Issue 35.1
Editor’s Note
To the Washington College community—
I think “community” is the operative word there, and I earnestly wish there was something unifying and distinctive I could offer up about it. The presence of that ambiguous notion of community on our campus is somehow all at once irrefutable and tenuous. For many of us, the spaces we occupy — the relationships we build, the organizations and departments we align with — are so unique to our relatively brief time here. In some ways, maybe that feels to us like permission to disregard this period as transitory, impermanent.
I want to urge you, regardless of the individual distinctions of those aforementioned occupied spaces, not to accept this perceived ephemerality as reason to write off this time. Our environment and social landscape here are ever-evolving, and we owe it to one another not to withdraw, but instead to contribute to that community-centered forward motion with compassion, sincerity, and purpose.
This issue of Collegian is our first collection of contributor works in volume 35. Though we rarely prescribe a theme, often we’ll see patterns emerge as we arrange our issues for publication. This time around, you’ll find work that centers on the interiority of environments — the social and the natural alike. Urgency lives here, as do both quietude and vigilance. These literary and artistic works are, in so many ways, endeavors to contend with impossibly interlaced conceptions of both fluctuation and stagnation.
Chiefly, this is an issue underlined by deliberate presence, which, at its core, is in the nature of community. The works compiled here were created and assembled with intention. Let yourself feel their permanence and their impermanence. Be present here with them for now. They’ll do the transitional work for you if you let them.
Be good to one another,
Sophie Foster
Editor in Chief
Table of Contents
Wateredcolors by Quinn Hammon (header image)
Veil of Hues by Ella Humphreys
“Magnolia” by Sophie Kilbride
“Breaking a deck in” by Jove Gleason
“Black Sheets” by Jaya S. Basu
witches like their coffee black by Quinn Hammon
“Bone to Pick” by E.T. Bogue
Wearable Waste by Fiona Beck
“The Last Sweet” by Sheri Swayne
Amid the Chaos by Arianna Jahangir
“Entropy, My Body Will Become” by Halina Saydam
“false gods” by Evan Merk
“Ted, you’re alive” by Jove Gleason
“Acedia” by Connor Cordwell
Sunset Ducks on the Lake by Delaney Runge
Veil of Hues by Ella Humphreys
by Sophie Kilbride
Magnolia
There’s a Magnolia tree reading over my shoulder.
She has a wild look,
with thick, leafy stems providing refuge from the Maryland heat.
Curled in her dark burrow of brambles,
reveries spill forth like sap.
Residual daydreams
stick to my skin like fuzz on a peach.
Her shade alleviates some heaviness in my head.
All around, the campus smells like summer rain.
In front of me, Mary Oliver is saying,
“For me the door to the woods is the door to the temple.”
I recline placidly in the cool grass.
The soft shifting and unlocking of her branches in the breeze
frees a pocket of sunlight onto the back of my neck.
Warmth falls as an oath onto my lips.
Silent prayers start to sound like poetry.
My outstretched palms are yearning for forever,
clasped toward the sun
as if to say, “Can I stay?”
A monarch drifts in on a whisper of wind.
Landing tenderly on a groove just out of reach,
his wings transform into a kaleidoscope of black and orange,
breaking into a ray of color.
Forever echoes all around me.
I let my eyes wander along her knotty veins.
They spot a cicada shell, an artifact of late summer.
Clinging to the bygone nights of June,
even this abandoned child
has found refuge in her wooded harbor.
A low whirr catches my ear:
music from a green ground beetle
flitting wistfully from branch to branch.
He’s singing a folk tune and longing
for salt and the smell of the sea.
A growth of lichen hugs her roots
in search of a campfire song
and some company.
She holds all these vagabonds dear,
welcoming the wanderers to a little beauty.
I lean against her wooden body
with a page open on my lap,
inviting her to read aloud,
but she opts for stillness.
I close my eyes and revel in her quiet affection.
by Jove Gleason
Breaking a deck in
On the floor of his dorm, I don’t teach him
tarot, I teach him how to shuffle.
