Strange Branches by Annelie Hyatt

Illustration by Jacqueline Subkhanberdina

Crooked teeth challenge the banality of our dinner
A jagged cemetery that haunts my speech
You were floating past the hinterlands of my embarrassment
Toward the monochrome beach of intimacy

You were floating past the hinterlands of my embarrassment
Searching for nothing in particular
In the meantime, I slashed through premonitions of loneliness
I calculated for myself in the bubbles of midnight

In the meantime, I slashed through premonitions of loneliness
Predicated on your impending departure
I slept on an enemy’s couch, I slept as dense as a dog
and you are a stomach of suitcases

I slept on an enemy’s couch, I slept as dense as a dog
That night, my tears gathered on the acetate
Nausea flares and I’m steeped in your parting decree
Woken up by the pigeons menacing someone else’s windowsill

Nausea flares and I’m steeped in your parting decree
I cannot enter your language, only listen to it
Finally, leashed to my chair in a bolted cinema
I turn toward the exit closest to you

Annelie Hyatt (she/her) is a senior at Barnard College studying English and history. She enjoys reading books and playing kendo in her free time. 

you, me, and john singer sargent by Charlie Coleman

This piece was first published in Quarto’s 2023 Spring Print Edition.

Illustration by Jorja Garcia

isn’t it lovely how in boston
so many public squares are named for painters?
a conversation of oil and teeth, had succinctly and wholly.
two is an integer with rare and special properties.

haymaker and the sleeping girl and it could be us.
we could exist in any sort of communicative configuration:
contemporaries in a downtown scene, ancient two-faced gods,
a student and a magazine typist.
even a man and a woman, imagine that!

representation fails, try less representational
and okay, nose to the grindstone. lines without capture,
wide open plains of garbled brushstrokes,
rivers and bricks enough to make anyone sick.

red howls of beaches and the end of color and the end of interiority.

promises of white beans and lifestyle changes
are shoddily wrapped.
both of us swear to overcome our provincial tendency towards worship,
but maybe it’s the city that lacks a symbolic language
for accounting insurmountable ecstasy
and heartstring duties,
the weeping we do in margins,
for sitting meagerly on a tuesday afternoon
waiting for a palmful of light.

you opened your mouth one night and breathed a pearl into my ear.
a baby cried for hours but we were at the museum,
we were on the floor angling for leverage.

i’ve seen pictures of the place where you live but i know you can never take me there.

i return to the beach, i am trying
for a string of words like a phone number.
opaque and speckled like a highway.
i suspect with dread that there is nothing that cannot be made like something else.

“less representational!” a director cries somewhere.
okay. i shall try.

at the museum we saw
the john singer sargent painting that made me resolve to tell you i loved you.

really, it could’ve been a rembrandt. it could’ve been a passing cloud.
it’s an object nothing more than the one i write now.
sometimes a symbolic language is overkill.

a spoon, to gut the creature.
remove the seeds and make it gaunt, hollow, baroque,
a poem with no words. buttered toast on a plate.

we never leave the beach.
we feast on green from the hummingbirds.
somewhere in the future john singer sargent paints great beasts on a cave wall.

Charlie Coleman (he/they) is a sophomore at Barnard studying English and philosophy. His work has previously been published in ANGLES, ZENIADA, and The Sandy River Review—he is also delighted to be published in Quarto for the second time! They are passionate about new wave films, love letters, kitchen sink dramas, film photography, 60s music, and long walks around the city.

My Lover, Filled with Abundant Elements by Natalie DiFusco

Illustration by Ishaan Barrett

The closest thing I’ve had
to a tragic embrace
was deflating an air mattress

I fell with all my weight, eyes closed
because I knew she’d catch me all the same
because I knew I was inflicting her
with a slow,
tortuous
death

Upon impact, she wrapped around
my outstretched limbs
as if I were a river
protected by her charcoal mountains
and everything else felt like confetti

Natalie (she/her) is a junior at Barnard studying English and creative writing. She’s from Long Island and can usually be found among the trees in Riverside Park, listening to music. You can find her on Instagram @nataliedifusco

The Brooklyn Bridge is Not Everyone I’ve Lost by Stephanie Fuentes

This piece was first published in Quarto’s 2023 Spring Print Edition.

