Medusa by Sylvi Stein

This piece was originally published in Quarto’s 2022 Spring Print.

Illustration by Watson Frank

Content warning for violence

Ten years ago, the girl you loved
stuck her head between the iron bars that loop
around the playground and she screamed
so hard she bit her tongue,
and second graders love blood
so we watched with bright eyes as the firefighters
and policemen and god and public safety
pried out her small skull.

The girl you loved used to eat Jell-o
off the damp linoleum cafeteria floor and tell you
you were her second best friend, after Rachel.
She used to kiss her elbow to prove she was a fairy
while you were left puckering into the air.
Playing Horse, she held you
by the hair and yanked like leather reins
sprouted from your scalp. Giddiup!
After the Greek unit in history,
she was always the daughter of Athena
and you were Medusa.

The girl you loved was so mean
to worms on the playground after the rain,
and this is where you drew the line:
you refused watch their pink bodies writhe,
like furious tongues cut loose. You would not
hold them down as she sliced
their smooth stomachs open
with safety pins.

Sylvi Stein (she/her) is a sophomore in Columbia College majoring in art history and creative writing. She enjoys long walks on the beach and clichés.

Song of the lately departed by Eleanor Lin

This piece was originally published in Quarto’s 2022 Spring Print.

Illustration by Mel Wang

妹妹背這洋娃娃
走到花園來看花
娃娃哭了叫媽媽
樹上的小鳥笑哈哈
- Traditional

Little sister takes her doll away
Thought I’d be staying another day
Looked back for a moment, and then it was gone
So long, so long, so long

She goes to see the flowers in bloom
How did this chill wind rise so soon?
When there come soft rains people despair
Sighs escaping to midnight air

A baby cries for its mother and cries
Though it doesn’t know, that it is alive
Before it has felt, before it has seen
This unbearable lightness of being

Look up and see, a bird on the wing
Is laughing, but not out of mockery
And though I waited for you this day
You’ve already whispered away

Eleanor Lin is a third-year student at Columbia College studying computer science and linguistics. She can be found on Instagram as @elemlin and on Twitter as @data_eleanor. You can find her other work at linktr.ee/elealin.

Student Discount by Mikayla Benson

Illustration by Tomiris Tatisheva

the museum is the ultimate silent orgy.
blank space filled with eroticism, pent up
Muted.
mutilated by color.
one may find it confusing that we are capable of
containing ourselves
here. in our colors and monochromatic garb.

i’m surprised every time. i enter
and not a singular person rips off their clothes.
doesn’t start kissing the acrylic.
it’s almost like a game.
Challenge!
who can last the longest.
we challenge ourselves to remain sober amongst constant fumes of desire and
pretentious tension.

there lies the metropolitan prude.
daughter. and child of september.
light-headed by black boots and snobbery.

Mikayla Gold Benson (she/her) is a 2nd year at Barnard College. She currently cannot muster the strength to write anything witty about herself, as she is too busy being too different and too complex, and too fascinating.

Postmarked by Caelan Bailey

Illustration by Jorja Garcia

My great-grandma Lee used to send me letters on stationery that looked like the paper incarnation of an antique china cabinet. Our penpalship began when I responded to a happy-tenth-birthday card with a thank-you note. A few days later a thank-you-for-your-thank-you note sat in the mailbox. Birds enwreathed in gold foil flitted alongside an elaborate cursive that could not be much younger than the 83 years between us. It was so illegible that I asked my dad to decipher it for me. But the more thank-you-for-your-thank-you-for-your-thank-you notes, the more the foreign flourishes faded into the ephemera. I could read her letters any day. Even when the handwriting became shakier and the mail scarcer. Even when they stopped coming.

Caelan Bailey is a junior studying English and History from Charleston, SC. While in New York, she enjoys making biscuits and thinking through what it means to be from the South.

Samson and Delilah, 2021 by C. G. Coleman

This piece was originally published in Quarto’s 2022 Spring Print.

