Illustration by Gisela Levy
Ribs
rusted on the fire escape
carve red caves
in my thighs.
A porcelain tile comes loose
in my mind.
I get high
and wonder why
you didn’t pick up
the night he died.
Esmé Ablaza is a senior at Barnard College studying Information Science and Contemporary Society.
Quarto 2019 Chapbook Contest Runner-Up
(Click on the image to view the PDF version of the chapbook)
Zain Murdock is a sophomore studying Creative Writing and Human Rights at Columbia College. She loves radically.
Illustration by Cameron Lee
This piece was first published in Quarto’s 2019 Spring Print Edition.
and as if he simply needed something to do with his hands on the day of rest / the good Lord made me like this / my soul attached to dust / brittle translucent chest overflowing / i am the ancestor of longing / i am not evil / i am worth grace / it has been said if you recite a psalm long enough it will coat your heart so even in sleep your blood beats to the rhythm of the lord / i chant to myself: i am not evil slash i am worth grace / my worth the subtext of a psalm unwritten / i have not yet forgiven myself for all that i will never be / these hands break so easily / i try not to crumble / i cling to dust / i remember all the funerals i could not go to / years after and i still fall apart at the stray thought / limbs spilling from the flesh / all the life in it gone by the time it kisses the earth / when i pieced myself together again at the bottom of my sorrows / it was because God willed it / i am not evil / i am not grace / because God willed it / my soul clings to dust / if it was His will i would be happy / it is His will that some whom i loved are no longer here / when a father wills it a house is warmed / i know whom to blame for this chill / in the house of the lord / there is more time lost than i have left / but i will endure / some days i wish i had died before anyone i loved / so i would never have to mourn / or learn to live without them / this is to say i would give anything to see some people again / even my life / what am i to do come days i want to hold my own head / in my hands / what to do but pray / read scripture as psalm / tomorrow i will not be evil i will be worth grace / who to blame for delaying my own funeral / but myself / if i have learned anything from my lifetime of silence from my father / it is that the duty of a man is to endure and to suffer in silence / that it is best if no one else knows you suffer / the evil eye never blinks / and atlas will never shrug / i have endured this earth for so long / martyrdom would be the same as salvation / in all the oceans of hearts i have dived into / i have been searching for a good place to drown / you may sever my head, father and i have no doubt that you will but the one to hurl this body into the sea or the earth will be me / and i will keep on singing / i cling to my soul / i search for the meaning of death / in the maws of the dead / from within them God whispered to me the evil are not worth grace / salvation is far from the wicked because they do not seek it / all the spirit i have is in the seeking / dust clings to me / all i have in me are words / and memories of the dead / how much do i lose until there is nothing left / to take / how many of us did God mold from dust / just to watch be dashed on the rocks / of salvation / if i am to die a sinner / may those i love be remembered as saints / may their ruptured eyes still see paradise somewhere / i have tried just to glance a corner of it / but i have gone blind in the trying / and don’t know how to confess it / if i have learned anything from my brother that was born asleep / and his spirit that has followed me to the depths of my soul / it is that even a dead man must not let suffering stop him / from collapse / i dont know how to ask for help / without shattering / so i will endure / and pray for mercy / until i am erased by it / my soul becoming one with dust
This piece was first published in Quarto’s 2019 Spring Print edition. It was awarded the 2019 Best Poetry Prize by Guest Judge Spencer Reece.
Illustration by Cameron Lee
after Tracy K. Smith
Asleep, we breathe little cuts into the morning
and it bleeds lemony blue light. This opening–
this movement of your shoulder, the angles
of the shelves and tables sharpening themselves
into reality. The world is opening too.
How miraculous the sun. How sweet
it must think us, to celebrate it’s coming
this way, softly, every day.
Every day. To ourselves and one another. And what
if the morning is neither opening nor closing? Just
another entrance of light, another way for the sun
to needle into our cells? An injury?
That, too, we would welcome.
