32 / The Sturgian

Special Thanks to

Amy Peterson, for her limitless expertise and patience

Marion Weeks, for her support during a difficult transition

Matt Fetzer & Jeff Hyer, for providing additional “eyes”

Allie Pendergast & Ben Doane, for assisting with production

Veronica Henger, for designing the cover art work

Dawn Cope, for her artistic eye

&

Scott Arcenas & the Creative Writer’s Club, for striving to

continue creating extraordinary literature in the name of Art

Thank you to those whom we could not include in this issue.

We encourage all students to submit their creative work for

consideration in the next issue.

Please consider donating to the

Gretchen Buntschuh Memorial Scholarship Fund

through Sturgis Charter Public School

in honor of Sturgis‟s most valued literary gem.

Comments, questions, submissions:

afenney@sturgischarterschool.org

The Sturgian

The Creative Journal of

Sturgis Charter Public School

NO. 2

WINTER 2010

Published Annually at

Sturgis Charter Public School

Hyannis, Massachusetts

Founded by

Gretchen R. S. Buntschuh

Alicia D. Fenney

2 / The Sturgian

Memories Charles Bihler will never forget how Gretchen brought to life the ideals of a Renaissance person and believed that should be every-one‟s aspiration.

Anna Botsford will remember Gretchen as the senior year English teacher who was passionate, curious, and wise, and whose love of theater spellbound and inspired her.

Julie Carman will never forget Gretchen‟s grace of character and power of intellect. Gretchen believed that without academic and personal risk-taking we would cease to grow, a philosophy that was instrumental in implementing the IB.

Alicia Fenney will remember Gretchen‟s inspirational teaching style, exceptionally high standards, and literary contribution to the upstairs teacher lavatory: stacks of New Yorker magazines!

Matt Fetzer will never forget how touched he was to meet a fellow transcendentalist during a conversation sparked by Gretchen‟s teaching of Moby Dick, with its infinite commentary on nature and our place in it.

Steve McDowell will remember discussions he had with Gretchen about Old English and Beowulf. This familiarity warmly welcomed him during his first year teaching at Sturgis.

Pete Steedman will never forget Gretchen‟s optimism and hope for the future when she read the Langston Hughes poem “Let America be America Again” to ToK classes when Obama became president.

Marion Weeks will remember the adventures of the Sturgis Sound-ings, Gretchen‟s brainchild. Like true fishermen on a fishing expe-dition, they cast the bait never knowing what they might catch and were delighted to reel in some beautiful reviews!

The Sturgian / 31

Brianna Juaire is a sophomore who is preparing for the IB Diploma Programme. Her favorite subjects are English, His-tory and Sciences. She likes to write about nearly anything in life and hopes to be published in the future. “Nap Time” was inspired by memories of Brianna‟s childhood.

Brianna Juaire Class of 2012

Nap Time

Hidden inside

Corduroy-patched holes,

With misshaped buttons and holiday glitter glued on the walls,

My childhood rests,

Napping,

Dreaming of the distant day

When it will be revived

And all of my old hopscotch chalk lines

Will see the jubilant sun again.

30 / The Sturgian

“Piranha Plant,” Clay, Wire, and a Play-Doh Cup.

Alan Haynes, Class of 2010.

The Sturgian / 3

In Memoriam

GRETCHEN R. S. BUNTSCHUH

~March 2, 1937 to February 1, 2010~

I hold it true, whate‟er befall; I feel it when I sorrow most;

„Tis better to have loved and lost Than never to have loved at all.

