Breakfast of the Birds by Giselle Silla

February 27, 2022 Columbia Quarto

After “Breakfast of the Birds” by Gabriele Münter, oil on canvas, 1934

“Idk this painting made me think of you,”
Maddie texts me on a Saturday morning
during this eye-blink of a summer
when we’re closest we’ve ever been,
our minds and hearts and arms curling
together like vines up a pole.

One day I will be the brunette in the painting,
breakfasting before a branchful of birds
with tea, sugar, a dark loaf, some apricot jelly
keeping my hair short to my collar
with a kitchen of my own and a view
(though I could do without the scarlet drapes),

and I will think of her,
see her somehow in the snow sliding down the elbow of the tree;
and who knows what we’ll be to each other then,
vines up a pole or planets among disparate stars,
but over tea and snow and birds and apricot jelly I will text her something like:
“Idk this moment made me think of you.”

Giselle Silla (she/her) is a sophomore at Barnard College majoring in Urban Studies and minoring in German.

Maiden Name by Anika Malhotra

February 26, 2022 Columbia Quarto

I’m sure you can imagine it: my mother
in the kitchen dancing to Burt Bacharach,

my mother, my mother.
My mother had the face of a child even though

she had never known childhood.
There was no mistaking that face of hers.

She wore it in the shopping malls
and the school districts. My mother at the stove.

In the driver’s seat. Within a guava tree.
Small hands on bark, soiled nails, russet, raw.

Sugar cane in her hands. Chewed at night
to ease the sting. In the water of her home.

Hip-deep in the flood. Sunset, on Vesey Street.
6pm, just one drink. Ossining, New York,

March 19, 1996. You must not draw on
your eyebrows or color your hair again. You

must read me this story. Mother, Mother,
I’m waiting for you in these grief-stricken pages.

Anika Agustin Malhotra (BC ‘24, she/her) is a Computer Science major; she listens to jazz; she is from the South.

Ode To Girlhood Gaia by Giselle Silla

February 18, 2022 Columbia Quarto

Someplace where life is old
I sat with twenty girls in a field.
When we sang “Taps” at dusk
our voices echoed against
the graying Virginia mountains,
and that was power
enough to last me till next July.

We walked down to the ravine
after dark, humming John Denver,
getting gravel in our shoes, and I imagined
my mountain mama all around me: the hills
that ebbed and flowed, rose and dipped their way
across the horizon were her head,
her breast, her stomach.

On the tennis courts at midday I imagined
I was resting in the valley of her palm
and how it would be when her hair
turned red, fell out in October
while I was too far away to see it.
I fell asleep in a soccer field once and woke disoriented
because the stars had moved across the sky

and maybe that’s why, when nine summers over
I turn down comedy night in Brooklyn
to lie beneath a tree, I gaze at its tender underside
and get the feeling that this is not unlike viewing a belly button
or the fragile seam of skin where an armpit
meets a shoulder, a secret crease of body
its owner rather not reveal.

Giselle Silla (she/her) is a sophomore at Barnard College majoring in Urban Studies and minoring in German.

hecatomb by Julia Tolda

February 6, 2022 Columbia Quarto

TW: blood, death

i didn’t want to watch
it die
but i did
it fell off
the
window
pretty pink puddle
of guts
it lay twitching
on the pavement
for
a moment too long
and i
shoveled its remains
its white fur
into
a nylon school bag once
carried to
a third-grade classroom
then
my hands were sticky
(not with blood)
an improvised grave
twisted rabbit’s foot
lurking
somewhere in the dirt.

Julia Tolda (she/her) is a junior, pursuing a double major in Comparative Literature and psychology at Barnard College. Her favorite flowers are peonies, and if she could give you the moon, she would.

Sappho by Eleanor Lin

December 14, 2021 Columbia Quarto

My thoughts weigh now
like the sky on the stars

and like heaven too
my worries are wheeling
through these lonely
dreaming hours

if only for
a moment I could
unhitch the axis of the universe
all would come
to rest

Why this morning?
Why this mourning?

Tears move so many stones
no more than the wind

but if you think this unjust
consider how much more
love moves than stones

I say there is beauty
even in the dying
of the well-loved day

Eleanor Lin (she/her/hers) is a second-year student in Columbia College studying computer science and linguistics. She can be found on Instagram as @elemlin, on Facebook as @eleamlin, and on Twitter as @data_eleanor. You can find her other work at linktr.ee/elealin.

