Fall 2021 Issue - The Harvard Advocate

Poetry • Fall 2021
on Monday evening, bleeding between
bricks & concrete, indecisive direction,
improper & traversing. weight
lurching, we force forwards. when a prophet
makes a mistake, I am not equipped
to forgive. even if he asks. sweating, knees
buckling, bobbing. we plead. jolted over
curbs & branches, I recite the Lord’s prayer
for the first time in ten years. somewhere,
Notes from 21 South Street • Fall 2021
“When I think about people, I think about space, how much space a person takes up and how much use that person provides,” begins Joan is Okay by Weike Wang. Our narrator is Joan, a thirty-six-year-old Chinese-American whose life happily revolves around the New York City hospital ICU, where she works as a physician. But when her father dies unexpectedly from a stroke, and her mother returns to America from China to “become friends” with her children, and her brother and sister-in-law mount pressure on her to settle down in the suburbs and start a family, and the coronavirus pandemic shuts all life down, Joan is forced to question her workaholism and define her own cultural beliefs.
Fiction • Fall 2021
We began each meeting with a hyacinth, to deny the Hole its hold on our lives. Our trusted servant, Father Brown, distributed flowers and heirloom glasses of cool water. We dipped our hyacinths, blush-quick and simple, and removed them, even simpler. Another dip, and another, and the dormant lacquer of a different, frightening flower cast itself over the stem we thought we knew. The third dip was the worst, no matter how many sessions we’d attended. Billy the Medicare salesman always shook so hard small droplets of water skirted from his wrist. But Father Brown’s voice reassured us that the hyacinth we held and the hyacinth in the water were one and the same, and he removed his flower and flourished its formal singularity, and we all relaxed. The water, although not the Hole exactly, could mimic the Hole’s obliterative properties. In the Hole, the flower became other-flower, its petals the very petals of its prior aspect’s doom.
Fiction • Fall 2021
Eileen didn’t expect to enjoy the bunker, even when she heard she’d been selected as staff. She imagined crates of canned food piled at foot-thick doors, stalactites over itching bunks, corridors reeking of mildew. And Nico hadn’t even applied, so—what did love weigh? This was on the second day, when the fever was still confined to Indonesia.








