Non-Fiction

To the Man Who Asked Me for a Poem

By Clarise Reichley

You approached me, hat in hand, with a simplicity. Your words fell out in accented syllables, “Will you write me a poem, please? For my wife?” I asked you if you were Spanish and how you managed to roll your “r’s” with such gusto. And you said, no, that you were Portuguese and corrected my pronunciation of your name (which I won’t put here for I can’t say it much less spell it). Your eyes were deep brown and swirling as they peeked over sunglasses and peered into my encumbered soul. Your hands speckled with age spots and your face adorned in gray whiskers to match the gray wisp of your hair. Age had come to you in grief.

In the whirl of market-goers surrounding you there was a solidity to your stature, a sureness to the way you held your sagging shoulders. I became some small moon orbiting the gravity of your experience with life. There was a hope that haloed you, a hope not televised or broadcasted and in your presence I felt the uplifting radiation of being surrounded by unending belief.

I asked about your wife, her name, how you met. And you told me she was dead, died from cancer more than a decade ago. And that somehow in your mourning you had found love again. You said “God brought her to me” and the way you spoke about God was beautiful, in the way only things said with foreign accents are beautiful. In your spliced English you told me of the village you grew up in: the red dirt streets, the chickens, your family. You told me how the boulevards were sterile when your wife died, how something you loved more than anything had fled the red dirt, not only of your hometown but of your heart, too. Then you spoke of the pain, the mourning, the aimless wandering on walkways you had known all your life. The creaking floorboards were silent and your children gone to America.

You spoke of transatlanticism and how over the static of a telephone your daughter had introduced you to her. Her the widow, you the widower. And you said you knew that this woman was an angel and that she was the new thing you loved more than anything. Grief, you said, will make you love even more. And so you took her to the opera and cried at the crescendos of song and held hands because together you had traversed grief and together you had overcome its dehabilitation. You didn’t love the grave any less, you just gained a new love for life.

And as you told me this tears tumbled from beneath your eyes and you touched the ring bound to your finger. To fall in love twice and with such hope each time astounded me. And so your monologue drew to a close. And so I clacked this remembrance into a poem with the eloquence of spoken story lost between the lines. And you grasped it gracefully as if receiving a family bible or taking communion or some other deemed sacred thing and then you were lost in the crowd and suddenly I didn’t feel so alone or pointless or purposeless anymore.

Clarise E. Reichley lives a transatlantic life between the skyscrapers of Denver, Colorado and the Burren limestone of Kinvara, County Galway, Ireland. Her work has been published internationally. Her piece Happy Harry was an Editors Choice in Teen Ink Magazine and she has appeared in UK/Irish magazines: OtherWise, Guaire, and Peeking Cat Poetry. She has been awarded a Regional Gold Medal by Scholastic Art and Writing Awards for her short story “Make Clowns Great Again.” Additionally, she published her own literary magazine, rhapsody. Every month she sends out a musing with her writings. Follow her work at clarisethepoet.com.

A Disappearing Act

By Andrea So

My uncle lived in a neighborhood of Hong Kong called Stanley. Every day after school, I would skip down to his apartment and cling to him until my parents arrived. Their car would speed down the strip of leafy road that, within the same neighborhood, begins at Hong Kong’s colossal Versailles-inspired mansions and slinks down into the housing projects– my uncle’s corner of the world. As I waited by the window for my parents’ car to turn the corner, my uncle would pinch a thin cigarette between his fingers and roll down the grooved wheel of the lighter. I used to ask him, “How are you alive if you have no teeth, you can’t eat anything, and you only smoke and drink?”

“魔術. It’s magic,” he would croak out in Cantonese, grinning at me through a thin veil of smoke. As a kid, this was how I usually found out which room of the apartment he was in. I’d follow the ribbons of gray silk that slowly disintegrated into the air, the way a child’s eyes follow a magician’s trick they can’t quite understand.

