Spring 2026 - Fear Issue - The Harvard Advocate

Big John stood near me with the electric blue above us, screaming out with its shine for everyone to drink it. Lines of neon stretched and twisted into a beauty of advertising brilliance. We were drinking it and the bottles were sweating and it made me feel good for the first time all day.

content warning: violence, blood, death

There’s no easy way to say this. The tiger threat was real.

Captain Paul Watson was born in Toronto on December 2, 1950. Through his early environmental work with the Sierra Club, he became a founding member of the Don’t Make a Wave Committee, which opposed underground nuclear weapons testing in Alaska. This group, including Watson, would go on to found Greenpeace in 1971. In a defining moment for his subsequent career, Watson and a crew of Greenpeace activists confronted the Soviet whaling fleet off the coast of California during their 1975 anti-whaling campaign. Watson and Bob Hunter, aboard a small Zodiac, placed themselves physically between the harpooners and the pod of whales. Watson attributes his lifelong devotion to the defense of marine life to the moment he shared with one of the dying whales that day: a gaze of mutual understanding, sadness, and incredible rage, as the whale’s pod was massacred and the crew failed to save them.

Beth Blum is a Professor of English at Harvard, a scholar of modernist and contemporary literature, and author of the 2020 book The Self-Help Compulsion: Searching For Advice in Modern Literature. She also teaches a General Education (“GenEd”) course, “The Age of Anxiety,” in which I was a student during the Fall 2025 semester.

By no means is this a famous story. It takes place in Huntsville, Utah, a small town of under six-hundred residents, located in Ogden Valley on Pineview Reservoir. Surrounded by three ski resorts (Snowbasin, Powder Mountain, and Nordic Valley) there is no shortage of idyllic views, nor a shortage of seasoned skiers wishing to park amongst these idyllic views. This is observed by the abundance of Parking by Permit Only signs that prohibit parking west of 7300 E Street, made possible by the Huntsville Town Ordinance on April 19th, 2018.

Gezi

Once again, a newborn cried for the first time. The bald scream carried her voice through crowds in a chestnut-smelling street, rousing the cats from their curbside sleep. The sound stretched farther on to the trees of Taksim as they shuddered with an intensity foreign to them. The cats knew of what was coming before us. They found Spirit in a corner of İstiklal, licked and nursed her. They were the ones who would tell her about the name of the street, about how long before it meant independence, it meant dismissal and rebellion. They told her, as she cried, that she was rebelling even now when she did not know the word for it. They were the ones who decided that the time was right and carried the newborn to a nearby park. The cats, from atop the branches of Gezi, all silent in their knowing, wanted to show Spirit the trees.

I asked the board to generate a question they would ask their fear. CBT and creative writing prompt books sold at Barnes & Noble seem to have re-connotated this kind of exercise, so no one entertained me. Instead they made many thoughtful-but-sprawling remarks on fear writ large that I have done my best to pin down and translate into generative questions. Below is our response to ourselves. —Tess Wayland, Features Editor 2025

Today I am weight. Today my tail quivers with the herd’s, a burly
pack of cattails swirling. I am big-bellied, furry, untamable. I am
full of grass. Today I get to think about my next meal. Today I
daydream about the rut, strutting and curling my lip, grunting with
my tongue outstretched. Today I want to wallow in the mud with
all the other lip-curlers, licking pheromonal heat. Shuffle of
salivating verve. Scruff of soul. Today I hoist my bulging bulk. My
nose twitches with distant splays of sweat. Ears infused in
chemical cues. I am nature, never devil. Today I give my love
away.

Warm for a fish,
The kingqueen of egglayers,
Innards sluicing round deckheight
Stain the waders of a bearded fisherman.
He slices clean the belly
With a curved tip razorknife gently,
Calls her gorgeous, kisses
Her whiskers whispers creekside
admiral admiral admiral admiral.
She expects that every man
Will do his slicing right.

          There’s something to be said about those little birds inside the eggs, with the sticky baby down and bones melted tender. This morning, you call me soup-for-brains and I imagine a boy’s guts cupped inside the feathered belly on my plate—another boy pressed open like a drum, a membrane. I drink the brine from a jar of Koon Chun plums for breakfast. Practice, I say, and you call me Pussy for the first time all week. They say it doesn’t taste like anything. Just the salt of the duck and the blood-tang of marrow. But I forgot you’re tutoring Leah Wong at her place today, so I turn and face your black-feathered buzzcut. No time for a game behind the school with the Chus’ half-popped basketball, which yesterday I poked till it dimpled and likened it to one of her mom’s big fake ones, and you hit me. For a split-second I thought I saw your eyes turn milky and your spine go baby-bent, but I pulled up your T-shirt and you were still hairless as a girl, your skin opaque. So it’s dinnertime and Mom isn’t home yet and all I have is the chick in my egg. He’s just boiled awake, beak parting to call me Dumbass. Soft. My fingers turn to yellow protein in calcium dust, prying you into this wet, scalding kitchen. Walls gum-pink and beating; I take you where heat reigns.

