Memorial Pillars by Ethan Ransom

Issue 37.1

Editor’s Note

Dear Washington College Community,

Now that the fall semester is in full swing, I have discovered how hard it is to find a moment to stop and breathe. I’ve had to block off time in my calendar to simply do nothing and I think a reality of being a college student is that this is a normal thing. We are in the business of being busy. However, I do not believe rest is a luxury, nor should we treat it like one, especially when rest is such an incredible ground for thinking, reflecting, and noticing our state of being and also those around us. The circle of people we surround ourselves with, I think, should be a source of rest. It’s important to notice who we are with when it’s easier to breathe, laugh, and be ourselves.

With this in mind, I bring to you issue 37.1 of Collegian, in which our artists and writers not only notice their surroundings and the community of people around them, but the variety of ways in which these surroundings are influenced, damaged, experienced, or redefined. In this issue, our contributors are concerned with knowing themselves, their culture, their hearts, and their rough edges. There is nothing sugar-coated or simple in this issue. Its strength is in its drama and complexity. Our contributors capture art that is striking, dramatic, and textured, and shape their writing around the people, including themselves, who have caused them to imagine, reminisce, grieve, and grow.

Between the front and back cover of this issue, I promise, you will be surprised. I have read through it a dozen times and it has consistently put me in a place of thinking and inspiration and I have even whipped out my notebook and written down ideas that these pieces have inspired. As an artist and also someone who likes to be fascinated, I invite you to read this issue with a posture of noticing. Read attentively. Read with care. Trust me, there’s some cool stuff in here.

With love,

Sheri Swayne

Editor in Chief of Collegian

blue heron

when i’m home, my heart is a great blue

heron, coasting languidly

above the bay, choosing fish carefully

while perched on a rock jetty.

just so, my heart

has always been: beginning

as a grey mass and each day growing

bluer in feather and flying ever faster.

that steady organ—that great blue

heron—is a tower on its long legs

when it stretches its neck

taller into the brackish sky.

when a hefty feeling floats through

the marsh of my stomach,

the bird will snatch it up and swallow it and

take time digesting this writhing prey.

sometimes, i worry the heron will burst—

in a firework of crimson and powder blue—

through my skin, that i will look down to find

that a large yellow beak has pierced

outward through my breast.

Broken by Ethan Ranson

by Ed Roundy

Can’t help my dog

Don’t you dare let that mangy thing inside!

You keep back now You keep your place on the step!

heels sunk ankle deep into concrete grating

sneaker toe sunk through underwood Don’t go peeling

bending down red-faced grubbed and lacing

to shave off the rubber You stay right there with it and!

Curl up if you got to

make roundness against the chill You just leave it there

Now! lawn haunted split railed mulch footed thing You

keep it outside! sundial spine angling twilight sunk-still

And looking dead at me

looking dead

You get gone from that thing! not looking

not resting leaving that thing swelling big and proud

drooping jowls down I told you so

Not coming in going out halting thin molting malt fizz

Frothing past lips You stop with that!

Don’t you come inside!

Focused by Ethan Ransom

by Hope Benjamin

Inheritance

Esperanza was born in Lima, the largest city and capital of Peru, situated in the valleys of the Chillón, Rímac, and Lurín Rivers, which is along the central coast of South America. At first, Growing growing up in Peru at first was a dream, as she had servants with her daily who would help her bathe and get dressed. Her father worked in the city and loved his family dearly, but her mother ruled strictly over her children. Their house was a mansion compared to the much smaller buildings in the city, as the home encompassed different emotions, siblings, and parenting dynamics. She loved and cherished her family at the time, but that would soon fade into the flames. Her name would then be engraved into my identity, my life, as her wildfire attitude continued to spread all over our family tree.

I remember the story and the way she told it to me when I was growing up, ; she came home one day, and a fire broke out in her house. Everything her father and mother had worked for began to burst into giant sparks, everyone who was in the house ran out as emotions ran high and my family lost everything they had ever known. Neighbors stared at a distance and did not help due to jealousy as the flames consumed the whole building. She then told me that firefighters did eventually arrive and helped extinguish the flames. Esperanza and her family would then decide to start over in America, specifically Ellis Island, New York and then to Miami, Florida. There would be another story beginning that would begin to intertwine with her own life, as growing up in the U.S., she would eventually meet Eugene Chiocca, my grandfather.