Transcendence by Eleanor Lin

December 10, 2021 Columbia Quarto

In the language of light
in murmurs of shadow
the leaves and the grasses are talking

as summer rays lance
through a green-glowing apse

the meaning beamed brightly
between twig and blade

yet the breezes of June
blow coldly today

to lighten the wings
of a bird startled skyward
by my lumbering oncoming tread

Eleanor Lin (she/her/hers) is a second-year student in Columbia College studying computer science and linguistics. She can be found on Instagram as @elemlin and on FaceBook as @eleamlin. You can find her other work at linktr.ee/elealin.

year of signs by Morgan Levine

December 5, 2021 Columbia Quarto

Quarto 2021 Chapbook Contest Runner Up

Click on the image below to read a PDF version of Morgan’s Chapbook.

Artist’s Statement:

Year of Signs is a chapbook about looking from the outside in. Each poem takes its title from a store awning either in New York or Houston, and they investigate experiences of grief, wandering, and serendipity: surprises of love and feeling in a time of loss. The poems lean heavily on other poets for company (Mayer, Merwin, Doty, Baudelaire), in addition to the everyday language of shopfronts, overheard speech, and physical gestures.

Author Bio:

Morgan Levine is a multimedia poet from Houston, Texas, studying English and Creative Writing at Columbia University. Their work has been featured in Quarto, 4×4, The Blue & White, Gigantic Sequins and elsewhere. Morgan currently serves as Editor-in-Chief of The Columbia Review.

may-fly by Eris Sker

November 8, 2021 Columbia Quarto

*Illustration by Bella Aldrete and Watson Frank*

trigger warning: brief mentions of violence

this poem speaks of vessels
meaning i count ships on the sea by their absence
and enumerate bee flight.
there are errors, of course, and i annotate recklessly -
my first mistake will be assuming this is a poem, not a memory.
count the rest.

say: i feel like a stranger here. i want my own words. i want the street to turn into loneliness which is a
flood which is the maxim that wild horses will not speak to you / say: i fought a river and married your
urn; say: lace curtains swaying, roof-bound. the bed creaks under our weight / say: i am in love and
therefore mistranslated / say: my little darling, entrust your pleasures to the winds.

this poem speaks of knives
which are self-portraits of wounds, waxing crane claws.
and i am not the mainspring of its narrative, nor a soft goodbye
convincing you this is holy ground. i do not disseminate hagiography,
except if you’re the saint
and i salvation.
my second mistake is claiming the poem loves me back
which it cannot while i am in it.
count the number of times i am in it.

say: i surprise the ocean with honesty, open mouth sinking, tongue still tangled / say: i find your name
imprinted on stinging cells of passing jellies; say: wrap around me / say: the wrath of possession which is
our truth which is forcing your spit down my throat and calling it history / say: i burn on a heart-shaped
pyre.

i am not willing to be malleable, to fill the kitchen with delight
and delicacy. i love you only through mutual laceration.
i make another mistake.
can you conceive of me?

notes:

the line 'my little darling, entrust your pleasures to the winds' is from kristina milnor's translation of CIL
4.5296, a female homoerotic love poem from ancient rome surviving scratched into the plaster wall of an
entrance hallway in pompeii's ninth region

the line 'mutual laceration' is drawn from georges bataille's work guilty

eris sker (she/they) is a junior at columbia college studying comparative literature & society and anthropology. they like moon jellies. you can find them on their personal Instagram and their poetry Instagram.

Mother Tongue by Eleanor Lin

November 3, 2021 Columbia Quarto

Yesterday you asked me
where had I
hidden away your
blue dress,

the one I had
borrowed, so to speak
and you sounded so angry.

What could I answer?
We ceased to fit
long ago,

too busy were we with
the work of
erasing.

No stains now, just
the faintest whiff
of fled memory

fabric
bleached to blinding
seamless

(but for you not something
slipped on and off so
easily)

while me I yearn for
a homespun shift
of dreams;

since my tongue, too unskilled
makes a game of
coaxing back into
continuity
snapped threads

and
makes a mockery
of your toil

with its crude
attempts at
reclamation

Hunger by Stevie File

October 25, 2021 Columbia Quarto

Content warning for self harm.

The stairs looked dead
Beat. Had Mama’s frame, off white
Washed over and over — I held on
Her rings like rain. I was young then.
I didn’t know where tears came from
Or scars, or bellies — but on the stairs I knew
I saw Papa’s eyes, fireflies trampled on
Too much. I was alive then. I was six, hurled
My limbs like a snowball, I hit my Papa’s face.
My Mama got red in her face. I had my first kiss
Next to the radiator, my preyed pulp
Evidence: the sheep steeped, bleeding,
Fur thawed out on the wolf’s white lips.