Illustration by Ishaan Barrett

I run so fast I am not running. Your home
holed out of graveyards and I turn up the

speaker. It is so hot the piers below are rimmed
with bleed of the flies and it is only so

terrible because you are not here to witness.
You do not have to tell me you understand

how death works. Here I am: above the bridge
where a car slides into the water though

no-one is passenger and I cry into my arms.
Light forming a slender arrow through a window

past this city to incise sight. The beam
underneath my feet cool as the metal belly

of beer cans and my hands so calloused
I believe myself to be Jesus even despite

not knowing the future. Here is my lightness:
sliced in the middle of a clubroom made entirely

of ocean. How feathers fall through the skied ceiling
so fiercely I imagine it your body. Even here I am so

scared of my father’s hand striking my face I forget
he can sometimes be kind. My own half-weight

gliding through a tunnel mouthed of cars and
into a glowing field licked clean of your

absence. How vast and wasteful. Bombs could
snow any minute now and it would be a miracle;

I pour saltwater into my body to keep my grief
alive: see it backlit and boned to my teeth.

Stephanie Fuentes (she/her) is a poet and writer from Boston and New York City. Currently, she is a first-year at Barnard College. She loves cold brew, lyrical essays and memoirs, and the tenth track on Carrie & Lowell. 

Superbloom by Vanessa Yang

Illustration by Ashley Yung

She asks me how much it hurts and I tell her I’m fine.
The sting of the needle is a bite like an old friend,
a mouthful of teeth secured to the skin under
my left shoulder blade. Fading into the background,
the hum of a gun like a gramophone, singing along
to the tune of permanence. I’m an auditorium,
my body a performance, and the patrons in the front row
like the singing just fine but are waiting for me to dance.
The curtains roll open and instead of a stage it’s a sink,
many sinks, the basins and ranges of the Mojave, contoured
in alternating altitudes like the musculature across my back.
I sank my feet into the sand and gusts blew the dunes over me
like a blanket, a cantata of transience chanted out
under their breaths. Brittlebush blossoms turned their faces
to the sun, their resin dripping like honey onto the shade of my neck.
I just want to be decorated in flowers, ambulatory ink seeping
into the vinyl of my skin, I want wandering lines that remain dark
through dust storms, I want you to be a mapmaker tracing the
topography of my spine and I want to be holy so please
make me a cathedral, my windows honeycombed with color,
stifled storm-light diffusing across the dome. You see, when it rains
particularly heavily during the southern California winter,
wildflowers drink up the downpour like an oasis. Come springtime,
poppies wash over the hillsides and reclaim the land, paint
the muscled back of the coastline in the colors of precolonial
consciousness, every lakeside and mountaintop surface blistering
in floral brights. But the curtains are closing, and I’m back in the chair,
my body pressed open like a butterfly in a frame, kowtowing in front of
an artist with her needles in my back, and we’ve returned to the singing,
a hymn held out over a lightless auditorium or a lament echoing
throughout the chapel of my ribcage. The enormity of my skeleton
scares me, and the audience is still waiting for me to dance,
to go home to the hillsides and pray for forgiveness, to kneel
among the citrine and the amethyst and beg for reversal,
singing my own name so quietly as if winding back a clock,
oh dear Lord, won’t you give me back an empty stage
or an uncarved wall, and we can start again, let me prove to you
I’m capable of bowing without wanting something in return.
But no, I’m awake in the thoughtless rain, and that was a dream
that didn’t happen. I went home to the hillsides and
planted trees that could not grow, for this was a desert,
not the redwoods, the land was already tired of nurturing life
that didn’t belong, and the wildflowers faded back into the dirt
by June. I went home to the hillsides and all I could hear was
a voice asking me how much it hurt, the performance of my body,
which has remained so resolutely still in this chair despite
my best attempts to breathe, but the sting of the needle is
temporary, just another dream that hasn’t quite ended. Back home
my mother hikes up a mountainside blanketed by blue-eyed grass
and worries about permanence, picks up premonitions of regret
before we even have a chance to feel them. My mother has always
feared this, the topographic map that my body has become. She will
wonder what the wasteland between my shoulder blades looks like
when I am older. Consider it, I will tell her, a superbloom.