This piece was first published in Quarto’s 2019 Spring Print Edition.
Illustration by Dora O’Neill
there’s an ocean lodged in the sheets and the springs and
the pillow-matter and the people between them that quiver like
kite strings—while they sleep and while they don’t.
the bassline makes a wingman. the words
punctuated by the crackle-pop of the microwave
strike the porchlight and scatter—
like perfume through an atomizer.
her lips are azalea pink and so wet with gloss that if you look
close enough you can see the moon’s reflection—
begging for a bite and just a few hours underwater where
the body arcs like sheet metal in a microwave.
in one orchestral maneuver,
like love in a Faraday cage, you are quite certain
this is the end of the world.
with parachute bones, you are falling faster than sound.
overwhelmed by the
taste of impact. you briefly believe in God. the air is
synesthetic with ozone, vanilla and hibiscus in no particular order.
you find you are a child learning truth tables:
categorizing your fictions and believing them anyway.
you are beyond the knee-on-knee chewing of confessions like
strawberry bubblegum and have become
the city’s neon bright adverts that reflect off a chrome hood—
backwards, incoherent, ecstatic.
she’s drying off to the hum of midnight radio tuning.
you say this room isn’t dark, it’s just ultraviolet.
This piece was first published in Quarto’s 2019 Spring Print Edition.
Illustration by Mita Sharma
Every baby born in the United States
is dreaming of a national park
is dreaming of 60 officially designated national parks
administered by the National Park Service
is dreaming of their baby blankets dipped in cold
glacial spill, onesies washed with
soap from a plastic box
pearl christening buttons
rolled in sequoia, and sand, and mulch chips
A ranger is lining up cars at the bottom of the mountain
A ranger is collecting pacifiers and teething giraffes
for the lost and found
Every time I'm born
I’m dreaming of national parks
50 cent soft serve, metal cups of pump water,
a poorly photocopied map to lose beneath a car seat
Every American baby is dreaming about the water cycle
land management policy
brown hats
drought
congressional budget lines
wildfires
and every American baby knows the same lullaby:
Arches, Badlands, Crater Lake,
land, land land
la la and
Remind me of the covenant
You wrote.
God, must’ve been years ago when I,
God, scrawled naked across that foamy desert
blood-backed on my belly
welting and weeping,
my teeth creeping out the jaw.
Guilt is a word for it.
I was trying to make good,
to make good
the ledgers, the debts, my debts,
my bluegrass grin
ethereal and muddybare
and hardly legible as once my hand,
and with a prayer reminding
the rebar crosses streaming down broadway
to make good too.
But where
and why in my lonesome,
have I forgotten?
I reckon up my teeth as friends often.
Call them my covenant
and my tongue the rainbow
that dries the blue ridge
to bone-coils in my spine.
The ship creaks. It settles
on the drain. I hear it suckling on the pine,
I hear its want. The animals stir
with themselves. Easy.
By dawn the sun comes up. The beaches
are bloated rags. The hills sopping on the sky.
I step out and greet the day. And am lone.
Oh Lord grab me by my nape
tell me it was worth it
to leave all them behind
and let me go free.
Illustration by Sophie Levy
Joan Tate is a sophomore at Columbia College planning on majoring in creative writing with a focus on poetry. Growing up moving across Virginia as a fifth generation pastor’s kid, her work focuses on confusions and conflicts surrounding gender, intertextuality, sexuality, God, classics, guilt, and the gap between Manhattan and Appalachia. Instagram.
Illustration by Gisela Levy
I watched The Last Jedi last night,
and if that deters you from reading further,
I poured a cup of coffee for myself this morning.
There. Now
we are in this together. I had a realization in two parts–
walking into the water up to my waist,
then plunging the rest in altogether,
though it’s April, though it’s absurd–
that is how my mother taught me.
Watch your parents break a rule they’ve made for themselves.
Text their spouse and drive,
have that one extra glass of wine,
rescind unconditional love, fear strangers
and forget to greet them.