It is midnight. I forgot my pills.
I’m next to a man so bright, my soul burns.
I don’t want to move. I pray our words were holy.
You’re mine. You’re mine. Too much. I hurl
My limbs off like rings, slipping through our sweat —
I’m too young for this. I throw on sheep clothing,
Running. Like I was running away from home,
Beat. The stairs look me dead in the eyes.
I can’t outrun my blood. They know
I’m here to live again. They know
I’m starving for winter — Wolf! Wolf!

Stevie File (he/him/his) is a queer writer and performer from York, Pennsylvania. He is currently a first-year student at Columbia College, aspiring to double major in theatre and creative writing. You can follow him on Instagram @stevierfile.

Note to P.T. Barnum by Crystal Foretia

October 15, 2021 Columbia Quarto

This piece was first published in Quarto’s 2021 Spring Print Edition.

content warnings for strong language and death

Inspired by Beauty Examined (1993), Kerry James Marshall

Since you tore my flesh piece by piece,
Can you put me back together?
Mesh backbone to my dignity
And hands to my modesty
After you’ve stripped me bare
And opened my cunt for the whole
World to see,
After I'm already dead,
After you've already killed me,
After you picked and prodded at
My voluptuous ass, unaging skin,
Plump lips and everything else you found
Savage to your naked eyes.
Eyes that saw my village as a chess board
Carved in the shape of savannah
And treated my brethren like pawns.
You, dear white knight
Should die.

Crystal Foretia (she/her/hers) is a junior in Columbia College studying Political Science and History. Born and raised just outside of D.C., Crystal is the daughter of Cameroonian immigrants. You can find her chapbook Notes from an Estranged Daughter, a collage of anecdotes and contemplations on Black history, in Quarto Magazine. You can also find links to all her published poetry via her Linktree: https://linktr.ee/cforetia

The Summer Punisher Came Out by Skye Levine

October 6, 2021 Columbia Quarto

This piece was first published in Quarto’s 2021 Spring Print Edition.

it felt like we were always working doubles
money always felt tight but we splurged
on Saturdays at the bead store
and hotboxed my car after almost every shift.

June went by fast
and the 21st passed without acknowledgment.
Something only has power over you if you let it
and I deemed my silence a reclamation.

I was doing my affirmations every morning
groundings every night
to say something out loud is to jinx it
so I jinxed my progress every day

as prescribed. I started hearing rats in the walls
in July, for the first time
in a while, scurrying through the scaffolding
squeaking so loud I couldn’t sleep.

Even though you didn’t hear them
you bought me Punisher on vinyl for the noise
and 3 grams to help me sleep.

I listened to Moon Song until the needle dulled.
You said it “hit too hard”
but you didn’t mean stop, you meant

It resonated with the part of us we can’t articulate
or won’t articulate, steadfast
in a silent reclamation
of our bodies, of our minds.

A rat died in the walls in August.
The rot was overpowering, putrid like his stomach breath
hot on my cheeks all over again, I tethered myself to my navel
and all over again, I shelled out $75 for the exterminator
who couldn’t bring herself to charge me full price
when there was nothing for her to kill.

Sometimes when I wake up I think I’m back there again—
The ghosts of his hands moving down my body
stealing myself from me
feel so real. But I remind myself:

they are my hands
they belong to me
this time around.

Skye Levine (she/her) is a second-year at Barnard, prospectively majoring in English and Sociology. She is from Austin, Texas, and is currently based in New York City. She loves hiking, live music, drawing, and drinking (too much) coffee. You can find her on Instagram (@skyelevine).

Middle Eastern Eyebrows by Lida

October 1, 2021 Columbia Quarto

This piece was first published in Quarto’s 2021 Spring Print Edition.

Every time you sink in thought you pull
your thick eyebrows together and that makes a frown.

Aunt says it isn’t good for a girl to frown.
Men can do it, but girls look sour.

But you’re not sour. You’re thirteen. Happy
when alone with your daydreams.

You put adhesive tape between your brows.
Now you can think and not be sour.

Lida (BC'23 she/her/hers) is a Psychology and Education major from Houston, Texas. Writing poetry is a way for her to connect with Iranian culture and explore new creative boundaries.

The Daughter Argument by Skye Levine

September 25, 2021 Columbia Quarto

This piece was first published in Quarto’s 2021 Spring Print Edition.