Vanessa Yang (she/her) is a junior at Barnard majoring in biochemistry. She enjoys driving next to the beach, taking pictures of the sky, and talking about California. You can find her on Instagram @vanessayyang.

THE BLACK JAGUAR HAD PINK CLAWS by Andres F. Arevalo Zea

Illustration by Kaavya Gnanam

PARA YAHYA HASSAN

THE WHOLE SAFARI SCREAMED AND MOANED.
FRIGHTENED TO THEIR BONES. MEN AND WOMEN ALIKE.
NOT FROM HIS TERRIFYING WARNING ROAR.
NOT FROM HIS HUMAN-TEARING FANGS. NO.
THEY WERE AFRAID BECAUSE:
HOW COULD SUCH A MENACING MONSTER HAVE PINK CLAWS?
NOBODY ASKED HOW HE HAD GOTTEN THE PINK CLAWS.
NOBODY ASKED WHY THERE WAS NAIL POLISH DEEP IN THE JUNGLE. NO.
THEY ASKED:
WHY WOULD SUCH A MENACING MONSTER HAVE PINK CLAWS?
AMONGST THE SQUEALS THE ORDER CAME WITH NO HESITATION.
THE SOUND OF THUNDER.
AS SOON AS HIS BODY HIT THE GROUND THE CONFLICT STARTED.
THE COUPLE FROM CALIFORNIA WANTED THE FUR. FOR THEIR NEW HOUSE.
THE COUPLE FROM VERMONT WANTED THE EYES. FOR THEIR BIZARRE
COLLECTIONS.
THE GUIDE WANTED THE FANGS. TO HAVE SOMETHING. (HE GUESSED.)
THE ENVIRONMENTALIST WANTED THE CLAWS. TO SHOW HER FRIENDS.
WHEN ONLY THE GUTS WERE LEFT, AN OLD WHITE WOMAN SAID:
GIVE THEM TO THE indios. SO THEY CAN MAKE SOUP. OR WHATEVER IT IS THEY
DO.

THE NATIVES GAVE THE BLACK JAGUAR A PROPER BURIAL.
UNLIKE THE SAVAGES IN THE SAFARI.

Andres F. Arevalo Zea (he/him) is a Colombian sophomore studying creative writing & computer science at CC '26. He was the recipient of the Academy of American Poets Prize for Tufts University last spring and is a staff writer for the Arts & Culture section of the Columbia Spectator. You can find him on Instagram @andresarevalo2205.

Mariposa by Andres F. Arevalo Zea

Illustration by Watson Frank

para Harry Schiller, Dean Simpson, y Jennifer Minnen

Now I
only go home
for the
Yellow Blossom. Dying

flashes of love were
never enough
rope to hold
the slam
of that sliding door. El

gato vacilando al
tigre. Especially
with five
months of fake
romance. Especially
with ten
years of
physical abuse. Crashing

down all in one fall: the
bees look majestic;
the tree’s flowers
are different
from down here. With a

rough stick of wood
kept inside the piano stool
or with Her bare hands.
My mother used
to punch the butterflies out of
my stomack. I’m sorry I broke
the eraser. Face

to the floor, I’m running away.
My dad sticks
Zoloft down my throat. A ver
si eso lo calma. You

said we’d get a couch and a
cat. I ran into your roots
because you forced me
to. On the bed I begged
you to stay
you booked the
first flight out of Bogota.

Andres F. Arevalo Zea (he/him) is a Colombian sophomore studying creative writing & computer science at CC '26. He was the recipient of the Academy of American Poets Prize for Tufts University last spring and is a staff writer for the Arts & Culture section of the Columbia Spectator. You can find him on Instagram @andresarevalo2205.

Eulogy, post-burial by Eleni Mazareas

This piece was first published in Quarto’s 2023 Spring Print Edition.