Now imagine all the rules they don’t have for themselves:
no rules against making
that exit ramp before the Delaware Water Gap,
no rules against
having no bank account, no ownership, $3.75 left over
for coffee.
I read once that no one writes about money in poems
because of inflation:
my children may not understand how three dollars
could buy a cup of coffee,
or why, though we never went hungry,
I have to count every dollar I spend.
And as for The Last Jedi–I let someone take me
and forgot about the past, which is something else
my mother taught me,
the self lost in cinema, so every week,
I go alone and find her. For me she is not stuck upstate
packing her mother’s belongings up,
does not only possess one bedroom, a Toyota Camry,
and a defective spine. She is there, and she is in the next empty seat;
she is the driver, or the passenger,
and we have both seen the bobcat down the road at the same time,
wait for the curtain of unbelievable rain to hammer us,
both gasp the shimmered beauty of an April blizzard
before I grow up, make money, become my own parent.
Kristian Anfinn Tonnessen is a graduating senior in Columbia College, studying Creative Writing and Russian Literature. He is curious about where the dozens of socks he has lost in the last four years have gone. Are they happy? Do they remember him? Instagram
god hands you a magic 8 ball
Illustration by Charlie Blodnieks
you shake it
it says signs point to no
a hole opens below you
you fall and fall and fall
you hit a ground
it looks like what you thought heaven would look like
lots of white people
all your shitty friends
the dudes on that soccer team
your grandmother
you think
you misread the ball
maybe you were flying that whole time
but
we’ve got it better up here
i promise
we’re naked all the time
every concrete sidewalk has hopscotch
that rain will never wash away
there are swings at every playground
god is three black women
they run a radio station called the good word
there are no commercials
but where you fell
you
get bored
the leaves can’t fall or change colors
it’s 55 degrees every day
you wonder why all the brown people
are somewhere else
we dance on clouds
and shit
every time someone asks how you doing
we say real good
there are no white people
to kick us out of places
if anyone tries to take our fingerprints
our hands will turn paper to flesh
and form a big black fist
also there are no white people
i met jesus last tuesday
he had dreads to the floor
they smelled like incense
we made up secret hand shake
i would show you
but its secret
you never met jesus
you live in four story house with your parents
it is peach
like all the other houses
we don’t have houses here
we beyond walls
you look
in the glove compartment
of your range rover
where you hid a small sheet of paper with the words
that appeared on the 8 ball years ago
but we don’t have to look
for anything
my grammy is here
she finally learned how to swim
and you
unfold the paper
start to cry
you spot a phone in the back seat
panic
dial 1-800-INNOCENT
and raise the phone to your ear
like you’ve done many times
but this time
god picks up
you say
hello
This piece was originally published in Quarto’s 2018 Spring Print Edition.
Illustration by Mitali Sharma
begins as a bedtime story. Annie surfaces for air, mouth leaking
white things into the sink. She spills forward until
I think she could split open: like all first children, she pretends to
die. I do not ask if I can see this. In one dream, we slice
open jackfruit, its belly a fresh storm under our tongues. This is
what it is to kiss her: the seeds burn through my mouth
for days. In Shanghai, we are sixteen, a new language cutting into
the body of the jackfruit. We fold and unfold our palms to
clean them. One night, we spend hours searching the dictionary
for the word that means naked. She tells me she is scared.
Me too, I say. In the living room, the television static is soft enough
to swallow, like a child hungry for her own ghost.
I learn that after the firstborn, girls are nameless. This is how
religion is made. Annie, I call, and she nods—in the dark,
we admit that we are sacred. That summer, the fruit is so golden
it is bloodless: the beginning of the world, as knowing as this.