Content warning for eating disorders

My daughter dances behind my eyelids when I dream.
I see her hair, dark like mine. Her profile, the familiar bump in her nose.
Her footsteps bounce off the grey walls of my apartment
on the nights I catch myself alone. Like my mother

That summer she couldn’t get out of bed
I’ve let the dishes pile up around the sink.
I play piano on hard surfaces— I hear Vivaldi’s “Spring”

as vividly as my daughter’s voice. I smell her fevers—
mild like honey milk. Under my breath,
I tell the grey space about Redwood fairy rings
and pretend I’m lulling my little girl to sleep.
I haven’t felt clean since California but when I think of her I feel untouched.

I can picture myself teaching her to paint.
Her little fingers wrapped around the gold-tipped brush
my grandmother gave me in high school.
I’ll ask her to paint what she hears when she listens to Mazzy Star.

Sometimes she looks too much like me.
She has a mole on her temple that she taps when she’s scared.
I don’t want her to know my history—

I push her from my brain when she tells me she's hungry.
Her wails reverberate around my skull, demanding food I won’t give.
After mealtimes, kneeling over the toilet,
She cries as we choke on my hand.

When I can’t sleep she lays beside me.
I stroke her hair and rhyme our breaths.
Stuck to my heels like a shadow, she learns my nightly practice of self-beration
And I hear the cruelty in her voice when she joins in.

I can picture her in San Francisco, eating peaches by the bay.
The blue water and pink houses marvel her; the sweetness of the fruit lights up her
eyes.

I want her to savor it—to swallow it and keep it down, but then I see her back in
Texas,
standing small as I stood in my childhood home.
Lit up grey by the refrigerator light, she looks up at me with hollow green eyes
and asks me why her body doesn’t feel like home anymore.

untitled aubade by Cassidy Gabriel

September 17, 2021 Columbia Quarto

This piece was first published in Quarto’s 2021 Spring Print Edition.

sit with me awhile on the sun
palm this light, pick it up between two fingers
slip this fire between your lips; now
lick this gold, distilled, in your mouth
roll it over your tongue and
crush it between your teeth
chew it in your way-back molars—

i am asking you to
swallow the sun with me.

hold it, endless, in your stomach.
pour it from there; you, a carafe of sweet and forgiving and bleeding sun. i will
take a sip
tilt back my chin,
exalt as it rises in my eyes

Cassidy Gabriel is from Flemington, New Jersey. She can usually be found outdoors. In light of her quickly-approaching graduation, she is relearning how to introduce herself without immediate mention of her class year (senior), school (Columbia College), and what she studies (Political Theory, Computer Science, and Gender Studies). And yet!

Flashbulb by Joan Tate

September 13, 2021 Columbia Quarto

This piece was first published in Quarto’s 2021 Spring Print Edition. 2021 poetry winner, selected by Yolanda Wisher.

donec virenti canities abest / morosa.
-Horace Ode 1.9

...the green is still there”
and it is the beginning of summer. there are lightbugsthat have followed me
from further south and sleep under my cuticle.
the porch smells like pine or what i think pine smells like coming from a can.
my father gets a beer for himself and, like a pastor, says he cannot wait for me to
turn 21,
i bubble

behind my eyelids and smile. i can hear a truck come by
and smell the exhaust but do not see it. only sound. i get the flashback
to a bad decision sneaking out in queer rebellion. i almost got murdered
or worse this past winter across the street in the garden
after worse happened this past winter
already. and i was back

with my feet on the grain and my father sitting
like there is a rock dangling from his collar and he sips his beer
and asks me to explain how it feels and after two hours or so,
when i have stopped counting the flicker of fireflies after a dozen or so and my
heart slows
and i can rub my fingers against the glass tablepane again. my eyes wander
to the smoothness of the knuckles on my hand and the treeline shifting

when he gets up and puts his two fingers
on my shoulder and pats again and again
to let me know there is love or at least less darkness
and concrete is not what cells are made of
but regret and power.

and some starfire peaks from behind the moon and flickers
and the screendoor clicks. i'm alone
counting again as they disappear in my clear night
just when it starts to rain.

Joan Tate (CC '22) is a trans poet studying Creative Writing Poetry and Classical Latin. After spending her childhood moving around Virginia as a 5th generation preacher’s kid and finding her roots in Appalachia, Joan has since become enamored with the living and transient quality of the New York school poets such as Alice Notley, Eileen Myles, and Frank O’Hara and attempts to find in her poetry beauty that is tied to being in your own skin. When she’s not reviewing the swings in Riverside Park or drafting questions for ghosts, she acts as a copy-editor for Ratrock and programs Experimental Music shows for WKCR-FM.