_____

It feels as if I’m walking on air. With each step I take, my bare feet sink a little more into the technicolor-yellow sand, leaving a winding trail of dark footprints behind me. In the near distance, a desert dune catches my eye, and another, and another, all strikingly identical– all climb up to the same summit, all slope downward with the same soft curve, all cast the same shadow on the desert floor. Looking up, I come face to face with a sky so ludicrously black and boundless it takes me a split second to realize that I am even looking at something.

A flurry of color bursts onto the sky’s dark canvas. It’s a hot air balloon, with its fabric loosely stitched in haphazard patches of blue and red. A brown wicker basket suspends from the balloon, but nobody is controlling this magnificent contraption. Nobody’s there.

I can see a unicycle suspending from the basket, tethered to it by two lines of wire.

I can see my uncle’s corpse splayed across the seat of the unicycle, his body bloody and bullet-riddled, his mouth stretched into a wide smile I am at once mesmerized and terrified by.

——

The first time I had this dream, my uncle was still alive. I was eight years old. Back then, I didn’t understand why this particular image rooted itself in my mind and refused to let go. My strong aversion to fantasy novels like Harry Potter confused my mother, and I would only stare into the bottom of my teacup as my friends pranced around and painted their faces pink with makeup.

Yet, my subconscious mind could conjure up images of balloons and baskets and bullet holes. Burying my face into my favorite stuffed elephant, I wanted nothing more than to step into a time machine and watch time flow in reverse. I wished I had never seen my uncle’s body or the hot air balloon floating above– I would be at peace, with only the vast sky and endless desert before me, the silence a steady static hum.

Although my uncle would later vanish suddenly from my life and leave me grasping at any traces of memory, I remember the elaborate Christmas cards he used to illustrate for me, adorned with sketches of towering pine trees and scenes of snowflakes adrift. Drawing was a talent of his that had dwindled away over the course of decades, lost to the haze of a sailor’s chronic arm injury and its resulting alcoholism, the consequences of which would haunt him until the end of his life. The graphite sketches would always be marked by his slight tremble, a flutter of the pencil at the corners. The red envelopes he tucked the cards into, however, were always marked with the same flourish: “To the most beautiful girl in the world.”

As I grew older, I found myself wandering to Stanley after school, forgetting more than once that my uncle lay confined to a hospital bed now and my parents didn’t need him to look after me anymore. But I marched on to his neighborhood anyway, never realizing that I was headed in the wrong direction until I came face to face with golden fences that towered over me and the white marble pillars guarding the tantalizing secrets of the rich. At that point, dusk would have already settled over the sky, and my dad would drive over and retrieve me from the entryway of my uncle’s apartment. I’m sure his neighbors must have been confused by the small girl on the floor, homework strewn across the dim hallway, but they never said anything.

After my uncle died, the dream began to recur every month. It later took on new meaning for me. While I used to focus on the grotesque image of my uncle’s corpse, I now thought about the heaviness weighing down my body seconds before I shook awake from the dream. This weight mirrored the heaviness I felt after he died– You never kept his Christmas cards. You search and search but don’t know where any of them went. You can’t even remember his favorite brand of cigarettes, or his favorite Billie Holiday album, or the way he did his hair.

Black was the color of his hair at his funeral. It was the first thing I noticed when my mother nudged me toward the window that separated us from the body in the next room.

Unlike my dream, there were no bullet holes, no blood. My uncle’s hair had been dyed black from his original gray, probably by some worker at the funeral home who didn’t give a second thought to how he had lived and who had known him and how they would recognize him now.

The man tasked with making my uncle’s corpse look presentable definitely didn’t know that my mom hadn’t told me about his death until a week after he died. How could he have known that I had been at an Outward Bound camp that week, celebrating the end of sixth grade? I could have been warming my hands around a campfire. I could have been hiking up a grassy trail. I could have been asleep as my uncle lay dying, but I’ll never know because my family denied me that right.

A layer of pink lip balm glistened on the body’s mouth, catching the harshly fluorescent light. It was the only thing about the body that seemed vaguely three-dimensional or real. My uncle’s spirit had already wrestled its way out of the cold body and shot towards the sky, until it was nothing but a twinkle in the distance.

