Lachlan Chu

Come with me
                              to the gardens, and we’ll find ourselves an arbor




to sit beneath. There I will teach you all the lessons,
                              how to make something the work of your hands.




Don’t worry, everyone. I know how thin the girl is,
                              how delicate. I have already mouthed every word,




already taken my lungs in hand and softened them.
                              Be a darling, Pecola dear, I’ll tell her. Go inside,




fetch me some clay. Compare yourself to a railroad car,
                              your body to its coal; even I can smell your




innocence evaporating from the stack. You know
                              what to do: follow where it goes, find it in your




hands, how they curve like breasts. Find it in your
                              clay, dark and fertile like a naked woman,




dripping wet, stepping out from the water.
                              As you shape her, remember the beauty,




remember she is yours to create. Anything you want
                              to be. Before we leave, Pecola dear, fetch me your




little white dolls. Dress them up.
                              Light them.


Summer 2023

Poetry

Breedlove

Eve Jones

So many excellent albums have come out this autumn, and yet 

by Chappell Roan is the only one that has wormed its way into my playlists. Chappell, an indie pop phenomenon, has reminded me of the glorious days of youth when I would listen to Kesha and anticipate similar climactic experiences in dark crowded rooms. But she has also shown us the way forward into the noise of the 2020s. “I’m so sick of online love,” she croons, before launching into an album opener for the ages, “Femininomenon.”

I can’t and won’t explain why her music itself is so addictive. (Something about rule of threes, pedal points, vocal agility, wide vowels, frequently landing on leading tones, reluctance to resolve chords, etc, etc.) But here I will attempt to unpack one aspect of her lyrics with which I am truly obsessed: she frequently will slightly alter lines from one chorus to the next.

This sounds kind of not important. Let me explain.

She most frequently employs these slightly altered lyrics to comedic effect. In “HOT TO GO,” her self-professed ‘cheerleader song,’ she sings:

And later, after talking about how long it’s been since she’s gotten any, she sings:

You’re expecting “dance with” (normal for a dance song), but you get “sleep with” (raunchy and unexpected). Haha! What a jest! A jape!

Equally funny and more bisexual is the chorus of “After Midnight,” where “I’m feeling kinda freaky, maybe it’s the 

 if you don't mind” becomes “I’m feeling kinda freaky, maybe it’s the 

if you don’t mind” in merely three intervening lines. This substitution subverts the expected to unexpected progression, because “girlfriend” is less expected from a female voice than “boyfriend,” and “club lights” and “moonlight” are equally likely. In fact, these substitutions remind you how similar these two couplets are. Not only do both end in the same syllables, but neither are materially different. A nonchalant statement about bisexuality! This is why the bi girls love Chappell.

The subtlest, but in my opinion the most impactful example of this device in 

is in “Casual,” her ballad about her semi-girlfriend telling her friends their relationship is just ‘casual.’ The chorus uses the following lines (italics are slant-rhymed stress that all fall on beat 2 or 4):

A triple rhyme followed by a departure from the rhyme mirrors exactly what Chappell laments, which is the disappointment of not following up on the expectations of the relationship. And this repeats a few times, given that it’s the chorus. But in the final bridge, we get this extended rhyme:

“Knee deep in the passenger seat and you're eating me 

Two weeks and your mom invites me to her 

Oh my god how do I begin to unpack the genius? Connecting the rhyme with the previously disjointed “knee deep” line starts to connect the dots of the passionate and committed moments in the relationship. The lengthened rhyme indicates a longer time to wait, as if the relationship and its disappointments have progressed within the song. The line “is it casual now” is just implied in the rhyme rather than being said, leaving both the listener and the subject to draw their own (obvious) conclusions. And the lengthened and repeated diphthong of [ou] in out/house creates a sort of howl, both far more plaintive and far less urgent than the repeated vowel [i] in weeks/me/beach.

Chappell is an artist of connected polarizations. She’s bicoastal and rural. She dances at the “Pink Pony Club” in Santa Monica, but she “miss[es] the seasons in Missouri.” She wants a “Super Graphic Ultra Modern Girl,” but is “so sick of online love.” She’s gay, obviously, and hyperfemme, obviously. So her artistry hinges on the collection of opposites into a cohesive performance.

And this lyrical motif, something that seems so small, is the perfect encapsulation of her as a performer. The differences don’t bother her, because she makes them as similar as possible. She navigates lyric changes so smoothly that you barely notice them, or you notice them and immediately laugh them off. Chappell is just gliding through, and if you’re caught off guard, that’s your problem.