His cheap plastic fans are working overtime,
trundling along as I show him where to put
his thumb on the paper with mine.
In the boiling late-spring heat
I tell him about the Tower, and Death,
and the Nine of Wands as we go.
It’s not real, I say, the pictures are pretty
but they’re just flat images in the end.
Sometimes the Fool can just be
some dink about to fall off a cliff.
But I don’t have my playing cards,
so with tarot we manage.
I tell him not to bend them much, if he can,
that I like the deck he’s practicing with,
its empty cups with their faux metal sheen.
He shuffles and grins, learning.
I don’t tell him on this Saturday on his floor—
my legs asleep, my ass asleep—
this is the only place I’d want to be
all because of the company.
Shuffle, cut, the cards slit together
and then collapse. He’s not allowed to study abroad
because that would mean there’d be no more Saturdays.
The AC’s been broken for two weeks,
and the linoleum tiles for more,
but we’re used to that by now.
He draws a card, the King of Cups,
and asks what it means.
It doesn’t mean anything, I say.
by Jaya S. Basu
Black Sheets
Your dorm room floor is carpeted in red and grey damask. You’re sitting on your bed looking down your fine nose at me where I sit, out of reach of your speckled arms or your portly fingers. You nudge my knee with your toe and I follow the gawky legs to your face. Your soil-colored eyebrows are knitted together and your thin, sweet lips are puckered, their gentle corners downturned. Your voice rumbles against the drywall around us and I pick at the loose threads in your rug. Your bed frame is crooked from where your parents attempted to re-loft it and got it jammed in the slot before giving up and hoping you didn’t collapse to the floor in the night as you slept. Your door has a mirror Command Stripped to the back, and in it I can see my own wall-eyes reflected from where I sit.
Your door is a monolith, an idol, a place of worship against which I have often pressed my mind’s ear, allowing myself to roll about in the black sheets of your high, lilting legato. Your voice has blanketed me often when I hear it through my own white walls, leaving me cold and bare when it’s gone. Your laugh escapes from your room by squeezing through the jamb and pads down the hallway on little feet with claws that scratch against my door. Your eyelashes smile at me and your lips wink at me and your arms encircle me and my waist cries, Yes! Yes! when your hands ask me.
I am glad the bed didn’t collapse from under us last night. I am clinging to the warmth of lying there, cradled in its and your embrace. I am listening to your lips with half my head and considering with the other half when I will be allowed to kiss them again. I am wondering if your legato was always this unpracticed, your lilt this erratic. Your laugh brushes against me gently, but I find myself missing the claws. The sheets envelope me, but I can’t help but notice they were warmer from the other side of the door.
witches like their coffee black by Quinn Hammon
by E.T. Bogue
Bone to Pick
Amber’s feet were cold, the type of cold that she could feel in her very bones. They hadn’t given her shoes upon her forced admission to the mental hospital; only a thin gown to wear in her cell of a room. She still had no shoes on the day when two blank-faced orderlies came to escort her down the frigid hallways toward the second worst fate she had ever encountered. Amber’s gown swished around her calves, and she could see the white fabric beneath the layer of grime. It reminded her of her wedding dress. Both shifts were funeral shrouds in the color of perfect pearls.
Cyrus, her husband, had loved when she wore pearls. He said they made her beautiful. What he really meant was that when she wore pearls, she looked like every other housewife in Pearl Lodging, Wisconsin, who thought they were being funny but were really just a cliché. When Cyrus said beautiful, what he really meant was docile.
Amber had only been 18 years old when she married him in lieu of being made homeless and penniless by her mother and stepfather. She killed him two weeks after turning 25.
One of the orderlies kept a too-tight grip on her upper arm. She would have fingertip-shaped bruises dotting her skin in a couple of days. Little bars caging in her flesh. A snarl caught in her throat at the thought. She wanted to rip the orderly’s throat out with only her teeth, but she knew that if she tried, they’d sedate her, and she’d lose what little time she had left.
