Chanter Literary and Arts Magazine - Fall 2025 - Reflections

Chanter Reflections

(noun): one who sings, or, the part of the bagpipe that plays a melody

Fall 2025: Reflections Macalester College Literary and Arts Magazine St. Paul, MN

chanter@macalester.edu

chantermagazine.com

Chanter would like to thank the following:

Our generous alumni donor

Professor Emma Törzs

The Mac Weekly and their office

Hozier, our patron god

Bruegger’s Bagels, MyBurger, Simplicitea, Trader Joe’s

Everyone being in their feels

Kelsey UP, Owen DOWN

The burger/the child

Forks but no knives

WONDERBOOM 2 (KELSEY)

The fuckass Bigelow printer

Sayuri Cumaranatunge(’s student ID)

Mysterious TMW password guy

The Graveyard of Possible Titles (expanded)

Editor-in-Chief: Jamila Sigal Vásquez

Arts and Literary Editor: Ellen Pendrak

Submissions Managers: Charlie Gee, Kelsey Blickenstaff

Public Relations Coordinator: Kelsey Blickenstaff

Editor: Rosie Smith

Staff: Fiona Candland

Grace Dubak

Sofia Kainz

Owen Larson

Sophie Okite

Ben Petterson

Paul Wallace

Ike Wicht

when s interstitial communional 8 Owen Larson

Response Prevention 9 Moxie Strom

My father tells me the centere cannot hold 10 Natalie Mazey

Feathers 11 Pine Starkey

January Baby 12 Bryn Cannon

Life on the Mississippi 13 Sarah Gray They Won’t Tell You the off-brand

There’s a Moshpit in Heaven 14 vegas sphere

How To Tie A Tie (EASY

VIDEO TUTORIAL) 15 Violet Stepen

Misrecognitions 16 Ezra Schulman On Beauty 17 AZ

Two Sonnets as Light and Dark Change Places 18 AZ

I Would Have You Know 20 Gavia Boyden

Body Bequest 21 Ellen Pendrak

Water Lillies 22 Violet Stepen Blue Waltz 23 Grace Duback

We’ll stand at the sea and find there are no words 34 Natalie Mazey you don’t know who you are 35 Sophie Okite

Pepper Spray 36 Calliope Coney (content warning: sexual harassment)

Evacuating the Mountains 37 Gavia Boyden

Life from the Tomb 38 Fiona Candland turkey vultures 39 Owen Larson

I Took a Turtle From Your

House When We Said Goodbye 40 Fiona Candland

Cedar Waxwings 42 Sarah Gray

Solo; Camino 43 Finneas Haarman

A Song for Summer 44 Ezra Schulman

Twenty Notches 45 Ike Wicht

I meet with my advisor and 46 Moxie Strom

Cups/Acts of Service 47 Charlie Gee

Art ~

Gazing Onto Superior 24 Luke Arendt

sous-sus in fifth 25 Ellen Pendrak got a good one 26 Sopias Robinson

Leaves of Many Colors 27 Sopias Robinson

Pendulum 28 Ben Petterson

Watchful 29 Faunus Moffroid

Bouquet 30 Ben Petterson

Sam’s Bar 31 Emma Gonzalez Cueto

Hamburg Banhoff 32 Emma Gonzalez Cueto

Self-Reflection in Broken Mirrors 33 Charlie Gee

Cover Art: Longing digital photography

Luke Arendt

Editor’s Note

The fall semester marks the start of an academic year, but it’s far from a perfect new beginning. For me, as a new senior and Editor-in-Chief, it carries the weight of absence: I can’t turn to our now graduated seniors for their opinions on ordering pieces or copyedits. However, I take comfort in the fact that some things remain unchanged. Who would we be without the occasional crashout over InDesign? I’m beyond grateful for the board members and staff, who are the most lovely, down-to-earth, and understanding people I could ask for. The Chanter publication and community space wouldn’t exist without them! Now more than ever, I feel the importance of Chanter’ s role in uplifting and celebrating the creativity of our student body. Surrounded by the backdrop of Minnesota’s first snowfall, this layout weekend, we at Chanter worked on one of my favorite aspects of this publication: putting together the puzzle pieces of poems and art.

Reflections is a title that came after much contention and deliberation. We constantly engage with the past, be it the seasons, the forms our bodies and selves have taken, or the generations and creatures that came before us. How better to represent such a human experience than with the pieces here, which are contemplative and unflinching in the face of truth? I hope this collection serves as both a moment of pause and a reminder that there can always be a gentle ending.

