Tag: Portfolio
7AM
by Toni Rendon '24 on September 26, 2022
Portfolio Staff
Poetry
It was 7am when I let you in, not expecting it all to end
But it was obvious, like it came in with a marching band
The chorus was filled with words we should’ve never said
The ruckus echoing off the walls in my head
The words hitting me till I bled
“Where have you been?”
“I’m back now, so calm down”
“I know you’re back, I’m not blind”
“What’s with the attitude, just say what’s on your mind”
“There’s been a rumor about you creeping along the vine
They say you’re not mine”
“Are you saying I lied or cheated, we talked about this
It’s a dead horse, why beat it?”
“Look me in the eyes and tell me you still mean it”
“How dare you question me, as if I’d ever leave
How many times do I have to say you’re stuck with me?”
“How many times have you lied and made me cry?”
“Not that many times, but why do you care? Don’t you ‘hate’ me?”
“Bringing up the past isn’t that great”
“You didn’t even want to date me”
“Oh god now I never wanted to date you,
why is it so hard to say the truth?
That’s exactly why I’m falling out of love with you”
“Tell me that’s not the truth”
…
Your silence has been ringing in my mind since
This encounter has left me loveless.
Now at I’m up at 7am,
Forever stuck in this memory
as I embrace the ghost on your side of the bed.
Food doesn’t taste the same, music has no melody
The sky’s forever a dingy shade of gray.
My world’s been thrown out of harmony,
The days seem to blend into weeks,
Weeks into that moment,
And I haven’t slept in peace.
Since you took that part of me
I long for the days when we had never met
So, you’d never be able to pollute my head.
It’s 7am and I’m wondering
Do you miss me yet?
We Are All Little Fleas
by Taylor Maguire '24 on September 26, 2022
Portfolio Staff
Portfolio
We humans are nothing more than little fleas that give Earth an annoying scratch. People have the habit of believing the world revolves around them. Their dramatics are born in their little suburban homes or in their crappy Subaru cars. Most of the time, the emotional disasters that feel like the sky is falling are triggered in the middle of an exchange of passive-aggressive dialogue between friends or lovers. But when the guy on your subway commute makes a remark about how your backpack is in his way, his elbow shove is nothing compared to the wrathful push of a tsunami.
When I was little, I wanted to become one of those veterinarians who live in the jungle and rescue injured wildlife for a living. I imagined living in a giant tree house, sleeping in a king-sized white linen bed, and cuddling recovering tigers and baby monkeys. Each day after school, I would line up my stuffed animals in a row, giving each of them a checkup and then kissing them in between their button eyes before tucking them to sleep. I spent hours reading cartoon books that portrayed elephants wearing blue pajama sets and jaguars in corduroy trousers attending an elementary school that mirrored my own. I wrote stories of bunnies throwing birthday parties in Greece and friendly crocodiles who engaged in water aerobics.
It wasn’t until my mom took me to the theater to watch the Disney documentary African Cats that I was first exposed to the horrors that lurk in the underbelly of nature. I sat in a theater at the age of eight watching the same stuffed animal pairing I slept with close to my heart maul the other to pieces. I remember the false sense of hope I had watching the baby zebras escape the clutch of the hungry cheetah the first time, only to watch the predator sink its teeth deep into black and white stripes a few seconds later. I remember seeing claws puncture hind legs, pinkish red flesh of limbs wedge itself between jagged teeth, pain written across the zebra’s wild eyes, a look of satisfaction painted across the cheetah’s. We left the theater twenty minutes later. My romanticized version of nature continued to fizzle out when I was met by mosquitoes who slurped up my blood and intruding cockroaches who scurried around my kitchen floor. I soon started to hate the very idea of being in nature around the time that I became a “tween,” and my desire to move to Africa and live amongst lions became a complete childhood fantasy.
I still loved animals, of course. I grew up living with two rescued stray cats from the ASPCA. Patches was black and white and had a little blotch in the shape of a heart that nestled right beside her nose. She’d wake me up in the morning licking my face and kneading on my stomach, digging her nails into my arms, pretending I was the mother who abandoned her. My other cat, Smokey, was a fatty with a pair of emerald eyes. His belly grew to be as big as a soccer ball and he had the biggest paws I had ever seen. Every meal he’d treat as his last, inhaling his food so fast he’d make himself sick. They both treated my bed as their own and would sleep in my sheets every night, leaving me sandwiched in between the two of them. I’d watch them as they’d dream on their backs, bellies exposed, snoring and drooling like any other obnoxious family member after a Thanksgiving dinner. And for a while, I viewed them just as any other old estranged relative with little quirks. That was until one morning, when my mom and I discovered an article about an old woman dying alone in her New York City apartment. The clickbait of the article read in big letters, And Her Face Is Missing!
“Well, what happened to it?” I asked. I assumed it was currently being used as a mask by some perv wandering around the Upper East Side. You know, just like any other perpetrator in Law And Order: SVU episodes.
“Her two cats Penelope and Fluffy ate it,” my mom said hesitantly in response.
“Patches and Smokey would never do that to us,” I had said as a statement. But my mom shook her head.
