Baywatch by Justin Nash

Issue 32.0

Editor’s Note

“Or, perhaps, Emily Dickinson, my love, hope was never a thing with feathers.”
—Claudia Rankine, from page 23 of Don’t Let Me Be Lonely

To the students of Washington College:

It should come as no surprise to you when I say the world is a different place than it was only a few months ago. Although they’ve come in new forms, I offer the knowledge that our current struggles are not entirely unprecedented. Three years ago, for the same purpose I’m writing to you now, Caroline Harvey wrote in her first Editor’s Note of the pain inflicted on people nationwide by the murder of Heather Heyer at the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally. This time last year, my predecessor, Mary Sprague, wrote of the isolation that can be caused by a small campus—how it can feel like we’re floating downstream from national conversations around equality and justice. Both of them affirmed the need for change, and the importance of artistic space to allow such action. Both of them hoped that we were on our way to better days.

Of course, hope is a tricky thing. It keeps us afloat in times like these, but it can be cruel too. Hope is what allows us to be let down, to believe change is coming and never see it. None of us could have foreseen that those issues of solidarity and national identity would have now reached a fever pitch, with us stuck squarely in the middle of two crises—one of global health, and another of racist violence being newly recognized by many Americans for what it is and always has been. This academic year has not started the way any of us would have hoped it to a year ago, but I do not say any of this to discourage you. Rather, I say it in the interest of being grateful for having begun at all, and as a reminder that our pain can show the way to what needs changing. 

When Collegian was founded, a promise was made to serve the students of Washington College. It’s in our name—collegian: a member of a college, of a community. Sadly, we haven’t always lived up to that promise. So, we’ve dropped the “The”—no longer a standout—and instead adopted the simpler Collegian as part of the whole. We’re changing the way we publish and the way we edit. We have new and exciting projects on the horizon that we hope will bring us together while we study apart. The work you’ll read below is part of our annual staff issue. It’s a new promise of the work we can do, and of the care you’ll receive when submitting. These pieces are full of nostalgia, disgust, heartbreak, longing, and absurdity. I can think of nothing better for our present moment, and I hope you can find something in them to hold onto. From this point forward, Collegian is for you. 

 

Take care of yourselves,

Justin Nash
Editor in Chief, Collegian

Table of Contents

Baywatch by Justin Nash

“hometown decay” by Eylie Sasajima

Shelter no. 2 by Liane Beckley

“Getting Over It” by Justin Nash

“Boys Who Know You Like Girls Fuck You a Little Harder” by MacKenzie Brady

Lift to Close by Liane Beckley

“Red High Tops” by Bella Wilson

Conservation Status by MacKenzie Brady

“We Are the Music Makers” by Emma Campbell

“In Which I Think I Am Experiencing the Aftermath of the Second Plague” by MacKenzie Brady

Cadillac Motel by Liane Beckley

“Sight-seeing on the TriMet” by Megan Walsh

“Glossary of Terms” by Justin Nash

“her name wasn’t actually jolene” by Isabelle Anderson

Projection 57 by Justin Nash

by Eylie Sasajima

hometown decay

those noises outside are machinery and plywood. something is always under construction. the parking lots and cookie-cutter houses that spring up are works of art that get old after a week. car rides feature new and old exhibits: gas station; fence (new); blank lot; fence (broken). when your mother isn’t looking, you run your hands across it all. it is some form of soft. you are swimming in the ocean of a backseat window, picking clouds to turn into animals and stars to waste wishes on. those noises outside are rifles picking off four point bucks. by now, you have taught yourself not to whine when you see the disembodied heads mounted on beige living room walls. their eyes are shiny enough to be weeping. you don’t want their tears. the cows down the street don’t acknowledge you anymore. milked or slaughtered? you’re not sure; neither are they. ​milked or slaughtered? they sweat out summers in mud and tall grass, grazing in pastures where sunflowers grow under a haze of paper factory pollution. those noises outside are cars speeding into oblivion. you hear another siren, or maybe the echo of one from before. the potholed roads are riddled with high beams and fatalities. this is the place where you screamed through your first red light, where you wrote your childhood onto the walls of a sagging house. this is the wasteland, built of failing strip malls and sweating cornfields, that spat you into the world. it speaks a bitter language. you have learned to speak it back. 