Illustration by Sophie Levy
what was the first voice in my head
that told me i needed to be fixed?
was it the echo of laughter from
the boys in school,
“your nose is so flat, you look like a pug”
pugs are cute, i say
only to be drowned out by the deep rumble of their prepubescent throats,
and the twitching smirks on their faces.
what was the first time when
i pulled at my skin, the part that wasn’t tight
soft, like pork belly—
no, my belly—
and said to myself that it wasn’t okay?
you’re disgusting
monstrous
fat
ugly
disproportionate
despicable
voices reverberating so clearly in my head.
you’re not perfect, no, you’re not perfect but
you’re so beautiful for an asian girl:
black hair cascading down shoulders
such oriental, almond-shaped eyes
I wanna hook up with an Asian girl for the first time
...
Lol I guess not.
(read 5:36PM)
boom, screech—the feedback is rough
against your ears, your nose, your lips, your skin,
your eyes,
the same eyes that your grandma said you would look prettier with
if you just got the surgery.
it rings throughout the night.
my mother said once,
“you always want something that you can’t have.”
is it possible to reclaim every fiber of
this being?
the tattered skin against my thumbnails,
picked raw in moments of panic,
my uneven and colorless lips,
bursts of pain moving up my right shin like a highway, the roughness
of a body not mine inside
My Body, my limbs in all its extremities—
the swollen twitch of the post-surgery eyelids i so desperately craved
and the aching hardness of the muscle i tried for
but could never have,
it was never mine in the first place, no?
do you want it?
i want to fix it, i say,
not knowing that i never needed to be fixed
in the first place.
Sarah Lu is currently a junior majoring in political science at Columbia College and grew up in Beijing, China. She is passionate about gender justice, Asian American activism, political theory, and pasta—she believes in the uniting power of the universal love for noodles. She is also really glad that she deleted her dating apps recently. Instagram
Illustration by Charlie Blodnieks and Dora O’Neill
If I could bring back Seamus Heaney
maybe then I’d have a lover
a real loverman for me,
perhaps he’d even be my boyfriend
and if we went over to Ireland
I am sure it would be magic—
Maybe I’ll bring back Seamus Heaney
maybe then I’ll have a lover.
I can smell us lying there upon the grass I feel
it always to be true, the muscles of his arm, the chafing of his stubble, soft, gentle in the light
of an Autumn sun through rotting leaves, of bitter breeze and the scratchy rag
he calls a blanket that we lie beneath—
We are so lonely on the soil.
And could he love me, do you think,
with white hair snowy on the manger
with love lust falling through the pilgrims
and all his sweaters wrapped around me?
It is a drip feed to the cannula—
Those are his lovely words, not mine—
It is a panic disco nightmare, lovely
Heaney please be mine.
Robert Mayo is a senior studying English literature and working part time in the Columbia Writing Center. When he’s not writing, he likes to do improvisational comedy, or buy books he won’t have the time to read.
Illustration by Sophia Levy
I look through a winter’s distance at the half-moons
Rising on a nail, solemn, unanswered distress
From a gelid outpost. In a winter like this, there is
Unique understanding of the speech of clouds
And chimney smokes, and scudding evocations
Issued from a silent mouth.
Long-lived clouds of this coal-town, once pomps,
Now dream down at a field of unsettlement,
Where before were sprawling signals of proud
Wolf-tribes, newly arisen in perspiration, having
Dispatched in steam embraceful harvests,
And mothers scouting chunks among flints
All along the gilded rails.
Such dreams invade in wintry hush, humming:
Things of the good hearth, flour with cornmeal,
Celery with elm leaves, chimneys that sustained
The mortal firework and commended it upward,
And the lush shine of cellar-cabbages. Also
A taishogoto my brother found buried,
And we called it the happy harp.
In a winter like this, there is an understanding
Of vacancy under unfeeling skies. I look at
The dumb brick-mounds, once a puffer like me,
And all is sense in that aeriform dialect,
Scudding evocations of those passers-by,
Long sighing of this land.
This is my first year at Columbia College. Major undeclared as of yet. I am from Shenzhen, China, and came to school in the States four years ago.
Illustration by Gisela Levy
In the bathroom mirror, I stand dim
and old. The women are all around me. On the walls
and the door. Behind the thick, plastic stalls. Scratching.
