Summer 2025 Issue - The Harvard Advocate

Poetry • Summer 2025
When we were boys we boys
Used to dive there from there
From where the ships came in
And they still do— the ships
I mean not so much the boys
Who like gulls would plow their
Feathers like fields. Now boys
We have sheep to herd and fathers
To be, and the sun was already
Setting on that lastly swallowed salt.
Poetry • Summer 2025
What if the brain’s pink impulses can only disappoint us, what if why, wearing that black,
backless address, is not a who?
We are the ones who do the crimes: and yet you are the wanted one.
The episodic soul is, like a sitcom, filmed in unreal time.
To care about this sort of thing is as wise as a digital clock.
But if the sky weren’t trapped in days’ and nights’ revolving door, the undomesticable
zodiac would use our every coffined litter as a tray.
And arguably London is more spit than shine, for days;
but does it not shine somewhere: somewhere so clean we can see ourselves in everything?
If you can, give voice to the throaty red anthurium, to the window, to the wall
that makes these rooms’ matter, and these stanzas, matter.
Through change, a whipping post becomes postmodern art.
Through change, a Second Advent turns to venture capital.
The episodic soul is moving at a quickening remove
from this unchecked, unbalanced world of checks and balances . . .
Dances a totentanz and sings otototoi
at billions of creatures clocking off into the void.
Then comes to us our luck, like a black cat
in a dark room, purring ergonomically.
Then sends it us, price-guns like tasers at our hips,
to value all the world – its messianic shabbiness.
Both pearls and vinegars have mothers, it now seems,
and the mother of invention is necessity;
and boy do we need you.
Notes from 21 South Street • Summer 2025
The purposes of this review are twofold: first, to convey the eminently pleasant though not necessarily intellectually stimulating experience of seeing The Light in the Piazza at the Huntington Theater; and second, to convince you, yes YOU, the member of the Advocate reading this (or honestly whoever else) to take up my mantle of reviewing shows at the Huntington now that I have graduated.
Fiction • Summer 2025
9/23
Therapist (Dr Keithe) says to keep running journal of treatments, reactions, flare-ups, etc., note as happen and/or at end of each day (and take care not to let documentation of obsessive thoughts become obsessive itself (I told her saying this improved probability that it would, she said this reaction was her intention, to provoke me)), this will help with analysis, seeing progress, where to go next, etc.