The Chiocca Family emigrated from Italy. Imagine cousins, grandparents, parents, children, all of them came over through Ellis Island in the early 1950’s. Eugene (also known as Papa) and his family would also choose to live in Miami, Florida. Two families would meet while being in a rich bustling place entranced in the culture of Miami, as multiple ethnic groups would make the community what it is today. When my grandparents met, it was love at first sight, . their Their wedding filled a catholic church with two families who formed together and became one giant gathering as they all stuffed in the pews. I remember watching the DVD, no audio due to error, two people so in love we filled multiple DVDs of family reunions, Christmas celebrations, baptisms, and home videos to watch if you ever wish for love from her again. When my grandfather died in Miami, so did she, as she would disapprove of relationships, looks, as she pierced her hands into everyone’s brain causing the fire to ignite and burn down all that is loved about her. One thing that came out of their love though, was my mother and uncle.

My mother with her Italian Peruvian features fell in love with my white-Ohio-American father while working at an old movie theater in Florida. I would grow up with my two brothers; the younger one of the two, Steven, was almost three when he had cancer. That kind of stress changes your thinking, as my father did not cope well, he would go on to cheat during this, which is why they would eventually divorce after I was born. As I matured, I was never taught to speak much Spanish or Italian, but I do know what my name means, Esperanza, Hope, Esperanza. Which one is my grandmother, and which is me? I think being named after a person sounds great at first, but when a person begins to pick you apart,is when it all starts to rewire your brain. She changed into someone I do not recognize, as she tears apart her sibling relationships, a whole part of our family tree is blank because of the fires she would start as it burns down branches. Now it is a fiery curse engraved on my birth certificate, hoping that she lived closer. If we visit, she will make me my favorite pumpkin soup, that she force fedforce-fed me when I was younger, and looking back I do miss that. And we could still visit Papa’s grave together, as we talk about how he could make everyone laugh or smile with just his presence. I wish she could spoil me and my siblings like she used to do every Christmas, every birthday, and Easter. Now, I only text her every month and check in because deep down that little girl inside of me does miss her hugs and kisses. She still cares for us, but in a way. At at a distance, because we cannot afford more burn marks to appear on our family tree.

Moors Sheep by L.S. Luckey

by Ed Roundy

Old Soldier Watches the Fireworks Display at the Centennial

In the first silence the flare ascends like a spirit, a soul before its drop. Fireworks burst above, shaped like thoughts of angels. The same shape as a ruined prayer or cannon fire through a hull, tearing, giving way to sky. And there is a great groan as the ship goes down, down into the black, and infinite tails corkscrew outwards, spurs upon spurs, and in the rushing silence afterwards there is the cascade of horses. The bright rowel of it strikes into the flank of the sky and bleeds the smell of gunpowder. His blood made a river through the snow in the shape of a star and there was always the smell of gunpowder. The center of all that red was silent, but pushed noise outwards, and the shout wasn’t long at all, but it echoed a long, long while. And the silence spreads like the wound, and in the haze, there lingers shapes upon shapes, the ghost of the fire and its imprint on the dark and all that gray. All that gray rushing and falling and blue-black with the wet and the weight of themselves staggering back. See him reach for the shape by his hip and when his hand closes around nothing he knew it would not have made a difference.

Mayday by Jeremy Cress

by Connor Cordwell

Disassociated: Dissociation

care warnings: drugs, self-harm

Alprazolam is a benzodiazepine used primarily for the treatment of anxiety disorders or panic disorders. They taste how I imagine chalk must. My mother has had a prescription for the pill for years though I still don’t know what it is for; I can’t remember the reasons she gives me for it. I do not have a prescription for Xanax. I like to get high. Prescribe is a verb, originating from the mid-15th c.: prescriben, “to write down as a direction, law,” from Latin praescribere “write before; ordain, determine in advance.” From prae “before” + scribere “to write” (from PIE1 root *skribh- “to cut”).2

When I was thirteen or twelve my mom prescribed me a therapist as a proscriptive measure. We talked about my sleep when my mother was not there in the room with me. I would have rather discussed the act of writing as an incision: the PIE root of prescription; the original notion.3 I was subsequently referred to a psychiatrist whom I trusted more than most other people in my life because he dictated my regimen of medicines. In chronological order of antidepressants: Prozac, Zoloft, Cymbalta and Wellbutrin. By 2020, my younger brother was entrenched in the alt-right pipeline and ascribed all of my actions to attention-seeking. Lucas beat me to the punch both times when coming out. The day I chose to re-announce my identity to my immediate family, I found the eleven-year-old snitching as he and our mother sat together on our broken treadmill.