Illustration by Ishaan Barrett

Today we are unlike ourselves— tight-lipped
and silent. I cannot stop remembering
the grape vine, that one
winding the wood fence in front of your building.
So extensive and loved,
bulbous and purple that my eyes couldn’t see
small spiders roaming.

If you hold contempt for me I’d understand,
in the end where was I but inside
your oiled mind, within your name.
And you look beautiful today in your blue dress,

you are not so cold and hard until
I kiss your face, see
your reddening skin between waned wrist-
bones. Those greying spots
on your hand. I know you

are somewhere bathing me, tucking your fingers
in flour, parting my hair
with the blue comb. Giving yourself
again to soil. You were always living
like that, preserving yourself
for someone else.

Baba had said don’t touch the bunch
in your colander. But I ate the grapes,
you know. I would eat anything
even if I wiped your kiss off
my cheek—

you can’t feel
it now, my brown lipstick on yours.

Eleni Mazareas (she/her), BC '25, is an English and history major concentrating in imperialism and empires. She loves poetry, joy, and a good bowl of Puffins cereal. You can find her on instagram @elenitsssa.

year of the snake by Julia Tolda

This piece was first published in Quarto’s 2023 Spring Print Edition.

Illustration by Ishaan Barrett

Content warning: death

you are eating
chicken hearts
chewing on valves
veins ventricles
fat streaming
down your hands
bile-yellow into the
chlorinated water,
the waterfall
your parents installed
last summer
because what's money
for, if not
for spending?

you are telling me
a polish folk story
where the dragon has
to be punished
so they fill its
mouth with salt
dunk its head
in the river and
it drowns then
you laugh because
i was born
in the year 2000

you are reading
me bad news
from your phone
ten pronounced
dead in shooting
helicopter crash leaves
no survivors
mother cannibalizes son
to survive alaskan winter
and somehow
you're still
hungry and
i can't tell for what
i don't know

maybe
for something
to love?

Julia Tolda (she/her) is a senior at Barnard College studying comparative literature. In her poetry and collage work, she explores "saudade," a Portuguese word Tolda would define as "the heartbreaking beauty of longing." Her favorite color is pink. 

Spiderwebs by Vanessa Yang

Illustration by Jorja Garcia

I am a bad daughter I have never killed
a spider the spiders are aware of this they string

extra sticky silk webs across my bedroom door I’ve
been walking through spiderwebs white fibers

sprout from my scalp when I step out I taught
myself how to knit I wanted to knit a sweater

for my mother on her birthday but the yarn
unraveled the sweater became yarn besides

my mother was born in the summer my mother
red like rain my mother’s hands webbed white

with scars like fish scales she killed the fish in our kitchen
she kills the spiders that cling to her shadows I am no better

than a thing in the shadows I leave home at seventeen
my red yarn stretched over a map the guilt stretches me the distance

stretches the spiderwebs until one
by one the bridge cables snap concrete knuckles crack

and crumble in one bite I am swallowed by river water
a boneless fishtail sliding down a throat

Vanessa Yang (she/her) is a junior at Barnard majoring in biochemistry. She enjoys driving next to the beach, taking pictures of the sky, and talking about California. You can find her on Instagram @vanessayyang.

Mushroom Parts Labelled by Mia Xing

This piece was first published in Quarto’s 2023 Spring Print Edition.

Illustration by Ishaan Barrett

After Charles Wright and Kierkegaard somehow

I don’t feel normal about My Mushrooms,
still wait for them to softly, like mist,
hate, to sow sudden radio silence
out of tired styrofoam into my sitting and been sitting;
still there are instances of humidity that send
all of me racing, still the cottages pray for air not rain,
fearing the big flabby ones that crop up.

And because it’s an old trick, you know by mushrooms
I mean them, the folks I sprang up from like
ears on bark.
The auricularia heimuer we call “wood ears”.
So I am the fungus, poem grows from inaptitude,
and from the tree’s deadest joints spawns now
a treasonous ear.
Or I say and mean mushrooms—
un-parse-able the wisps
of I-am-attached-to-them-by-rot;
of the-forest’s-dream-of-hogs-turns
my-sporely-piety-into-courtly-love.