Columbarium by Thomas Mar Wee

September 3, 2021 Columbia Quarto

After Henry Green

This piece was first published in Quarto’s 2021 Spring Print Edition.

I.
noun.
From the Latin, columba
meaning “dove”
In Chinese, naguta
“a pagoda-of-bones”

this dovecote
with its | lattice-work of shelves |
pockmarked by urns
one recalls:
the dome of the Pantheon
Borges and his infinite library

in its sheltering arms
porous, permeating, perforated
like skin under a microscope
or a chestnut
its dark, brawny husk
guarding the tender flesh

there’s a word in Chinese
yiwu (遺物): “leftover"
something discarded & remaindered
which we
embalm with associations
maunder with meanings

these few, worthless things
the deceased
have forgotten
left behind:
[too worn shoes,
a dozen, burnished coins
a pair of cracked
spectacles]

if I have anything like Religion
it might be
Etymology

for I enjoy nothing more
than the opening up of words
dismantling
their little boxes

and, like a well
peering down

into them.

II.
In this
budding grove I sit
on a mossy, lover’s bench
under an aged sycamore

on some decomposing, Irish estate
amid cornflowers
my presence disrupts
a tendentious stillness

With one careless movement
I startle them
their cries echo
from so many
small places

suddenly,
a gust of wind lifts
the ground swells
a shroud of white,
rippling, brilliant
momentarily blots the sun

Thomas Mar Wee (they/them) is a writer, poet, and editor based in New York and a senior studying English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. A writer of poetry, fiction, and mixed-media work, their work seeks to explore liminality in literary forms and the ambiguities they inhabit as a mixed-race, genderqueer person. They are currently at work on a short story collection and a novel.

Andalusia, 2009 by Kaylee Jeong

August 27, 2021 Columbia Quarto

This piece was first published in Quarto’s 2021 Spring Print Edition.

A documentary about Spain on the TV, my mother is dreaming of a life to end her own, and though she has never said so, for the last seven years it has all been my fault. I got my money’s worth with you, she said, staring at pink and red hills. I believed for the longest time that in Spain the sun was always in the middle of setting. I believed for even longer that all TV was about Spain. Except for the ads, which I liked, but made my mother cross, saying We use blood, hair, saliva samples to determine your body’s own most efficient methods of loss. We got him seven hundred thousand dollars--I’ll tell you how, right after this. But there was never a right after this, only more Spain, more laxative tea, more Spain. My mother’s perfect life on commercial break forever, my perfect life standing next to it, too afraid of starting a fight on accident. But it’s thinking of science programs. It’s thinking of Mars. It’s thinking of being next-door neighbors with the planetarium, spending all day looking up, only going home for three square meals. Someday I will write no journals, only grocery lists. I wiIl live on that hill everyone keeps dying on. My mother has loved Spain as long as I have been holding my breath. It has been so long and so long.

Orange by Leif Wood

May 1, 2021 Columbia Quarto

Gather all your tears up and place them on your fridge with a magnet.
Humanness is captured in shrines

As too the lines
Near my eyes or my belly.

I become urns
And scorn the libraries burnt

By the chrysanthemums outside
That grow up their sides.

Icarus flowers whose design’s
Are too mouthy and unknown to

Ever be worth it.
The mirror lacks flowers, just lines dismissed,

Or perhaps kissed!
Or perhaps the mirror is ocean; sky.

Leif Wood is a sophomore at Columbia College studying English and Philosophy. He is a big fan of words and trees.

To The Woman Who Sat at Table 21 by Leif Wood

April 25, 2021 Columbia Quarto

she ordered scallops
and said:
“This is what
the lower class

is trying to
tell us, there
is dignity and
satisfaction in work,

I took my
own garbage out
the other day,
and I was like

wow.”

I am a paper mâché smile
Glued to unnamed hands that
Curl out from the holes in a polo.

But this is how I appear in my dreams:
Wearing everything with sequins,
Preaching the gospel to traffic lights.

I would have called this poem Stardust
If it was about me or a pigeon,
Which is self-explanatory.

And I will always count the blemishes
On my face to immortalize them.
I am Hecate out back under the stars

Listening to the bottles breaking
In the trash bag hurled onto the gravel.
How alone I can be and how joyful.

Leif Wood (he/him) is a sophomore at Columbia College studying English and Philosophy. He is a big fan of words and trees. You can find him on Instagram @leif_wood.