“Never bothered you before,” the nasty voice of Cyrus Hawthorne echoed in her ears. The ghost of a man pissed that his dinner was on the table too late, that his house wasn’t clean, that his wife refused to shut her mouth. “Never had a good grasp on time, did you, Amber? You’re such a lunatic, it’s a wonder it took everyone this long to see it.”
Yes, Amber thought, she was a lunatic. She never did have a hold on her sanity, and never would, no matter how many shocks and straitjackets she was introduced to. Her mind was a detached thing, untethered from her physical form and the life she hated. It was only when startling bright red came into focus that she felt real—when running her fingers through her best friend Rita’s auburn locks or dipping them into an open vein.
“Move it!” One of the orderlies barked the command as he shoved her roughly. Amber scoffed at him, baring her teeth as she did so. Like a dog that would never obey, she thought.
“I should have just gone to prison. Even that would be better than being here,” Amber spat angrily. She made the guards wary with her venomous words; she could tell. They’d never seen such an openly enraged woman before. Certainly not one who regretted accepting the insanity plea that kept her out of the slammer but sent her into this hell.
The judge, her lawyer, even the friends who had come to visit her, they all thought that she had just snapped one day. They thought that the murder of Cyrus Hawthorne had been committed in a fit of rage and a moment of instability. They were all wrong. Amber had spent four months concocting the murder and the method, planning it like a good housewife would plan a Sunday dinner. Eventually, she had chosen to do things simply; she offered her husband a drink full of citrus, knowing fully well that he was fatally allergic to it. He’d gone into anaphylaxis and died within a half an hour while she watched coldly.
The murder had been completely calculated. It was what came after that was an act of spontaneity. She hadn’t intended to go for the butcher’s knife and the frying pan. She hadn’t intended to break out the good wine and pair it with the coppery taste of flesh and blood. Yet she had, because when her husband lay dead on the ugly carpet of their stupid, boring, boxy excuse for a house, a hunger rose inside of her. It mingled with the anger and made something savage and sacrilegious and utterly spectacular.
The meat tasted good. The power of ingesting her husband, passing pieces of his corpse through her lips, swallowing them down to be destroyed and digested, had tasted even better. Mincing him into tiny bits felt poetic; it felt like the inverse of all the times she had been cut up until she fit into a box made by her mother, her stepfather, her husband, and society. Eating him was a form of retribution too. Marriage to him had consumed her life. It was all “Why isn’t the floor clean, Amber?” and “Is it too much to ask for a hot dinner and a drink after a long day of work?” and it was cooking, always cooking, burning herself up at the stove to provide sustenance for Cyrus. It was him satisfying his hunger while her own was deemed wrong and left to fester.
For one shining moment, Cyrus finally nourished her as she had been expected to do for him, without complaint, for years on end. For one shining moment, Amber wore blood on her hands unrepentantly. She expressed her rage openly, as women were never supposed to. It was the most freeing moment she had experienced in her entire life.
She didn’t regret any of her deeds, even if they had gotten her caught, even if they had brought her here. Amber had spent her whole life wanting to be free—free as the wind, free as dear Rita was (Rita was unmarried and unashamed, charming women and singing the blues, and Amber wasn’t sure whether she wanted to be like her or with her). She’d spent her whole life wanting to show her angry face to the world and make it recoil in fear. She had finally gotten that moment. Not from the father she had never known, the man she had spent her childhood wishing would come find her, come and save her. Not from her stepfather, the man who taught her mother subservience but could never break her. Not from her husband, the man her family told her she needed in her life. Not from any man at all. From herself.
When she was seventeen and her first and most secret girlfriend, Lucille, had cheated on her with a man and then dumped her like trash, Amber had gotten over the breakup only after she and Rita had keyed Luce’s fancy car. When her stepfather yelled at her, so many times, she killed the hurt and the fear by yelling back. The first lesson she had learned was that anger was the only way out of the cage she was born into, simply because of what was and wasn’t between her legs. The second lesson she had learned was that everyone might preach that revenge was wrong, but it felt so very right.