Shelter no. 2 by Liane Beckley

Shelter no. 2 by Liane Beckley

by Justin Nash

Getting Over It

after Zach Doss

Your son is getting over it. It was you who told him to do it. Just get over it, you said, Quit taking everything so seriously. So, he gave it a go, and it started off going mostly well. The argument had started when, by jumping on his bed, you knocked off the clothes he had just sorted into piles. You’re amazed to see that, almost immediately, he gets over the clothes, which are now on his floor, and the laundry basket in the hallway—both with surprising ease. By the end of the first day he’s gotten over a fence, a ladder, an entire row of desks, the back of the couch, and a candlestick just for the hell of it. He’s making fun of me, you think at first. After he gets over a pack of purse-sized poodles leading their dog walker and slides across the hood of a police car Dukes-of-Hazzard style, you’re sure he is.

That’s enough, you tell him, You can stop! But he keeps going. He leaps over the swimming pool, hops the chicken wire around the garden, and—even though he doesn’t quite stick the landing—backflips over that one out-of-place bush coming up the driveway. Even though you, perhaps unintentionally, caused your son’s new behavior, you do everything you can to discourage it. You say, You’re going to hurt yourself! You’re going to break your ankle! When you get twisted in the air and break your leg and the bone is sticking through your skin, don’t come to me, because I am not going to be the one to take you to the hospital, you tell him. Though, of course, you would—with equal parts disdain and urgency—make sure he got to the hospital. Being a parent just requires some tough love every once in a while, you reassure yourself. 

Despite your efforts, there’s just no stopping your son. And now he’s caused another problem on top of the one you had tried to fix. He still gets upset over the general state of the world. His brother’s racism still gets under his skin, although you, your husband, the whole extended family, and both your son and his brother are white, so you don’t understand why it affects your son so much. Your son makes a big deal of who you voted for, who you wish you would’ve had the chance to vote for, and even the fact that you didn’t vote at all for a few offices because you just didn’t really care for either candidate. He even gets mad at you for doing his laundry, because he says you do it wrong, which you don’t really understand because you taught him how to do it in the first place. 

The new problem is that, at the same time, your son has gotten over nearly everything. The neighbors are mostly amused by it, but they are starting to ask questions. Little things, like the generalized What has gotten into him these days? and others that are specific enough you think they might have some kind of personal investment, like Is he planning on trying out for the track team? You worry that they’ve started placing bets. 

Your son, however, is happy as could be. Every time he gets over something, he rolls on the ground kicking his legs and clutching his chest from such hysterical laughter. It’s like a cartoon. You’ve always been hellbent on being perceived as a good parent, the one with children that always seem impossibly happy, but now that it’s happening you aren’t very keen on the attention it’s gotten you. The farmer down the road has asked your son to come jump over his crops every morning. It’s become a bit of a spectacle. Lately, your son has had to get a running start to clear the thin tip of the field, and this means to the farmer that his crops have been growing very well, so he’s started inviting other farmers from the local auction to come watch. Not wanting to be upstaged by the farmer down the road from you, they invite your son to come jump their crops, too, that way they can prove theirs are just as tall. Of course, he accepts; there’s just no stopping your son.

One day, in a fit of rage (which was not started by, but was exacerbated by, his getting over it) you say to your son, Oh would you just knock it the fuck off already! You regret saying such words almost immediately but it’s too late. He starts doing that too. 

He climbs up to the roof of the barn and flips over the crest, smacking the weathervane to the ground in the process. This goes on for years.

Despite that one time he was nearly expelled for doing parkour on the roof of the high school and kicking off all the lightning rods, your son graduates. It’s not what you wanted for him, but you aren’t surprised when he joins the circus. He invites you to all the shows. Each season gets more and more extreme, you think to yourself. His career reaches an all-time high when he is paid to flip from platform to platform over the Notre-Dame de Paris for a TV special. His career hits an all-time low immediately thereafter, when he is arrested by French police for punting half the gargoyles from their posts in the process.

Seeing one of your children in prison destroys you. The fact that it is French prison somehow makes it worse. At this point, you are in what most people would consider old age. Your health was already declining, and the grief causes it to plummet. By the time your son is released from French prison and can fly home, he is just in time for your funeral. He goes straight there from the airport. He runs in, skirts around the wall of the funeral home, past a crowd that is admittedly smaller than you would’ve liked, and hurdles your casket, catching his back foot on it in the process. He is too good at getting over it for this to be an accident. Your body spills out on the floor of the parlor and your son is there, exuberant on the ground beside you.

by MacKenzie Brady

Boys Who Know You Like Girls Fuck You a Little Harder

Put their hands around your throat and

Introduce you to their mother

Squeeze a little too tight

Put their arm around your waist

Leave you heaving but 

Smile down at you so you know

They didn’t mean to be so rough

Everything is going to be okay

 