As a kid, I despised my mind for harboring this dream, but I understand more now– every time I jolt awake from it, I still lay confined to my bed until I can untangle the limbs of nightmare from reality, but that image of his gunshot-riddled body is all I have left of him. When I stop having this dream, I will lose the last connection I have to my uncle that isn’t the blood coursing through my veins. I feel like the kid in the crowd who begs the magician for one more trick, just one more, after he’s already packed up his suitcase and heads for the door. I beg my family for the truth behind how my uncle died, for stories about him, but it never works. Nothing ever changes.

Whenever I dream of balloons and bullet holes now, I feel strangely tied to him, as though I am catching up to his spirit across the galaxies that exist between the living and the dead. Not like anything is ever really dead or past, even. The dream always reminds me of my uncle’s apartment, now abandoned, where I used to follow the ribbons of gray silk that led me to him. This time around, however, my uncle doesn’t appear after the smoky haze has vanished. Through gripping onto this nightmare, I am chasing yet another disintegrating smoke trail that separates my uncle from me– this is the magic trick I cannot tear my eyes away from; this is my dizzying pursuit of a deathless disappearing act.

Andrea So is currently a junior at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. She loves Ernest Hemingway, Laura van den Berg and Natasha Trethewey.

Lessons from Pot Stock on Living My Life

By Lilly Dickman

“What do you want to do in life?” My biggest fear is having to answer this question. My twin sister answers it with ease. Being twins, we’re obviously the same age, so we’ve had the same amount of time on this Earth to come up with an answer to this question. Clearly then, time isn’t the independent variable in this equation. I don’t know why we both couldn’t have woken up one day with a light bulb above our heads.

“I want to go to film school in California so that I can live by the ocean and be a screenwriter. If that doesn’t work out, I’ll be a biochemical engineer,” my sister answers in one breath. Her plan seems unrealistic, until she explains her web of filmmaking classes and independent studies, acting courses on top of AP Biology classes, that seem to have been worked seamlessly into her schedule. In reality, her meticulous plan wasn’t easy to configure. My sister worked through emails upon emails, meeting upon meeting, and summer school to achieve the arrangement of courses that will create the yellow brick road to her dream occupation.

Me, on the other hand— I can’t even decide what I want from the sushi menu at dinner. Faced with any decision, especially about my future, and I shut down. At a time when I’m preparing to make choices involving hopes and dreams, colleges and majors, my indecision is an issue. One day I think I should study psychology, the next I think I want to write, the day after that I want to own an overnight camp and live in the woods. I can’t even decide who is the more “normal” one in this scenario, my decisive sister or wishy-washy me.

“Work hard, and you can achieve it,” says pretty much every teacher, college counselor, or parent ever. “How am I supposed to work hard if I don’t even know what I’m working for?” I think. I can’t strive for it if I don’t know what it is. It’s not fair, I think. Why do some people get to know what they want to do and not others?

It seems to me that the people who know what they want to do from the beginning have an overarching better shot at life. The sooner you know it, the sooner you can work toward it, the sooner you can achieve it, right? I yearn to have a passion, something that makes me hungry, something that makes me work toward a specific outcome, an it. It’s the lack of knowing that triggers my fear. The “up-in-the-airness” of no plan is scary.

Which is why, most likely, I am freaked out by the cannabis stock that my grandfather bought for my sister and me a week ago. “I’m telling you,” he said at dinner, “this stuff is gonna be big. Just hang onto it for a little while.” So, in addition to questioning the legality of the purchase as well as my existence, I spent the past week watching the price of my weed stock on my iPhone app. It kept rising.

“Do you want to sell it?” my grandfather now asks us at dinner this week. I have no idea. I don’t know about stocks in general, let alone cannabis stocks. And I don’t know about me. Am I striving for millions and going for broke? Or am I playing it safe and cashing in now so that at least I come away with something? My twin sister, of course, knows what she wants to do. She’s in it for the long haul.

So is my grandpa. “Let it sit,” he advises me. “It’ll go up, it’ll go down. Just take it day-by-day. See how it goes and see how you feel. Eventually a day will come and you’ll know what to do with it. It’s a gamble, play the game.”