~Alfred Lord Tennyson

She described herself as "a seasons person"; sensing how light or dark the room is upon waking each morning, Gretchen Buntschuh would evaluate how long the light days would last before winter took over. Gretchen was a true poet at heart, even in the first fleet-ing moments of day. Always optimistic, always inspired, Gretchen Buntschuh offered so much to the Sturgis community. In the years before the Interna-tional Baccalaureate Programme was installed at Sturgis she was an English teacher, English department head, and Assistant Principal, sometimes wearing all three hats at once. After a brief retirement, she returned to Sturgis as an IB Extended Essay advisor, college essay supervisor, and grant-writer. Although she was a member of the support staff, her heart was never far from literature or the classroom. Last year she helped found two literary projects: the Sturgis Soundings literary review and The Sturgian literary journal. To enrich the literary atmosphere at Sturgis, she founded a faculty creative writing club. She was a beautiful poet who once said “I love beautiful words. I love to dance through the language.” She thought about returning to teaching and found an outlet assisting Theory of Knowledge classes. Pete Steedman fondly remembers “the enthusiasm Gretchen brought to our study of Grendel. When a student „got it,‟ her face would light up and she would shoot me a huge grin from across the room.” Her contagious smile was one of her most memorable attributes. So many of us were touched by Gretchen, whose legacy is a source of inspiration. It is in that spirit that The Sturgian is dedicated to a woman whose love of literature and learning could not have been expressed in one lifetime.

4 / The Sturgian

Welcome to the second issue of The Sturgian, an annual-ly published forum for literature and art created at Stur-gis Charter Public School. As an “I.B. for All” institu-tion, we are proud to celebrate the innovative spirit of our students who continue teaching us about the world of creativity and new thought that exists beyond the classroom. This edition presents Sturgis‟s finest literary and artistic talent, including a Sturgian first: sequential art! Please consider contributing to the next issue.

Alicia D. Fenney, Editor-in-Chief

“You have to keep growing and changing, or life just

isn't as exciting.” ~Gretchen Buntschuh

The Sturgian / 29

Finally, a Chemist who had been perched on the front bench stands up. He gestures to the table of elements, carefully pinned up on the blackboard which protects the seated from the searing wind. And all eyes follow.

The test subject has closed his mouth, and the benevolent liquid has long since disappeared. He has given up on fame, and more im-portantly, the hope of helping the Chemists as a whole. That is the point of the test subject. Now he believes he is irrelevant. But not so.

The second Chemist gestures angrily for the first to open his mouth. The test subject refuses, but to no avail: his mouth is forced open. He is resistant, for there is nothing in the carefully scribed rules about this.

One drop, two drops, three…

Results. The liquid fizzles and burns; the test subject is in convul-sions, wracked with pain. His tongue is burned clear through. Nor-mally, this would make the chemists go running for their clip-boards to record this strange phenomena, but this is only entertain-ment and is not worth the effort. Entertainment has no real need to be written down, as long as the proper procedure is remembered. A second roar of approval is heard from the charred on-lookers.

And so they leave the test subject, the painful wreck of a test sub-ject, blistering on the platform in the sun. (Later, a Chemist on maintenance duty will come, wonder how the body got there, and simply clear it. Procedures are ingrained into them by now.) They are returning to their labs, where they will conduct more experi-ments, create more inventions, benefit what deserves to be benefit-ted.

Not one of them sees the thing that comes out, bursts out, of the stomach of the forgotten test subject, created from the perfect mar-riage of the chemicals introduced and the test subject‟s stomach acid. Not one of them notices one of their own, newly emerged.

The thing emerges from its perfect, scientifically correct womb.

And its eyes follow.

28 / The Sturgian

tered and unrecognizable from years in the sun, blurred from the rain that never comes. The Chemists surround the platform, some sitting on the dry, cracked benches, and the rest cross-legged on the sand. They wait.

And wait and wait and wait.

Finally, two Chemists emerge from the dusty plains and slowly make their way onto the platform. There is polite applause from sanitary white gloves, the only part of the chemists not gritty with sand. The two Chemists stand alone in the middle of the platform. The second gestures for silence. In the shiny table‟s reflection, a special table, flame-resistant and chemical spill-proof, their shapes cannot be differentiated from each other. They are not essential to the result.

There is an honor, a great honor, a horror that is sought for, that is bargained and pleaded for, hoped for, and most of all, feared: to be the test subject, a predetermined fate.

There is a fifty-fifty chance for the desired outcome. If he lives, he will become a legend, loved by one and all, a god of his own mak-ing. And if he dies, a heap of burnt flesh to be forgotten, he will be useful to no one.

The second Chemist is examining the two liquids on the table. A selection is made, held up. A roar of approval is heard from the charred on-lookers.

With a wave as practiced as a magician, the second Chemist ges-tures for the first, the test subject, to open his mouth. The tongue is the only part of a Chemist that is not sun burnt.

