children of lir by Ella Humphreys

Issue 36.3

Editor’s Note

Dear Washington College Community—

The weather is slowly warming, and things are starting to feel alive again. Gentle spring sunlight is brightening Cater Walk, and I’ve noticed the robins returning to campus in flocks. Yet, watching the frost melt and give way to blooming new beginnings has inevitably reminded me of the quickness with which time continues to elapse. Life, lately, has felt fast- forwarded; the news is bleak and constant, weighing each day down with burdensome knowledge of national affairs.

Amidst the endless flow of dreadful headlines and the distressing passage of time, I’ve found myself relying heavily on writing and art as a means of expressing what often seems inexpressible; when my family and friends have heard enough of my incoherent, half-informed rambles about the state of the world, my pen picks up the burden of relieving my overcrowded thoughts. There’s an unparalleled force in channeling those feelings—the grief and sorrow, fury and fear, excitement and joy and melancholy that all, somehow, coexist—and turning them into something tangible.

Crafting language and art are acts of resistance. The impact may feel small—curves of ink on a page that, perhaps, no one outside of our beloved Chestertown community will catch sight of—but the mere existence of creation is visible and so powerful. With this sentiment in mind, I want to reaffirm Collegian as a space that encourages and embraces this creative expression. Uplifting the voices of our campus community is and always will be our priority.

Curating Issue 36.3 has been an absolute thrill—a breath of sweet spring air after a dreary, cloud-layered winter. Each piece of poetry, prose, and art offers a distinct voice and vision, a glimpse into a wholly unique perspective of the world. The writers and artists featured in this collection wholeheartedly invite us into their meditations on the weight of grief and time, their musings on what it means to challenge limitations, and their reconciliations with vulnerability. If hope truly is the thing with feathers, our contributors are not interested in trying to cage it; instead, they allow it to fly freely, interrogating the defenselessness that emerges from its absence.

In times of need, slow down and listen out for hope singing from its perch; but I hope Collegian 36.3 reminds you not to be afraid when it eludes you. Embrace those feelings; use them if you can.

With love,
Lucy Verlaque
Editor in Chief

Katie

Waking up, the hardwood is cold, the coffeepot is cold, and the sky
is greying into daytime winter blue

Youngest sleeps, baby brother in eldest’s bedroom, big sister on the sofa bed,
husband yawns and flips himself over. And she’s gone.

Less birds than last week wait for you to sit beside the
window with your coffee and your breakfast bar

The Wordle is “taper,” the Connections is too easy, the paint
on the door is only more chipped, a stain on your new kitchen,

the neighbors drive off, and you’re in the window—feet nestled
over the dog’s bed by the heating vent in your

two pairs of socks. For two days now, the occupation of your
last nine months is over. No more watching British

crime dramas together and no more daily drives to the hospital at this
hour and Shakespeare was right about all the

men and women because for nine months, coming back around, she
needed you and now she doesn’t. Not anymore.

And the neighbors—for two days now, the neighbors buy
you pizzas and the employees of the Diocese of Trenton

ask you questions about the arrangements and the rain falls
again but on a different world. One without her

suffering. One without mothers. For you, the world will never
again have such a thing under the slate Trenton skies where

you spent your whole lives together. Life turns on returns and losses—
you return to Trenton, you return to your mother, she returns to you, and

to the Earth.

Untitled by Liam Peregoy

by Connor Cordwell

Plaster

A watch ticks at the wrist; moments
making themselves apparent, the passage of.

The hands climb higher ‘til, once again,
time begins. A face shatters, the hand

slips: a stopped clock is no
clock at all. Sometimes I think

not much of anything is real. I know I never
truly have been. Disoriented, sinking

toward the floor, I press reddened skin against
the unforgiving tile and choose to lie

there for a minute. Chipped bits of paint
on the wall reveal a hidden depth: more

white paint. I presume this is what
I am made of: more white paint.

How many fallen pictures does it take to see a room,
the soul of it? No more, I hope;

too much, and I’ll hear the clock
start ticking.

Time in Art by Kaitlin Osucha

by Averie Hitzges

The Train’s Cry

The train’s tortured cry sounds from the distant black on the outskirts of town, where no streetlights glow warm. It is a wounded whistle, a plea, full and terribly tender. The scream swims through the streets like a fervent flood. It drowns out even the great buzz of the cicadas, reaching into their shells with liquid fingers and cracking them open, emptying them. Small corpses fall like rain, a gentle puttering of husks on the pavement—wailing above them, a somber sound propelled by the night’s breeze. Leaves shake from tree branches; flower petals fly from their slender stalks. It is a low, surging sob, an unending moan that buries all beneath its tragic torrent.

The bellow blows the air from my lungs. Its breeze upsets the heavy wetness of the night air, stirring humidity into cool. I am curled knee to hollowed chest on the lawn—even the plush grass beneath my foot-soles reaches towards it, bending all at once as if they could lift from the soil and fly with the sound. The pilled fabric of my sleep shorts and my threadbare tee-shirt rush that way, and my tangle of dark hair, a great mass of curls knotted by fitful rest, hover from my skull in the direction of the train’s call.