Still, Amber thought bitterly, just because she was a murderous, arguably insane cannibal, just because all the drugs and shocks had failed to dull her jagged edges into a soft housewife shape . . . God, getting lobotomized really wasn’t fun.
The orderlies shoved her roughly onto the operation table. They strapped her down and made the restraints too tight. Amber complained. Women weren’t supposed to complain, but she did anyway, because if these were the last moments she had with her mind intact, she might as well live them as truly as she could.
Her friends had visited her in the mental hospital many times. They’d expressed sympathy, told her they wished it hadn’t come to this. They’d asked her why she didn’t come to them for help when she was unhappy. They’d tried to hide the fear in their eyes, like they were going to be what she devoured next.
Her dearest friend, Rita Truman, had only visited her twice. Once, right after she was admitted. The other, a few days ago. She’d been the first and the last. And she’d brought barbeque both times. If anyone asked, the girls claimed that it was pork (it hadn’t taken long for Amber to be arrested after everything went down, but there was just enough time to call Rita, to give her five refrigerator-safe dishes of butchered meat. A taste of freedom, for the only authentic person Amber had ever known).
The doctor picked up his scalpel. He looked at her like she was an inconvenience; he sighed like she was a problem. He wasn’t invested in what he was butchering. Amber thought, then, that her incisions, which had been so personal, were far kinder.
She bit down, sinking her teeth into her plump lower lip. Little did these fools know that 35 miles away, in a run-down trailer filled with vice, a woman with hair like the flames of Amber’s anger and no inhibitions holding her back had violence in her heart. Rita had the spoils of freedom in her freezer and a list of men’s names (with Amber’s dear ol’ stepdad at the top) tucked under her pillow, accompanied by a codependent promise of vengeance. Little did they know that one taste of retribution and of a wicked man’s flesh would never be enough, not for either girl.
Little did they know that they could destroy her mind, but she’d live on anyway.
Amber licked at the broken skin of her mouth, letting the sharp, metallic taste of blood roll over her tongue. She thought of Rita and the way she would look while wielding a hatchet in the name of every woman swallowed whole by a man. She thought of the way it felt to dismember a man’s corpse, hollow him out of all his organs, like a tree eaten by parasites. Like an apple eaten by serpentine superstition. Amber grinned, showing all her too-sharp teeth.
The doctor put the scalpel to her forehead and made the first incision.
Wearable Waste by Fiona Beck
by Sheri Swayne
The Last Sweet
there’s a
hole
in five hundred
black chests.
fivehundredblackchests
thrown and mauled in
snake nests,
puffed and red with
white boy sneers,
my american tears.
there’s a
harriet, a douglass,
a hate riot,
something lungless,
black coffee-brewing, spine-bruising,
thousand-pound water-
spewing
in america.
i had a dream that the
sons of shackles and sons of
shacklers
will sit at the table of brotherhood.
no, i say to my whip,
those jagged shards of nine,
i had a nightmare.
i saw your blackface, your hand
to my smacked face,
that's race,
says a girl with
box braids.
i’m the last sweet
light brown sugar-spiced
diabetic dear
defeat
but i’m your checkbox cheat?
i'm othered, other,
a multiracial dust cover.
i’m my trini grandmother.
she had trouble but no face down.
she’s a too-bright too-dull
light brown
and now half-assed passed down
is your
shame phrase,
insult gaze and your
talk down.