Also, Chappell is the queen of puns. “I heard you like magic / I got a wand and a rabbit.” Come on, now. Go listen to the album. And let this be my bid to get it on all of our party playlists here at 21 South St. I want to dance to “After Midnight,” after midnight.

Notes

Chappell Roan Has Taken Over My Life: A Musical Analysis

Cindy Phan

Wild Things is the winner of the 2023 Louis Begley Prize judged by Rebecca Panovka and Kiara Barrow.

The month the world begins to end, your sister shows up holding a monkey’s tail.

“Come with me,” she says. “I think we should give it back. He must be missing it.”

It is six in the morning and too early to deal with this.

You’re half-convinced that she’s a mirage, some cruel trick of light and delirium, but when you blink, your sister is still standing there, every bit as blisteringly beautiful as she was ten seconds ago. Every bit as terrible, too. It has always been hard to look at your sister straight on.

You close the door on that beautiful, terrible face.

It doesn’t keep her out, of course. Locked doors never have. But, out of what you can only guess is politeness or maybe guilt, she waits long enough for you to think about whether or not you should tell your mother that her eldest daughter has come home, long enough for you to decide against it. Long enough for you to start thinking about breakfast.

By the time you emerge out of the refrigerator, breath chilled butter-thick in your throat and an egg in each hand, she’s sitting at the kitchen island. The monkey’s tail, you notice, is still twined in her fingers.

“I’m not going with you,” you tell her. You put the eggs down on the counter, and they wobble, sway back and forth like a pair of drunken old men. Only missing the slurred laughter, the sheen of sweat on their bald heads. “I mean it.”

“Okay,” your sister says. Her gaze stays steady on you, but out of sight you hear the eggs rattle to a standstill. “Can I ask why?”

 you want to bite back, just to be spiteful. Just to feel the acid-sting of it on your tongue. But you don’t have the stomach for it, so instead you clatter around the kitchen for a pan or maybe a spoon, make more noise than you need to. “I wanted to make an omelet.”

She says again, “Okay.” And then, “Why don’t you?”

“I don’t know,” you answer, uselessly. “There are two eggs. I just. I’ve always used three.”

“The world’s ending,” she points out. Her voice is kind. You think kind sisters are worse than cruel ones. “You can make an omelet with two eggs.”

Later, after you’ve cracked the two old men open and swallowed their yolky insides, yellow still sizzling against your throat on its way down, you take a good, long look at your sister. You manage to do it without dropping your eyes, without dipping your chin to slant her silhouette into your periphery.

There are some things in the world, like war and night skies and sadness so full you can’t hold it all in your mouth, that are easiest to understand in fragments. Your sister is one of those things. The last time you saw her, you were seven years younger, and she was walking out on you and your mother and the man who wanted you and your sister to call him 

. Sometimes, that is still the way you dream about her: the ink-black spill of her hair down her back, the steady line of her shoulders, the wistful flutter of her skirt. The way she got smaller, and smaller, until the horizon swallowed her whole and it was just you and the porch and your empty hands.

Her hair is a little different, now. Cut shorter so it feathers around her face, barely reaches past her shoulders. It looks impossible to tie back. Your mother would call it impractical.

You don’t know what you’d call it. Surreal, maybe. It’s always been hard to describe your sister, feels a little too much like trying to catch rain in your fists, but 

is as close an adjective as you’re going to get. Surreal, your sister in your mother’s smartly suburban kitchen—your sister with her dark eyes and birdwing hair and her clothes that move like water, like light. Surreal, almost wrong, like seeing a fish out of water or a sparrow on the ground.

“I think we’ll find him in Montana,” she muses. “Or Idaho. One of the two.”

“Oh,” you say. “Okay.” You’d forgotten about the tail and its implied owner, but now that she’s brought them up again, you wonder how you could have thought about anything else. “Have fun in Montana. Or Idaho. Did you want breakfast?”

To her credit she hardly seems thrown, except for the slightest downturn of her lips at the corners. You take a childish sort of pleasure in it anyway, the ripple of that frown disturbing the still lake of her face.

Your omelet-sodden plate is already in the sink. There’s a part of you that wants to grab it and drop it on the tile floor, just to hear something shatter.

“Why?” you ask instead. Not even to be difficult. It is less, you reflect, a question about why she is inviting you along now, more a question on why the offer comes seven years late. 

