under their caps

and over their cold black radars

at anybody but me.

Especially then.

I believe the leadership of a third base coach

should forever remain calm and collected,

the way the sun naturally attracts the earth

without effort.

I believe in slightly submissive friendship 

with a first base coach,

like a dad

who can’t say no.

I believe in cutting it up with the catcher,

making the officials laugh.

Tell him not to aim for my teeth this time – 

I’m too pretty for that.

I don’t believe in pitch counts

or the automatic take on 3-0

or leaving your fate in the umpire’s hands.

You’re not up there to take walks – 

You’re up there to create a situation.

Force them to make a play

or a mistake

(depending on where the baseball gods decided

to place the pebbles)

Just 

swing

the

bat!

—DJ Johnston

The Secrets of the Jungle

With battered shell and wisdom 

swimming in the iris of his eyes,

My father warned me.

He exhaled – 

Look at the jungle and tremble.

He inhaled its green skunky sweetness,

a fly to its fiery center.

The gummy warmth wrapped its arms around him

Like a great grandmother 

who died long before his birth – 

it knew his name.

The whistle of the wind 

that forever hissed 

through the cavity in his chest – 

paused.

I should have let his scars guide me

around or over or under. Instead,

the thick swirl

of the leaves and the branches and the smoke 

hypnotized me

and I stepped through the dewy veil.

The jungle was a siren 

with hips like the New River.

It was a crystal glistening waterfall

fading in the Serengeti.

It was a worm wriggling just on the edge of a hook,

and I was a spring-time bass

on a wet morning.

I sniffed 

milky-white clouds 

of sticky, heaving air.

It smelled like the bitter sweat of love 

that lingers the morning after.

I gripped 

thick, fuzzy, 

crystal-gooey stems.

They felt like the sting of camaraderie

branded in my shoulder hours after a brotherly thump.

I opened my ears 

to childlike chirp-songs, 

nostalgic buzzing.

They sounded like my mother,

Whenever one door closes, I hope one more opens.

I stared unblinkingly 

at writhing, breathing 

slime-scaled undergrowth.

It looked like the confidence of a new vein 

popped from my forearm after hours of clenching and pushing and curling.

I swilled intoxicating nectar 

from misted, pint-sized wildflowers 

with rusty-clear petals.

It tasted like homecoming,

broth from my grandmother’s pot roast; beef, carrots, and onions.

In truth,

The jungle was none of those things.

Instead its viney tendrils

tickly to the touch

tried

to slither about my neck,

squeeze the life from my throat – 

choke out the truth teller,

early riser,

over-achiever.

Its chemical canopy

tried

to bury the sun

with a thousand gorgeous gravediggers,

suck the air from my lungs – 

smother the academic,

self-respectful spirit,

good-looking kid.

Its vagrant strays

tried

to plunge their slobbery splintered canines into my jugular;

they cackled at all my jokes,

ravaged my flesh and bone and identity – 

consumed the loving son,

dependable brother,

child of god.

For an eternal moment

the jungle splintered my body, 

shook out my shiny new liver, lungs, and brain cells 

for fertilizer amongst its roots.

The jungle seized my spirit and drank from it,

watered its sea of fleshless beasts with my blood,

laughed as it fed its soil, trunks, and leaves.

Miraculously,

my father learned to be a lumberjack.

But my jungle was not his 

to slaughter.

He instead waited

for me to ask for his axe.

When I finally pulled my see-through-skinned face

from the worms and dung,

just for an instant – 

stretched one arm 

toward his ankles – 

he placed the weighty instrument

of destruction

in my bony 

skinless hands;

he showed me how to swing

one WHACK

one THUNK

one CRACK

one day 

at a time.

— DJ Johnston

A Series of Loosely Related Haiku

Women are supposed

to live to be seventy

two. That’s ten dog years.

The U.S. census

says sons should be fifty-five

when their mothers die.

Fifty-five minus

seventeen is thirty-

eight gray New Year’s Eves.

That’s nine-hundred-and

ninety-one every other

weekends without us.

Six months to four years 

of grief is healthy. I’m an

overachiever.

Time’s nothing to God.

There was evening and there was

morning. The first day.

Time’s an illusion,

make believe, shadows fading, 

mortal suffering.

Six eternities

passed since this poem began.

I must not go on.

— DJ Johnston

Words are a Disinfectant

A soapy soul scrub.

A cleansing of the consciousness.

My pen,

the sponge

squeegeeing my chest plate.