The works we receive from our wonderful peers always inspire me, which is why I’m so honored and excited to present them to you here in Reflections, the Fall 2025 edition of Chanter.

Jamila

Sigal Vásquez

Editor-in-Chief,

2025-2026

interstitial communion Owen Larson

much has been made of the beauty in a peaceful river the practiced tumble of cliffsides onto pine-dusted shores and the trees atop them in full regalia a troupe of vultures undeterred by gray skies higher still watching a fire perform its innumerable dances

but these poems exist already I walked through them this past october in their permanence on the st. croix they are things worth less in quotation and I must ask you to forgive my earlier frugality

permit me instead to speak of what is fresh to my senses and temporary like the loaves of bread piled plainly in that brown paper bag by the firepit how we passed them between ourselves each tearing off a palm’s worth mouths lying in wait for it as we proffered the remains to another the primality of it all, just five minutes from the highway! how could basalt and lichen hope to compete?

the end its crust thick was set aside for a while in that bag and we stood in a huddle eating and there was not a single particularity of the bread not a single thing that I could now remember that I could now care to remember except that we shared it in that narrow clearing and those moments were as lovely as everlasting as any vista

Response Prevention Moxie Strom

These days I like to insist that no meaning is inherent. She tells me if I fall in love I’m doomed because love is different from anything else. This is latest in a long line of things that are supposed to doom me because they’re different from anything else. As far as I can see I’m still okay. Knock on wood. I clip down sidewalks in the spring wind and cry adoration to wall sconces. Hopefully, my head is less a caged wolf and more a marimba. The wood is there, but I pick which keys to play. So give me your hand. I’m ready enough.

My father tells me the centre cannot hold Natalie Mazey

After William Butler Yeats

My father and I begin to float above the couch he threatened to get rid of.

It’s my favorite — stains and dog hair and all. I love the far right corner with slits in the fabric patched with white thread. I love the divet in the far left, an imprint of my sister who spends only half the week here — how I can curl into her indent when I want nothing more than to return home. We drift, my father and I, and I clutch onto the blankets, attempt to tie myself to the earth. But we hover, two planets letting go of the pull of gravity. Our heads touch the ceiling until we are bursting through it and I lose sight of the stitches and the couch and the home. The centre cannot hold. But we are floating in tandem. Unstained. Unburdened.

Feathers

Pine Starkey

Such a sight, how feathers fall from heaven

How morbidly they scatter on the ground

Though Lady Luck says count merely seven

It’s thirteen feathers scattered that I found

Such a sound, now hear how the angels cry

How desperately they weep in tandem

There’s no world where a broken wing can fly

Nor where this bloodshed is merely random

Dry hands, absolve yourself of all your sins

For not even judgement can stop you now

On and on, your tangled false story spins

Until you make Love itself turn and bow

But lover, your force cannot make me crack

And without you, my feathers will grow back

January Baby Bryn Cannon

Sweet summer, you almost had me fooled With your lakes and your leaves and your light. Your smooth ebbs and flows, your endless weeks and sprinting days.

I forgot my mittens and my fur-lined boots, embraced the tan lines and tank tops and ran full force into the Minnesotan daydream. Boats on the water, bare feet in the sand, birdsong in the sky.

Oh how I loved you, believed your promise of future, of time.

But I am a January Baby, born from the frost and into the snow. It’s September now, but I know.

I know who demands that I come home. And I hate how I’ll fall into the lull, the white blanket dampening my fear of the cold The snot and the slush, the dead and the buried. Winter is in me, always lurking, always reassuring. Around and around again, she comes, and every time, she brings the stars.

The shiny, shimmery reminder of the fallen, of the universe, of endings and of wishes.

Sweet summer, I will miss you every day But the winter calls, and it’s she I must obey

Life on the Mississippi

Sarah Gray

Collapse the sideshows & their clamor, my dry hands purple as sails, or the dreams of sailors.

I don’t say I love this place out loud, but I do smell the weather changing & when you pick me up, I’ll smile. I’m not bitter. Suddenly I remember this world. No more airport blues, my hundred and sixteenth dream, I buried the hatchet, love is over.

Thank you. It’s the end of the meal, I’m grateful, I’ll wipe my mouth. I clean my teeth, my legs lose feeling.