In fact paralyzed, as though they will always be with me,
though the problem is that they won’t,
and I cannot believe both at once, become both at once,
bitter and a future orphan.
Is there any telling if they are happy
to be here, while they are?
I don’t know—I am so busy listening.
The dream turned my sporely affection
into courtly love, sending me after
my fearsome mushrooms, the knight
pursuing the absurd autumn aroma of unsettled dirt.

Mia Xing (she/her) is a senior at Columbia College from Canada and China. Her recent discoveries include osmanthus incense and brown butter in baking. She hopes to practice law and give back to her communities. 

Song to the Moon by Eleanor Lin

Illustration by Jacqueline Subkhanberdina

Eros shook my
mind like a mountain wind falling on oak trees
—Sappho, Fragment 47, translated by Anne Carson

I paid the breeze no mind,
but the ancient trees, they knew,
gripped Earth steadfastly;

as saplings bend to the
will and whim of the
tempest—
so green as them
I bowed
to inconstant desire;

as the moon
gives freely of
her bright beauty,
so you shine for me—

above a hundred others
in whom envy yields
to awe, in this
too-brief hour
solely yours.

Eleanor Lin (she/her) is a senior at Columbia College majoring in computer science and linguistics. In addition to writing the occasional poem for Quarto, she has also contributed to the Blue and White, Columbia Daily Spectator, Columbia Science Review, and Columbia Continents human rights magazine. She was selected as a finalist for the 2022 Betty L. Yu & Jin C. Yu Creative Writing Prize from TaiwaneseAmerican.org. You can find her on Instagram @elemlin and Facebook.

on teeth by Anne Overton

Poetry Winner in Quarto’s 2023 Spring Print Edition.

This piece was first published in Quarto’s 2023 Spring Print Edition.

Illustration by Mel Wang

i’m going to crank you open
he says,
fingers in my mouth—
no, you won’t, i think,
you can’t, actually.
sure, i’ll open wide, tongue to the side, face towards you

but that is not what open means;
you’ve never seen me open,
my lips will split at the crease,
my jaws will unhinge, serpentine,
sir, i will slurp you up
blue gloves and all
i have more teeth than you could ever dream

sorry, i’ve got to crank you open here
it’s just a tight space
back here near the wisdom teeth—
of course it is, i think,
this is where i hide my desire,
this is where i rot.

Anne Overton is a senior at Barnard studying psychology. 

How to Build a Fence by Haven Capone

This piece was first published in Quarto’s 2023 Spring Print Edition.

Illustration by Jorja Garcia

I.
How many days in a row have I eaten Reese’s Pieces for breakfast?
I can’t do my girlfriend instead of my homework because I got an A on one essay,
Good God. But there are lots of ways to bend the phrase
Taking care of yourself.

How often do people wait to kiss someone because they want
to be kissed first? I kiss in every order. So it would be
shameful to put that to waste despite that I still cry in my bed because everyone hates me
while they all stand silent at the door with more
chocolate. Under the bed I’m yanking dark caramel, who pulls burns melts but still forms again
again again to rot.

II.
How wild my best friend said my depression is cooler than hers because
I am still kind. Kind? I told her I thought she was kind. You are missing the point,
She replied. I am yet to be sure of The Point – In the hot sun I
take something for nerves then gap the holes in my day thus far once I’ve
fixed my mascara I will make sense of my life and

How come I am living it.
Picture this natural disaster of falling in love like a domino, gay this place
Would you rather debate dog show ethics or spend five minutes coaxing hot
syrup into the fat of an arm as to prevent hollowing out. My bearings never fucking
gather just free solo scary mountains who growl with their jaws ripped open, tongues wet with my
arrival.

III.
How am I already aging enough to notice that I have started to forget
What people have seen of my body? telling my sister in a Starbucks that when I overheat
I shutdown she just looks at me and says she has known me my whole life I feel ashamed
therefore I am leaving
The riches of abyss sweet recluse so that my father never has to drink alone again.