My words,

the gritty crumbs

that fall amongst the windows and walls 

of our sink.

My voice, 

the slippery stream 

washing sin from my stained plastic soul,

circling the cold classroom metal

tighter and tighter

until they pour down the open ears 

of my strange poets.

I am now smooth to the touch,

spick and span,

until

another poetic prompt

shines a bath of unfiltered sunlight 

through my window,

across the suspended slow-dance 

of floating dust,

a spotlight for untouched splotches

of burnt-on trauma,

dried-up regret,

soaked-in self-hatred.

I place the sopping wet sponge,

dripping with ink and previous professions

between my thumb, fore, and ring

and I begin again.

and again.

— DJ Johnston

Artificial Goodbyes

Artificial flavors are simply chemical mixtures 

that mimic a natural flavor in some way.

In a filmy plastic bag, tiny

flaming-hot red hearts 

suffocate in the air 

meant to protect it. 

The fragile body collapses

at the pop of a seal,

the slam of the car door. 

The truck is packed &

neither of us possess any words to say. 

We take turns

painting our nails 

paprika red 

with powdered cheese.

Our hands dip 

into a bag of spicy Cheetos.

Afternoon swelter coats 

us with sweat. We have forgotten 

to check the milkweeds 

for spicebush 

swallowtails one last time. 

We aren’t that sad,

the same way these

cheetos aren’t that spicy. 

Instead, we pride ourselves 

with how many fistfuls we can eat 

before reaching 

for the ready-made glass of milk. 

How many goodbyes can we fit in before 

tears make their way to quench open wounds? 

My tongue humming, scorched. 

I rock into the deafening 

heat, grant it permission to burn 

whatever it touches. 

Red 40 dye and sodium diacetate 

metabolize into

dopamine and oxytocin. 

You lick your digits long clean 

of indulgence, of aftermath. 

A reminder that sucking on 

your thumb once gave you comfort.

& even though you’ve outgrown this, 

you can still have the secret,

taste of vinegar,

the satisfaction of 

ruby thumbprints 

becoming rosy & 

pure again for supper. 

Tire crunches on gravel 

as the promise

of a taste more real 

& substantial 

drives us apart.

— Isabel Ryan ‘21

Uncertainty Principle

by Isabel Ryan ‘21

I am pedaling in place. The bike is going almost absolutely nowhere. I stand up to put more pressure on each pedal as I pound, like kneading dough over and over. I take the opportunity to wipe my running nose, head heated by an internal iron stove. I pick my body up and let gravity do the rest. The tire gives and sinks into the asphalt as it inches up the incline, making me think I was scammed with the bike I got second-hand. It’s aluminum alloy dipped in a vat of radioactive yellow. The seat is too far up for comfort, but I didn’t think to adjust it, and once we were all on the road, I was too embarrassed to stop and fix it---better to give two thumbs up when Ike called out. The rest of the group is somewhere over the hill. It’s me and another girl who is two lengths ahead---also inching---and two others are somewhere behind us. We’ve gotten over two of the three hills Ike warned us about. Something about changing my gears, he said. I wetten my lips, gathering the remaining spit in my mouth and call to her.

-Wanna walk it? I’ll walk with you.

-I think I’m going to keep on going, she shouts, without looking back. 

Her pace seems to quicken just as my heels skuttle on the ground. I come to a halt. A missed opportunity for friendship over our shared exhaustion. My brain and heart are pulsing as one big muscle. My lungs quiver as I seize a breath, swing my legs out from the bike. It feels alien to my legs touch ground again. Six miles on the road while trying to stay upright on this silvery contraption really makes you rethink the mechanics of the human body. The layers of muscle. 

Now that I am no longer listening to the sounds of labored breathing and the occasional curse prefaced by prayer underneath my breath, the chirping of insects becomes just as distinct as cold breeze dabs the sweat off my forehead. The tire gears keep on its clock-like clicking, and I try to match it with my walking pace. In a cream house with deep purple shutters that faces where the sun would rise, a light goes off in the window. 

The clouds are awfully kind, letting what light cast off of the trees, fences, and few cars a gray blue. The girl is no longer in my field of sight, and the horrid feeling of being left behind slowly quickens into this eerie, wonderful solitude. Loneliness and solitude I’ve found to be different. The former is when hands ache feel the warmth of another pair and the latter are hands content, folded in one another. On a few occasions have I mistaken loneliness for solitude. I’ll be in my room, championing my ratio of lemon to honey that swirls inside my mug, and then look out my window to see a few friends getting dinner without having invited me. And I wish I hadn’t. They must’ve thought I was swamped with work. I would’ve probably said “no”. It’s moments like that where I forget about my tea and have to warm it up again, then a third, fourth time.