Tough & proper as an accent, brave as a secret. You say it’s a cottonwood, so it’s a cottonwood. I don’t cry over little things, except when I do, remembering love, mixing potions & metaphors, my spirit crazed & mobile. Please. Pretend with me. However you want to phrase it, everyone has a river which is theirs. Okay, the Mississippi belongs to no one. But that’s not a river. That’s a man, or a war. You & I stare at it for less than a minute, each in our own private rapture, & I don’t know what you think about, but I think about change.

Lately I don’t call, or want to call. I’m on the bank of memory burying clues.

They Won’t Tell You There’s a Moshpit in Heaven the off-brand vegas sphere and on the 7th day God finished Its battle jacket and got on stage. the music was loud and fast and kind of bad. and the angels were beating the shit out of each other in the pit — at least some of them were the others were sticking their fingers down each other’s throats in sketchy back alleys where the only holy water is narcan and the fallen sleep on cardboard with their clipped wings in a knot out front Peter kept the gate with a sharpie and ear plugs because even angels must protect their ears inside the air smelled like sweat and weed, and 1,000 bittersweet childhoods and as God ended the angels cried for an encore but the venue closed at 10 so instead they went home and drank molotov cocktails until they fell asleep on dirty couches dreaming of their bloodied smiles and falling in love

How To Tie A Tie (EASY VIDEO TUTORIAL)

Violet Stepen

First bring the small end of the tie just below… I fail immediately. Silk slips through my fingers like trickles of soft beach sand, my helpless hands left open and begging. Ties are untameable beasts, dead-velvet snapping serpents until the application of firm, learned hands. Thank you for teaching me, video-man. Thank you for your faithful phantom hands wispily grasping my shoulders, transitory father figure, father of many a tie. I never wanted to be here, blinking through the early-morning fog in front of my mirror, but you give me the easy, thoughtless direction, my safe life-path; all I’ve ever wanted was to feel safe. Now we’re going to flip the big end over our hand, flip it around the back, pull forward... Again, failure. Why can’t you just do this for me? Why must I tie myself to the self I thought I abandoned, I thought had died? I’m just a soundless echo filling in a ghost, anyway. Make it tighter. No, tighter. Tighter. Tighter.

Misrecognitions

Ezra Schulman

What I once thought was a big black crow, peeling wrappers from the yogurts and the applesauce, was not. Looking back — and through my spread-out, trembling hands, I have been looking back — it was a shadow, or a poet’s drowsy line I’ve broken in.

Look at ten years old with your head laid out on the plastic table, as you used to. America was a quilt of counties, each with a public library at the end of a long warm road. Car radios buzz, and you have never been stung when dragging your hand through a mass of flowers. The ceiling lights are on then out, your brother makes pictures of the sun, the earth is a set of molten layers portrayed in books. The earth is brittle and newly born.

Your dog spent his whole life at home, and even so, he has grown old. He is sitting where the sun is now. Isn’t that the knowledge of our elders?

On Beauty AZ

After Anne Carson

Can you believe it? Even in this short life there was always someone who stood with you, side by side, like the many leaves hung together on a bough, or the road that led to the next. This is how we learned and lived in Beauty: Sunlights on our knees, shoulders touched shoulders, what is us? we asked. There is the wind — moving like a whole. There is what we are, told by what we know, by comparison, by proximity, by the thrill of something new, which makes us brave, makes us believable. The world slowly un-strung itself, individual, vast, unaltered, old, uninterrupted, without shame, without shadow, almost like death, carrying the heavy in this wind that was sung in an early morning in a bright summer like how everything had once begun.

Two Sonnets as Light and Dark Change Places1 AZ

1. The Sonnet When An Artist Told Me Wrong

is when things don’t fit together. When I was five I knew I was wrong, or the world was wrong. I kneeled before my grandmother and asked her to prove that I was real. She could not. The next day, I walked around the kindergarten calling myself a wrong lover. Everything I loved was false: mother, father, older boys and girls, animals, wind, water. I started to realize water and father are the same. Only time made me thirsty. Turned out I was always thirsty, even when I was sleeping. This I inherited from my grandmother, who wakes up every night at 2 to drink water because her dreams dry up and end in a desert: a bus on which my grandfather took to the other side. She ran after it and saw the desert. A bridge where she saw a man jumped off before it led her to the desert. The desert is always claustrophobic, she said to me one morning, I couldn’t move around because there was no shadow to step on. I don’t get it. It is wrong, she said. Then I realized it was not the light, but the shadow that I didn’t love.

