The Sketchbook

Volume VIII Issue II

The Sketchbook is the literary magazine affiliatedwith St. Anthony Hall, Brown’s

co-ed literary fraternity. It is a semi-annual publication that welcomes submissions

from all Brown and RISD students as well as members of any chapter of the Hall.

Submit your work: sketchbook.kappa@gmail.com

Visit our blog:blogs.brown.edu/sketchbook

Dearest Kappae, Thank you for the past four years of cuddle puddles, couch tubs, Fat-Bottomed dances, hugs after hard days, never-ending happy birthday songs, semi-naked poker games, holes in walls, solarium nights, and friendships that will last a lifetime. Thank you for giving me this community and I’ll miss this home of mine so much!

Enjoy this Sketchbook as a token of my love,Celia Megdal K’12

Sketchbook Co-Editor

We two alone will sing like birds i’ the cage. When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down And ask of thee forgiveness. So we’ll live, And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh At gilded butterflies. - King Lear, 5.3.10-14

Seb Pihan K’14Sketchbook Co-Editor

Table of Contents

Frankly, Dear, I Don’t Give a Damn by Mia Rollins K’14 Cover

Malacandra’s Fate by Alexandra Urban K’12 1

Butterflys by Allison Silverman K’14 2

Smoke by Nicholas Morley '13 K'11 3

Semanticide by Ari Beller K’13 5

[ ] by Nancy Fu K’15 7

Window by Allison Silverman K’14 8

The Beetle by Nick Anderson K’13 9

Examination by Noah Fields K’14 10

You stepped out of a poem... by Gillian Michaelson K’11 11

Experience by Noah Fields K’14 12

Muffin Monday, Tasty Delish, Protect Her by Mia Rollins K’13 13-14

Artwork by Jacob Thrasher Φ’15 15-18

A Brief Love Affair with Glitter...by Hannah Jones X’14 19

The Lazy Activist’s Lament by Alexis Hope Lerner K’15 21

A New Way To Fall by David Reich K’14 22

Things I Wrote After A Night of Not Sleeping... by Dylan Felt K’13 23

This Sketchbook was created in loving memory of

Sara Jaye Overstreet K’13

1

Malacandra’s Fate by Alexandra Urban K’12

Ransom, hoping to keep his friends, to keep Malacandra,eventually gave in to the understanding that he could not return. No human could return because the planet itself was returning. And so, the journey began, or continued I should say, since it had been journeying around our Sun for a long while at this point: now, however, the planet as a whole slid off its orbit and was thrown back into the darkness. Outer space, Ransom discovered, is not only the womb of worlds but also the keeper of fallen creatures, a mystic graveyard suspended in the sky. These planets had fallen not from a lack of effort or of strength but because their world had out lived its life, now time for a new world to transform this light into their own. Life is kept by the Heavens, Ransom realized. Planets are born from slices of stars.

2

Butterflys by Allison Silverman K’14

3

SmokeNicholas Morley '13 K'11

“Was he very beautiful?”

My grandmother blushed. I imagined many drafts of my grandfather's nudeness stuffed in some shameful attic box. “Let me get photos.” After five minutes she huffed around the corner from the kitchen with a manila folder. She bent over and slipped a thumb into the top of each of her edema socks. “Skin's weeping,” she said in German. “Such a shame. The kidneys were doing so well. Such a shame.” In old age she'd forsaken English. I was too scared to ask if it was on purpose.

I'd asked my Oma about my grandfather plenty as a child, to the point of humor. “May-be for Lent I'll give up ignoring that question,” she'd say and wink. Then she was put on dialysis, I turned 18, and my parents divorced.

“Here he is up on Fire Island.” A black-and-white picture yellowed, crosshatched wrinkles spanning its entirety, of a hunched and lanky man, slim nose, high cheeks, hands behind his head so his arms and shoulders flexed, pretzeled, lackadaisy. Head not-recently shaved with a monk's five-o-clock shadow. He wore no shirt but too-big overalls covered a concave chest. “You can see the paint.” The splotches were heavy over his knees and shoulders-- I'd thought they were the wear on the photo. He'd been on commission to do up the townhouse on whose porch he stood, in pastel pink.

“First job he got when we crossed over. A German couple owned it. We lived there.”

“Lived in it?”

“I cooked Bratkartoffeln on their Ava. God, I love Avas. No stoves like them anymore.”

I turned the photo over. “Forty-six,” scrawled.