I agreed to let it ride. Not that it’s easy. Not that I don’t check the price of the stock constantly and wonder if I’m doing the right thing. But, I’m practicing living with the unknown. I realize now that my grandpa’s lesson on pot stock, of all things, is a lesson on life. Life is risky, unpredictable. Even if I, like my sister, knew what kind of game I wanted to play, there’s no guarantee of the outcome. Simply having an it doesn’t guarantee success.

And, just because I don’t know what my aspiration is, just because I don’t have an it, doesn’t mean I’m not in the game, striving for something. Maybe my it, right now, is just to figure out my it. Maybe it’s good to not have a plan, to let myself exist, and see how I feel. Life, like my stock, is a ride, and I just have to be okay with letting my hand play out.

One day I’ll know, the answer might even become obvious. But until then, when people ask, “What do you want to do in life,” instead of freaking out and questioning God’s purpose for placing me on this Earth, I’ll just rephrase the question in my brain: “What do you want to do with your cannabis stock?” “I’m not sure yet,” I’ll answer. “I’m taking it day by day.”

Lilly is a junior at Highland Park High School. She is a hip-hop dancer, a water-skier, a writer, and a twin. Her play, What Happens In Springfield, was performed at this year’s Short Play Festival at school. She lives in Highland Park, which is a suburb of Chicago, with her parents, her sister and her dog, Pickles.

Dia Dia

By Ysabel Li

In the funeral home, I was looking down and staring at Grandpa’s face. It was pale and bloodless, but calm. I stood there with my parents and my brother. We were all wearing black. The carpet was tan, there were no windows, and five rows of empty chairs filled the small space, which smelled distinctly of air freshener. I was listening to my brother talk about the days when Grandpa taught him to speak Shanghainese with a better accent. My high-heeled shoes felt as if they were sinking. My mother and father spoke next, and they talked about the happiness Grandpa brought to the household. He’d always comment on how good my English was, although I was born and raised in America. When it was my turn to speak, I had nothing to say. I didn’t know why.

All I knew was that last week he was alive, and that today he was gone. What were we going to do with his green coat behind the door, his closed-toed slippers, or his reading glasses? What was Dad going to do with the wheelchair he had built for Grandpa? Everyone looked at me and waited for me to say something kind about Grandpa, but all I think about was, why did he need a shiny satin blanket in eternity? And what was I supposed to say?

I recalled the time, just three weeks before he was admitted to the hospital, when I was sitting at my desk, studying French possessive pronouns. Grandpa stopped at my doorway, peeked his head in, and stared. It was a hot summer afternoon, and the windows were open but the cool breeze hadn’t kicked in yet. He looked solemn, holding his hands behind his back and his face drooping. He didn’t have much hair, but the hair he did have was all gray and swept to one side.

He was frail and thin, and he wore oversized beige polyester pants and a green knit sweater, even though it had to be ninety degrees in the house.

He casually asked me, “What are you doing?” I could tell by his face that he just wanted to chat and have some company after spending the entire day alone in our four-bedroom, two-bath ranch-style house in the suburbs, where nothing happens except the trash truck on Tuesday mornings and the sprinklers every night.

I was trying not to feel so exasperated at all the pronouns and derivatives I had to finish studying that night. As I sat gazing at his expectant face, I thought about how he had solely taken care of his family and his wife of twenty years after she’d fallen sick. It was back in China when my dad was only fifteen years old and Grandpa worked full-time as a mechanical engineer at a textile manufacturer. Though I didn’t know the story about his life as a worker there, the scars on his hands and arms told me a piece of that story. I felt guilty for not wanting to sit down and ask him about his life. I felt that I should have talked to him and taken notes and gotten his perspective.

TALK TO DAD ABOUT GRANDPA, FIND OUT ABOUT GRANDPA’S JOB AND WHAT GROWING UP IN SHANGHAI WAS LIKE, WHAT WAS HIS LIFE LIKE?

I said, “Just doing homework,” and turned back to my book. I heard his slippers shuffling down the hall and the TV clicking on. A Chinese drama show played in the background.