1 “Light and Dark Change Places is a term I adapted from Anne Carson’s Wrong Norma, in which she wrote, “a movie’s just bright and dark things changing places.”

2. The Sonnet That Hopes In An Ideal World

everything is bijective. Everything can be responded to. I thought to myself as I stared into the silence, hoping it would reflect something back. When I traveled to Europe, I went straight to where Proust lived. It was an ordinary street. Paris had just rained and the leaves were moving as much as they were allowed to in the wind. On a plaque was carved “Marcel Proust 1871-1922 habita cet immeuble de 1907 à 1919.” You see, I don’t recognize anything in French. It seemed like Proust lived like everyone else. So what was the deal with the madeleine cake? Maybe it has to do with the mind, the imagination. If I close my eyes really hard, I can feel my mind like a blanket. When I stretch it, it bounces back and some dust drifts off. And the dust tastes nothing like the madeleine cake. This is when I fall back into silence, because an ending is always without reflection, a plaque written in the unreadable. I tell myself I should be brave. I run into an ending like Virginia Woolf with stones in her pockets, wading into the River Ouse. Then the bright surface.

I Would Have You Know

Gavia Boyden

1. Preferably, we’d care about things all the time, and with great velocity. We’d care about things even before the light seeped between the door and the floorboards, even before the light seeped between us. Before we wake up, we think about what we are like before waking.

2.

Before, I woke up and thought about all the words I said that never made any exact difference.

About all those words: I said them the way an eye fixed says nothing, but travels any distance.

The way I fixed this says nothing about the way I would have rather left it all hanging.

By the way, I would have you know I never wake up careless. And I never wish the light would come later.

Body Bequest

Ellen Pendrak

I’ve donated my living body to science

In hopes that perhaps

Those grad students with veins flooded by coffee

Will get more use out of it than I ever have

Me, this medical marvel

Young flesh sloughing off old bones

Old bones crumbling into young dirt

Shorthand notes are scribbled

As I decompose before their very eyes

Let them peel back my skin

Practice quick slices through muscle and sinew

Let them bicker over who gets to pick apart my brain

While I roll my still-blinking eyes

Call it a last-ditch effort

A vest-less dive off a sinking ship

I call it hope that these late-twenties caffeine addicts

Can do what two decades worth of actual doctors haven’t

And unearth the flaw in my system

Or at least do what two decades worth of actual doctors haven’t

And make a damn good effort at it

All I ask,

And this is legally binding, you know, Is that when the scalpels and monitors and safety goggles are put away

And the scientists have gone somewhere to write out their conclusions

Is that they let my bones rest easy

As I never have.

Water Lillies

Violet Stepen

We went alone to that art museum, took the bus together there and back. On display were natural works by Monet, you know the ones. Those petal-littered lily ponds always bring me to the brink of tears; things aren’t pretty like that. Never am I more conscious of myself than when I look at art with a texture. I am always changing, one way then another, and never with any destination in mind but that pond, thick with beauty, painted nostalgic-pastel, draped in stillness, without disturbance.

How do I exist in your memory now, states away, what wavelengths of cognitive light represent me in those blurry brain-paintings we all call our memories? Tell me I am not the ugly sum of my smiles or my clothes or my too-visible bones. Remember the good quality of our time, my quietude, the simple data-fact of our friendship?

Oh, may some master of art abstract me, brush anew my indignities, paint my uncried tears a mineral blue! Make me an impression, make me unreal, make me beautiful.

Blue Waltz Grace Duback

After Emily Dickinson

The beckoning of the Moon to the ocean’s

Vastness craving the rhythm of a heart

Begging for the reassurance that they too May dance together. Flawless and smooth.

As witness of this waltz too

I question how can one feel blue

Gazing Onto Superior

digital photography

Luke Arendt

sous-sus in fifth digital art

Ellen Pendrak

got a good one digital photograhy Sopias Robinson

Leaves of Many Colors

digital photography

Sopias Robinson

Sam’s Bar

digital photography

Emma Gonzalez Cueto

We’ll stand at the sea and find there are no words

Natalie Mazey

After Ada Limón

The summer I paled under frozen what-ifs, you took my hand to the shore. I needed sun and you needed space, both of us in search of something worth burns. We buried our feet like crawdads in the sand, spreading out our arms like snow angels in June. You pointed up to cumulus clouds dancing in humidity. You said they look like Jesus on the cross, I said they look like the wings of a goose, outstretched and free. So small, the two of us, no bigger than these ants crawling up soda cans dripping in condensation. But here we are imagining the meaning of the sky’s art, prayer to poetry, back to prayer. I imagine you tying yourself to my shoulder blades with satin ribbons, reaching to collect the sky in our arms. We’ll stand with our toes kissing the expanse where sand fades to sea, wind whipping our hair until we are one flag, standing in salute of meaning undefined. We can be the cross or the goose, or just be two girls, swaying, free.