One drop, two drops, three…

The first Chemist still stands, tongue outstretched like the offering of a gargoyle, waiting. And all eyes follow.

The crowd of Chemists, many of whom had been shifting and craning their necks to get a better look, fall silent. They begin to murmur amongst themselves, confused by what they see because they do not remember what happens when the right chemical is not chosen on the first try. (They do not have good memories; that is why everything is written down, in neat little charts.) Sometimes it happens, the choosing of the wrong one, and when it does, they sway together in disappointment, as they always do. They have forgotten what to do next, just as the volunteering test subject al-ways forgets what happened to the old one.

The Sturgian / 5

CONTENTS

Jake Taylor

the second wind brings me a snow storm

7

Sophia Mitrokostas

As in the Green Trees

8-15

Kyra Dauwalder

His Creation

16-17

Ben Doane

Dummy

19-23

Gabe Roderick

In Her Honor

25

Delia Cullity

The Land of the Chemists

27-29

Brianna Juaire

Nap Time

31

6 / The Sturgian

“19,” Charcoal.

Jake Taylor, Class of 2010.

The Sturgian / 27

Delia Cullity Class of 2011

Delia Cullity is a junior IB Certificate candidate taking High-er Level Latin and English. She has always been interested in writing and horror fiction and would like to be published after graduating from Sturgis. She would also like to pursue a career in acupuncture.

The Land of the Chemists

Dust swirls around the lifeless rocks and settles around the lab equipment, discarded on the dunes.

It is time again.

They are restless. The ruthless ones who control every element of life. Any fragile leader who had emerged over time had crumbled under the weight of their demands. They. The barren ones. The Chemists.

Weekly exhibits that give information on the experiments normal-ly bring them together. One or two Chemists non-verbally explain their most recent discoveries to other Chemists. (Language is un-necessary when science is involved.) The instructing Chemist points and gestures to clarify the results. And all eyes follow.

But now it is time for entertainment. There is a rotating schedule and a list of those who will be involved, chosen in advance: very organized, very efficient. They set-up the stage and rickety benches, they sweep and they clean out the little chalk tracks of the black-board. When one of them makes the sound that could be interpret-ed as a call for more help, the others oblige. They work together; they are good at that. Once the wooden platform is up and sure not to sink into the sand, one calls to the others to tell them that all is ready.

They come in droves, like rats, over the hillsides: white-coated and goggled. Their feet bare and covered with sores. Their faces blis-

26 / The Sturgian

“Cereal Box,” Pen and Marker.

Adeline Banker, Class of 2011.

The Sturgian / 7

Jake Taylor Class of 2010

Jake Taylor is a senior IB Certificate candidate taking Higher Level English and Art. He will attend Hampshire College in the fall. He is a musician and organizes art, poetry, and mu-sic events. He is also student council Vice President. Jake‟s inspiration for “the second wind” was a snow storm that greeted him after an adventure up North: a school trip to Quebec. There was something magical about that night and the snow reminded him that fresh starts are inevitable.

the second wind brings me a snow storm

When the snow falls: the cold, cold night turns to beauty and reflection. Here‟s to a new start: clean with structure. A new shape, but not just any shape; a shape without form. It was brought to me: the snow storm. I was drowning with the rain. Now I am drifting with the snow. Intentions: to bring still life; to cool the smoldering embers. Tonight I will dream, tonight I will truly sleep.

8 / The Sturgian

As in the Green Trees

She arrived in long socks and was wet through with a trou-bled rain. Nose and cheeks flayed into bloom by the sour winds, and I cannot remember if there were days before.

She was Elizabeta‟s daughter, and Elizabeta had been my most dear friend. She and her husband had been crushed into an early death by a crumbling Parisian roof, but the little girl had been spared by grace of her appetite: she had gone across the street with her nurse for a sweet something from the baker‟s window. And as I combed and fretted and played with my gift, I cast endless prayers into the empyreal vastness in thanks, and I praised the drunken

Sophia Mitrokostas Class of 2011

Sophia Mitrokostas is a junior IB Diploma candidate taking Higher Level Latin, English, Biology, and History. In the fu-ture, she would like to study anthropology or English litera-ture. “As in the Green Trees” takes it's title from the last line of the John Keat's poem “I Had a Dove,” which describes a person's sense of loss after his beloved dove has died.