He'd been an art student in Berlin during the war. They'd met at art school.

“He'd take me out to the theater to see opera, or to the cinema. They always played the same schlock. War this, war that. I was very bored of war films. And Ernst would argue that any money that went against communism was well-spent in his book. But he went to school to avoid the draft. And his uncle was married to a Jew. They both got taken away.”

“So was he a Nazi?”

4

“Oh, no. We even ran away when the Russians came.” They had escaped together in the night from the school bunkers. “We ran and ran for days through the woods. We drank from streams. We didn’t eat until we got to the American lines. He carried a big sketchbook and I took my camera and that was it. And the clothes we wore. He lied and said we were Austrians because the Americans liked them more. I was sore about that.” She laughed. “I said, and I remember this, if I wanted to be Austrian I’d have married the Fuhrer.”

The laugh went and went until it transcended humor, dove into something more muddled. She drew out another photo, of Opa now with hair and a shirt beneath the overalls, and a taller fellow to his right. “This is him with the man he painted houses with, Zajic. They were lovers.”

A quiet enclosed us. It felt ritual and pure. I dared not break it.

She drew out a third photo. A building in flames. “During the bombing raids, when we were in bunkers beneath the dorms, Ernst would sneak out there with his easel, follow the firefighters on his bicycle. He'd try to paint the big administrative buildings in flames. He called it his zeitherausforderung. To capture something falling apart. I followed after the all-clear. I would draw him.” She turned the photo back to herself and gripped it with both hands. “And we'd go until either the fire was put out or the building was consumed.”

“Which did he prefer?”

Oma smiled. It was the right question. “Fire.”

5

SemanticideAri Beller K’13

Walking home last night with my mind in a fog, a friend ap-proached me to inquire on my condition.

“How are you, Ari?” he asked, and I replied absentmindedly that I was good. But on this occasion, my friend made the unusual choice to press me on my response.

“Are you really?” he asked, noting the quite obvious fact that I was not exhibiting the general characteristics of one who is doing well. This response caught me off guard, and I was, for a moment, dragged back to a state of conscious awareness in which I could reflect on this exchange.

Had I lied to my friend? I don’t believe I had, at least not in the strict sense of telling him an untruth. For the word I had offered him as an appraisal of my state of being was empty. I could have used the same descriptor in the moment of my deepest depres-sion, or in the moment of my most ecstatic joy. In either case, it would have conveyed to him equally nothing. I could have used this word in an honest attempt to communicate the state of mod-est contentment that I believe it was once intended to signify. Still this attempt would have been as meaningless as it was last night.

I had not told my friend a lie, I had not told him anything at all. I had offered him a sound that I knew meant nothing, and that I knew he knew meant nothing, and he had had the good grace to call me out on it.

6

The word “good” is dead. It has been hollowed out and stripped of significance by overuse and insincerity. And though I have only begun to notice this phenomenon, I am inclined to believe that the same can be said for many other words. Entire swaths of the English language gutted, deprived of their meaning and function by a slow and deliberate process of semantic decay. Entire con-versations with vague acquaintances and more sadly with former friends built on linguistic nothings. There is no meaning in these words. They are a shell of conversational formalism insulating us from real connection. An apathetic cultural response to the complexity and frightening engagement required to answer the simple question “How are you?”.

The process of semanticide is slow and subtle, and almost cer-tainly subjective. There was a time surely when the word “good” meant something to me, though my guess is that even at that point it was long since dead for many others. I can not look back and say with definitiveness when it died. It seems to have been a gradual deterioration. I advise a general caution to all who read. The word “good” is not so irreparable a loss to the English lan-guage that it cannot be overcome. But think on other words for which thoughtless overuse is slowly giving way to ambiguity and banality. Consider, for instance, the number of people (or things) that you profess to love.

7

[ ]by Nancy Fu K’15trigger warnings: violence/bodily harm

Notes tear through your fingers, slicing through bloated flesh like ink through soda.

Pour into me.Please.

Your eyes widen, black spots in a blackness with no end.

You are mine.

Slip through nail beds, leaving lacerations like tea parties and roses.

I told you not to

Talons in midnight velvet and pearls of coal sink into pale ideas, wrenching a needle through graveyard meadows.

I will stay.

Lavenders’ thorns lace eyelashes, adorn wire necklaces with a whisper. Remember the hiss of serrated rubies against your skin, sweetheart. It will stay settled between the crisp stars in your stomach until you can hear the shift of mountains on Andromeda’s palm.