you don’t know who you are Sophie Okite

is it really so bizarre to live from the outside in? is it really so strange to dream in the 3rd person? you do not remember yourself, do not recognize yourself an observer to your own life watching yourself from the corner amorphous and indistinct but the alternative makes your stomach churn “i am this” how presumptuous to say such a thing how absurd to give yourself personhood it is easier to just keep your distance from yourself even if you don’t really remember what you look like after all, what you feel when you look in the mirror is not recognition but fear

Pepper Spray

Calliope Coney

Content Warning: Sexual Harassment

The time on my phone reads you should’ve insisted on an Uber as I stand stiff at the bus stop. The men are contrapposto as they bring blunts to their lips and then bluntly call for me, organizing their murder a few steps closer.

My dress is made from a rose. Each petal tears one-by-one with their whistles in the wind till I shiver due to the chill running (though I cannot) down my spine, and I’m naked and afraid they’ll make a pass or that I won’t pass.

But I must keep my face composed, even though I know they can still detect motionless targets.

I miss the privilege I forsook before signing a new signature up for womanhood.

The friends I went out with are guys with eyes able to be fixed on phones rather than surroundings. They do not:

1. own pepper spray.

2. reach down and grip onto cylindrical preparedness.

3. understand why I increasingly fold myself against them.

One of the men blows smoke that reaches down my throat and I try to not let any part of him in.

My hand tightens around the pepper spray in my purse.

Evacuating the Mountains

Gavia Boyden

The mountain did not stand alone.

There were many of them lined up, like black birds.

Like blackbirds they too could lift away at any moment, on fire. On fire their grasses were gold like before only they cost much more and terrified me.

Don’t repeat this to anyone: I hated that forest sometimes, from afar. But up close I would repent and repent and repent

Life from the Tomb Fiona Candland

A bitten apple for a Red massacre.

Pale virgin flesh, exposed. Dry. What have you done?

The crust wilts at the edges; Your lips have death upon them. With each crisp crescent you bite Teeth freeze at dusk.

Seeds hide behind fibrous icicles. If I place them in the frozen ground Will life sprout from your tomb? Mother, please hold my hand.

turkey vultures Owen Larson

fewer it seems than yesterday surveil lakes with no carrion & highways ripe-bellied with tire-prints

you can read an attestation in the stumbling of their wingtips: buckthorn thickets make poor kindling but they are all so focused on their dwindling meals & they pass beyond the far treetops unable to cry

I Took a Turtle From Your House When We Said Goodbye

Fiona Candland

Dearest Grandfather,

I took a turtle from your house when I said goodbye; I’m not sure if you said goodbye, too. I took two turtles; I think I was only supposed to take one. Today, I have seven apples on my desk and one pear and I can’t stop crying all the time. I bought some flowers yesterday to brighten my mood; it worked for a little while, but now that they’re here with me, I’m afraid they’ll die; I’m afraid I will let them die: I’m afraid they will die on me. To get you must give. It feels like all there is is addition and subtraction, reduction for nothing, for the death of emerald leaves falling off trees, shivering bones, ripped, dry bark, one after another standing naked in rows; feet sedentary, claustrophobic dirt seals — steals. Spring will never come; reduction to abjection. I took a turtle from your house when you died.

At the supermarket where I bought my flowers in bloom, I bought a card in the sympathy section, too. It reads: “Every life leaves a trail of wonderful memories.” There is a stone arch with waves and sea cliffs through its center, waiting on the other side. I’d like to walk through the arch and feel the waves and their winds on my face — I’d like to laugh for a while. I’d like to stare into the horizon until I forget what it is I am looking at — I’d like to sigh a very big sigh. And once I have gathered enough mud on my feet, I would like to climb the rocks back up and through to the other side. While I walk through the arch’s center, I’d like to stretch my arms and drag my fingertips over the stones. I wouldn’t mind if a ragged edge broke my skin, as long as it hurt for a while. There is lavender on the other side.