I unfurl my fists and catch cicada skins in the cup of my palms. They pile quickly there. I tip my hands and watch them flutter to the ground, scattering in the green. The wind carries their corpses up and along with the train’s howl. The small brown bodies dance along, floating, following that wail like a puny funeral procession.

With it comes a flurry of ripe green leaves, all shapes and shades, flitting about on the whining waves. A powerful gust brings some to smack at my cheek. I peel them from my damp skin, pinch them by their stems, and watch them wriggle about, attempting to escape. When I release my hold, they drift upward and quietly disappear over the street’s hill, trailing the insects.

Petals of every sweet hue, slim and flattened, fat and bowl-shaped, whirl about behind the rush of green. They twirl gently forward, spinning color down the asphalt. I hold up a hand, open-splayed to the wind—they flit softly through my fingers. Their pleasant powdery scent envelopes all, and I inhale deep, lining my lungs with honeyed air. In seconds, the fragrance flows away as if it never was.

They—the cicada husks, the leaves and the petals—rush not away from the sound but in pursuit of it, stalking at the drip that follows the deafening deluge. When the last pink piece of flora vanishes into the road’s dip, I am flooded by an inexplicable urge to chase it. I stand, stretch from my crumple of limbs, and gaze upward. Early morning, not a single star. The evening’s sky is swallowed into an inky pit, like a mouth that opens to reveal its vast blackness. No cars swing past; no shine of headlights reflect in the street. Only the yellow flare of the streetlights stretch their warmth across it—I toe at their shadows.

Careful and quiet, I edge into the light and creep forward. Peering over the road’s crest betrays only the winding path of the streetlights and the void that it vanishes sharply into. The bellow continues, consumed with grief and tinged by some wretched warning, edged in feverish anguish. Inexplicably, my bare feet begin speeding forward, indifferent to the pebbly debris on the pavement. My arms swing upward from my sides, outstretched as if I could pull the sound towards me—my mat of hair, starkly black against the warm light, whips over my face in pursuit, blinding me. Sightless and silent, my hurried stride continues.

When my knotted curls return to my shoulders, I see I am just inches before the black. Here, even the thin hair on my arms lifts, the pale of the skin beneath glowing in the last streetlight. My legs are illuminated, throwing a milky sheen that reflects onto the asphalt and disappears into the darkness. Still thunderous as ever, the train’s whistle sounds off sorrowfully. Enraptured, I follow thoughtlessly, stepping into the void.

In the pitch-dark, my foot never reaches the pavement. Strangely, it is as if I descended into a bottomless pool. At first, I float about the black, giddy, before catching speed and beating fruitlessly against the wind with my fists. My body twists and twirls and I am laying upon the air, falling and falling endlessly, eyes straining to train to the colorless flat surrounding my form. There is only nothingness all around, nothingness and the terrible whine that mourns all, swallowed by despair, circling me on every side. Flapping furiously, my arms flip my body to every corner of the empty dark. Suddenly, a great flurry of something small and soft flits onto my chest, fluttering away as I turn. Shocked, I roll to face their direction and resume stillness, gliding almost gracefully along the wind—the velvety thin petals come to rest on my face, limbs, and stomach; all that is turned assumedly upward. Then, things stiffer and larger pour from the black and pile on my form, great gusts of leaves diving downward, slipping over my eyes. A thin crinkling sounds from above, and I brush them gingerly away. Cicadas and their shells plummet onto me like hail, beating my bare skin. Some sound with a terrible crack as they meet my body, others living, screaming, shrieking in sickening tones. With the weight of these, I fall swifter, and the woeful wail whirling with the cicada song is nearly extinguished by the rush of air around me.

I hit the street hard and gasp like I had been holding my breath. My eyes wrench open to nothingness. In the dark, my ears grow keen to small sounds—outside, soft footsteps pad down the hallway, ceasing briefly before falling swifter and heavier. The front door utters its familiar creak, pulled gently closed. Dazed and dizzy with sleep, I shuffle out of my blanketed bundle and grope along the wall for the doorknob. I grip and turn its cool metal, step into the black, and flick the hall light on.

Only one door besides my own stretches open to reveal its shadow-lit innards. My loose fists meet my eyes, rubbing bleary sleep-lined delirium from the sockets. No, it’s empty. It’s empty, like a shell of shed skin.

Outside that room’s cracked window, the train’s cry continues, only presently permeating my mind. Its sorrowful song thrums like a current, like the rushing of my blood. I fall, and that falling feels eternal, a sudden slowing of time. As I descend, the wailing ebbs into a soft whistling whimper, just at the edge of town, where no streetlights glow warm.

Moon Garden by Savannah Nies

by Quinn Hammon

Peering at Scars on the Moorland Surface

“Question— The half minute time is up, so Come to the scratch, won’t you?

Answer— Blast your eyes, it’s no use, for I cannot come!”