And I will show you,darling.

I will show you the night’s opalescent secrets, watch as they render your mind full like the ocean after a storm, hold your hand as they slink under your nails with crystalline exuberance.

Pour into me.Please.

8

Window by Allison Silverman K’14

9

The BeetleNick Anderson K’13

Listen, children, heed me well.Attend the terrors that I tell.

In your home a monster lurks,plotting out his wicked works.

The Beetle’s what they call the wretchall hard black shell and claws outstretch’d.

Cursed is the child who’s caught sleepingwithout his parents’ wishes keeping.

To him The Beetle’s sure to cometo eat the brat. Yes, every crumb!

A tot with ears and neck unwashed? The Beetle comes, jaws flecked with froth.

A twerp of cruelty unrelenting?The Beetle skitters, dark eyes glinting.

A twit whose sums are not solved right? Black claws come clacking in the night.

Any truant or tyke who does as he pleaseselicits The Beetle’s most ravenous wheezes.

So strive for naught but to obeyto keep that Beetlish threat away.

Tremble not – don’t have a fit.All you need is to submit.

10

Name: Noah Fields (K’14)

Everything in your future depends on this examination

Write in pencil, fill bubbles completely. Name goes in the upper left corner.

Might you escape this exam, dignity preserved? (Sample question)a. Fame is a boat boarded by the lucky, not the meritorious. b. Is this a rhetorical question? c. Bear : church :: Stockholm Syndrome : lethologica d. ^ His answer. (When in doubt, answer “c” for “conspiracy”.)

Appear: Spelled A-P-E-A-R? A-P-E-E-R? A-P-P-E-E-R? A pair of p’s and e’s as seams? So it seems.

Afloat without a map ____________________ . (Fill in the blank) a. Ride at your own risk. b. Boat god, if you exist, appeer and grant me luck. c. Pride of lions, conspiracy of ravens, congregation of alligators praying for fresh meat.

Away is one way. What is another? a. Decay. b. Decay. c. Decay. d. Decay.

11

You stepped out of a poem I was writing for someone else. by Gillian Michaelson K’11

You stepped out of a poem I was writing for someone else. You stretched out of the paper, bending the pages with your fistfuls of words, verbs curling your toes, conjunctions connecting your jaws in two perfect rows. You were a head filled with nouns, disjointed people, places, and things with no beginnings and no endings. Thoughts fully formed unmodified impossible to enact. Phrases you changed into living facts. Your chest adjectives, your legs adverbs, your arms exclamations held high. Interjections split your midsections while prepositions filled your eyes and articles flitted like flies along the contours of your thighs. Modifi-ers made up your back rising out of the page stripped white and black.

12

Experienceby Noah Fields K’14

What is in hindsight obvious and cliché was once fresh and nothing felt more vivid.You suffocated in the raw intensity nobody, not even the daffodils, had ever felt before.Even the stars came for you, gnashing their teeth and burying every dream you ever had.

If you could slice open the experience and hold the fragile, damaged core in your palm:“This! This is my pain. Feel the scorch mark here? And this scratch?”

With perspective, moment x slips into the periphery and subsequent sunsets dull even the sharpest edgescriss-cross red yellow purple hazeHow foolish you were, to believe the sky was fire.And this, the careful habit of forgetting and forgiving, we call wisdom.

13

Artwork byMia Rollins K’14

Muffin Monday

14

Artwork byMia Rollins K’14

Tasty Delish

Protect Her

15

Artwork by Jacob Thrasher Φ’15

16

Artwork by Jacob Thrasher Φ’15

17

Artwork by Jacob Thrasher Φ’15

18

Artwork by Jacob Thrasher Φ’15

19

A Brief Love Affair with Glitter and Power Derived from Self Destruction in Five PartsBy Hannah Jones X’14trigger warning: bodily harm

Part one was a lime green glitter shirt, the kind that feels like sand paper, covered-- no, made of-- a sharp, reflective grit. Each piece glowed iridescent, forsaking color for shine. Somehow, as a whole, the shirt was still undeni-ably green. And when I say green I mean the color of NFL turf run through the washer with bleach, like a relic that will someday be used to represent the entire decade of the nineties. The shirt pressed in with sharp edges on your soft, voluminous torso and felt like armor faced in the wrong direc-tion. You suffered for this archaic and violent beauty.

