Kolam
by Kate Murray

      She squatted on the earth, the red wet soil like clay beneath her feet. The silver bangles around her ankles jingled as she moved around the kolam. She held the fine white rice powder in her dry hand, letting it run out through her first three fingers, controlling it lightly, without any pressure, creating even lines and curves on the damp earth. The pattern was a complex one, each of the intertwined curves extending out like the petals of a flower.
      The sky was still gray, the bright Indian sun had not risen and the road was almost deserted, not yet filled with the traffic of motorcycles weaving in and out between the cows and goats and bicyclists. Women walked with bundles of sticks on their heads, over the potholes, and the occasional bus passed, filled with white tourists, leaving billows of dust in its wake. In the quiet, all along the street women crouched in front of the entrance of their doors, laying out a new kolam, a sign of welcome, in the dirt of the doorstep.
       Her hair hung in a thick black braid, swinging with her as she leaned forward, completing her pattern. She lingered longer than necessary, indulging in artistic finishing touches. An hour after she had started her kolam, the boy finally came walking down the road. She recognized him without looking right at him; she knew the way he moved, the light swing of his long arms and the easy movement of his body, and she watched him out of the corner of her eye.
       She glanced up as he walked by; lowering her lashes so that all she could see were his athletic shoes, once white, now stained the dark red of the earth. He slowed down, moving onto the edge of the road every time a motorcycle or bicycle drove by. She raised her eyes to his knees, dry and brown, bare beneath the bottom of his shorts. And then just as he was about to pass her, she raised her eyes to meet his. They were black, looking straight at her. He wasn’t smiling, but the look in his eyes made her feel as if he were. It was only for a moment, and then he was gone.
       Even when her mother teased her about why she took so long at the kolam in the morning, she pretended that she didn’t know what Amma was talking about. She smiled and never answered. He walked by every morning on his way to school, sometimes with his friends, but more often alone, and every morning, she squatted outside the door, making the kolam; every day it became more complicated.
      A month later, her mother told her that her father had chosen a man from another village for her to marry. She had seen him once or twice before, and remembered his eyes, not necessarily cold, but not warm either. She nodded and smiled graciously above the lump in her throat. And throughout her life, when her husband would ignore her, or worse, when he would hit her, she would close her eyes and think of another boy, walking past her doorstep, his soles stained red.

Kolam: a painted prayer or blessing drawn in rice powder on the ground outside of doors in Tamil Nadu India.

Ever So Inspired
by Ashley Farris

i wish i could be a starved poet
committed enough to sell
myself for the sake of art:
a fingernail for an adjective
my heart for a verb
i want to live in an apartment
with rusty sinks and a community toilet
bare light bulbs with broken chains, peeled paint
and an old jewish man sporting hand-knit sweaters across the hall
i want to cut my hair short and be scruffy
have holes in my jeans and
not care if i am wearing stripes and plaids
or that i’ve mended the ripped stitches with duct tape
i want to always be so inspired
as to write on absolutely everything
paper bags, napkins, and especially cigarette cartons
to sacrifice my stomach
so i may find haiku in anything
even in the dingy apartment, cardboard box, or other place of residence
mostly, i just want to be
so in love with word and sound
that i am content
without aspiring
to anything more than ignorant humility.

Into Our Clothes is a collection of poems and short stories written by a talented selection of students attending Goucher College in Baltimore, Maryland.