I Had a Dove John Keats

I had a dove and the sweet dove died; And I have thought it died of grieving:

O, what could it grieve for? Its feet were tied, With a silken thread of my own hand's weaving;

Sweet little red feet! Why should you die - Why should you leave me, sweet bird! Why?

You liv'd alone in the forest-tree, Why, pretty thing! Would you not live with me?

I kiss'd you oft and gave you white peas; Why not live sweetly, as in the green trees?

The Sturgian / 25

Gabe Roderick Class of 2011

Gabe Roderick is a junior IB Diploma candidate taking Higher Level History, Art, and Latin. After Sturgis, he would like to pursue a career as a social worker. His inspira-tion for writing “In Her Honor” was respect and admiration for his sister during an illness.

In Her Honor There have been times When she‟s lived through death and despair Without shedding a single tear. She‟s mourned and regretted That day when she lost her most beloved. Not only has she survived loss; Like Dresden she is a survivor. She‟s been put under with anesthetics, Put under the knife, cut open, and healed. She wears these scars as medals of Honor, To show her true colors. But this time something has attacked her inside. For 9 years of pain, It has reigned, Supreme in all its might Despite her desperate fight. She‟s bled and fought hard. The honor is almost all gone. The blood has dried but I can‟t tell who has won: Death Or she. She emerges with new scars, Black and blue trying to heal themselves. She wears these new scars with pride, Put into her collection To show her honor.

24 / The Sturgian

“Untitled Tree, No. 29,” Watercolor.

Lauren McCann, Class of 2010.

The Sturgian / 9

architect in the deeper rooms of my soul.

Elizabeta had willed this curiosity to me, and I was in-formed of my inheritance by way of a letter in the Sunday post. On Tuesday I owned you. You were a confusion of briny tears and a certain stickiness about the fingers; I let you suck at them, as it pleased me to watch the dewy furrow and thread of consternation as it ripened on your brow. I dressed you and cleaned what you made dirty.

My wife had been a sturdy Italian woman, always moving and talking and furrowing her brow at things like a late postal de-livery or a broth that was too thick or thin. I had met her at the deli on Fifth Street, and within the year we were settled with a nice con-tract and her mother‟s army of porcelain dishes that must never be touched or even looked at too forcefully. I had wanted a son. She had wanted a new set of curtains for the guest bedroom. I was un-happy for the first year, and let her well enough alone after the se-cond.

Marianna had given birth to many books, and had been made a man by them. O. D. Caldwell, the men at the publishing house had christened her, and she wrote her female stories without being a bother. In April of a certain year, a friend had assisted her in publishing under her own name, and in July of that same year she was dead of typhus. The book sold just over a two dozen cop-ies.

At first, there were always people dropping by. They came to see how the widower was bearing it all, if he looked too thin, if he looked too grim, if the house was in disrepair, if the pretty, young maid was looking a bit rounder in the belly. When they saw I had a little ward in my keeping, they came by with lovely rib-boned things, and brightly painted things, and dolls with empty fish eyes and cherub curls. You squeezed these and loved these, and I loved you.

When did you first take your infant nails to my heart? Carving your initials into the living, quivering, moldering meat there, weaving a noose of my veins. The day you found Marianna‟s old hats, and pavonine strutting I beheld all afternoon, with you splendid amid a nebula of plumage and the warm scent of moth-balls. The afternoon I took you to feed the pigeons and you skinned your pearly knee while running to kiss the one with the brown speckles. The breath you take before you speak, the whisper of your palm against the banister, the inordinate amount of butter you put on your toast.

10 / The Sturgian

You slept for some time in Marianna‟s study, converted to a bedroom with walls the color of taffy, and sprinkled with tin-kling, elfin teacups and a carpet warm and soft as living fur under-foot. And when it was clear you preferred my crimson and oak fur-nishings and my fleecy coverlets to your own infantile realm, I re-furbished once more, this time ordaining the room a library.