What’s important is that your mom bought you this shirt on a regular day when she had gone to Hamrick’s for something else and I cannot overstate the significance of this uncharacteristic splurge. She didn't buy it because you needed a shirt, she bought it because it was made for you, and even a good Nazarene woman couldn't deny that.

I'll say now that it looked good on you, because no one else ever did.

Part two was a journal with a pink glitter butterfly on the front, a color that was high pitched and breathy and warm to the touch. You used it to confirm your femininity, a concept that was tenuous at best when you were twelve years old and chubby and had chin length hair.

The day after you got it, you wrote three pages about how much you hated the pretty girl down the street and didn’t touch it for seven years, until your parents got divorced and you were helping your mom move out of your childhood home. You were shocked by your younger self ’s capacity for hatred.

I don’t forgive you for your anger back then, I merely want to reassure you that it’s all very different now. You no longer run your hands over the rough, sparkled surface just to feel the burn. You’ve learned how to look without stabbing.

20

Part Three was a relapse. No, part three was a dance party with Pabst Blue Ribbon, a song with a good bridge and a boy that a lot of your friends don’t like anymore. The good bridge came and you threw white glitter into the air, letting it fall into your eyes softly, like snow, and not at all expecting it to burn. But it did. It always does. It’s an irrevocably painful obsession you have, these hexagonal daggers that sneak into your bones and scrape and stay forever.

Part Four is your every-day glitter, worn as a dusty perfume, a chalky lotion that keeps your skin taught and feeling like yours. For others, it’s a prank and a weapon you use at unexpected times. Watch out when Hannah dresses as a fairy. Who sprinkled glitter on the carpet? You put it on a pizza when you’re high on new friends, and ingesting it acts as a vaccine, a poison working with you to make you stronger.

Part five is you, naked in your bathroom, blood red glitter clinging to your body in the shape of veins. The harsh light gives it the illusion of movement, and it flows through you, delivering power to each cell individually, whisper-ing softly for hours about how much it likes you.

21

The Lazy Activist’s LamentBy Alexis Hope Lerner K’15

We study the anatomy of extinct treesby reading bleached cross-sections of their pressed pulp bodies.We drop bills into cups clasped by desperate, homeless handsafter our companies refused to afford them real change.We praise the Lord’s name in our temples and churches but soil it in our bedrooms ( - plus others we should not delve into.)

Do I make you feel uncomfortable? Disconcerted?Perhaps as much as the one locked away in Omelas.Can you comprehend what pain we centralize unto Earth?Or did your teacher forget to assign it in ninth grade English?

We build parksbecause land has to be assigned to be free.But under the earth’s mantle, the roots of all aspens are connected - even those that leave no evidence on our side of the ground shading our swing sets. Careful now: do you feel that seismic revolution? Mother Nature’s phalanges worming through the dirt, riddling it green before it hardens into bedrock,abiotic, apathetic…

We choose death because life is a privilege we are not sure we deserve anymore.

Righteousness has two black eyes from the fists of greed and bigotry.We persist in our campaigns and charities -Walk for This, Kickstarter That -leaving God to handle the dirty work of actual altruism.And when we educate ourselves to avoid these mistakes,parroting the media’s ethics and preaching our own arbitrary goodnesses to our children, we do it from the comfort of our living room couches: watching daytime television, wasting away on diet pills, Prozac

and self-pity. Can Oprah convince you to do the right thing? Can Kermit the Frog convince your children? Can I even convince myself?

22

A New Way To FallBy David Reich K’14

Our selves untethered, slipped out of the day,And that moment was not followed by the next. We soared, swam, sailed, explored in every way,And touched and tasted time itself as text.

We shared bodies. Flows pulled us around.We lived as armies locked in war’s advance,As words’ inscription and repeated sound,And as all things that just discovered dance.

But fell astray, pulled freely by our play,When I’m an orbit, you’re an untested kiss.And though your traces spiderweb my way,Your substance, flesh and water, I still miss.

In traces dance forever you and IIn traces live, in traces sometimes die.