Soul or flare, or then a reckoning. Spare pasts
from gashes prior. Polyps of personage,
like tight-packed parcels, plucked apart until
raw as small carcass ready for forks.
In a butter time—pre-present, future eventual—
a pickaxe couldn’t puncture them,
warlords would run away. Partial coordinates
given to an inescapable whorl
of vortices. Where portals pulse like swollen
spores. Starlight a soft no
among firm certainties. Spent parts compose.
Bereft reports galore.
A prion named Osiris. Three halves of actual
mysterious. Glee
in the beak of a beetle-eating wing. A vulture
called heaven
and buckshot ascending, followed by arrows.
Shift. Balance shadow. So bright it’s
invisible. Ointment that causes burns: ready.
Worms to salve open wounds: yes,
acquired and writhing. Together in friction,
opposing in function. It is funny.
There is no lab-made master. It isn’t hill or
area is. This isn’t a lapful of
sour liquor. Soiled trousers? At ease, sailor.
Full-mast into an impasse.
Plaster representation of an ashamed demi-
urge, the unbearabilities.
But such meantime is finite. Day-glow dark,
past tense ultraviolet.
On preorder: new options for ultra-violence
+ premium optics.
Mining for diamond-eyed, mummified angels
again, are we? Simply choose a weapon
by taste before warping into storm. Know all
angles of any possible prism or rip.
Your altered ergot did it. Tore open a torso
and apologized right to the heart.
No two wrongs go unabsolved? Phantasmic.
The world would rather not see.
But the world is easily forced into elasticity
despite byproducts like loss.
Erosion entertains. Pushed against whirlpool.
By now, you’re cold. Dry.
All because other bugs couldn’t play kindly.
Spat venom. Ate eggs.
Am I so niotic, to insist we become incessant
in scope? Sun—iamb.
Frightened wet want to become warm steam.
Going away haze.
Come here, lump. We wrap each other in body
-shaped rugs.
River of roe and rye. Ripe lore of excavation.
Drown hydras if feeling so dehydrated.
Hope a high anger, a whole-horned anglerfish
with a hot-white dangler hovering
above a simple tongue, a coherent explanation.
Unsure if Smith loves Wessen
as much as Winchester adores dear Remington,
some eggs miss this basket.
Like larvae larger than the insects they become.
Groan. Gear finally gone.
Bruised down to grain. Iota by bit. Roundabouts
a pound of prime flesh.
Pure flank. Alpine breeze, a roar of borealis—
hide, like, yesterday.
Listen, dude...your rodomy is showing. Brother,
you’re not mine.
Sorry, Sybil, sibling with half of a lame syllable.
In the chrysalis is a crucifix clutching
a very unhappy skeleton. Crack it like alabaster.
Down swings the sludge hamster.
Rise up, necromancers. Too tiny, too untimely.
You’re an incredible witness.
You just aren’t credibly people. Hardly a hum.
Haunted, this future ghoul.
Crucible crux, limp desire for simple progress.
Cauldron bubbles. Pink,
oiled, sensory boiling. Hypothermic nakedness.
Ambergris earrings
matching a cartilage necklace set: flesh collage
of our feral myth.
Look—I will skull your bone if you bohemian
my grove. Let’s abdicate our cadavers.
Cram inside the same cranium. Seasonal juice
spoils first. Fresh meat bruises easy.
I could’ve said goodbye first, or much sooner.
Holy as a basket a baby might set
out down a river and drown in. What a lesson?
Bye, now, freshly lost legend.

A winter windstorm
blows down the power lines. We
eat by candlelight.

"To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven." Ecclesiastes 3:1

It started with a discussion of the second world war. A cheese platter was placed on the coffee table. An unnamed jazz record was playing while the moon, tangled in the pines like a balloon, shone through the living room windows. Prisms of light fell slithering on the rug. We were in a room walled with certainty. The lights were yellow and warm. I mention the light, you see, because of what it did to our bodies. The academic went into a long story about Truman, arms resting perpendicular on the arms of the chair. The lawyer, addressing me and two others, was standing in front of us entering into an unsolicited debate. My father was there, hands on his hips, and I don’t think I’d be alive today if we hadn’t used it. And suddenly another entered the room, seated in the corner with legs neatly crossed saying nothing, whom I was being urged, for no reason other than their arrival, to mouth the words thank you to. All lawyers stand with astute faces. Leaves unseen had struck the window, another bottle of red was uncorked. All executioners sit effaced. The chandeliers, glistening, were dangling like ears. And now, said the economist, chuckling, we only worry about dying from aliens or asteroids. There was laughter. To refute this, you understand, was pointless, because it was true; the room’s geometry confirmed it. There was laughter. This is when it happened. The way a river cracks under the chilled hoof of a deer in winter, the room was riven by words. Not the water, but the sound of ice aching in the woods. Not the unease, but the ordinary revealed within. It provided a momentary glimpse at the logic of this house, of just how far from the world it is. Dearest, though on a diferent continent, of a different night, you were sitting next to me, our elbows touching like clouds; us, in this room where the doors were illusions, likely misunderstood, and the ceiling was iron. This occurrence, now long gone by, a cavity in the night since filled. Everyone left, went on with their little lives full of little joys—they amassed photographs of amber skies, kissed in the kitchen, noticed the perfume of a stranger on the bus, and made many, many plans. There’s no good reason to be telling you any of this. Consider it a sort of confession. A sort of wail. A touch of your hand hoping to be discerned. I can’t get the sound of the room out of my head, muffled and turning, as if already buried. The house is haunted. The house is me. You know this. Every night I return, standing hunched in the hallway mopping up the blood on the hardwood. There is neither a mop nor blood.

THE MARTINI DID NOT FIX ME!
I JUST REEK OF SPILLED OLIVE BRINE
AND THE COUNTER IS ALL STICKY
WITH HAPHAZARD VERMOUTH AND GIN.

So much the rather thou, Celestial Light,
Shine inward, and the mind through all her powers
Irradiate; there plant eyes; all mist from thence
Purge and disperse, that I may see and tell
Of things invisible to mortal sight.
— John Milton, Paradise Lost

I did nothing but wait for a week in mid-June, in a town on the last train stop out of Milan. It occurs to me now, no longer entrenched in that wait, that I was simply paralysed by this barrier between what we so desperately imagine life to be and who we are.