Features • Fall 2025 - Diagnosis
Poetry • Fall 2025 - Diagnosis
after Ellen Bass
O black bean boy, O owl eyes,
O package of muscle and fur.
My cautious companion, my
in-love-with-me friend. What will we do
without your low grumbles
your hot-water-bottle body
beside us all winter? O sun-scorched nose,
O wacky teeth that can’t bite a thing, O
fluted, veined callalily ears
taking the world straight to the heart.
There is no guy I’d rather sleep with,
no slinky tuxedo like yours.
When you frolic and hop
in your nightly routine, the sounds
of cracked glass and low howls
are like the heartbeats in a womb.
In that embryonic waterfall, we sleep.
Two lucky mothers.
O bloated bladder, O swollen,
sleepy heart. When we nearly lost you,
we sought you in our grief
to ease our grief. We held your exhausted body
to us. O seeing soul, O aperture closing and
widening, catching the landscape
of more than mere humans can know.
Beloved beast, dear body that heals and heals.
Tiny horse, honeyed contralto,
our leaping, whiskered seal —
Fiction • Fall 2025 - Diagnosis
W E The People entered the home of the Crisis Actor illegally. This is true. Why deny it? We certainly weren’t going to be invited in. There was the matter of him knowing our faces, from those days when we picketed on the gum-spotted sidewalk or confronted him at his car in a parking garage downtown, our accusations drowned out by the scrape of skater boys. And, of course, there was the restraining order. Legal lines had been drawn and, yes, we decided to cross those lines, which resisted no more ably than strands of cobwebs stretched across a basement doorway.
The fresh online pieces we experiment with outside of our print cycle. Formerly known as Blog.
Notes
The purposes of this review are twofold: first, to convey the eminently pleasant though not necessarily intellectually stimulating experience of seeing The Light in the Piazza at the Huntington Theater; and second, to convince you, yes YOU, the member of the Advocate reading this (or honestly whoever else) to take up my mantle of reviewing shows at the Huntington now that I have graduated.
From the Archives
Fiction • Spring 2023 - Decoy
Edited by Talia Blatt
Sheila Heti is a Canadian novelist, playwright, and essayist. The Fiction Board of The Harvard Advocate met with her over Zoom the morning of December 15, 2022. We spoke about her novels and children’s books, theater, mushrooms, reading her diaries in The New York Times, artificial intelligence, and how maybe everything is just fiction.
Poetry • Summer 2024
Leaves of trees were more alive
than the birds, as my mind went
back to the chauffeur kneeling,
waving his wand—the detector
for explosives under the sedan,
saying, “Just in case.” Then after
checking into The International,
I go upstairs to a room, & I ask,
Have I been here before, standing
at this mirror? A shadow of birds
in trees outside the park pulls me
up to the window, & then a voice
saying, “Do not go to the park.”
Those birds tell all of us to look,
& then I feel as if they are woes
disfiguring the sunset, or lovers
of those gone into Kenyan bush.
My face here on a windowpane,
seeing them as part of myself.
They make the trees smaller,
divined by a lifetime of pleads.
A silhouette of them in the trees
moves with me toward the park,
but before I enter a voice says,
“If your driver had not waved
the wand beneath that sedan
maybe you would not be here.
You know, timing is everything.”
I stood again at the window
as if only waiting for someone
to stir up that cloud of wings
waiting for the world to end.
All at once, I wanted to hug
someone, or to just hold her
against me, breathing as one.
Their skullcaps of pale feathers
became too much to believe in.
Such a ragged hour of half-dead
dreams & deep longing. Maybe
if not the park, I’ll go to the bar
on the corner. I stop at the door,
turn, & walk back to the hotel.
A week later, a grenade is tossed.
Three Aussies die in the Jericho,
& I try to say what turned me
around at the door but I can’t.
Their gaze on me, & half-dark
wings writhing into specters
or deep eyes of prophecy.
Archived Notes • Winter 2021 - Fast
Hannah La Follette Ryan is the New York based photographer behind @subwayhands, a viral Instagram account which showcases portraits of strangers’ hands on the subway and boasts over 250 thousand followers. Poetry board member Ezra Lebovitz and design board member Anna Correll spoke with her via email this January about her work, her method, and the rules of subway decorum.
Poetry • Fall / Winter 2023
You have to understand: there was no noon, no down. Time passed. Day turned to night. I woke and slept. I drank, I ate a bit, I slept. There were few nouns. They wouldn’t connect. I didn’t know fan. I kept kicking off the blankets and pulling off my clothes. The people came and went. I didn’t know now, I couldn’t find the latches, and every few hours I found myself at baseline, staccato, returned to tonic. The light moved through its stations: soft white, blur-white, buzz-white, white-white, cream-white, cream, tan, black. My dreams were flickers, my days were smears. I slept in a mechanical bed, three feet in the air. Time and more time. The questions were confusing. I answered in song lyrics and scraps of poetry. Twenty-nine dollars and an alligator purse. It would have been funny except for the yelling. And the fear—the mind that didn’t work, the leg that wouldn’t move, the people who should have arrived but didn’t. I pitched fits; cried jags, hair-triggered—it was neurological, endless. Finally they knocked me out. They clocked me. Soft white, blur-white, buzz-white, white-white, cream-white, cream, tan, black.
Features • Summer 2021
In the days after high school graduation, having ridded my schedule of high school effects, I found myself in possession of a remarkable amount of free time. Three months’ worth, to be exact. The last time I had this much free time was probably elementary school graduation, and I had spent most of my high school years yearning for this kind of idleness.
2026