How do I stop writing a million lines about limbo? The rightness of lacquered lips and
the illness of inhabiting the world. Saltless peanut butter from the jar for supper, red
by the bottle so my head doesn’t fall of this reaching neck. Hours in a room whose
walls say what I cannot: Awake? Yes. Alive? Not particularly.

Haven Capone (she/they) is a junior at Barnard tentatively studying creative writing and Italian. She plays Mellophone in the campus ensemble Columbia Pops and loves bears. She could never pick a favorite genre to write, and will forever move between them. 

Caesura by Charlie Coleman

This piece was first published in Quarto’s 2023 Spring Print Edition.

Illustration by Kaavya Gnanam

It’s a drag on history or philosophy, maybe.
After 11 minutes the movie is discarded. Film critics weep!
The jewel of my mind is no piece of theory.

Some weeks I direct Hamlet and you rewrite the Bible,
and some weeks we fuck into the night and miss our trains.
I mean not to be crude but rather to be vulgar,

to speak in my home tongue. Mornings were silent.
Perhaps if we could dissect a human soul
like a pig fetus, we could quit our jobs, be light-dependent.

I press us towards curiosity while you struggle
through atmospheric reentry, flipping pennies,
always paying close attention to entropy and unraveling thus.

Always trending earthward, restless with superstition.
On some griping Tuesday: a line of questioning advanced.
It marches on foreign territory with champagne.

Is there love without distance or beauty without death?
Can I name you without killing you? There is pain too,
in what’s for dinner tomorrow, in domestic fantasy.

If every word is a blood money diamond,
then we are lost, thinking the same thoughts
on different frequencies, still kissing through the morning

but never letting light through the blinds. No machine
operates with complete efficiency, and every I love you
must burn some meaning off into heat.

Though, I hope, that phrase less than others.
They fight wars on every street corner, yet we
wait for the mail. Drive to the shore. We could elope even,

were we less saturated with urban sediment.
It is our fault, for believing there are still codes to crack.
We could pave roads, were we not creatures of sentiment.

Charlie Coleman (he/they) is a junior at Barnard studying English and philosophy. His work has previously been published in ANGLES, ZENIADA, and The Sandy River Review—he is also delighted to be published in Quarto again! They are passionate about new wave films, love letters, kitchen sink dramas, film photography, 60s music, and long walks around the city.

Sheffield by Phoebe Mulder

This piece was first published in Quarto’s 2023 Spring Print Edition.

Illustration by Jorja Garcia

Yesterday we wandered through the cemetery
it wasn’t a metaphor it was just something to do.
It's not purgatory if the train passed through
though we stand in Northern windows
and we wonder. To ourselves, of course.
Well you wanted out of here (I had watched
this movie before, and heard the songs, for
that matter). So you wrote essays on the old
observatory and I offered flimsy lines about
history. When you kicked gravel I imagined
a thousand tiny spines scattering and when birds
cooed at our cereal silt sometimes I sang along.
If only to make my mom grin. If only to sound
more like her. If I stayed I would teach the
thrushes how to read. And I would be a waitress
with homemade earrings and I would learn
to laugh without a tongue. Yesterday we fought
over my driving – I’m awful with stoplights
and I want you to promise to come back. I dug
fingers in my grandma’s compost and screamed
when the worms wanted more than apple
cores. They’re coming for your heart, you said.
Later you bent on bedspread and your body
was a comma and you blew smoke towards
the window crack and I tucked birthday cards
from Cici in my underwear drawer. If I stayed
I would write books about bird feeders and
islands and find myself in the footnotes.

Phoebe Mulder (she/they) is a sophomore at Barnard studying History with a minor in Education. She enjoys ginger pigeons, coffee mugs with sentimental value, and over-analyzing lyrics on Genius. You can often find her hanging trash on her wall, insisting it’s a collage.

Gatekeeper by Jennifer Guizar Bello

Illustration by Tomiris Tatisheva

Written in 2021 age 19*

Intellectual
Poverty - An open letter to Columbia/ Barnard

The white girl at my historically white college mocks me
Her words jumping off her tongue flawlessly
Like pigeons flocking at the sounds of footsteps
Ironic that we live in new york
Don’t you know? Even the upper west side has sewer rats.