 Your sister is impossible to read until she isn’t. The tenderness of it catches you like a punch to the throat, like a hook in a fish’s mouth, spools you out until all the beautiful, terrible love you have for her is spilling over the counter. “Because I’m trying to be better. Because the world is ending, and I am trying to be better. Is that enough?”

You say neither and hold out your hand. “Can I?” Wordlessly she passes you the monkey’s tail. It’s heavier than you would have guessed, has the meat of your palm dipping against its warm, solid weight. Some of the shorter furs bristle, but mostly the length of it is soft like felt. You wonder how anyone could lose such a thing.

“I’d want it back, if it were me,” you say.

Somewhere in the house, one floor or maybe a whole world away, your mother and her husband are still sleeping. He’s a sprawler, will have his arms and legs thrown out like he’s trying to hold the whole bed hostage, and your mother will be curled up on her side, hair dark against the mattress. She will be facing away from him.

In an hour and a half, she’ll wake up to meet the sun. Uncurl her spine, slip her cold feet into waiting slippers, make her sensible way downstairs to the kitchen. The world is ending and she will make breakfast, something sensible and loveless: bacon brittle and not-yet-browned toast and bitter, resentful coffee. Maybe she’ll see the chair where you usually sit, now left empty, and the absence will itch at her like a lost tooth and she’ll miss you. Or maybe she won’t. Before your mother was sensible she was your mother.

Right now, though, your mother and her husband are both asleep. You think of them only vaguely, the way you remember a shirt you haven’t seen for a long time or a childhood friend. It is early in the morning, not quite seven yet, and in this dawn-shrouded kitchen there is just you and the sister who left you behind. The sister who is trying to be better.

“I’d want it back,” you repeat. The monkey’s tail lies warm and docile in your hands. “And. I guess Montana isn’t that far away.”

“It’s not,” your sister agrees. “Neither is Idaho.”

“Okay,” you say. The world is ending, and worse things could have shown up on your doorstep than your sister. “Okay. I’ll come with.”

Your sister used to tell you whenever she dreamt about your father. In one dream, the moon dropped into his mouth and swelled, swelled, until it split him open at the seams. A reverse metamorphosis, man turned god turned chrysalis.

In another, the tide lapped at his ankles like an eager dog. He followed it, walked right into the ocean. Left no footprints behind.

You can’t remember your father’s name—only remember him as the man who ate a moon, as the man who was eaten by an ocean. If you were to ask your sister, you know she would be able to tell you, but it feels wrong, somehow, to name your father. Like naming the wind, or the first animal to break your heart. Names conjure the illusion that something is yours to keep, and if you name your father you don’t know what you’d do with the ghost of him after.

It happened like this: your father was here, and then one day he wasn’t. The rest of it, as far as you know, is moon and water.

His absence would not stop haunting your sister for months afterwards, left her shaking awake in the middle of the night with her fingers outstretched, closing around nothing. Your sister, her wet cheeks and her empty hands. You didn’t understand until you did. Until those empty hands were yours.

As do most things involving your sister, the drive begins quietly. She has always liked to wait for things to come to her. But seven years is a long distance to bridge, and some distances you don’t know how to cross on foot. The monkey’s tail sits between the two of you like an anchor.

Outside the window is a slow blur of suburbia, neat green lawns and neat white houses, oozing into one another thick and formless like syrup. You’re on the road long enough for the sun to wake up, peek his round face past the horizon and cast everything in gold. You count the cars you see on your two hands and still have fingers left over.

Eventually, you unclick your seatbelt without asking for permission beforehand. Fold your knees up to your chest. The world is ending, and you’ve always wanted to go on a car ride with your seatbelt off, at least once.

Your sister looks over briefly before she returns her gaze to the road. “Just this once,” she says, in warning.

“Just this once,” you agree. Outside your window, the houses melt into the background. You’re seeing more trees, now. The occasional billboard too, its lights dim and flickering. Every now and again a convenience store, never with a name you recognize.

Your sister drives with an easy, languid confidence. Fingers light on the steering wheel, window rolled down to let the breeze kiss your offered faces. She has never owned a phone and as far as you know has never been outside of California, but somehow you’re certain—in the intuitive way you’re certain of your own name, and how many lives you’ve lived, and the fact that the world was always going to come to this—that your sister will be fine. If she wants to get you to Montana, she will get you to Montana.

You blink. “No. I had an omelet, remember?”

“Two eggs.” Her voice is mild and you can’t tell if it’s an acknowledgement or a correction. You graciously assume it’s the former.