–Branwell Brontë, “A Parody”

If I were Branwell, my name and lungs condemned
to dissolve, my face fated to be obscured
by my own hand, how I would have longed
to die here, buried in the wind, curls suspended
in air like roots reaching for soil, fingers limp
like dry leaves on quivering branches.
I ought to let myself be caught in the sky,
to watch my own biography reflected in quarry basins.
I’ll drown in this purple pool of leatherlike grasses.
In the water that dilutes the sky into
brown, I meet my eyes on the surface,
see the pupils smear across my face;
there
is the wind.

This water juts deeper than the telephone poles. It swallows
the clouds, and the wires, and the ongoing histories that permeate like groundwater.
If I were to drain this quarry, I might find his bones
displaced from their coffin by the sheer force of the moor,
but I’ll let Branwell rest for now. Instead, I’ll let this weather wash over me,
pressed to the ground like the wind-matted branches. I run my fingers through heather
as though through my own hair. It isn’t so cold when Earth’s fur
envelops me. I’ll submerge myself in dirt like warm water. If I sink
into the scenery, I’ll meet Branwell at this mountain’s core. I’ll be the grass,
tangled with myself and perpetually unsettled,
absorbed in the air literature itself once knew.

by Evan Merk

WHAT KEEPS YOU UP AT NIGHT?

When I think about it, I can’t pick out anything at all. Under the cover of night, when the stars blink awake and the loons coo in the distance, when the river water runs and the cars go silent, I can almost grasp it. A melody of a dream I can’t quite capture, humming under my breath but not knowing the words. When I startle awake in the middle of the night, for one single moment, it is only me, alone in the dark. I have a flash of clarity. The myth goes like this:

The storm rolls in, and the hell-diver calls. She cries out in the sky as the rain falls down from the heavens, her long beak open in a mournful song. The pink-orange sunrise is blocked by a blanket of dark gray thunderclouds, all-encompassing. She watches an eagle in the distance, silences her grief. She knows what the eagle does not: a loon beak is sharp, the angle precise. Her baby has already been ruined by the beast’s claws. There is nothing left for her to lose. She is a mother mourning.

The loon launches out of the water, deadly and efficient. She spears the eagle on her beak. Like an arrow to the heart, like a knife to the back, it slices clean through. It is too late for retaliation. The rain pours down, slicking both birds’ feathers as they crash into the water. They descend into the darkness, their splash accompanied by thunder booming above the surface. The loon pulls her beak out of the eagle’s chest, leaving the beast to drown. She emerges with blood falling from her face, mixed with the lake water she is coated in. In the morning, on the shoreline, two bodies will be found. An eagle carcass impaled, and a dead loon chick torn apart.

When the sun rises, someone will stumble onto the beach. They will have woken from a nightmare they cannot remember. Their toes will dig into the wet sand, looking for comfort where there is only carnage. They will bury the loon chick and the eagle side by side, underneath the sand, with pebbles as gravestones.

But while it is still night, the loon mother sits in her nest for two. She sprawls out her wings in an attempt to use the empty space, but cannot seem to fill it. It is only her, alone in the dark.

mid-flight by Ella Humphreys

by Logan Monteleone

In denial of hot tea’s capacity to cool

Moments, steeped with dandelion greens and cinnamon,
spices and leaves bittersweet
as the silence we sip them in,
make me wonder—while the sun slips
down the wall and time evanesces like steam
from the cup—if you trust that this
is enough. This, an afternoon of
folded hands and passed-down sweaters, turning
cream-colored pages that wear away between fingertips; of barely noticing the wristwatch ticking, keeping time only with the scherzo of your vinyl records, making measure with the wrens in the sycamore; of perpetually rocking back and forth like the long gray ocean, predictably
breaking in the background. Before you, now, a subdued
but satisfied look on my face says I love you
in spite of this great, inescapable impermanence.

I see it when you glance over the glasses on your nose.
You know that this serene afternoon is fleeting;
the dark, sun-blocking plumes on the seagull soon
fade to a colorless snow. You know that memories become lost among sepia-toned scraps in an unvisited attic, just hopeless appeals to mildew, to
whatever is left of this world, to unpromised posterity, begging, dust off and remember us.
You know that these floorboards, well-worn yet solid beneath us, will return someday
to the flowering weeds, presently lying unharmed and harmless in beds we made by lifting,
dropping, and lifting our spades in sandy soil sectioned off by the temporary cover of pavement. Know that someday you and I—like your rosemary bush that went back
on its promise of perennial growth—will dry up.

In this gently fading light, I soak in repose and become
stirred-in sugar to the present, to your warm presence. Here, reason becomes irrelevant and I pretend
your terracotta teapot will sing, will call to us, say
gather, and we will turn our splintered chairs
to face one another, to efface the clock, forever.
Ignoring the increasing length of shadows,
I choke back drowned flecks of calendula, choke back tears, and—despite the glazed clay returning to dust between your thinning palms—I feign
an ignorance of endings. I pretend that the present
places itself in a stable spot of time and,
like a ‘45 circling the Victrola even after
the final chord has faded, spins in blissful defiance of all that says a moment is not, if we wish it to be,
ceaseless.