Nevertheless, I attempted to explain the circumscriptive nature of a name both Lucas and Layla still mouth. A lack of labels makes man bolder. Bold is an adjective, from Proto-Germanic *balþaz- (source also of Old High German bald “bold, swift,”) in names such as Theobald; Old Norse ballr “frightful, dangerous.” The meaning “requiring or exhibiting courage” is from mid-13c. Also in a bad sense, “audacious, presumptuous, overstepping usual bounds” (c. 1200). From 1670s as “standing out to view, striking the eye.”4 My mother and her son share many commonalities; they both are swift to assume. Such is their boldness. The name Layla is derived from Arabic ‘laylā (ليلى) meaning “night;”5 Lucas, from Latin lux or “light.”6 I perceive this to be quite incongruous and believe that they should swap names.

Lucas and I were kept separate for a month as our relationship had grown volatile. That same summer, I was prescribed Clonidine. I developed tics which had become so frequent that for a few weeks, I couldn’t make out most sentences without squinting, or flinching, or squeaking through them. “It’s cute. You sound like a guinea pig,” Ma lilted one likely hot afternoon. I screwed my face up at her on purpose. Throughout the three-year quarantine, I slogged through the process of receiving hormone therapy at Nemours Children’s Hospital. I concurrently consulted with a neurologist there regarding the more recent development of involuntary motor functions. I was made to pace in front of Zoom windows. After the appointment, the frizzy-haired health professional attributed the cause of my tics to be anxiety relating to my state as trans.

I was consequently diagnosed with both motor and vocal tic disorders as well as generalized anxiety disorder. I cannot recall discussing my anxiety with this woman, but in fairness to her, there is never much I remember. After starting testosterone on October 14th, 2021, I also saw a rheumatologist at Nemours. I complained about joint pain, which she assumed meant I believed I was arthritic. She had told me I was flat footed and hyper-mobile and commented on my “flexible knees.” As always, I was prescribed exercises—and Meloxicam. By the time I turned sixteen or seventeen I was to take five or six pills a day. The tics quickly decreased in frequency and intensity, but I still have my moments. “Don’t do that,” my mom admonished one evening while we were eating out. “Our waitress will think you’re catcalling her.” Lucas looked more mortified than me.

I would say my mind is fluid. Maybe that’s not the right word, though I must cut to the chase. I am wont to meander and struggle to commit. I stopped taking Meloxicam first because it emptied out the fastest and Ma had her own. We are similar in that we like to share. Cymbalta gave me withdrawals that felt brain damaging. I stopped Clonidine because I do not need it. I haven’t picked up any of my scripts in years. I don’t want to be prescribed, though I took Xanax today and finally felt more normal than I have in weeks. “Did you seriously just take a whole one,” Ma admonishes, “when I told you to take half?” There’s a lilt to her voice as I exit her oversized SUV. “Yeah,” I shake, heart pounding a familiar staccato as I smirk back at her. I had tried to tell her something the moment before, but the details are muddled. My chest hurts. “Mine too,” she replies, and I slam the door on I love you. My life does not have order, but I still endeavor for direction: praescribare. Months ago, I began experiencing bouts of dizziness accompanied by random arrests of the heart—more like a seizing of the psyche.

I find it preposterous that a small white pill could quiet the echoing cavern of my chest cavity. The tightness in my heart praying for the clarity of crapulence. Ironic for the girl denominated “whole.” Though I cannot afford to be prescribed do not mistake this for proscription. Proscribe is a verb, from Latin proscribere “publish in writing” (literally “write in front of”).7 Some things you must carve out for yourself.

1 Proto-Indo-European

2 “Prescribe - Etymology, Origin & Meaning.” Etymonline, www.etymonline.com/word/pre- scribe. Accessed 24 Sept. 2025.

3 “Script - Etymology, Origin & Meaning.” Etymonline, www.etymonline.com/word/script. Accessed 24 Sept. 2025.

4 “Bold - Etymology, Origin & Meaning.” Etymonline, www.etymonline.com/word/bold.

5 Team, Momcozy Care. “Layla Baby Name Meaning, Origin, Popularity Insights.” Momcozy, May 2025, es.momcozy.com/blogs/baby-names/layla.