Amid the Chaos by Arianna Jahangir
by Halina Saydam
Entropy, My Body Will Become
My relationship to the world was polysyllabic. I heard words spoken one after another, their cadence and rhythm flowing right into the next. I wanted my name to be the same: woven with my interests, connected and inseparable. Where did it end and where did I begin? In a way, it is almost a death to self. There is no mold, no clay, no kiln. I am the artist’s hands, and yet I have squeezed my creation too hard. I want to be a sponge and soak up every last piece of knowledge imparted onto me, and yet I will never learn what it means to be undefined. Give me dashes when I want there to be lines. Give me circles when I beg for squares. Shape me into a structure so abstract that the universe must create its own rules to bend to me. Shatter me and then rebuild me until I am nothing but a mosaic. Until I reach the unknown, let me become an exploding star, let me shout my words.
by Evan Merk
false gods
The calloused tips of my fingers trace his wrists, following the veins up toward his heart. His other hand dances idly through my hair, creating ripples of waves in the strands. His eyes are closed, his smile fond, and I don’t understand it yet, but he’s falling in love with me.
Little ripples become crashing tsunamis, and I follow the surf like a man possessed. My jaw aches with the tension of want, from drinking up all the affection he can give me.
This is my apotheosis. He looks at me like I’m something worth loving and I feel like a god. This must be something holy, for what else could fill me with light like this? Nothing else but a reverent touch could let me ascend. Nothing else but careful whispers sung like prayers could make me listen.
We fail to consider our fatal flaw, the crux of it all, our one breaking point: we’re just men. Mortal bodies aren’t meant to hold this, to give and receive this level of devotion. This is meant for gods with unnatural strength and too-big hearts. This love is too heavy but there’s nowhere else to put it.
Devotion becomes obsession. He’s picking petals from a different flower than I’ve ever seen. He loves me, he loves me more, he loves me most. This is what I wanted. Love was all I asked for, and he’s giving it to me, but it’s a heavy burden. The weight of it clings to me, holding me down when it used to lift me up. The sticky sweetness of sappy words is becoming amber, little rocks in my body that rattle around when I just want to live. It’s fossilizing my heart.
I’m cruel to him, and I know that, when I rip up the petals and wash off that sap. When I excavate my heart and hide it away. When I tell him I can’t love him how he wants, that love like this hurts. I forget in the pain of it all how to be kind. Somehow I manage to choose both fight and flight, to bite with my words and run with my legs as far as they will take me.
I appreciate the irony now of ending up outside a church when the fog in my head clears. I don’t go in, and I don’t pray, but I give the building a nod. If this is what devotion looks like, I wouldn’t wish it on the gods. I wouldn’t burden them with it.
by Jove Gleason
Ted, you’re alive
In spring, there’s these white trees on campus,
and it’s hard to be a miserable son of a bitch
when petals rain down on me like a fairytale. I’m tired
of choosing between blue and pink. I didn’t like
Sleeping Beauty half as much as I thought I would,
and I think that’s okay. I don’t remember
how to write an ode. I’ve seen it so many times
that when I show my girlfriend Bill and Ted,
I can say the lines as they come:
Bill thinks Ted is dead. Bogus. Heinous.
Most non-triumphant. I’m always angry
but sometimes the anger abates
and all I’m left with is me. The frame of my
Bill and Ted shrine is orange. The backing is
green. For weeks I do nothing
but play a video game where a man in green
and a man in orange paint a wall to say: Something Beautiful
is Going to Happen. Their paint is red.
I’m learning to wear color again.
I taught myself how to play the guitar to sing
love songs. I broke up with my girlfriend
around the time my baby brother got his
boyfriend. I’ll take the brunt of being the queer one
for him. Every poem I write ends up
being about my queerness. Even the ones
that aren’t. Look harder. When we watched it,
my ex-girlfriend thought that Bill and Ted
were in love. They are.
by Connor Cordwell
Acedia
Nails grip at softened
bark, see Sloth;
a torpid, snoring, sinful thing.
Again, lame
Sloth, you’ve missed your nightly leaves.
Smitten, senseless, Sloth disdains
to wake.
Pious, pained Sloth, you shun
solution and seek excuse.
Father tried; He
granted absolution.
You rot here, Sloth. As if molded
into dirtied sheets.
The shoes beside your bed
collect dust,
and algae grows
upon your bothered back.
Listen, green
Sloth, hear the hermits praise their days.
For you alone, the morning waits.
Sunset Ducks on the Lake by Delaney Runge