How often my thoughts still rest on that slight body. Har-vest hair, eyes like curves in the horizon, a drifting rose, blush and heat in her skin. Her fingers and toes were wandering filaments; darting from table-top to grazing my ear to lacing together to en-meshing my nerves with their cotton softness. She had palm-frond feet and a milky belly, her navel shallow and smelling of warm wa-ter and something richer. She would scratch the page with her fin-gernails as she read (folding the corners to mark her place) and chew her hair as she thought. She was fraught with freckles, and I reveled in counting the constellations on her shoulders as I braided her hair in the summer, arranging our two fates so that they en-twined about each other, mating my intemerate Venus and irenic Mars as I wove.

When you were seven, I often took my breakfast in the bed-room with you, loth to rouse you, though incensed by your dream-ing without me. I would bring you nectarines and peel them; the scent would wake you.

And you were forever watching me with leporine eyes, a heartrending appeal limned into my own drear eyes by pupils that dilated in flashes of jet and were rimmed with a caustic, acid-green in some of our moments and in others were barathrums chiseled into discs of insipid slate. How could I contend with such mutable opponents? I could not, and so I gorged you with trinkets and sug-ared things and things that shone for an hour and then were flung aside like fleeing faeries, all servile to your capricious fancy. All servile, all wary and jealous of your touch.

There is a moment, my little one, when you reach and stretch the stony attitude from your arms in the morning. Bleary sunlight would bleed through your fingertips and the backs of your ears as the bedroom window swung open and the dawn flowed undammed into our secret cave of musty carpet and the nightstand forever tacky with your spilled cups of juice. In this ecstiacal mo-ment, when your baby arms reached out above your head, your twisting shoulder-blades looked like puerile wings to me, love.

And if I watched you while you slept, what then? Am I doomed to be the lover of pillow breath and woolen warmth, when

The Sturgian / 23

Conclusion

Cold, he turns decided, there is no fight.

A match is found, the doll gasps, hot.

Conflagration

22 / The Sturgian

Collapse

The Sturgian / 11

you burned like a slip of lunar fever against my side and drew in the hush like a dye, until you were all silver and dove-grey with it? If I watched your lips dry with every hot wheeze, and I knew how your arms flung themselves above your head in a great surrender-ing to unconsciousness, and if there was often a finger offered to your curling, infant hand, to sheath and warm with skin made smooth against cotton and down...if there were such things as the-se, who counts them wicked? My tremulous immortal, with mor-phine lips and lashes like the frayed edges of dreams.

Your school days were a tempest of ribbons and the edges of sandwiches ruthlessly shorn from their jelly innards. I recall a boy by the name of Benjamin. Colt legs and a voice that broke like splintering cymbals, you stood as a fawn in your ginghams and stockings and were sent into a rapture of duckling giggles by his every fumbling word. The fever of him passed, but it shook me to my fetid core and you were not allowed to go to walk home along the road by his house. I needed you caged, my dove, and if you raged against the bars (lean, hairy and lightly freckled after that summer at the coast) I built them stronger, and fed you white peas, and kissed your sweet little red feet as they paced and clawed and scratched out flightless messages in the golden floor.

Sometimes I feared the fey malice in you, love. Some hea-then humor would touch you as we sat together under a tent of sheets and feather out across your forehead in portentous lines that I could not smooth out with my thumb or with honeyed words, and I would be scourged by your caprice and seek sanctuary in that corner of the kitchen that you would not approach because it smelled perpetually of potato peelings, or on the porch when the sun had burrowed into the horizon and you feared to step beyond the lighted limen of the house. You would call and I would spurn­ until, despairing and penitent, you edged into the gloom and alighted upon my lap, curling there like a warm chestnut and pressed all about by the night.

The winter you were thirteen I took you to the great pond beyond the city, and there you learned to glide like a heron on a sky of ice. Your skates were a moldering maroon and the laces were frayed as they were woven between your numb fingers. Bundled so thickly you could have survived a direct cannon blast, I loosed you upon the ice. You fell, and I learned to grip your waist and bone-china wrists so that we drifted like scuttling leaves over the petri-fied pond and wobbled like dinghies in a squall. And when your lips were grey with cold and the ice was profaned with scores of love letters you had etched with every turn of your ankle, I dried

12 / The Sturgian

your streaming nose with my sleeve and swaddled you in fleece and furs until I could deliver you, steaming with warmth and sleepy with cold, into bed at last.