Illustration by Ashley Yung

I
I receive letters in spades, slipping through
buttons and backstreets. The feathered air
settles bluntly, a vegetable knife upon
the city, there is nothing to do. Scholarly attendant
I pluck out afternoons from downtown
cinemas, golden-hair women weeping out
cottages or dangling orifices, foreign rivers,
domestic rivers. There is walking to be done,
emptiness to be washed and discarded, smoke
to rise and trains to catch. I wouldn’t dwell
but life gets awfully narrow and even quiet comes
inside the smooth pearl of a sound, a street
shout skipping up through the windows.

II
An ill Sunday morning. Somewhere deep below
the libidinal nonsense, broken glass train
platforms, and omniscient scar tissue is a
bleeding organ. Something purpling.
A shanty house propped up with museums
only to be toppled by verse. Lying martyred
at 3pm the same searing light of heaven that
must have appeared to Joan as she sighed and
sparked shows glinting on my windowpane.
It has very little to say to me, except perhaps
that I should be talking coffee rather than
crucifixion. Glory is rarely prudent and
rarer still brief, so honored I rose and let
my uneasy concert play and brew and play.

III
You’ve made me translucent, and everyone
on the subway can read through my skin
like some cheap paperback. I suppose you’re
also responsible for the messages, the lamplight
rain in the evenings, the architect of this autumn
romantic. I will wrap my favorite bench,
intersection, in wax paper and send it off express
for when my name begins to dissolve on
the tongue. A paperweight to anchor your nights.
Forgive me. I think I’m a corner newsstand
philosopher slipping around on skates when
I talk to you this way, but you’ve left me
with no other language than the low drones of summer.
Horribly improper, but perhaps something could be
corrected if you slipped a finger underneath my collar…

IV
A woman asked me, as I crossed to the park,
how to get to Charles Street, and worst of all
I knew and didn’t have the words to say.
A kitchen sink apocalypse was forming on
the horizon, all rocky beaches and Freud
and ink under fingernails. Dreams play out
coyly, fair-weather test subjects, while some of
us rot in underground contemplation. Maybe
the strain is in the attempt, or I am merely
poisoned by a world folded in on itself.
I’ll be a greeting card lover—it seems so
much easier. It’s all breathless pennies now,
vending machines, bruising dawns, and it
all comes much too late. If I haven’t evaporated
by Friday, come see me. Bring luck and wit.

C. G. Coleman (they/them) is a sophomore at Barnard studying English and Philosophy. They are from the DC area and passionate about new wave films, love letters, kitchen sink dramas, film photography, 60s music, and long walks around the city. Find them on Instagram at @beingoflight03.

Some Requests by Trey Purves

This piece was originally published in Quarto’s 2022 Spring Print.

Illustration by Watson Frank

I want a bar that I’ll always go to afterwards
and a dog that isn’t mine
but doesn’t bark when I pass by.
I want what minors call comfort
and adults call hypnosis.
I want everything out of reach
sitting in the palm of my hand.
I want to know what to order and not
have to ask for something fruity and strong.
I want a list of every name I’ve ever been called
and a voice to sing the blues.
I want money that has never been touched
and a fire that has never been lit.
I want to feel the sting of the wasp
and not watch its wings land on my flightless body.
I want a tootsie roll and a rubber duck
and a solid amount of shower pressure.
I want time but not too much.
And I want everyone to look me
in the eyes.

Trey Purves (he/him) is a sophomore at Columbia College studying Sustainable Development and Creative Writing. He loves to run, sip on smoothies, and wander around the forests in his North Carolina hometown.

Corner Piece by Grace Novarr

This piece was originally published in Quarto’s 2022 Spring Print.

Illustration by Watson Frank

Saw you on the corner today, orange and blue somehow small and I missed our day in the sun in the summer and it snowed this week which didn’t make me think of you — I had in fact forgotten you until I saw you on the corner. In the time when we knew how to refract the best of ourselves, the sideways rolling-down of the mirror, the fat drops of rain in our open mouths when we threw back our necks and folded our collars over our sweaters. In the center then, open fields, wide parks. Four drinks in until we glitter, until you roll up your sleeves and there, scars. Do not answer my questions — I’m writing this story. I’m writing you onto the couch across from me. We were hand in hand in hand as always, growing more into all fields of vision, growing again.