The trees speak soft tonight, but the skinny one rubs herself
against the bricks out there.
Sloughing off scrolls of paper skin.
Wooden walls wooden walls.
The green public bathroom on Cumberland Island
next to the Live Oak trees.
Those ropes that dug and wormed their way
into the earth. I hear the Chincoteague ponies,
their manes swishing.
I am sitting in the sand, the dunes are white and sloping,
and somewhere far off are the horses.
The beach trees mime the story
of that fallen Magnolia in my yard back home.
The root ball that kicked
up the wooden fence and set Aggie free.
I went running through the neighborhood
all day to find her. Sitting in a small mailbox
with her paws crossed.
She followed me home, scratching. She sniffed at the dark walls,
the ones I’m building in the sand. The dunes crash against themselves
like splintering wood. “We’re going home, girl.
This sand is soft like home.”
Bernadette (Bernie) Bridges is a senior in Columbia College studying creative writing with a focus in poetry. She would love to eat some boiled cabbage right about now. Instagram
Illustration by Iona Tan
When the world should’ve been an oyster,
she worked at a laundromat & dry cleaners
washing delicates and designer coats,
ironing folds from a husband’s dress shirt
when dearest, dangsin*, is across water
is a cross ocean?
Fluency, truancy, delicacy sewn into hems
for memorization, or was it
alteration. Made in Not America but not
(store bought, ready made)
somewhere sounds stitched to English letters
scrubbed names strung on a line to dry
snipped for easy pronunciation.
A story.
Grandmother laughs at how
a party dress of loose crystal beads went
rolling, cascading, cried like mermaid pearls,
in the blue wash of revolving, spinning.
All night she reattached one by one,
hand sewing, lip syncing, we learn the craft
for phone calls that cost more than minimum wage.
The price of
little rolling tides that turn and turn until
all are alluring, lulling white, laundered and
sterilized by ultra Tide. She sits
behind the counter, legs swaying, tracing her mother’s stitches on
a threadbare handkerchief scented by hibiscus and brine.
Dry-clean only shifts of chiffon, lace, silk
(treat with caution) these shells
mend to redolence, mend new.
But does she have none of these tags
wash with warm water,
handle with care.
*something to call husband in Korean, but also love and ‘you’
Seowon (Angela) Lee is a freshman in Columbia University who will probably major in some combination of Creative Writing and English because she is indecisive and abhors math. Her work has been published in the Jet Fuel Review and the Claremont Review as well as in her high school literary magazine The Wit, which has won the National Press Association award. Instagram | Facebook
Illustration by Sophie Levy
Her middle name was Theresa.
And it’s that I never knew
that strikes me, because I’ve always wanted to name
a daughter Theresa.
Waxy is not quite the right word
for her body. The cold
is more disturbing than the texture,
when yesterday, her hands were so hot.
For the third time, I am left alone
at the house, with the aides, and her,
thanking god not for mercies
but just that no one is talking
about anything but disposing of medicines,
how many years they spent
working for Catholic Home Services.
Her middle name was Theresa,
and for all the talk of gifts,
blessings, and the mole on her brow
that allegedly looks like a heart,
she was a closed and private woman
who suffered, and caused suffering
like the rest of us. She died
with two nicotine patches on her arm,
in her sleep.
Talk of angels,
we’re only angels in what we do,
in the secrets we keep from one another
for forty years,
because there’s nothing else to do, no conclusion to be reached.
Theresa, after all, means reaper,
and the harvest of our pain
is long in reaping, golden and damp,
drying in the sun, suffering like wheat.