My, how she grew. It was indecent; it seemed our morn-ings were filled with tender shoots and dew drops, and by dusk you were a shivering willow, a roiling river, had shed your fawn aspect and pulled on the sinewed meat of a terrible doe, cloaked in an alien hide. I held your hand and it expanded within mine; you held my thumb, my fingers, my hand, and soon I felt you would hold the whole of me in your palm. I would weave myself into a glove, and lay myself between you and all foulness.

And she would devour me with acarine fingers; scurrying and burrowing, scraping and composing canicular verses on my shivering entrails where before only brumal dirges brooded and rimed the secret dankness. She slunk and slithered as a leech which changed my blood for chrism. In the cavity of my abdomen, I could sense the great worm of her writhing in its milky blindness and beneath my flesh I felt a formic seething, with her face mirrored in the infinite insect facets of lidless eyes.

The summer you were fifteen I was deeded a cottage on a dreary lake, and you reigned as mermaid queen from dappled June to drunken August. Long afternoons you lay steeped, drowsy and browning, in the wanton caresses of a wandering Indian sun, wax-ing brazen and a languorous gluttony apparent in the dim folds of your belly and the sleepy curling of currant lips.

In these days your breath reeked of jeweled hard candy made tacky by the heat and glued to its stained-glass wrapping, and you declared yourself as an opiate cloud that flitted into our little bedroom a moment before your body in a great, gamboling fume of baby oil, warm skin and something acrid and smoky, like heat-soaked pine and crushed needles.

There you simmered, my celestial whim, content to mould degenerate empires and vast landscapes of crumbling turrets and towers with faerie standards in turmoil upon poles of driftwood, and blustery moats made muddy and vile by floating beetle corps-es. You dined with the wee royals and danced long twilights with them, the tiny creatures mounted on fireflies and you, my own wailing pagan sprite. I lost you to their ways with every fey spoon-ful.

It was there I discovered the thread of ocean in you, dyed an lurid cerulean and strung so heavy with oyster fruit that it threatened to slip through your veins and wind its way to the curl-

The Sturgian / 21

Cold

Man: “I hate you.”

The doll glares at him, lusty fire dancing behind its eyes, licking the

inside of its wooden skull. If it didn‟t share a set of lungs, it‟d

scream at the oaf for driving off the side of a cliff, rant about not

having been born into a more satisfying profession, like firewood.

Man: “It‟s so cold out here. At least you have your box.”

To this the dummy acknowledges the frost creeping around his

open lid. Perhaps he kicks a clump of it away with his miniature

dress shoes, brushing off the shoulder of his black tuxedo with a

fluid movement of his hand. He watches the man for a while, as

with his face in his hands a muffled sobbing pries a path through

frostbitten fingers.

Man: “Go to hell, little wooden man.”

The creature in the casket smiles, showing off every one of his hun-

gry wooden teeth.

Career

From the ventriloquist‟s scrapbook:

20 / The Sturgian

glass, and for a moment lays there in silence. The dead beer churns

under his coat as he turns to reach past the driver‟s seat, pulling

with strength not for one with such a sluggish heart. Through the

passenger-side window he drags his prize; a case the size of a

child‟s coffin and painted black as if for a funeral, with worn leath-

er straps.

Looking up, he can see the pines from the inside out, a perspective

he is not used to, but is oddly comfortable with. He seats himself

atop a fallen tree with the trunk beside him, watching the smolder-

ing truck as the temperature steadily drops.

Childhood

He was grey, the present was not.

He tore the paper off the box,

Its ribbon fell red, as curiosity

Became the primary motive.

It came with everything a little boy should have.

Glass marbles for eyes,

A smile white as pearls

And lips painted red like a fire truck.

It was the solution to the problem

Of apathy in a child.

The Sturgian / 13

ing, reaching, wavering starfish arms of your heart, drowning it in brine and kissing fish lips. And when you raged with me, when you stamped and fretted about our little coastal cove of bleached plywood and musty coverlets where we two naiads sojourned then oh! what a movement in your skirts, what a pelagic tempest and a mermaid‟s malediction in you brow. Sea foam frothed black and plague yellow in your eyes and your lips bent with a trident‟s ven-om, curling over oyster teeth and glistening a wet coral. I found a gull‟s call on your breath and all about you the air was tinged with a caustic salt. Brood, go and brood my briny darling, and swim back to me in an hour, in an evening, borne on halcyon tides. And you would, usually around dinner time.