You remember offering your sister breakfast, the question more distraction than sincerity. It’s not as if you were going to refuse her if she had said yes, but for as long as the two of you have been apart, some part of you still knows your sister. Will always know your sister. And you had known, even as you asked, that she came home for you, that she wouldn’t have accepted breakfast until you agreed to come along first.

“A little,” she admits. She drums her fingers against the dashboard. “Do you think McDonald’s sounds okay?”

You almost ask her where she thinks she’s going to find a McDonald’s out here, in this sleepy little town with a name no one knows, but before you can, you see the unmistakable silhouette of those golden arches break the horizon. Like magic, almost.

Except it’s your sister, and she has always been harder to stomach than magic.

Your sister turns into the drive-through, which is empty of cars except for yours. You can’t tell if there’s anyone at the window. Even when you crane your head, you can’t tell if there’s anyone inside the building at all.

The car rolls to a tentative stop. Your sister leans her head out the window, says, “Hello?” in the direction of the intercom. Silence is the only thing either of you hear. She tries again, louder. “Hello?”

It takes so long for the intercom to crackle to life that you almost tell her to leave it.

a voice says. Tinny from the feedback, out-of-breath like they’ve been running. 

“Didn’t notice you there. I’m the only one on shift right now. Usually there’d be someone to tell me if I zone out, but. Not today. Or not right now, at least. I’m hoping someone else will come in later, so I’m not alone.”

“No worries,” your sister says. “Are you good to take an order? We can go somewhere else, though, if it’s just you.”

There’s silence for a moment, as if your sister doesn’t know how to respond. You don’t know how to, either.

“Yeah,” your sister ends up saying. She orders the first two things she sees on the menu, then asks you if you want anything. You ask for an apple pie because you know it comes ready in a box. You’ve been craving something sweet, anyway.

The tinny, disembodied voice repeats your order back to you, 

big-mac-ten-piece-chicken-mcnuggets-apple-pie-do-I-have-that-right?

 After your sister confirms yes, that’s right, it tells you your food will be ready at the next window.

it says, as if remembering something, right before your sister pulls away from the curb. 

“Oh, almost forgot. Can I have your names?”

 “Our names?” your sister echoes. “We’re the only ones here, aren’t we?”

“No—I mean, well, yes, you are the only ones here— but no, not for the food. I don’t need to ask your names for that, we have a whole process, and everything. I just—I want to start collecting people’s names, you know? With the world ending and all. It’s. I don’t know. I’ve been thinking. Some people might not have anyone to remember their name, is all.”

a pursing of the lips, the tongue. When she introduces herself, the tinny voice has to repeat it three times before it gets it right.

“Miley,” you interrupt hastily, a correction with less teeth than you mean for it to have. Less teeth because you know your sister intends no malice by it, but no one has called you 

 in a long time, that name like stones. Heavy in the throat, in the chest. You say again, “Miley. I’m Miley.”

“Yes,” you confirm. You don’t look at your sister’s face. “Miley. That’s right.”

You don’t know what your sister was going to say, or if she was going to say anything at all, but when she pulls forward to the next window, the owner of the tinny voice leans forward to greet you. In their hand they have a brown paper bag, yellow arches splashed across the front of it.

“and Miley. It’s nice to see your faces. Here’s your food, I hope you enjoy it.” Their voice is significantly less tinny when you hear it from the source, not distorted through a spiderweb of metal and wires. It’s a nice voice, you think. Warm and clear, like tea with no honey.

“Thank you,” your sister says, and passes the bag to you. You rearrange your legs so it nestles comfortably into your lap. The warmth of the food bleeds through the thin paper, through your pants. You imagine it flushing the soft skin of your thighs pink.

“Those are lovely,” you say, before you can stop yourself. You point to the antlers sprouting from either side of their head—fawn brown, downy with softness. Smaller than you would have expected, but when you take a closer look, you notice the soft velvet hanging from the whorls of their horns. “Are they still growing in?”

“I think so,” the no-longer-tinny-voice says. They absent-mindedly reach up, touch the tip of an antler. The motion makes the fledgling silk brush against the back of their hand. “I can’t tell you for sure. I don’t know a lot about deer, I guess. But I’ve made my peace with it. There are worse things to be.”

“Of course,” your sister agrees, always easier with strangers than you. “Deer are lovely. Someone I knew turned into a beetle.”

By the time you think to ask the no-longer-tinny-voice their name, your sister has already pulled away from the drive-through. By the time you think about the no-longer-tinny voice again, there are no chicken nuggets left, all of them having long gone to warm both your stomachs. The cardboard boxes are hollow and grease-stained. Behind you, the sleepy little town grows smaller and smaller, smudges into obscurity with the distance.