I don’t want to be younger, I want to be older with you. I don’t want to go back, but I want you to come back.

Moving in and around like a bright spot across the cornea of my right eye, flickering in and out like water. You are still, on the corner. No cars are coming. I am walking away. I am turning back. The buildings are tall; all there is for them to do is stand. You are on the corner and in a second you will move away from me. We all always have the choice to make everything stop. I could say your name but I don’t. So you go, and so it goes.

Grace Novarr (she/her) is a junior at Barnard, studying English and other things. She is from New York City.

Sam by Sylvi Stein

This piece was originally published in Quarto’s 2022 Spring Print.

Illustration by Watson Frank

In the summers before we grew up,
my brother and I were two halves
of the same face. Every July happened
in the library, the Walmart, or a lake.
To see the rest of the universe,
you needed to be in the car.
We loved hallways.
We especially loved red ice pops and unicorns,
and we went to so many summer camps we hated.
There was mandatory soccer
and the pools we shivered in bluely.
There was the girl with the broken doll that made him cry
and the counselor with a whistle
who made me draw a picture
of every rule I broke without knowing it
and I still see her in bad dreams.
We traded a dirty quarter back and forth
on the living room floor, scraping designs
into scratch tickets and we won a dollar
and eight cents once. We were gods.
We woke each other up in the morning
because the stairs were too tall and dark
to go down by yourself.
We played this game called Inside Sledding
until mom took the extra mattress away.
My brother and I hated the baby.
We liked spaghetti-os
and the sugar cookies from the bakery on the corner,
but only the first bite.
We took turns being mermaids in the lake
until dad said my brother was a merman only.
We trampled the flowers he planted in the garden,
all of them except the morning glories,
because those were our favorite.

Sylvi Stein (she/her) is a freshman in Columbia College. Her writing has been published by Beaver Magazine, Eunoia Review, Orotone Journal, and AYASKALA Magazine, among others. In her spare time, Sylvi can be found wandering the aisles of used book stores, even though she has more than enough to read at home.

night-time skater by Eris Sker

This piece was originally published in Quarto’s 2022 Spring Print.

Illustration by Ashley Yung

for t.s.

suppose a bloom of jellyfish spills through
the morning. wanes into the tub, sets down
beside you, stingers wiggling around your legs.

& you rattle.

suppose they’re grieving. each jelly lies in tears,
shredded on your belly like a soot tag.

& you still
think of fire before you sleep, though your sister
says that’s silly. the spiders can’t be plotting anything
new. they're dying anyway.
you acquiesce but you can feel them
crawling up your shins
each morning.

suppose the rest of the night is spent
peeling each stinger off your skin: the monumental task of
asking for forgiveness.

& still the nightmares slip in through the stings
embedded in your fingers.
your episodes continue. you shatter plates at breakfast,
and all your teeth are chipping,
every secret lost to flame.

suppose the gelatine becomes a jelly-fall; you slip,
collapse, the bathroom door spins open.
suppose the corpses turn to carpet, crunch beneath your feet.
suppose you’re wreathing on the supermarket floor,
delicate foam around your mouth, you only
want a cure –

my sea skater, treading over memory
of flashing lights: before you needed warnings.

before the jellyfish kept firing
and you requested mercy. instead,
meander through another seizure.

eris sker (she/they) is a junior at columbia college studying comparative literature & society and anthropology. they like moon jellies and peonies.

5 Haiku from 113th Street by Joan Tate

This piece was originally published in Quarto’s 2022 Spring Print.

Illustration by Mel Wang

3:02

The window crack sends
a wet breath of seed pollen.
My worried door coughs.

12:17

An ant braids its hair
perched on my pinkiepeak. Careful,
you would hear no thump.

6:55

Whiffling steam, those spring fabrics,
the drop running down my thigh
tastes like rust.

9:45

The streetchair takes this
first chance to burrow my back.
At least I may sit.

7:34

Golden hour is here,
two birds dash above us both
just like the starlings do

Joan Tate is a graduating senior in Columbia College majoring in Creative Writing Poetry. This fall she will be attending UMass Amherst's Poetry MFA. When she isn't writing about the ebullient bewilderment of bodies in time she can be found wandering Riverside Park and admiring its many raccoons.