And I would wish for two more years, five more years, a wider hip perhaps and steadier eye. For the vague softness about your hands and jaw to harden into the calamitous lines of a wom-an, and for the soapy, buttery scent about your skin which often congealed around your neck and behind your little elf-ears, and provoked my maudlin heart to impotent shuddering, to thicken and ferment; perhaps then I would not leaden and blench when I brushed you, downy darling.

In the early days of November, (she had just turned a mi-raculous sixteen; I had the living room decked in emerald hangings and pretty, green paper swans for the occasion. She declared them garish and took them down by noon.) I took to taking walks with my sweetheart, leading her around the parks and admiring the ros-es in her cheeks when they were bitten through with the chill. On one such walk, she coughed a little startled cough, and no sooner had I swaddled her tightly in my coat than my dove fainted quite prettily onto the cobblestones.

She spent the rest of the afternoon in our bedroom alone. Bringing her a bowl of soup, I trespassed upon the sight of my lady clutching the windowsill. And so I found her emptying all her ter-rible blushes and rose-thoughts in a violent purgation of our blas-phemous communion. Blood fell in phlegmy dollops from the cor-ners of her mouth and the globules swung as festering rubies from a spider- trapeze spun of rosy spittle. She shrank to her knees, with-ering, and I saw myself prone and breathless as a trout beneath a deluge of gory drops slipping as trembling scarlet worlds from a rosy portal.

The first doctor was a fool, the second was wrong, and the third stood an hour laying funereal words over my stricken darling like spades of earth, calling her names like “grim condition ” and

14 / The Sturgian

“unfortunate in one so young” and “consumption”. I swallowed these and remembered how when I was inflamed you were febri-fuge distilled, housing a holocaust in your belly so that I might sleep awhile. Eight weeks I dragged a clammy cloth across your brow and spooned a noxious nectar that learned men had pre-scribed between your grey lips, cold and brittle as crumbling battle-ments. In the night, when you would sweat and shiver in turn, I curled myself around your sere frame and felt the precipitous ridges of your spine cleave my chest in half.

You died on the fifty-second morning, and I did not leave you until the fifty-sixth. Your hair, though wasted and a mere gos-samer notion against the pillow, was the funereal shroud I wove all about my face. I could smell your spirit ferment and feel some se-cret alchemy transmute it from scent to celestial ether, and the close air was redolent with you, you distilled.

I would have lain in sepulcher sweetness with you until we two petrified and all the ages of the world crumbled our gory, gor-gon bits to mingled dust. Your waxen, tallow neck held no horror for me, and I kissed the shadows and hallowed depths of you with trembling deference. Into the ivory folds of Galatea I murmured heathen eulogies and cooled my prayer-blistered lips against her frigid palms.

At last my neighbors removed me, uncle and husband car-rying my body to the sofa and perhaps placing something warm and woolen over it, though all I gathered was the dim impression of contact. I felt coffee in the air, and there were low voices brewing with it. I slept.

And then they were planting her in the earth, and in anoth-er moment she was a germinating seed of necrosis, spreading love-ly tendrils and petals of pallor through the soil. I dragged my fin-gernails across my cheeks in misery. Black-vested God spoke brief-ly and shook my sweaty fingers when it was over, apologetic and victorious.

I returned to my vague walls and dim rooms, and saw that our golden aviary had been hollowed and the bars had turned to rust. I saw your feathers collected in miserable, snowy drifts on the stairs, along our bedroom walls, tucked under our pillows where, I admit, I almost mistook them for (your) little gloves or discarded stockings. Out in their world, it began to rain.

And where was I to wander, my lonely, lovely, languishing lost one? When all the world had been skinned and its hide stuffed with smoke and echoes, where was I to find the solid earth? And so

The Sturgian / 19

Ben Doane Class of 2010

Ben Doane is a senior IB Diploma candidate taking Higher Level Art, English, and History. He is aiming for a career in sequential art and often can be found somewhere underneath a pile of stuff perched precariously atop his drafting table. He has yet to achieve godhood, and still wears a hound‟s-tooth scarf to hide the bolts on his neck.