Stick their fingers in your mouth and

Tell you to wear the tight red dress

All the places women have 

With the too-small black heels

But think they can do better and

Run their fingers through your hair

Do it aggressively

Only tug at the knots

 

Pin down your wrists and

Rib you about girls

Lean all their weight on you

Say they love you after and

Know where you’re most sensitive and

You believe it when they

Use it against you

Leave you because they think it’s weird

Like you knew they would

Which does not become less true just because it’s sad

Lift to Close by Liane Beckley

Lift to Close by Liane Beckley

by Bella Wilson

Red High Tops

Brand new―
New to mean six years old, size one sneakers.
Bright red canvas and shiny white soles, 
laces double-knotted by my mother’s nimble fingers.
Mismatched socks to say, “I am old enough to choose my own,”
direct defiance of white lace around my ankles.

 

Broken in―
Broken in to mean six-and-a-half, frayed laces wrapped twice around skinny ankles.
Rubber soles pounding linoleum tile, 
a line leader’s unearned confidence births a playground dictator.
A dictatorship that ends in principal’s office chairs,
my mother drives home without looking at my crocodile tears in the rearview mirror.

 

Worn―
Worn to mean seven years old, faded red canvas and soles thin from stomping where I should’ve stepped.
Matching white lace socks, chosen by my mother,
who pulled the stinger out when it lodged between my mismatched sock and my skin.
She knows the sincerity of bumblebee tears.

Conservation Status by MacKenzie Brady

Conservation Status by MacKenzie Brady

by Emma Campbell

We Are the Music Makers

            My dad, while sitting in the airport, said: “My sister Jill once shook the hand of Yo-Yo Ma and said it was not very soft.”

            Unlike with most things he said, I could tell what provoked this. It was the musical score open in his lap. His right hand clenched the armrest while his left one—the important one—brushed the air, pulling imaginary sound from a string section and signaling the brass’s triumphant entrance with a flick of the wrist. Conductors didn’t read Grisham or King in airport waiting areas. They read Brahms or Tchaikovsky.

            I bit, saying: “How could she tell that from one handshake?”

            His floating wrist faltered. Once his conducting hand found a metronome-steady pace it was not to be diverted, unless its owner became involved in an impromptu philosophical discussion.

            “The callouses,” he said. He flipped the score shut, trapping his thumb between the yellowing pages. “If you shake a musician’s hand—a real musician—you’ll feel the physical proof of their work in those callouses. That’s how you know they got it.”

            “Got what?”

            His hand resumed its track. “If you had it then people would tell you.”

            My brother came back from the gift shop with a crinkly bag shaped by the smooth sides and sharp edges of a jewelry box. When he sat down he put the bag gingerly in his lap.

            “What’d you get?” I said.

            “Fuck off,” he said. “It’s for Gram, not you.

            I told him I realized this, and was only asking because I’d gotten our grandmother a Snoopy pen and a gift card to Texas RoadHouse and wanted to make sure she’d be happier with my shitty presents than she was with his.

            “Not my fucking problem,” he said, and held the gift box tighter, as if I might grab it and run. His hands were daisy-white and netted with puckered veins. A tickle of wind would be enough to tear the skin from his fingers, which were long and nimble and never still. Hands like those would be wasted on a boy who doesn’t play an instrument, our mom often said, sometimes proudly, sometimes forlornly.

            “Language,” my dad admonished without thought. My brother scowled and rubbed his left shoulder, which was higher than his right from holding his flute aloft six hours a day. 

            My dad lowered his hand.

            “We were ruminating on an interesting query while you were gone,” he said to my brother.

            “Are you going to tell me what it was?” my brother said. He was unkind, but not all bad. He was a beautiful musician. I hated him a little less than I loved him. 

            “Your sister asked: What do you think of people with soft hands?”

            “That wasn’t really my question,” I said.

            “It’s what you meant.”

            “You feel for calluses,” my brother said. 

            “And that wasn’t my question,” my dad said. 

            My brother made no response. I told him I didn’t think I’d ever touched a soft hand. 

            “You wouldn’t have,” my brother said. “Only the fortunate have them. Not our family.”

            “We are fortunate,” my dad said.

            My brother sneered. “We physically exert ourselves and get no recognition because nothing we do is necessary. We don’t work, at least not like the rest of the world. That is distinctly unfortunate."