“I don’t know…”
I thought back to the times they’d puff up their tails and curve up their backs in the shape of a crescent moon to make themselves appear bigger than me. To scare me. Or all the times they’d hiss loudly after I attempted to dress them up in American Girl Dolls’ tutus. Their teen mood swings would eventually turn, and the next thing I knew they’d be purring in my lap again, but that eerie feeling of being nothing to them continued to haunt me.
The laws that exist within society don’t apply to the natural world. If I ever chewed off the head of my ex-lover, there would be a movie about it. Newspapers would be filled with details about my crime. Photos of bloodsoaked sheets and pictures of the deceased smiling from an old Christmas card beside the word “victim.” My mugshot under the huge headliner: “The Female Ted Bundy.” Praying mantises, however, don’t sport around in orange jumpsuits after their snippets of intimacy turn south. Rather, the decapitated heads of their mates stand as a trophy of survival, a ticket of approval for their next thriving generation.
My relationship to nature is now limited to my visits to the beach. I swim alone, feeling the waves of the ocean embrace my body in its arms. It’s cold. I am irrelevant. Every time I get pushed by the waves of the ocean into its murky sand, I am reminded of my insignificance. And yet I still run back to its abrasive nature, I run back to being swallowed, chewed, and spit out again. There’s a comfort in knowing that I am just another menace that parades about the earth’s skin. We are all fleas inhabiting a place that has bigger fish to fry than the parasite that clings to its fur.
Listomania
by The Cowl Editor on September 26, 2022
Features
Worst Places To Show Your Parents On Parents Weekend
- Ray
- Guz
- Eaton Street
- Communal bathrooms
- Chad Brown Street
- Where I failed my civ final
- Radcliffe Avenue
- Foxy Lady
- The middle of the flame where the pee sits
- Suites
- Any freshman male’s dorm
photo creds: pixabay
Rocket
by Kate Ward '23 on September 8, 2022
Portfolio Co-Editor
Creative Non-Fiction
Most people would say that there isn’t anything funny about death or losing a loved one however, when my grandfather passed I ended up inheriting what turned out to be something quite funny. My grandfather used to drive a red 2008 Cadillac, it has four seats and it belongs down in Miami with an eighty-year-old behind the wheel headed towards their weekly solitaire game. Or it should have some mid-fifty-year-old man shouting Billy Joel lyrics on the way to a seven a.m. tee time. My family and I call this car the red rocket. Despite being fairly old, this car is (what my Mom would call) zippy.
So, once summer hit I started taking the rocket to work, windows down, music up. The music that flowed from the car was everything but what an eighty-year-old in Miami would listen to. It was an eclectic mix of Bad Bunny, Steely Dan, ABBA, Logic, Kendrick, and the occasional Piece the Veil song. A twenty-year-old driving her grandfather’s car, heading to work at a children’s art camp. It’s ridiculous. My Mom got frequent text messages along the lines of “Saw Kate driving the caddy today!”
To that I would respond, “Okay but did they like the Bad Bunny I was playing?”
Like any teenager or young adult with the ability to drive and a fast car to do so, I started abusing the power gifted to me from my grandfather. I ended up buying an absurd amount of snacks and ice cream which earned a laugh from my Mom as I would pull into the driveway, Efecto by Bad Bunny thrumming out of the window. She thought it was incredibly ridiculous and my Dad thought it was great because he ended up bumming some of my snacks.
Aside from working at the art camp, I also worked as a nanny. The two kids, ages six and two, were immediately obsessed with the car and decorating it. They also wanted to be driven everywhere (that did not happen). The two year old, every day on our walk would see some other red car and immediately shout out “Kate’s car!”
Wrong. If there isn’t a bag of Spicy Doritos (the purple bag, of course) in the passenger seat and a flat Celsius in the cupholder, then that isn’t mine. I remember when I first started driving the rocket around, I desperately wanted to make it my own. After getting a phone holder and Aux cord, I wanted stickers and trinkets to hang off of my rearview mirror. Towards the end of the summer, my StabiliTrak and braking system needed to be serviced. My Dad got in the car and looked around, pointed at the moth sticker on my glovebox, and asked, “What is that?”
“Moth sticker from art camp,” I replied with a smile.
He chuckles a little and shakes his head before pulling away.
I’d like to hope that my grandfather is looking on and laughing from wherever he is and not cursing my name for decorating his beloved sports car and playing music you “can’t sing to,” as my grandmother would say.
Curiosity and The Family Cat
by Fiona Clarke '23 on September 8, 2022
Portfolio Staff
Poetry
At home you and I make the coffee without caffeine,
For the heart murmurers who gather in another room,
While jostling predispositions in hallways wait their turns to be heard.
We save the coffee grounds and the broken eggshells
For the soil of the vines and bleeding-hearts and thyme
That make clear our hearts and lungs and fill our eyes
With loss-impossible oxygen.
And so, surreal and serious, I smoke no more, and speak much less,
And yet these days, I take comfort
When I hear the rain fall like knuckles cracking,
And I look up to a sky that has grit its teeth,
Prepared to rain its blows upon me,
But cracks a love-worn smile.