23

Things I Wrote After A Night of Not Sleeping, Subsisting on Coffee and Donuts, While Listening to the Following Songs by Dylan Felt K'13

1. Written to "Jeff Davis County Blues", by The Mountain Goats.

This is a song you listen to at sunrise after driving all night. Dawn is bleeding into your eyes, and your thoughts are slurring like rusty guitar lines. You're missing something and you aren't quite sure what it is but for three minutes and fifteen seconds you think you've found it. You only catch singular lyrics because you want to keep the narrative fragmented enough that it could be about you and even though you aren't driving through the Southwest you hope that there is someone out there who won't mind that you're coming home no matter where or when that is you think that maybe if you feel asleep right now it wouldn't even be that bad. The air in your car tastes like coffee, the kind that won't wake you up but won't let you sleep either. You know the song is coming to an end and you wish that there were more words because you don't want the feeling to stop and you don't want to believe that you can't come home.

2. Written to "Love is All", by The Tallest Man on Earth.

You remember falling in love for the first time and even if you haven't yet, this song makes you remember what it was like from the moment you first realized that your heart shivered like piano strings when she walked into the room to the moment you were pulling your head out of the river at 6:35 in the morning and you weren't sure why and you weren't sure where she'd gone but you knew you didn't miss her. You look back on your first love with pride for your bitterness and nostalgia for your own pain. You remember the comfort you created wrapped in blankets of the words and wounds you dealt each other when you whispered 'I love you' and neither one of you meant it. You love feeling this cynicism because you are wise and you know that you won't make this mistake again. Your heart is sharp and hard but you desperately want someone new to find the soft spots and you'll make it as easy as you have to, because whoever they are they're fucking worth it and you've never doubted that and you don't understand how they could either. You rock yourself to sleep with a smile on your face and you are already feeling the beautiful pangs of letting someone else go.

3. Written to "King", by Years & Years

There's this fantasy you've always had of meeting your soulmate and fucking him in a bathroom stall and maybe never learning his name but you don't care either way. You used to go out at night and wait at the bar for someone to take your hand and guide you there because you knew that they second he touched you it would come to pass like the inevitable death of motion. Perhaps they would occur at the same time and you would find yourselves forever frozen in the filth of the bathroom stall in a moment that was and would always be perfectly existent and you wouldn't need to feel that it was yours to hold or let go of, but that you were the moments' to keep forever if it wanted to and somehow you were sure that it would. You made a playlist of disease and pestilence that you wanted to make love to. You wanted to be eaten alive from the inside out. You wanted to feel yourself dying in a moment of absolute existence. You wanted to be frozen in the moment of dissolution. You wanted to rule the world.

24

4. Written to "Youth", by Daughter

You were sixteen when the rain started and you remember the look on your father's face as he came in from work one day taking off his mud-stained boots and leaving them at the door to dry. Outside was grey and blue and inside the walls of your house were a warm brown and you had enough wood to last for months and sometimes the glow of the fires that you're still allowed on birthdays is sufficient to make you feel that maybe this isn't so bad after all. Your mother's coughing has become a part of the storm, the way lightning flashes and sparks and thunder rumbles and you go running to the window because for a split second the monotony is shattered and when your mother coughs you run to her bed and you look through the window and you see that she's smiling and you wish more than anything that you could touch her and dad's boots are still sitting by the door and it's been years but the mud still isn't dry and it's leaking out now and you can see it spreading across the carpet and the floors and all through the house and when you walk your feet splash and squelch and you're worried that one day the fire is going to go out and the mud will cover the house and the light-ning will stop flashing and dad's boots will still be there by the door and it will have been years and you'll still be sixteen and you won't remember what any of this was ever like at all.

5. Written to "Parted Ways", by Heartless Bastards

You rolled the windows down on your old Volvo station wagon and drove into the canyon because you loved the way that sound echoes in there. You left your car running with the keys in the ignition and the music blasting and you sat on the roof to watch the sun going down and you were alone and for the first time in forever that felt absolutely fucking fantastic. You let the car run until the tank was empty and the music shut off mid-song. The sun had set ages ago and you were sitting on the roof of a car in a canyon five miles outside of town and you didn't give a shit because you were you and you were there and there wasn't anything else to worry about anyway so why bother. You left the car with the keys in the ignition and you walked out of the canyon and turned right at the highway, stopping at the corner store. You sat outside until they opened at 6am and you could buy a portable container of gasoline. You wandered back into the canyon with the intentions of repeating the process until you got lonely, but by 11am you realized you were hungry so you drove to the diner for a breakfast burrito and you ordered exactly what you wanted and you ate the entire thing and you left a decent tip. You listened to music on the way home, because you knew you'd never get there. You still haven't. The car is dead now.