You think about the stranger. You wonder if they’re still manning the McDonald’s alone: their still-soft antlers, the names they collect like coins behind their teeth.

The end of the world, as it turns out, comes with neither a bang nor a whimper. Just the slow, gentle slide of everything returning back to the earth. 

When people talk about dying, they make it out to be something ravenous and gasping, the way a fish thrashes on the shore or a gazelle strains against teeth. That livewire thrum of blood, of pulse. Of every breath buffeting on the tongue to make it out alive. But you think death is not always hungry, that sometimes it comes holding more love in its mouth than blood.

How the end of the world happened for you was this: one day you woke up, and when you went to get the mail, like you did every day when you were the first one awake, you bumped into Mrs. Liu from the house across the street. She was getting on in years, had been for a while. There was no novelty to the silvery sheen of her hair or the graceful lines in her face. She greeted you, and when she turned to go back to her house, the sun glinted off the skin behind her ears.

“Auntie,” you found yourself asking. “Are those scales?”

Fiction

Wild Things

Allison Cekala

Daily observational photographs facing east from the shore of Holiday Beach in Owls Head, Maine, in pandemic winter 2021.

200” x 100” grid of 10” x 6.7” individual photographs, 2021

Owls Head Weather Report

The Harvard Advocate

On a tepid and earnest May afternoon, the Advocate boldly went where no Advocate member has gone before: the Harvard stadium. Equipped with one student-athlete, one former varsity baseball player, and many people kicked off of their youth little league team, we embarked on the ultimate battle (that no one asked for): to beat the Hasty Pudding in Softball. We were the best dressed, drunkest, and least appropriate team the stadium has ever seen.

 The Poetry Board, in the style of a ragtag group of unlikely friends, prepares to play the game.

: Before the game, we did a cursory run through of the rules of softball.

With the rugged American charm of twenty or so achievement-junkies, the game began. In the coming minutes, we learned three things: a) we were playing Hasty Pudding, b) we were playing the Hasty Pudding 

 members, and c) they were a no nonsense team.

But we, too, were a group of dedicated, disciplined athletes. What they had in lung capacity, we had in Pabst Blue Ribbons, final papers to procrastinate, and an unyielding zest for life. So we put our hearts on the line and kept our dignities on the bench to play American softball.


& though the Hasty Pudding band (which we must assume were tuba players, trumpeters, pianists, and the like) were mighty, the Advocate played harder.


We were up by ten points by the second inning, and the Hasty Pudding men began to get frustrated by our blazer and beer clad group. We celebrated our premature win by drinking more beer and wearing more blazers. The spectators, a group of Advocate members happily living in their jock fantasies, cheered.


& though we lost the game, we were forever proud of the fact that we never cared to begin with. Next year, we resolved to practice less and drink more, and forever be young and carefree at the Old Ball Game.

The Harvard Advocate Plays Catch

Patrice Helmar

Juneau, Alaska - 2017. Silver gelatin print, 11X14"

Lifeboat Repair at Aurora Harbor 

Thane, Alaska - 2016. Silver gelatin print, 8x8"

Prospector in Gastineau Channel 

Katie Catulle

I polish my face every morning. Sometimes I don’t even turn on the light in the bathroom, I don’t even draw the blinds. I can polish my face entirely in the dark now. I scrub, vigorously, starting at the top and circling right, down, and around, hands ticking around the face. Then I roll and buff, buff and roll in similar cycles. I repeat this three times; I can’t risk leaving even a blemish, even an imperceptible smudge. The end is my favorite: patting my face with a warm towel and misting with soft, delicate facial spray. Ocean breeze, I think.

As I’m ticking away at my face, circling and scrubbing and polishing, it’s almost as if I can feel time slipping between the slits of my fingers. I remind myself that I enjoy this. I enjoy tangibly touching time, almost. Someone—I can’t remember who—once mentioned the accumulation of time we spend on appearance, but that it’s fine, since we enjoy it. I was shocked. Wasn’t it enough that I made myself beautiful? I didn’t know we were supposed to enjoy it too!

I used to ask Pascal, every day, if I looked okay. He would always say I looked fine, pull four shots of espresso, and return to his prints. Sometimes I miss that ritual.