And all dear and delirious, we dare to lay it bare:
“O brother, where art thou bleeding from?”
“A horizontal smile and a vertical touch—”
“Son, my children are gathering precious stones and metals,
And getting blood and dirt on their hands—”
“Daughter, I am fool’s proof and wise man’s wonderings—”
Say that the house is half empty—your son has died.
Say that the house is half full—
Christ is going up to heaven.
Infatuation
by The Cowl Editor on September 8, 2022
Poetry
Sarah McLaughlin ’23
On the couch, we talked about everything and nothing. A number of things I’d remember, and a number of things I already forget. The movie watched and other movies, the songs we heard and other music, the things we liked about our grandparents and the things we hated, how many of them were still alive, how many memories we had of them taking care of us in our childhoods, the earliest things we could remember, the things we tended to forget, the names and faces from our teenage years we already couldn’t place, what we thought the trajectory of the world might be, what our city might look like in five years, ten years, twenty, whether or not we’d ever want to go to space.
It amazed me how mundane conversations could be, and how easily they could become captivating. It scared me, too, how even in those mundane moments, my attention was captivated by the most unimaginative things, like the curve of her eyebrows, or the way she pronounced piano, or how the shadow above her collarbone changed shape as she shifted.
This was infatuation, I realized, in the hours I spent with her there. It wasn’t seeing someone as larger-than-life, as completely flawless, as the pinnacle of human beauty. It was noticing imperfections and being obsessed with them—not to fix them, like missing punctuation in an essay, but to notice them, understand them, commit them to memory. to see them not as flaws needing correction but as small pieces of a whole, to understand that whole as greater than the sum of its parts.
It wasn’t writing love songs and drawing hearts around their name, it was counting freckles and the ums between sentences.
Tiff and Earl
by The Cowl Editor on September 8, 2022
Features
Dear Tiff and Earl,
The first (official) darty of the semester is coming up, and my roommate and I still haven’t managed to find a solid friend group to accompany us. Any advice for quickly making friends so that we can live out our darty dreams?
Sincerely,
Future Darty Crasher
Dear FDC,
If you really want to wow the crowds, don’t worry about making friends before the darty—make them AT the darty! Just blunder in, latch on to someone, and thank them and all their friends for coming to YOUR little soirée. Jay Gatsby would approve!
Cheers!
Tiff
Dear Future Darty Crasher,
Who says you need a big friend group to go to a darty? Have an intense pregame in your room, convince your roommate to explore Eaton Street with you, and rock the darty with confidence! As long as you follow the darty’s general theme, you’re sure to find a group of darty-loving people to adopt you and your roommate into their friend group!
Crush Your Darty Dreams!
Earl
To Friends of the Past
by Mariela Flores '23 on September 8, 2022
Portfolio Staff
Poetry
You were so special. Like a beam of something good sitting next to me in every classroom, every space, every inch of the world as if we owned the air that we breathed in.
You were so good to me. With words that wrapped me up warmly, just like a hug. With belly laughter that only you knew the sound of. With talking about futures neither of us knew how we would get a hold of––I sit here somewhere that feels too much like the past, waiting to know if you are close to your future. I hope you are well.
I hate mourning you while you are still alive, living a life I thought I’d be a part of. I hate watching you grow from afar––I try to reach into the pixels and write something good, something clever, algo bonito. It doesn’t matter anymore. I know that.
I’m not angry, I’m not even sad, you’ve let time fill that wound with new laughs, new people, new warmth, new futures, new stories. Still, I miss you.
I wish you would have let me know it was the end of us. The end of catch ups in between brand new classes, brand new people, brand new lives.
But you will fade into my memory, like a dream you wake up from after a deep sleep. You will fade like the friends before you and the ones who’ve come after.
I think of you now and then, you’re like an echo in the air, you’re only with me briefly.
I just hope you are well. I miss you, and I just hope you are well.
LISTOMANIA
by The Cowl Editor on September 8, 2022
Features
Worst Things To Hear During Syllabus Week
- “We’ll start class today with a quiz/pop quiz”
- “I don’t like to give out As”
- “Okay class, let’s take out the reading!”
- “No unexcused absences”
- “We won’t have breaks during class” (it’s a marathon class)
- “The final for this class will count for over half of your grade”
- “Attendance is required for this class”
- “No tech”
- “There’s gonna be a final paper and exam”
- “Barely anybody has passed this class before”
- “I will be cold calling”
- “Participation is worth 40% of your final grade”
- “Let’s do an ice breaker”
Augustus
by Caitlin Bartley '24 on September 8, 2022
Portfolio Staff
Poetry
I worship you on a golden altar of daylight,
knees sinking into sand where I sit in supplication,
flaunting you unabashedly with my flushed cheeks
and freckled chest, wearing you like a cross.
You spoil me seductively,
appeasing my appetites with your alms
of apricots and aperol,
arousing my desire with the amorous caress
of your balmy evening air,
awakening my spirit in your seas
of salt and sin.
I would sacrifice the seasons to slave away
under your sun, yet you abandon me unapologetically
once the summer month is done.