Getting into Rhythm
Dylan Drongesen
His styrofoam
cup filled with beer
to start this morning and the last.
Rain pummels down
buries a tear,
he left when everything collapsed.
A photo strip
in my bedroom—
memories soaked and drowned in bleach.
My mind wanders
toward the fume
a sun-tinged glimpse just out of reach.
Caustic white floods
and streets bleed heat—
on my cheek, chlorine dances in beads.
The rubble in
my soul burns sweet,
we pick strange fruits and spit out seeds.
He wanted to
eat the fruit whole—
I worried he would sprout a tree.
A distorted
mirror, a hole,
one decided to grow in me.
Before seeing
color and depth
Everything collapsed when he left.
Dylan Drongesen is a Senior enrolled in Cornell’s School of Hotel Administration. He is from Orlando, Florida, where his love for restaurants and hospitality shapes how he sees people and place. He writes in the margins of busy days.
ROADKILL REQUIEM
Clara Matton
I
moss grows between the space where i live and die
moistened by the salty drops i cry
an evergreen epitaph
breathing whisps of hope
crimson clover clamped
between barefoot big toes
murmur prayers
to the weeping willow (sensitive) the witch elm (misunderstood)
for the knot of earthworms
and the new-to-the-world birds that weren’t ready to fly yet, in all their limp incompetence
as you count sheep,
wrap yourself in repressed memories
as if the goose you splattered across the thruway on a sunday morning
whose slender neck you pressed into the pavement cracks and ridges of your tires
was used to fill your invisible blanket with down
rather than slathering the road with sticky red paint
instead of filling your eyes with thick hot tears
fantasies of forgiveness feel real
as you dance (tumble) whirl
into the dream (trance) world
II
fleshy feet
belonging to
a possum pancake
jellied guts on asphalt toast
now i’m thinking about death while i drive
the lobes of my brain throb and wince
stretching to remember the before and afterlife
did i only dream that there was nothing?
white as womb
dark as death
what exists in the static between?
Clara Matton ‘22 holds a degree in Global and Public Health Sciences from Cornell. She is a dietitian, roller skater, and WRFI DJ.
Sustenance
Yash Moitra
I see the sustenant reactionary.
She is a young lady, probably, with that paper-blue mask and the eyes of a single mother. There
are no flus in the air.
A young masked lady and what looks like her daughter walk into the terminal.
They leave the smoking room and don’t smell like cigarettes; the younger doesn’t look like she’d
know how to light one.
A young masked lady and what looks like her daughter join me in the terminal.
Lady Longlegs stashes a lighter in her basket just as the flowers have come to burn.
I look out onto the grass beneath the tarmac. Kiddo-
Leans against the glass.
“It is much too fragile.”
“I know.”
Two smiles and a frown erupt.
“There are no flus in the air”, pleads she. I know, but I cannot convince her so-called mother so.
Longlegs turns a plush red as I rip off her mask and face.
She passes.
I see the sustenant reactionary.
Yash Moitra is a Junior studying Applied Economics with an interest in Game Theory. His writing may be found at oeuvre.yashmoitra.com.