6 Team, Momcozy Care.

7 “Proscribe - Etymology, Origin & Meaning.” Etymonline, www.etymonline.com/word/pro- scribe.

Vulnerability by Casey Johnson

by Sunny Coxe

keep your teeth

you cannot let them take your teeth. they will try to convince you

that it is love in its purest form, the way that a fever makes you warm,

but you must instead shake off their infectious terror

and the venomous lull of familiar shores.

even when they say, because they will say,

that you do not need your canines nor your claws,

that you will be safer if you cannot gnaw on the ropes

they wrap around your wrists, you must resist, you

must insist that your body is not theirs:

steal their scissors and scalpels to wield as sword and shield,

under no circumstances should you allow yourself to yield.

there is indeed something sacred in the ugly viscera behind your skull.

you must insist upon this until it’s gospel, while it’s raw still,

until they can hear nothing else over the cacophony of conviction

in your own skin. and so i will say it again and again:

keep your claws, keep your edges, keep your teeth.

by L.S. Luckey

Grandma’s Shelves, with Dickens

It’s a record slip, time, and it all comes flooding around at once, into our home and out of the corners of my grandparents’ split level. Grandpa’s getting ready to sell after losing his wife in December. He can’t afford it, and he can’t drive. In seeing one another again, he and I are experiencing a slip of five years, half of this decade. He’s skinnier; I am no longer fourteen. The grievances of his six children have been tumbled to the surface, shaken up by pancreatic cancer, and spit up in the former real estate agent daughter’s help selling the house, the insurance-man son’s help selling the van, the Georgia and Arizona daughters wanting this china set and that pile of clothes she left when she moved across the country.

So out of the endless garage come street hockey sticks, house coats, tapes from 1980—featuring children’s voices, the hits straight from the radio, and the real Maria Von Trapp speaking to an auditorium in which great-grandma sits—and a single cranberry Sprite, ’cause, having gotten used to sodas as mixers, I now like the feeling in my nose. And I walk in and out of it all, a Cranberry Sprite to welcome me back from Isabel in Kennett Square on a Sunday evening, but Mom and my aunt Sarah live this life every day. Grandma’s phone forever sits charging in our family room.

We can’t take everything; the basement built-ins need to stay full for the showings. I want to conduct an exit poll— What mattered more to you: the positive effect of the visual aid we provided so that you can picture your own books on the shelves you’ll be ripping out, or the negative effect of the tobacco baked into the carpeting and paint? Be grateful; for some children the scent may be connected with a thousand thoughts, and hopes, and joys, and cares long, long forgotten.

And the looking-to-buyers, like the people I know, don’t wonder about the rumbling ground under their feet; the lives under the grass of the pauper’s cemetery that sits on a patch of this farm-turned-mid-century-neighborhood, the slaveholding founder of my education, and the immigrant- owned businesses that have faded from my favorite tucked away shopping center. Connecting my grandparents’ house to mine to the shopping center, a water flows behind from which the street took its shape. I grew up on the Little Shabakunk Creek, which flows into the Assunpink, into the Delaware, but where are the Delaware? Streams touch where the five years preserved a certain impression for me. Every time I’m in that house I’m playing school on the steps and I’m exhilarated during the hurricanes, there’s a Christmas tree in the corner, a bed waiting for me while my parents vanish for a weekend, and there’s me hiding behind the sheer curtains, spilling blood where two walls join to a corner, eating dinosaur nuggets in the dining room, pancakes in the kitchen, and thanksgiving dinner in a plastic chair at a short table shoved into the living room, all while uncles fuss over my leg stuck in a kid’s stool and my grandma sits sick in her recliner, joking with me about the British landscapers solving this murder.

Every time I’m in this house, I’m hours away at school, not calling, not texting, not visiting, trying to stay away from the truth of it.

by Evelyn Lucado

Ode to Grendel

One day I could grow teeth like talons, let my

skin leather —

hair fall thin—

bones rip free—

for the

first

time with a

body mine,

I’ll be a

bitch and a hell beast

of my own right.

But I could

rend

limb and limb

the business boys

in the suite upstairs who

drink like men, their laughter

like theft—

like my Natty Lite

piss stench-soaked tile ceiling—

like dorm room molding—

and

prone on my rock mattress

I wonder

what it feels like to

satiate.