            My dad, whose face was pinched and his knuckles white, said, “But we make music, and that’s important.”

            My brother laughed. The gift bag rattled in time.

            “If we have nothing but callouses to show for it,” he said, “then does it matter what we make?”

            My dad's fists softened.

            “Perhaps,” he said. “But I’m willing to bet Yo-Yo Ma wouldn’t trade his sandpaper hands for the softest ones in the world."

            He sat stoically for a moment, idly rubbing his index finger against the opposite palm before reopening the score, lifting his hand, and picking up where he’d left off. 

 

 

by MacKenzie Brady

In Which I Think I Am Experiencing the Aftermath of the Second Plague

She was not driving down her mother’s driveway / late, after curfew. Her younger brother / was not asleep in the passenger seat. // As she drove, she did not purposefully hit / every leaf that littered the road— / did not imagine their satisfying crunch under her wheel // until one, miraculously, jumped two feet off the road, / saved itself from her incoming tires. / She did not almost throw up at the thought of it. // She did not turn down the music and roll down the window / to hear the croaking chirps / of the ones she left in her wake. // She does not remember this story, vividly, when / years later, she walks up the driveway, / this time alone, to get the mail // and get out of the house for the first time in weeks. / On this walk, the one she doesn’t take, she does not see a frog flattened to the road. / It does not make her stomach sink. // She does not get distracted by light under an overturned boat, / that she is convinced can’t be coming from the sun / and must be from the boat even though she knows that kind of boat doesn’t have lights // she does not get so distracted by a light under a boat that she almost steps on a snake, but if she does, thank god she looks down before she steps on it. // Whether that does or doesn’t happen, she doesn’t see any irony in it. // On the way back down the driveway, / after picking up the mail, / she does not count the bodies of the dead frogs. // There are not seven of them. / They are not flattened almost beyond recognition / and so crispy that it looks like a kid held a magnifying glass to them, // cooked them for hours, years maybe. / But there are no kids here, / Only fried frogs and a slight breeze. // She doesn’t pass the snake again, and when she doesn’t, / she can’t figure out if it’s dead or alive. / It’s frog-squished to the pavement, / not round enough to slither away. // She is not thinking about the snake and the squished frogs anymore— / cannot focus on things dead or alive or neither. / There is only getting the mail and walking home. // There is only rubber and asphalt. 

Cadillac Motel by Liane Beckley

Cadillac Motel by Liane Beckley

by Megan Walsh

Sight-seeing on the TriMet

Outside the bus, asphalt steams in the heat, 
demolition tape secretes brick buildings. 
Inside, beer bottles leak from a wet plastic bag. 
A man blocks the doors with his oiled body. 
A baby’s foot escapes a stroller, small shoe
threatening to drop. Across the aisle, 
the man’s bare chest swells, slick with hair. 
Grimy handprints overlap on the rails.
The man sweats through white mesh briefs,
staining them sheer. Young parents grip their daughter
between seats, hide her in their shade. Close by, 
the man sways, erect, feet spread apart
as if standing in the sea. The bus windows 
flash with sunlight. Back outside, a crane 
razes a high rise to the ground. 

by Justin Nash

Glossary of Terms

after Franny Choi

Glossary of Terms .png

by Isabelle Anderson

her name wasn’t actually jolene

we belt in our best dolly impressions as we crawl down main street / stepping into the lyrics, like a tight skirt / like we know something they don’t / like if we say the name loud enough we’ll become her / i bite my lip at the men scattered on the sidewalks like sun-dried insects / their hands are cupped to their ears, grasping at the words that make her up / the fiction we call a woman / when i write letters to the girl my first love left me for, i address them to jolene / for the men who have loved me green eyed and nameless, i became her / i watch my sister’s blonde hair flit in and out of the moonroof, catching the cranberry light of an expiring sun / she screams i could never love again / and i hear all the life she’s yet to live / she sings along with blushed cheeks, like she has something illicit on the tip of her tongue / she looks like my best friend, mouth full of marijuana smoke she doesn’t know what to do with yet / jolene / she looks like the group of us, our first time dissected from a man’s car window / jolene / the timid curve of her mouth becomes a smirk in rehearsal  / jolene / she sings in someone else’s voice, sounds like a tongue held between thumb and forefinger / jolene / in that moment, i know all the women my sister will be / the ones she’ll choose to be herself / the ones they’ll turn her into / we sing the false name a final time / let the car go quiet / and my sister says, play it again.

 

Projection 57 by Justin Nash