A Quiet Night In Mexico
by Dan Bornstein

      My mother, father and I sat for a very long time, mostly abstaining from conversation and food, making eye contact with one another only by accident. We chewed on the silence, picking its sharp bones from our teeth. An entire meal with only the sound of boards bending and creaking against the winter cold, of clearing throats, of crickets chirping, and of forks scraping against plates as they rearranged small piles of spaghetti; those millions of sounds you notice when nothing you can say is appropriate.
      I noticed maybe a dozen cookbooks were scattered across the kitchen counters, books with the names of a countries I’d never been to printed across their covers. Most nights, the smell of seared monkfish or steaming moussaka wafted out of the kitchen accompanied by loud jazz music, and my mother’s singing, if she thought no one could hear. Tonight she served undercooked spaghetti with store bought pasta sauce and scooped small forkfuls into her mouth. She seemed to forget that the pit in her stomach did not allow room for things like food.
       My father gulped down a few mouthfuls, then pulled his cheeks up in a fake smile, making his jaw labor hard enough that I could almost hear it tremble and groan, like an old wooden bridge sagging under its own damp weight.
      I sat with a hand resting on my knee under the table, hiding the not-so-healed cuts across my knuckles. I could never stop picking at the scabs. My mother was looking at me, waiting for me to force down even one bite, but I just kept absentmindedly pushing around my heap of undercooked pasta until it got cold and I could dump it in the trash, go to my brother’s room and just sit. Maybe hit play on his CD player and blast whatever was in there.
      My brother was in a hospital fifty miles away, sucking down clear fluid from a tube sticking out of his arm. Every hour or so his eyes would start fluttering and he would moan louder and louder until a nurse came into the room and pushed a button, shutting him up for a while longer with the dull push of some drug I couldn’t name. A hospital blanket, stiff and uncomfortable as a ragged sheet you picture dark-skinned men sleeping under in third world countries, hid his broken and scarred leg. Nothing covered his fractured skull.
      A doctor who would forget my brother’s name as soon as he took off his stethoscope had come into the room with his latex-gloved hands clasped in front of him to speak with myself and my parents. He laid one sterile hand on my brother’s thin shoulder and told us that there was nothing they could do about the swelling in his brain, that all they could do was to wrap a line of tape around it and tell everybody to stand back.
      “Right now, you just need to be patient.”
      I could have killed him, I think. But instead I nodded and said thank you.
      He threw his latex gloves in the trash before he left the room.
      My brother had looked as if he might have only been asleep, but he flailed as much as his body could muster, drowning in the broken dreams that tore apart his sleep with the sound of broken glass and screeching tires.
      A tear fell from my mother’s cheek into her spaghetti. My father didn’t move to lay an arm over her shoulder; he never said that everything was going to be all right or not to worry, and it wouldn’t have been right if he did. Why even open our mouths? We had all been there when the doctor said, “He might not make it out of this without some brain damage.”
      You might have a fucking vegetable for a brother, was all I could hear. Just two days before, I had stepped off a plane to be picked up by my father and brought to Brigham and Women’s hospital in Boston. The day before that, I talked to my mother, a million miles away, from a payphone by the side of the road in Cuernavaca, a Mexican city built out of plastic and Polaroids for vacationing Americans.
      I can’t remember really what my mother said to me that night, but I listened as if I were taking the pulse of every word that she said and found them all hollow.
      A boy walks his girlfriend home just a few nights before Christmas, hand-in-hand, down a well lit street. So well lit that neither of them see their shadows cast in front of them, as the screaming headlights of the glistening cherry-red grave tumbles in around them.
      They hoped that Spring, my brother’s girlfriend, would be able to have an open casket funeral.
      I remember the last three words my mother said to me: “Are you okay?” Her question was honest and so was my answer. I slammed the phone down into its cradle.
      Again and again, harder each time. I wanted to feel something being destroyed in my hands, even if it was a public telephone in a poor Mexican city.
      Whispers from small circles of the dark-skinned natives trailed me around the streets.
      Permita que el Gringo trate con sus problemas cómo él hace
¿Se matará él?
      Pienso que eso es el hombre blanco más triste que he visto jamás.
      I walked around for hours, a crazy American kid bleeding and barreling around a quiet night in a foreign country.
      My mother picked up my plate and used her fork to scrape the heap of cold spaghetti onto the heap of her own scarcely touched food along with my father’s, a whole empty meal consumed by the garbage disposal in a few short seconds.
      We left for the hospital after my mother did the dishes and later that night it rained, washing away the other sounds of the night like patches of blood and bone fragments.
      My brother’s leg eventually healed and the swelling left his brain unharmed, and he would mention the accident very rarely. On one occasion, he told me about the final conversation he had with Spring, whom I pretended he called his first love, but really he called his last. He said they were walking hand-in-hand down a well lit street, talking generally about the future, that they no longer spoke in terms of if’s, but of when’s. When I hear him talk now I know his leg is still broken somewhere and his skull is still fractured, and at night he’ll have to curl up in uncomfortable hospital blankets.