Under the Hedge by Casey Johnson

Barnegat Light by L.S. Luckey

by Faye Dorman

nihon juu-go: the fictional city pt. II

this past walk, i went in a new direction.

i ended up walking away into a more industrial area,

where there are few people,

little walkways, open train tracks to cross.

i stopped on a bridge for a second; a waterway

lined with buildings that seem empty, seem uncared for.

skyscrapers with clothless balconies loom in the distance.

across the tracks there is a semblance of familiarity:

of upscale workplaces and hotels, of empty udon shops.

the area is new to me, but the familiarity stays.

maybe that’s why i like this place so much.

i see so few people in this area, so few that

seem to genuinely live here.

at the fireworks show, the balconies were empty of people.

when the trees were blooming, the parks filled

with less people than there are now that

the air carries water weight.

the train station is a nightmare.

the mall above it is barren.

the baseball team is considered

the worst in the league.

this city feels like it doesn’t know

who it is, what it’s supposed to be,

what it’s supposed to mean to the people that live here.

i look into the nearly still rivers to see a

mirror of myself, standing tall

as a background to my reflection.

Dwelling Space by Jeremy Cress

by Margaret Stiles

I Loved Over Vast, Empty Knolls, Along The Edge

May 17,

Today, I have decided that Kate must not change her last name.

I made this decision in the office, and like, of course when I shared this during a polite conversation with Jessika from Marketing, she said I was “overstepping my bounds.” Which, is honestly, the most ridikulous thing I’ve ever heard. As Kate’s third closest coworker, I am, like, really really really concerned about her, and if we’re going to be super glued besties, then, like, I have to show some ini-shitive.

First of all, Brandon - and what an ick, right? Kate should, like, totally be with someone who has a better name; Like William, like, he was a prince from some European country, like, uh Albervania. Yeah.

Anyway, Brandon has, like, the worst last name: Kelsey. I mean, I guess it’s O.K, but uh not for Kate. First of all, aliterta-ta or whatever it’s called is not cute. No one wants matching initials, that is soooooo not SoCal to do. Clearly, this gorilla man has tricked poor Kate into destroying her aesthetic, because there is no way that she would make that kind of choice in her right mind. I should know, I follow all of her platforms, including her OnlyFans. Logically speaking, as Kate’s most underrated and under-noticed advisor, she should be marrying someone with the last initial S, so that her initials match Kate Spades. Gosh, I am just a ge-ni-ous.

So obviously, like, I need to scare this guy off, right? So Kate doesn’t have to do any heavy lifting? Emotional labor in Prada heels? Ugh, no.

I’m debating keying his car and breaking his windshield with my Louis heel (in-deh-structible as always babe <3). Because, like, Carey Underwood must have been on to something, but honestly, like, was it enough?

On second thought, that’s a joke, I would never commit a crime. Kate can’t associate with inmates, and she needs me to monitor her life like this; how else would she manage? I don’t think she could without me devoting my entire life to the cause, because like, she’s blonde. Love her for that though.

Anyhow, today Kate spun her matcha latte three times clockwise as she walked by my cubie, which means that she is counting on me to save her from this vibe-ruining bastard of a dog boy.

Jessika from Marketing keeps trying to talk to me when I’m helping Kate, and says that I need to stop “concerning myself with the in-tre-ka-seas of my colleague’s private lives.” Well, Jessika, first of all, thesaurus rex much. You’re like, not impressing anyone with your four “silaball” words. Second of all, I am not hindering Kate’s relationship just because I know she has a great ass, I’m doing it for her brand. I should have told Jessika about my oath of celibacy, but I don’t think she would actually know what those words mean, and instead, like, says long words to sound like a smarty pants. Well jokes on you Jessika, nobody actually likes a smarty-pants if they where corduroy pants with a sweater vest.

I do think I saw her talking to Carol again today, but like I don’t care how many times Carol says, “Oh, you need to stop commenting on Jessika’s appearance,” or “You need to stay out of the Marketing wing,” or “I’m serious, if you do this again, I’m writing you up.”

They’re just buddy buddy in their jealously over my relationship with Kate. Jessika dresses like she’s trying to cause pandemic part two from the amount of people she’s making sick with those outfits, and Carol can’t stop me from trying to spare the office from her terror. We all know that all HR really stands for is “Hardly Railed.”

Anywho, I believe I’ve decided I have to go put a beaver in Brandon’s car. For Kate.

Ha ha, uh-ledge-id-ly. I’m so funny.

Love ya!