She’s used to always being right
Her tongue is the made up of the same
Christopher Columbus rock hard stone
Her tone is made up of the same
Red
White
And blue
like the flag.

My tongue
Quivers
My lips sealed
My body is an earthquake
Like the ones that displace people,
Only this time it's displacing me
Only this time it’s your words picking at me
And not your drill

She mocks me for not knowing her stupid cultural references.
I’m not sorry for not knowing who Cyndi Lauper is
Or Molly Ringwald.
I’m not sorry I didn’t read the yellow wallpaper
Or the Great Gatsby.
Mocks me for being a product for her disruption

A product of her ancestors disruption
You’re right you're not the culprit
But you’re responsible for upholding the same
Destructive force

Kept poor brown and black kids captive

There's poor brown and black kids dancing the schoolyard with chipped paint
Lead overflows their water fountains

They are told not to drink water.

Kids whose first meal of the day was stale rice krispy cereal
Kids whose only moments of serenity were only present during nap time.
Kids who couldn’t afford more than a pen and paper
And a soul.

My first beautiful memory was reading the
Magic Tree house
On the sunny steps of my underfunded schoolyard.

How I yearned to be like those little white children
Roaming on forgein land
Touching the stars with their bare fingertips

Meanwhile I burn my hands while playing with fire

At my elitist historically white college

The chandelier glows with every lightbulb
Staring at the golden rim I see myself.
I’ve never been fit for glitter or glamour
In my reflection I see my mother, the cleaner
Cutting her fingertips with sharp pieces of glass
I’m the worker at the front desk,
The cook at the grill
The janitor cleaning up your spill.
White faces pass me with entitlement and disgust.
I tell the worker,
To have a good day.
I tell the cook to give me whatever he can,
To relax his shoulders,
He doesn’t have to pretend.
I know he’s had a long day.
I tell the janitor,
I know how to clean after myself.

I see his tired bones shaking under the sun-like glow.
If the light fell differently, I could've been him

Wine bottles of my ancestors blood
feed you from their fingertips
My father was a farmer, constructor, labor worker So you Could be the next jeff bezos
So you Could ignore the houseless man on the street corner
So you Could act like “you worked for everything you have.”

Everytime I look at a white man I want to throw up.

I’m not sorry my school plays were made up of recycled and donated parts
I’m sorry that children at my school play with a broken dream and a future that was not made for them.
I’m sorry that I let you break me, just so you could have fun
Tearing me apart
Choosing parts of my identity just to validate and invalidate

“You’re smart for a girl who grew up in the hood”
Public housing was my best friend
The sirens on my street were lullabies
At the age of 5, I realized not all loud noises were fireworks.

For the child of an immigrant like me there is no
Teenage dream
I spent years looking inside those closed gates.
Silver and steel
Metal bars
Only this time you are praised if you can get in.

How can you explain
Metal detectors at school
More police than counselors
“50% drop out rate”
How can you explain
Life as a literal test you were never prepared for
Keeping the poor, poor and the rich, rich
Millions of dollars in debt
Just to have the bare minimum to survive
A vicious cycle of exploitation
They always tell the poor kid
“If you work hard enough you’ll get somewhere”
They never said we’d die getting there

I guess that happens when you are born into a world that simply wasn’t made for you.
I hate waking up and going to school
When people are being murdered
by the same system that made education another system of oppression
I hate waking up and going to a school that is directly responsible for that oppression.

So I stop telling myself I’m not enough
I stop telling myself that this world wasn't built for a girl like me

There’s a version of this poem where i drown in silence
Bite my lip
Hold my tongue
But not this one.

Jennifer Guizar Bello is a student at Columbia University.

The Beach by Chiamaka Kanu

Illustration by Ishaan Barrett

They say the eyes are the window to the soul but I think you can learn the most about a person
by looking at their hands. My mother says I have long nail beds. I always thought they were
short. Compared to hers, they are long. Did you notice that, in the car, I put lotion on my hands?
Preparing them to embrace you in the softest way I could. Did you try for me, love? I think of this
when I yearn for the soft sting of your touch.