Under the Cap by Sam Losee

This piece was originally published in Quarto’s 2022 Spring Print.

Illustration by Rawan Hayat

found text from Mushrooms of the Northeast: A Simple Guide to Common Mushrooms

Some fair distance from here, rather than ending time abruptly
we will cut open the world like the spoke of a wheel. Her spine nothing
but long dangling teeth, veins net-like and scattering from the long

black bruise. This world will be over and then reproduce. In the wide space,
where the common grocery store will change to dust, attachment methods
will be complex — some specimens will cross the jagged

ridge above the loose featureless black. Miniature tubes, numerous, look-alike,
may fashion ends in the wild underside, the sponge racetrack where a pink light
affects the eye, clear at last. Angular folds, unique gills, spores coarse enough to

cut. Tiny shrunken seeds will ripen and burst from your hand. Will you
care for them? Raise them to have trumpet faces? In this book,
you will not find help. Only a three layer knife. Or a lens facing the flesh,

free to be studied and known. A thin half is enough for a print, you know.
Oh! A sound will appear from above. Free in the easy air we will make.
Do you see her? The young bear, brownish, tiny in the crowded wood.

Sam Losee (they/she) is a poet, flower farmer, and Adventure Time enjoyer from the Hudson Valley, NY. After they graduate in May, they plan to finish knitting their first pair of gloves.

becalm by Gwendolyn Davison

Illustration by Camille Sensiba

In this city
the city of heaven
of Sirocco
you shall receive
a steady unyielding
stream of favors from
the lord.

presume your suffering
to be over your itinerant
life has begun we welcome
you to the caravan you
may mend the wheel for
a favor and the lord
your god shall grant it

you may enter —
we reject no one
save for those who
wish to keep others
in place inside those
who wish to settle our
bodies born to move
free as the salvific wind

to be calm is to die to
sit to stew is to sell
your magic seeds to
a necrotic landlord
our lord our god is no
figure of land or universe
but of body itself of

rustling skirts of polka dots

of stripes and shimmer and

shear and sweat and stubble

of sweet of mother and of

gentle gathering in the great

unknown

we welcome you to wear your clothes

or to shed them to sing with all the air

in your lungs or between breaths.

only do not settle. this city is the city

for those who refuse to be its dwellers

Gwendolyn Davison (she/her) is a sophomore in Columbia College majoring in history and concentrating in English. She enjoys baking, hula hooping, and writing in her free time.

Making Sense Of It by Grace Novarr

Illustration by Camille Sensiba

I wrote four poems with this title.
Your body was plugged into the wall.
I heard only 80s music. I closed my eyes
and saw no stars. 

You dreamed of kissing me and that same
night I dreamed of a nest of bees 
exploding in my chest. My body 
broke like a waterfall over your skeleton.

Flowers grew from the slats of air
on the fire escape. I splattered paint
on the wall in the shape of a tadpole
being flung onto land by a wave.

The book had too many pages.
I ripped them out and taped them
to the trees on my block. I saw your shadow
there in the roots, springing up like a mushroom.

Do you understand me? There is no making sense
of this world that lacks you. Each night I put
a mirror by my window, so that if you come visit me,
you will see only yourself. 

Grace Novarr is a rising junior at Barnard, studying English and other things. She is from New York City.

