Summer 2025 Issue - The Harvard Advocate

our plane’s wing slips over the crimson moon
and the man beside me asks for
a bloody mary and I ask for ginger ale
air bubbles I choke through my nose
into my torqued stomach full of
pesto pasta and sun-dried tomatoes
reminiscent of the old salad bar by my

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.

/ sestina for the feeling of wanting to shed all your skin, wash it, flip it inside out

i

the first guy i kissed told me you have this crazy thing
where you refuse to settle within reasonable confidence

We watch a cleft sunset sink. I think of dogs

and their dark downs of fur, circling the bay

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.

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.

We are sad to share the news of the passing of Charles Dessau Atkinson III '58, longtime trustee of The Harvard Advocate and a valued member of the Cambridge community.

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.