But I knew this was solitude mainly because I was outdoors. I feel safer in a forest than I do my room.This kind of solitude is sacred. Nothing makes you quite as aware of your existence as singular than navigating a place in which you must learn to sync your breath with what surrounds you: a fallen walnut, the dimming sun. How different it was to be displaced somewhere south of our small city---a city small enough where you aren’t afraid to venture a bit further, though big enough to see something new. This newness took the form of a rooted wishbone. Not far from the road was a one-story home, and guarding it, a Japanese Maple, still lime and grasshopper green, whose two thicker branches run away from each other like the same ends of a magnet. I almost make a wish, but something in the way the leaves uniformly point to the remaining road---fluttering to the all-knowing wind---snaps me back on the seat, and I am back to kneading road. 

I get to a bend where I hope to see the ambitious girl waiting for me to take up my offer on friendship and the walk. We’ll talk first about classes and professors and the weather and how sore we’ll be. She’ll ask me to get coffee one day, and in two weeks I’ll read her one of my poems I whipped out after eating the best chocolate croissant of my life. The chocolate croissant will somehow be a metaphor for how patient my mother’s always been with my father, and how I’ve watched love flake, like fallen snow, onto a ceramic plate and then be dusted off into the garbage disposal. The girl’s not there, and I’m having a hard time imagining when this 10 mile ride is over and I get to go home.  

Before I have time to think about walking again, the incline gives a bit, ushering my body forward. I’m suddenly not needing to put strain on the bike, prompting me to arbitrarily change my gears to accommodate this feeling of falling in control. If I go any bit faster, maybe a lightbulb will start to flicker. I am an electron whose placement in the world cannot be known at any given moment. Small and significant. When Werner Heisenberg was probably alone in his study and realizing the implications of quantum mechanics, little did he try to imagine what being an electron would anecdotally feel like. Yet I like to think he did, that it is tucked away in a coveted journal separate from his lab one, scribbled into it the line, “like losing control over a bike on a steep decline, forgetting that the world exists as distinct solids, liquids, and gasses: in a cloud of blurring bursts of color”. 

I grin to let the icy wind run in-between my teeth as my helmet leans towards my pony tail, the helmet held back like a parachute. My grip tightens, just in case an otherworldly portal opens up and swallows me whole, leaving nothing but the rattle of a few small rocks. The novelty starts to wear once the periphery settles into familiar shapes again: an oak, a sea of brome that borders the gravel road, a fellow, tuckered-out electron with a  smile, a wave. 

Full Heart

I didn’t think that I would ever have that piece of me filled again.

I thought that once the void opened up in your heart, you just had to accept it. Live with it. Tolerate it. Embrace it.

But recently…

Recently…

Like the l

      e

        a

  v

    e

        s

Falling from the trees,

They start pile up, one by one.

Important, meaningful connections I didn’t expect to have.

New friendships, forged through movie nights and drinking hot tea and saying “hi” at the right times and opening myself up instead of shutting myself down when I see someone.

Old friendships, renewed through late night study sessions and Walmart trips and learning to trust again and knowing that it is okay to be vulnerable and that it is not me against the world but one big us.

New opportunities, new experiences, doors opened by my own hard work and a little bit of serendipity.

One by one,

(one by one by one)

They fall and gather gently until there are more than I count beneath my feet.

They fill up all the empty spaces.

I carried all this shame and fear in my heart. That people hated me. That people were rejecting me. That people could never love me.

And why would they? Why wouldn’t they in all my insecurities and imperfections and oddities? 

But people keep proving me wrong.

People keep proving me wrong.

You see me.

You know me.

I love you.

Thank you.

(J.N.)

You ask me where I’m really from.

I am from the water well

Deep and quenching

I am from the smell of Earth

Sweet

I am from the pleats of my grandmother’s sari

Vibrancy in swirling colors

I am from the beat of the tabla

Strong

I am from the smallest seed of a guava

Growing to shade you from harm

I am from a melody

To give your heart a companion

I am from the froth on ocean waves

Dancing high into the sun-pink sky

I am from a dandelion

Carried far away, to grow anew.

—Alankrit Shatadal