Dummy

Crash

Four tires rotate on their axels, paired off in a dance in memory of

the pavement‟s reassuring touch. They spin with a haggard gait,

limping almost; they peddle feebly at the falling snow. The car lies

on its back with its final breath escaping the hood in a puff of magi-

cian‟s smoke, its life extinguished forever in the dissipation of gas-

es.

No.

In the cab, a man stirs, his eyes opening and closing in rhythm with

the creaks the cab makes as it begins to buckle. He is the color of

ashes, wet with rain or tears, and long past their lives as embers. He

lets escape a groan as he watches his friends leak from their brown

paper bag onto the ceiling-floor and suddenly his priorities change.

His arm finds the seat belt clasp easily enough, but he is not pre-

pared for gravity‟s embrace. He lands on his back in a pile of wet

18 / The Sturgian

“A Closer Look,” Charcoal and Pencil.

Rachel Krafton, Class of 2011.

The Sturgian / 15

I set off to beat away the shades with my distempered instrument, condemning serpents and stars alike for their cupidity. I walked, and it began to rain. The drops were intolerably heavy.

Through the wavering sheets of water, I perceived dim monuments and somber seraphim, and the cemetery gates loomed large and dismally jointed, jealous of their treasure. These I passed, and the sentinels seemed to me as likenesses grown out of the gory earth, souls petrified as they reached to the vault; too heavy, cold, beloved for flight, they lingered on in dour semblance, casting van-ishing faces toward a hard god.

Then I stood before her own dear, drear stone and consid-ered the raindrops as they buffeted and scoured and thrashed against the letters etched there.

In a moment I was pressing one wasted cheek to the black earth, and in the next I was boring down into Hades, soil giving way before my frenzied fingers and lusty arms. I dashed away peb-bles and boulders alike, pressed through circles of sinners, shunned poets there indwelling and wandered singly in search of my Be-atrice. At last I felt the wooden face of your dank bed, and with a great prying I released you and bared you to the moonlight.

And she was a fish-boned doll wrapped in tissue skin, the sunken hollows beneath her shoulder blades grim valleys where I sheltered trembling palms. I gathered her hands to my chest, her fingers cool and grey as willow wands in a frost. The rain made the space between us fluid and seamless, hugging the lines where we touched and divorced reluctantly. How long I sat and rocked my withered burden, cupping her head with my hand to prevent it fall-ing at grotesque angles, I cannot remember. Again came her deliri-ous effluvium, and I collected the fevered notes of scent in the void of my belly, my nostrils, my trouser pockets. Lethean waters glazed over our shuddering limbs, and with my fingers I pulled back your lips, which were black and curled over your teeth. I felt your tongue: a shrunken, coarse knob. I kissed each feature in turn, and saw phantom raindrops collecting on your brow.

And so the night grew old and passed away, but I tarried with the boatman. I will not surrender you to him, my little death, my dove.

16 / The Sturgian

Kyra E. Dauwalder Class of 2012

Kyra E. Dauwalder is a sophomore who is preparing for the IB Diploma Programme. She hopes to take Higher Level English, Art, and Spanish or Biology. After Sturgis, she would love to travel and study abroad in Spain. Kyra wrote “His Creation” in response to an English class assignment that asked students to include or adapt a Biblical allusion in an original free verse poem.

His Creation

Let there be

Light so strong and bright,

It will scorch the deserts dry,

Darkness blowing,

Darkness freezing,

And chilling you to your bone.

Let there be

A wanted sky of distant blue,

But too far away to reach.

Water filling,

Water sinking,

And washing you away.

The Sturgian / 17

Let there be

An earth where life is banished,

It plunged within silent space.

Plants creeping,

Plants twisting,

And stealing the air you breathe.

Let there be

The full moon to shine bright

Upon the gravestones‟ crosses.

Stars drifting,

Stars burning,

And forcing you into shadows.

Let there be

Animals that run wild

That we hunt for bloody meat.

Birds screeching,

Birds hunting,

And tearing you to shreds.

Let there be

The peace that life searches for,

Peace only brought through hate.

Different people forming,

Different people rising,

And then becoming our enemy.

And He saw that it was good.