This morning, I draw the blinds and polish my face in the sunlight. I love to feel the natural light shine and reflect, love when the cold, pure, piercing rays reach my cold, pure, piercing face. This morning, I do miss our ritual, but probably only because I’m feeling a bit more reflective now.

I find my way out of my apartment: turn left from the door and walk twelve steps to the end of the hallway, turn right, walk twenty-two steps to the elevator, fumble to press the button, wait for the ding, ride the elevator down and walk through the lobby, wait for the swirling cold air to hit twice, enter the revolving door, and leave onto the auditory-intense street. This is either my favorite or least favorite part of my day.

Always, I’m hit with the endless horns hoping to announce their urgency over the hundreds of other urgent horns. Usually, I’m hit with incessant drilling, banging, sawing, for some perpetual renovation. That’s helpful, actually, so I’ll know to dodge the scaffolding. Sometimes, I’m hit with snippets of conversation spilling across the street.

Today, it sounds like someone is getting fired from a modeling shoot over the phone. I hear tears and pleas and she could have sworn that the time was an hour later, she was on her way now, please.

I would stay to listen, but it’s Thursday, and I’m already wearing my bright pink A-Line dress. I flutter between the contemporary art museum and random galleries and smaller exhibits, but on Thursday, I’m always at the city’s main art museum.

I’ve memorized the path to the Impressionist wing by now. When I used to give tours here, I would breeze through the other galleries to spend an hour doing close visual analysis of my favorite Monet paintings. Sometimes I wouldn’t even go to the other galleries; I would just head straight into the Impressionist wing. Which is actually challenging because you have to pass through so many other exhibits on the way, and everyone wanted to stop and go into each and every exhibit, and it was so exhausting to keep shepherding everyone along as they tried to root themselves in front of every inconsequential vase, dish, landscape.

But then I got to the 19th and Early 20th Century European Paintings and Sculptures section, and I could breathe. Rest. There, I was in complete control. Once, I spent forty-five minutes discussing 

 and that didn’t even include time for questions, which are consistently disappointing. There was—is— just so much to discuss: the pastel sky behind the deeper purple shadowed trees, the duality through the reflection, the history of Monet bribing the lumber merchant so he wouldn’t cut down the trees until Monet was satisfied with his painting, and yes, I did talk about the brush strokes. It 

 Monet. I mean, he is simply genius, the beauty he portrays from afar and the chaos up close.

At some point I may have received some mildly degrading form of a verbal warning, but it turns out Monet is quite popular, so when more and more patrons started requesting the “Monet Tour,” the museum finally just let me do my own thing. Which was fine. I had written my undergraduate thesis on three Monet paintings, and the museum had one of them, so I had a lot to say. I think they were really upset when I stopped showing up to work.

To be fair, I did keep showing up; it was just that no one recognized me. And I couldn’t exactly lead tours anymore. It’s a bit funny now, everyone’s different impressions. It induces some internal chuckles, now and then. Most think I am part of the museum, like some sort of interactive art piece. A few people think I am some sort of commentary on how art is a mirror held up to society. Or to themselves.

A lot of people simply come up close, so close they’re breathing on my face, and adjust their hair or lipstick, which I learn through comments made by other people, giggling and tittering that they didn't think that was “the point.”

And what is the point? Why do I keep coming back? It’s annoying to have to stand and listen to insipid commentary on the paintings I can no longer see. Sometimes I simply can’t stand listening to one more spoiled teenager or snotty sixty-something or even some polished twenty-four year old talk about the brush strokes and debate the time of day and discuss how Impressionism is really just Expressionism, except for, like, these flower paintings. I mean, I feel like my face might actually explode.

But the Impressionist wing is and always will be primarily a place of serenity. Of comfort. Before, I could just stand planted in front of those golden frames for hours, allowing my mind to empty except for the image before me. I plunged into the pastel scene of four trees bursting out of the water, submerged myself in Monet’s 

 and walked along his wavy, slightly blurry scene of the early light gently illuminating the muted trees.

Someone talked about the healing power of art and pretty things once, and how beautiful aesthetic experiences can produce happiness simply by looking. Maybe a part of me still wants to reflect that ideal.

Or perhaps the point of coming back here every Thursday is the weekly silly little hope that someone will remember me, will recognize me. That 

 recognize me. I dream that he’ll walk into the Impressionism wing one Thursday and remember the girl in the bright pink A-line dress who knew more about Monet than he did. But not more about painting. Never more about painting.