Ysabel Li is a senior at Lynbrook High School in San Jose, California. Once a champion figure skater, she has retired her skates and taken up creative writing and water polo. Her work has been nationally recognized by the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards. She loves to dive into ice cream (cookies and cream) and aspires to become a young scientist. She used to raise chickens named Linda and Caroline.

[worth]

By Caleb Pan

[paintbrush]

I started with watercolors instead of washable markers and crayons. I subsequently loathed markers and crayons when I was finally introduced to them. Colors were usually limited to only ten distinctive options. Maybe eleven if they included a pink. Boring, I whined as a bratty four-year-old. Watercolor entices the expansion of your given palette, the blocks of ink close enough to guarantee a delightful accident. I spent hours playing alchemist, my imagination staining innumerable paper towels from cleaning off brushes. Whatever I imagined, I gave myself the responsibility to birth it, training myself in the playful temptation of creation. Of course, this was the brief period of time before dreams were only okay as long as you didn’t believe in them too much. A year later, at age five, I learned the world was confusingly unfair after a class friend and her family were killed by a drunk driver without warning; a hardened heart isn’t healthy at an early age but I recognized dreams often die, too. That never made me settle for just ten colors, though (or maybe eleven).

[mechanical pencil]

In fifth grade, every day right after recess, I was pulled out of class with five others. We were part of a tentative study of “smart kids,” reaped from gifted assessments we took in fourth grade. I was a “twice exceptional” – highly gifted and talented with a mental disorder, an interesting asset for researchers. Uncomfortable, I despised both admirations and belittlement from adults who decided to merit me with a blue medical report and a congratulations letter. As guinea pigs, we tested experimental enrichments, scratching out solutions to algebraic problems on lime graph paper. Fitful clicking ricocheted around the room, our lead repeatedly snapping as if the mechanical pencils we received were syringes desperately pumping fragile steroids into our fledgling potentials. If the medicine ever worked, I don’t know; they took the data and left. I’m still a cerebral wild card, a clumsy renaissance man, an Icarus that flies too close to the ocean than the sun, a scarred and self-taught wielder of the double-edged sword. Regardless of how I turned out, I don’t let two pieces of paper tell me who I am.

[highlighter]

In middle school, I never understood “getting the main idea” from a reading assignment. I lived my junior high career as a heretic, never highlighting that priceless one-sentence summary we were indoctrinated to ceaselessly sniff out using an alphabetized list of context clues. Okay, admittedly, part of it was out of spite (bless my 8th-grade teacher’s heart). But to this day, whenever I highlight something, I’m chasing after bizarre-looking butterflies and white rabbits – what I do and don’t understand; there’s no difference. Sporadic stripes of neon serve as a map of my curiosity; the summary is a footnote that I’ll put at the bottom of my works cited page and probably neglect to put in my essay altogether. I inherited the mantle of the intellectual gadfly, the pride of Socrates: pestering dead poets and playwrights for their techniques and personal lives, stalking the posse of sci-fi and fantasy authors on universe building, ransacking essayists for their social commentaries, exploring the proclamations and pamphlets of history’s greats and terribles. Forget about the summary; it’s still a hobby of mine to drag the devil out of the details.

[ballpoint pen]

I never liked pens. You can’t erase ink, and my handwriting is an ugly hybrid between print and cursive, the lines bleeding too closely together making my e’s look like c’s and my g’s like gaunt commas. Because of the erratic pace of my hand, my letters often smear too. But I use pens to scribble out dumb ideas and write more absurd ones underneath them. I always attempt to be organized when writing with a pen. That never happens, of course: smeared ink and half-hearted doodles infest the margins and any white space between them. My idle ambition slumbers until I pick up a pen – ink has permanency and confidence graphite lacks, elements required to smelt lofty dreams into actual goals: the consequence of use could be the forming cartilage of a masterpiece or another reminder to celebrate my human failure. Whatever the result, I disown my notes and maroon them cabinets, lulling their unappeased spirits back to sleep, empty-handed without deserved credit. They come back, however, whenever I dash out my signature on a dotted line, claiming something captive in my name, ultimately having the last laugh.