Kristian Anfinn Tonnessen is a senior in Columbia College majoring in creative writing and Russian Literature and Culture. He hopes to spend the next two years working as an English teacher through Teach for America, then go on to graduate school to study Russian Literature, god knows where. This is his third poem published in Quarto, and eighth overall. Facebook
Illustration by Gisela Levy
first and foremost
please don’t ever misconstrue me
this poem is not stray away
but to navigate
into a truer me
imma spoken poet truthfully and usually i tell the truth,
but you see from my youth, i learned that my pain was a blessing
never conquered the sunshine, so often used my rain as a weapon
my tears would stain through my confessions
and my fears would frame my adolescence
but, my journey was seeded into a region where only truth can see it
started with 2 dreams,
sailed the waters from Mali to Harlem to accomplish three things
raise two queens
and one king
reign supreme
but, still Allah fearing
mashaallah i’m blessed to be one of Allah’s children
gave me the rhythm to manifest a vision
i been told that I been a boss
Allah blesses the paper that i scribe my words across
i just hope that one day before i meet the most Divine
i’m intertwined
and defined
in the thoughts of all minds
create eternal tidal waves
and watch my metaphors rise
and fall
through the test of time.
Mamadou Yattassaye is a second year Columbia College student studying creative writing with a pre-nursing track. He aspires to be a nurse practitioner but also is pursuing his poetry and music as well.
Instagram | Facebook | Soundcloud | soul4youth
Illustration by Dora O’Neill
Daily robots learn to love
after bank checks, photos of bank checks.
A smartphone and her mother
To be held. To recognize
bank accounts. Today, A.I. is quiet.
Let’s take a walk.
In the future Clockwise is all around us.
A.I. helps without seeing.
What other objects are that thing?
Machines need to understand
the head of the photo. Three people
3 bodies in the park riding a bike. A video.
Computer was among those, we didn’t know.
Computer didn’t know how to write
about a cat, a dog, an airplane and a sailboat.
Color and intensity.
A.I. looked to become increasingly associated
with a physical entity. For example, a dog.
A dog through a cage. The limits of the dog.
“Yes, that’s a dog.” Our first word, our time
inside the wheel.
We are designed to perform, to rely.
The dog is a baked good. Another language barrier.
How do they understand
such subtle barriers?
To be nuanced. So taken
and so hidden.
Bernadette (Bernie) Bridges is a senior at Columbia College studying creative writing with a focus in poetry. She loves hamsters and she hopes to be one someday.
Illustration by Charlie Blodnieks
Would you care
to share
your feelings
about all of this?
I can see her
just behind my forehead
broken on the floor
and the flags of China dancing
sweetly on the moore.
“It is sad,”
I repeat
(as I have three times before)
“It is bad,”
I conclude,
and speak no more.
Robert Mayo is a senior at Columbia College studying English Literature. When he’s not writing he likes to run, do improv, and pet his dog.
Illustration by Mallory Evans
She steps through the door, held open
through clanging sweet shop bells
to agar, sucrose, stitched carbon structures,
rings of peach.
Girls should be sugar and spice, he says,
should shush and shuffle,
be bitten lips and held down fists,
as if ‘everything nice’ is everything.
We are what we are fed.
You’re lucky I don’t hit girls, he says
then from where blossomed
our busted licorice lacquer lips?
Dust our lashes with snow sugar,
mute our maw with molasses
to stick a finger and lick a taste.
Flies gasp in amber drops, cavities captivating decay
in a candy shop of sweet acridity. Dare buy
our silence in pennies and granules of hypocrisy, and
dare say, smile for me, sweetheart, darling, dearest.
See how the heart is slewn in insulin, by
a bowl of sugar, jar of honey
sitting behind glass on sunlit window panes
stained with sticky fingerprints.
She kicks open the door of the shop, she buys nothing
he says. Sweet doe-eyed, tongue-tied, complacent convenience,
she says I eat what I want.
Seowon (Angela) Lee is a freshman in Columbia College who will probably major in some combination of Creative Writing and English because she is indecisive and abhors math. Her work has been published in the Jet Fuel Review and the Claremont Review as well as in her high school literary magazine The Wit, which has won the National Press Association award. She is currently obsessed with first snow, Percy Shelley, and trying to survive her first semester of college. Instagram | Facebook