Time in the morning always falls forward like a shot of espresso, one minute browning in the cup, the next jarring your taste buds, your nervous system, and then, swish, it’s gone. By noon, some middle-aged man is giving a watered-down analysis of 

, barely brushing beyond the strokes. I mean, just admit that you haven’t had a critical thought since the turn of the century, please. I take that as my cue and float to the photography wing, the most transient collection, hoping to overhear something about any new pieces they’ve curated.

causes me to pause, to become still. Every word falling into my ears creates a flash, and my mind is left with the afterimage. I see pictures upon pictures, still images swirling in the insides of my eyelids from my favorite photographer: Pascal.

Then I open my eyes, and I’m walking around a gallery filled with images of myself. I see myself frozen dancing on the rooftop in the rain, where the sunlight caught in the falling water drop right before it fell on my face. I see a candid of myself hiding my nose and mouth in a flower—a lilac—at the botanical gardens, looking up through my eyelashes. That one’s posed, though I thought it wouldn’t be so obvious. I see my face fixed mid-laugh at a joke told off camera in front of the fading sunlight. I think I hated that picture once. I wander through these images and realize there is no one else in the gallery. I turn and turn, looking for a window, a door, but all I can find are more and more images of myself—toasting at the hotel in his hometown, posing with a paintbrush at the little studio we dabbled in, on the steps of the museum where I gave the Monet tours.

But he always did have such an unremarkable voice. It really could be anyone, I realize, and this pulls me out of the imagined gallery, as if my memory is a film strip being rolled back and my vision is pushed forward into the darkness, becoming still.

I turn to go, to return to the comfort of the Impressionist wing. I will complete the afternoon there. Though the afternoon always lingers more languidly, each moment sticking up close to the next. Afternoon time is trying to squeeze crystalized honey out of the bottle, is the gelled sweetener resisting. But I will return, oscillating between hope for new, insightful commentary and annoyance at the derivative dialogue, an unchanging pendulum of anticipation and stoicism.


“Photographs are simply a desire to suspend time.”

The voice, Pascal’s voice, says, and images swirl from the first moment I knew he loved me, when he captured the most beautiful image of me and I knew he truly saw me, perhaps saw me even more clearly than I saw myself, and I said the same words that that voice says now because that’s what I wanted to do—I wanted to suspend myself in that beautiful, perfect moment in time. And in one beautiful, perfect moment, I believed someone understood.

He taps me on the shoulder. He says I seem familiar, he thinks he’s seen that dress before, once, from a girl who almost knew more about Monet than he did. He mutters that it’s probably a pretty standard dress. It isn’t. My friend got it for me at Paris Fashion Week.

He asks me about my face, and I shrug, and he takes my hand and leads me around the familiar museum. I’ve heard it all before from countless professors, patrons, dates, peers, children, grandparents. I’ve heard it all before from him.

I’m attentive, I’m reflective. On the borrowed Fabergé egg on display, the pearlescent pink enamel adorned in gold panels. On the pursuit of beauty: the perfect eye shadow palette, perfect shade of nail polish, perfect diet pill, perfect angle for the camera. On the costume gallery, the waves and ripples of fashion and beauty. On wanting to reflect the images in the magazines, on social media.

On Frederick William MacMonnies’ “Self-portrait,”: how he included a copy of another painting in the background, in reverse because he was copying it from the image in the mirror. On portraiture: how Pascal, convinced he was an artist, asked if he could paint me. He wanted to suspend time with a brush instead of a lens, and he said because I have such a deep appreciation for beauty and such a developed understanding of art, I would be perfect. So I agreed. I trusted him. I believed in his artistic eye, especially after he captured my silhouette so beautifully through his camera lens.

He posed me in such unpleasant stances: crouched down to pick a flower, or arms outstretched and on my tiptoes as if mid twirl, or suspended on a beam continually falling. Inevitably, the paintings looked horrible. I shouted, dropped tears, I couldn’t believe he had made me look so unattractive, was this how he really saw me, I thought he loved me.

“You just don’t understand my artistic lens. I have a vision. I’m trying to capture time,” he had said.

 don’t understand artistic vision. Art is supposed to reflect beauty, not distort it.”

“If you’re such a genius, maybe you should try. Do your own portrait,”

“Maybe I will,” and I returned the next day with a freshly purchased designer ensemble beneath a fraying artist smock, my most precise makeup and curled hair, and lugged a big, beautiful golden mirror into his studio.

And now we’ve finished the tour and I must return to attention so Pascal can lead me out of the building. He asks if I want to see his studio. He tells me he’s an artist, which I know. An artist and an appreciator, a creator and a connoisseur. I nod.