[calligraphy brush]

Chinese calligraphy, like all things in the Sinosphere, could not be simple. It could’ve been just a writing style. But it also had to be an art; a discipline; a cultivation of character. In other words, bitterly difficult. Despite its reputation, the technique and form aren’t usually what drives beginners away – it is the ubiquitous demand for patience. Children fail superbly, me being no exception. It takes time to know the right amount of pressure to apply on a hook stroke while resisting the urge to flick your wrist. The brush is traditionally considered as an extension of the calligrapher’s body, coinciding with his or her virtuosity. If you can’t subdue your impatience, you forfeit your concision and clarity. I’ve pulled at my hair more often than not just from writing my own name while growing up. Even worse, my younger sister was extolled by a master calligrapher, doing wonders on my then prepubescent ego. Eventually, matured with humility, I learned mastering anything requires investment in myself first; and even more difficult, to be patient with myself afterward.

[no. 2 pencil]

You must use a No. 2 pencil or you will not be scored.

Caleb Pan is a stressed out teenager who enjoys hash browns and maintaining his 4.0 GPA. He’s an avid reader, writer, coder, and martial artist in his free time.

Ladies, Gentlemen, Etc, Please Take Partners

By Char Pavlov

Ladies, Gentlemen, Et Cetera, Please Take Partners for a

WALTZ

The view from above could either be a stirred pond of drifting flower petals or a box of ticking clockwork. Social waltz sits on the edge between organic and mechanical. Try to feel free, but still united with a partner. Respond to a partner while still fitting with the rest of the room. It feels beautiful to find that balance.

I like social waltz best when it’s about balance,

but the dance has a built-in power gap.

Take another look down, and notice that some of the flower petals or cogs are moving more than others. The ones who move more are the follows, or in traditional terms, the “ladies,” and their partners are the leads, the “gentlemen.” Lots of people don’t pick a role based on gender – I prefer to lead because leads spin less, and I get dizzy easily – and more experienced dancers, myself included, often learn both parts. But it’s nonetheless relevant that the traditionally male part directs every move and is considered the more difficult part, to the point where sometimes a class will be taught by a lead, using a silent junior teacher as a prop to demonstrate moves.

Social waltz has the ghost of the patriarchy inside it.

Unless society is perfectly egalitarian, where everyone both decides what to do and carries out these commands, there will be power disparities.

And when there are power disparities, those with power will be tempted to forget the perspective of those without it.

One evening, I was following a waltz and instead of resting his free hand on top of mine, my lead was squeezing so tightly that I couldn’t pull away.

If we’d been on a collision course with another couple, I would’ve had to put all my trust in this man I’d met two minutes ago when I’d asked him to

dance.

We’ll have a short break between sets. Get a drink, have a snack, keep your energy up.

We’ve got a long night ahead of us.

Ladies, Gentlemen, Et Cetera, Please Take Partners for a

CROSS-STEP WALTZ

Recognize and accept that we’re living with a power imbalance.

Come up with ways to make the voices of those with less power heard.

I’ve talked to people who teach beginner waltz who have successfully co-taught classes in lead/follow pairs, each having an equal voice so that each role’s concerns are addressed. One pair even tried to teach all their students to lead and follow at the same time, so they’ll be more flexible and sensitive to their partners’ positions. It’s tough to teach two roles at once, and rather confusing to the students. But maybe with a bit more attention paid to class structure, it could be managed. Or maybe there’s a better way to teach lead/follow empathy.

I would want a classful of beginners who I can test ideas on. Maybe some of them will go on to become as interested in the problem as I am, and test ideas on their own students. Maybe one of us will figure it out, and maybe we’ll be able to make the same principles work in politics, school, the office, or whatever part of society we land in.

Ladies, Gentlemen, Et Cetera, Please Take Partners for a

Char B. Pavlov is a bigender Northern California native in their first year at a small liberal-arts college in the Midwest. When not dancing, they can be found acting in Shakespeare plays, arguing about Star Trek, or reading books about medical malpractice. They are intending a biology major with a history minor