Eulogy for a subleased room, enumerated by Tristen Pasternak

Illustration by Armaan Bamzai

- A light under the door (1)
- I know you’re awake
- 20 minutes on the stairs (20)
- A dream, two palms (3)
- A hand held (4)
- Crying / dishes (2)
- An embrace (1)
- A forehead kiss (1)
- Soft light, orange light (1)
- Heatwave (1)
- Falling into (1)
- Dark wood (1)
- Sore vaccinated arms (2)
- A first touch (2)
- A smile underneath me (1)
- A 5 am alarm (1)
- Cheddar (1)
- Rats (80)
- You asking me what kind of decorating I’d like my home to have when I am older (1)
- Laundry room (1)
- A flood (1)
- A hot furnace (1)
- A hammered dulcimer (1)
- A heart opening (2)
- A seashell box (1)
- An eternity at once (1)
- A tree, grass, a star (3)
- Sleepwalker (1)
- A rainy day (1)
- The MET and your bare asscheeks (3)
- An invitation (1)
- Holding your face in the light from the stove (1)
- Tea (2)
- Such a gaze you invite me to spend the night in here (1)
- A tuck in, a goodnight, and I climb in with you (1)
- Sitting around a candle (1)
- A conversation (1)
- A short embrace, a good smell (2)
- Standing up, you touching behind me, my undressed body (3)
- Pancakes shaped like hearts (8)
- One shaped like a dick (1)
- A piece of tree from the island (1)
- Kissing each part of your body (1)
- A tap at the door (3)

Tristen is a graduating senior in the Barnard class of 2022. She majored in English & Creative Writing and is from the Philadelphia area. Tristen is excited to travel this post-grad summer, to go to parks, and to read for fun in this new part of her life.

Coming to by Eleni Mazareas

Illustration by Watson Frank

This is how to be alone: I split from my walk to scrawl
comparisons, those ones unfound & unliving.
I want to pretend I know it- the gulls, the separating blue
just beyond that guardrail. If I lean close enough
I tell myself I smell the atlantic, our town, you.
& I unwind like the spool tucked in an old cookie tin.

You don’t sew anymore, I do it myself now (I’m too far
away & my bones too grown). A fondness stretches
in my grudging chest, things resented gently waking.
Old dreams come to earth with relenting leaves:
the Hudson is not salty, not pure either. Beneath,
trash scrapes its green innards, brown rolls & billows.
I thought I knew its face- none of it, I know none of it.

Eleni Mazareas (she/her) is a first year at Barnard College. She is planning on majoring in English and Creative Writing and minoring in Modern Greek. When she’s not at the souvlaki cart, you can find her cocooning on the fourth floor of Milstein.

I'm Dancing Through and Languid

Illustration by Bella Aldrete

I’ve swept the apartment and
scrubbed the sink. I curl up in a
sunspot on my rug like a cat and
breathe. I want to tell everyone
how great I’m doing. I want to go
back and say, Look! I couldn’t be
more pleased! And heave my
mangoes and poetry at them. In
my sunspot I decide that it’s only
for me– mangoes, poetry–
city abandon. A sweaty Summer
morning in a lover’s shadowed
Claremont apartment. My father’s
face pinned up against my peeling
wall, the glow of a passing siren
sending red against his laugh,
champagne spilling from the
bottle in his hands. High school
girls on the front steps of a
brownstone on the Northside of
Washington Square Park, knees
spread wide, paper plate pizza
grease painting their lips. Holy
whispers of precants as I wait
in the back of St. Paul’s nave, the
family of birds that flit among the
columns. A shared cigarette
behind the Natural History
Museum, on a Riverside bench, a
rock in Sheep Meadow. A
midnight: whimsical, breezy love.
And at 6: sunrise, seeped into my
sheets, into my naked body.
I keep it all for me as I wake.

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

Sundown on 108th, Breakdown by Anika Malhotra

Illustration by Watson Frank

It's not fair. That you're not beginning to cry in the
stairwell of your apartment, too. Isn't it dreadful.
In the laundry room, in the Duane Reade, on the
steps of Manhattan School of Music. In the East
Asian Library. This city reaches down my mouth
until I surrender everything I Our Fathered
down. Subway smoke won't leave me alone. Never
ending pot. In a room of Filipinos I feel dark
and clumsy. So nervous I stop thinking. On the way
home I want my mom. I keep dreaming about
her at the piano. Young and bony. These days
she'll get off the phone with Nanay and aks me,
How could I miss it there? It's true. And my dad tries
to teach me words in Hindi and my tongue is stiff.
I am brown and Catholic and it's so wrong, isn't
it, so I stay quiet with the others, I stay so silent.
And Jesus Christ, I don't care about it, St. Paul's
is just another place to cry, anyways. So that when
she asks if I went to mass, I don't lie, I hate lying.
Confession: I am earnest. I am a lesbian. I don't
want to think about marriage. I keep my scapular
on during sex so I'll still go to heaven.
Confession: I know I'm a bad person, and I don't
care. I'll chase after what I want and get rejected,
I let it get to me every time. I self harm and I never
touch myself. And I touch myself more often these
days, often on the bathroom floor, knees spread
wide and head thrown back, holy. And everything
is minor chords and melodrama. Falling back and
waiting for texts. Convinced I'm not safe. I hate
lying. I know I'm a bad person. I don't care. Don't care.