We enter his studio, and I imagine it looks exactly the same—tall, white walls (no windows, it’s underground, or in the middle of the building, I can’t remember which), once almost blindingly white, abrasive, but covered with unfinished canvas and paint splotches. The walls were arranged by color scheme—the north wall his black and white scales, west wall variations of reds and sometimes pinks, south wall always greens with occasional yellows, the east wall a conglomeration of uncommissioned and unfinished works.

He tells me to watch my step, so I imagine the floor is the same—countless pads with color swatches, blending and mixing to obtain the perfect shade, opened tubes of paint strewn around, bundles of paint brushes in every size, in every level of disarray scattered by each wall.

I want to tell him that I don’t even know. I don’t even remember at what point it happened. It was probably gradual. I mean I would have noticed. I’m quite observant, especially about, well, my own face. Anyway, one morning I looked in the brightly lit mirror, perfecting my face, and my nose had been completely rubbed off! Just like that! I was more careful for a few weeks, patting and polishing more like caresses, less like scrubs. But I found a blemish near my mouth, and I simply had to scrub at it, and as I dabbed at my mouth, it rubbed into the shiny surface too. The eyes went next, both of them blending, becoming reflective. And now all I’m left with is hair falling behind a circular golden frame reflecting the world around me.

It was an adjustment, to be sure. Especially when I lost my nose. I actually wore a Band-Aid over it, like I had gotten it done. Not that I ever would have. Everyone knew my nose was my favorite feature. Losing my mouth was pretty tragic too, but I made do. I never talked much before, beyond the Monet tours, having a silvery voice that seemed to get lost in crowds, even the silent ones. And then I lost my eyes and I became a walking reflection, and no one could recognize me anyway, and so I stopped caring.

Life was a little more fun for a while. A whole day I think. Sure, I ran around, bumping into everything, but the anonymity, the utter detachment from my appearance, was incredible. Everything was clear.

But no one could recognize me. No one even seemed to notice I was gone. And so I stopped answering phone calls, texts, stopped paying for a phone plan all together actually. I simply disappeared.

But I can’t tell him that. I shrug. I suppose it could happen to any of us if we aren’t careful.

We walked toward the east wall, and he stopped. “This is one of my favorites. Do you want to know the story behind this piece?”

“Once I knew a beautiful woman, and we fell in love, and she disappeared.” 

You loved someone else? Loved someone beautiful?

 But before she disappeared, she had started painting a self-portrait. 

 She would stand in front of the mirror for hours, begging her appearance not to change until she was finished, until she was satisfied.

 Okay, that is absolutely false. I wouldn’t talk to my appearance. And besides, how could I possibly be satisfied? I wasn’t an artist. You are the one who—

 She was obsessed, dancing against time, wanting to perfectly reflect her image. And then one day she just never came back. 

“And because I had taken so many pictures of her, after she disappeared, I decided to finish her self-portrait, from photos, from memory, blending her original vision with my artistic lens. Look, here it is.”

He holds up a piece of artwork to my face, the shadow reflecting an image once mine, now flipped and mirrored, distorted through different perception, through memory. Am I supposed to smile, widen my eyes in excitement and surprise, exclaim that it’s perfect, complete, that I’m finally satisfied?

I sign thank you, it’s beautiful. I must imagine it is, because I was.


I’m back in my apartment now, standing in the bathroom, about to polish my face and go to sleep.

Maybe tomorrow I’ll take the transit somewhere new, somewhere entirely random, and I won’t even worry about getting lost or constantly bumping into things and looking silly, and maybe I’ll find my way to the ocean, and I’ll feel the shining, shimmering rays glint and glimmer as they ricochet from my face, and I’ll feel the sea mist brush around me, and I’ll walk to the edge of the sand and let the waves meet my toes and leave, tickle the edges of my body and retreat.

Summer 2023

Summer 2023 Issue - The Harvard Advocate

Poetry • Summer 2023

Breedlove

Poetry • Summer 2023

Cardiology

Poetry • Summer 2023

Playing

Notes from 21 South Street • Summer 2023

Chappell Roan Has Taken Over My Life: A Musical Analysis

Notes from 21 South Street • Summer 2023

The Harvard Advocate Plays Catch

Fiction • Summer 2023

Wild Things

Fiction • Summer 2023

Reflections

Art • Summer 2023

Owls Head Weather Report

Art • Summer 2023

Lifeboat Repair at Aurora Harbor

Art • Summer 2023

Prospector in Gastineau Channel