Sometimes I wish to forget you, for you to be taken away for a while. Only just for a walk in uncut grass and the pleasant dampness of the morning’s dew. To sit on my heels and look out onto the vast, unwavering blue. Only for a few seconds would I like

to be sewn into the keen unconscious of the ocean’s indefatigable hue. I would like to be taken, subtracted, for a little while, and then I would walk back through the brick wall missing its center, put back into a life without you.

With love, Your granddaughter

Cedar Waxwings

Sarah Gray

After Mary Oliver

Not that I didn’t remember before, but we needed to open every window in the house before I could really hear it.

In the bedroom, like a child, I wept over cold pasta. Who has never done it? Who has never opened their mouth as wide as they could & known it was not wide enough?

Please, abandonment, kiss me so gently. Whenever I need a reminder.

Please, it was barely June & the cedar waxwings called so quietly you had to see them. My mother always sees them. They leapt from one elastic maple bough to the next & even the weight of their hollow bones made the branches dip deeper than any trampoline on which I’ve ever jumped.

They jumped. Their tiny heads pointed like admirals without even the memory of fear they twitched & leapt & landed, every time.

Solo; Camino Finneas Haarman

Mi Amor, Mi Alma, Mi Niña, Mi Armonía; ¿cómo podría perderte, Perdida? Siento que no te conozco, Mi Vida. Me morí, sin saber lo que hacía.

Cuando en el ocio yo me mantenía, pensando que eras desconocida, sin la pasión del amor encendida, incertidumbre era lo que sentía.

¡Yo quiero vivir de nuevo contigo! Pero en el amor, yo siempre lo arruino. Te pido perdón; “lo siento” te digo.

Mas, me dejaste. Con esto termino: Aunque no estás, yo con besos te sigo y así continuaré; solo, camino.

A Song for Summer

Ezra Schulman

I’m going to spend the rest of the summer drinking and listening to This summer.

One night, they let the fireworks go, Concluding a few days of anxious silence. Why leave those things hanging around, I thought, Why don’t we just go all the way And blow the whole sky to pieces?

The rain came in and then left, Like an absentminded boyfriend. And of course the thunder came as well; Throwing me out of bed for amusement, Left me looking at the blue outside, I was wanting it so badly.

I could have escaped. In the few seconds between Lightning and thunder, firework going up And firework gone, I could have escaped. The sun went up and now it’s out and the stars Lie behind the hum and smoke And clouds. There’s something to this Whole ordeal, this Quiet city revealing itself In tangled movements, those tracks left on the prairie grass, Those outskirts around still water. Another golden classic.

Twenty Notches

Ike Wicht

I thought I would die young, haunt suburban America. Captivate the masses take their desires hostage and ransom them for everyone’s autonomy.

I assumed between desire and safety was a choice I had to make. I did, and I chose wrong.

Death could have made me an effective deterrent like a cross by a parkway make people start to kill their momentum rolling down the road end of the tunnel.

The only light I see is the candle in the birthday cake I can’t eat. My metabolism slowed down it must have seen the cross. The flame dies. I have to live I wish that before I lose another decade a way to turn around emerges.

I meet with my advisor and Moxie Strom

Their prescription is to make bad work. I’m sick of writing saturated with shame. Maybe there’s a good way I can look at you. I like your face in bad fluorescent light. I like the soft snow and purple sky. I like their advice even if it means I have to get serious about Google Calendar.

Nobody finds it hard to believe I need medicine for this. People soften their voices to let me speak. I was never such a mouse before I came here. But I never had to speak through this much shaking. Is there a benign compulsion? What else could writing be?

I don’t want to write ashamed anymore but I wish when you got close to me I’d feel singular. I wish I would cleave, second definition, the one that means come together. I want to forget half of this, at least.

Cups/Acts of Service

Charlie Gee

Tonight, yellow light, and love, fill this room. Laughter bounces off the high ceilings. We are a tangle of legs on one sofa, we are hearts and lives intertwined.

And tomorrow, I will wake up too late, to one of the grey mornings of fall. The coffee table in our living room will be scattered with abandoned jars of water, with empty mugs once full of warm apple cider. And my heart will be full.

Two years ago, I wrote so often of this loneliness that I now realize is foreign to me. This time is fleeting, I think. So I relish these tasks, the ones that remind me of all of you.

In twos and threes, I will carry cups to the kitchen sink. As warm, soapy water fills the basin, I will rinse each cup clean.