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

Prayer Movement by Anika Malhotra

Illustration by Mel Wang

Christ. I’ve cried in all the Catholic
Churches on the Upper West Side.
I lit too many candles and never paid.
I kept my hands folded and genuflected
before sitting. Kneeling. I kept my hands
folded and asked you to save my mother’s soul
when she dies. To take my mother’s soul
out from under the Little Caesers 40 miles
from Atlanta. That she may be saved from
endless highways and Home Goods and
the grief-stricken walls of her quiet home.
When I tell you to do these things I feel
as though I am screaming at myself. Dear
God. I am praying for my mother, not
myself. I am praying for myself. Dear God
I’m praying to you I’m keeping my
hands folded I tore the skin off my thumbs
despite the fact that my nails are dull and
unpainted. Shut up about that one. And
holy shit, I’m not guilty. I came to you.
And I’m talking about my mother, not
myself.

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

The Apartment by Giselle Silla

Illustration by Watson Frank

My roommate cooks ground beef in a pan

and suddenly I am homesick

for the first time since the dogwoods

in April when Sara said springtime

happens here in slow motion.

On La Salle someone leaves behind

a silhouette of perfume for me to encounter

in the elevator and I thereby come to know

what it is to rest in the crook of their arm. I recall

how on Albemarle the afternoon laundry scent of strangers

collects in invisible clouds in the street, betraying

what it is to sleep in that stranger’s bed at night.

I purchase a yellowing book from the Strand

whose insides smell like soy sauce

having absorbed the byproducts of cooking, of human living

into its fibers, into its spine, and I recall

how my notebook pages stick together in summer,

grow plump and damp with humidity

so that ink runs like street lights in the rain,

and too-firm pencils might tear the crumbling paper.

Here, a wandering whiff of cigarette.

Now, an applause of June thunder.

Somewhere, a G chord in a window.

Somewhere, a toilet flush at midnight.

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

Another Failed Attempt at a Sestina by Giselle Silla

Illustration by Mel Wang

I walk down to the river
and think about drawing
the clouds,
think about mixing watercolor paints,
purple and pink like the outsides and insides of plums, dragging my brush along every
cloud’s bruising underbelly as daylight dissolves into gauzy evening

sun. I wonder how Abby can be in Ireland and draw
everything but the clouds.
She seems to draw every
cow she lays eyes on, paints
self-portraits after De Kooning and green evening
shadows along far-away rivers,

but never clouds.
She’s stopped texting me every
night. Or maybe I’ve stopped texting her? Difficult when she’s busy painting
in Ireland, where evening
for me is midnight for her, and she keeps such a good sleep schedule, like a river
and its tides drawing

in, drawing out every
night, Dublin out of rhythm with New York. Shouldn’t a painter
keep odd hours? Ready to create whenever struck with inspiration, evening
or morning, noon or night? Shouldn’t creativity be a river
that cannot be dammed? A sun against which the shades cannot be drawn?
A window which the breath of sleep only clouds?

But then again what do I know about being a painter?
What do I know about green evening
shadows along rivers,
about Ireland and plums and the drawings
of De Kooning? What do I know about clouds?
All I know is that every

evening
I walk down to the river
to let the last drops of day pass me by, and I think about Abby drawing
in her wooden room in Ireland, a fingernail moon behind a cloud,
the charcoal on her wrists and forearms threatening to cover everything
as she blends the shadow of a face in a painting,

while here the evening sun paints the river in a thin film of rippling gold,
and every cloud blushes like the bashful subject of a drawing.

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