Chiamaka (she/her) is a second-year at Barnard College studying Neuroscience & Behavior and English. She has been writing for as long as she can remember, starting with short stories, and recently found a home in poetry. She likes trying new things. You can find her on instagram @chichi.kanu.

Lupine by Ana Carpenter

Illustration by Tomiris Tatisheva

Content warning: implied suicide

Wake up and touch your face. Feel for fur, nestled behind ears, beneath your chin. Don’t panic—you knew this was coming. Don’t worry about your sister coming up the stairs, she’s not awake yet, not this early. You can feel the hum of the fluorescent lights tickling the hairs on the back of your neck. They’re innocent hairs for now, soft and downy. You are a bird waiting for the monster to emerge. If you tumble out of your bathroom nest of razors and toothpaste, will your limbs crack open? Will the fur, the fangs, the claws wrestle out of you? Step outside. Practice howling at the sky. How will you do it, when the time comes? Imagine the tilt of your neck, the snarl of your teeth. Lips curl back, blackened gums. Shriveled wolf girl howls are useless. You aim to terrify. Narrow your eyes and look through the trees. Out there, past the creek of lazy sweltering summer fame, past hawks cloaking their young with feathery wings, past the teeny-tiny doll that slipped from your jacket pocket on a family hike, you weren’t allowed to search for her, you couldn’t save her—past everything there is a lake. Don’t swim to the bottom. Don’t hover at the edge of the slick oily water and stare into the endless dark. There is nothing down there for you, nothing for wolf girls with claws and canine teeth. It’s okay to be sad. Soon no one will recognize you and you will not recognize the sadness. Somewhere there is a little bird girl at the bottom of a lake and she is not sad. Little bird girls shrivel away in bedrooms. Little bird girls crawl up the stairs at five a.m. and tell you they want to die. You rip her apart because you don’t know what else to do. Her brittle squawks mean nothing. Accept that the transformation is coming. Accept that your sister is not coming up the stairs. Snarl at the forest because this is your fault. If you run through the trees, eyes narrowed, you will find a teeny-tiny doll in a pile of gray-brown leaves. In the second-floor bathroom you will find yourself in a mirror. White toothpaste stains on the counter. When you howl into the bottom of the sink it will sound like wings.

Ana Carpenter (she/her) is a sophomore studying English at Columbia College. Originally from Chicago, she enjoys long walks and watching TV. You can find her on instagram @ana_carpenterr.

Five Seconds by Savanna Rust

Illustration by Jorja Garcia

Smile with your eyes
and i will with mine
Crooked teeth and all
Tell me you’re hurting with no words uttered
from your lips, as swollen as they are,

I see your tea-stained pearls for teeth;
crooked smile and cracked vocal chords, bleeding
you’re bleeding and are trying to stop the blood;
these are your lyrics from a song unsung
a life unlived

Do you know the body holds so much of life’s pleasures?
a beautiful plausible purpose unknown to those with chipped teeth,
broken nails and fatigued eyelids
desiring closure every five seconds

One,
some have never known the capabilities of the human body
only the persephone

Two,
the pang of living plagues each moment
like clockwork with an empty feeling eroding the body of itself.

Three,
but if you smile with your eyes,
you cannot escape the transparency
fluidity
vulnerability the body has to offer.

Four,
that arrives when a stranger or two exchange your glance for theirs;
a momentary exhale

Five,
as no obscurities lie behind the eyes,
your pupils are brown, chestnut - even - like mine.

so smile with your eyes,
and I will mine

In black ink, I now conceptualize the divine ~

Savanna Mai Rust (she/her) is a sophomore studying Creative Writing and Film and Media Studies at Columbia College. She has been writing ever since she was little and has admired the works of Shonda Rhimes and Ava DuVernay and their contributions to Black representation on-screen or in the writers’ room. She also has interned at the NYCLU as she is passionate about the intersectionality between Black rights and the arts. She is the oldest of four and comes from a Caribbean, specifically Jamaican, background that has influenced her work and identity, as well. You can find her on Instagram @savannamaiart and @savanna_rust7.