The 1$ Game: 50 Shades of Grey

“The 1$ Game” is a series by one of West 10th’s Prose Editors, Victor Galov, published every other Friday. Victor buys any book that catches his attention — and costs a dollar or less. Some are Pulitzer winners or literary classics. Others are clearly neither. What do “The Fountainhead,” “The Prince,” and “50 Shades of Gray” have in common? You could find all three for just 1$. 



This time of year is often stressful, frustrating, and cold. So needing a bit of warmth and comfort, I read 50 Shades of Grey, by E.L. James this weekend. It got me all fired up, too. In all the ways I’m sure the author hoped I wouldn’t be.

50 Shades details in clear, precise, grueling prose the relationship between Ana Steele (clumsy insecure literature lover) and Christian Grey (genius, billionaire, playboy, philanthropist.) He plays sad piano music after having sex with women in his penthouse apartment. She is always worried she will drop things. He flies airplanes and was abused as a kid. She is a middle school aesthetic that reads AP Lit books and works in a hardware store every now and then. He ties his secretaries up in BDSM dungeons. She’s never held a guys’ hand before. Your standard love story, right?

The sex-scenes are alright? I’m not an expert in erotica as a genre, I’ve read a few such novels though, some on purpose and others by accident. This ones about average? He doesn’t have a dragon tattoo on his chest, and the dirty-talk is kept to a relative minimum so that’s nice. There’s one scene where it mentions that he is wearing a leather jacket and that was the only one that got my heart to thump, once, solidly in my chest. But then he just takes it off. And talks about how he’s sorry for being a jerk. And then he’s a jerk, again, in that same scene. It never even says what happens to the jacket. Is it in Ana’s apartment, still? Or did he put it back on and take it home. Somehow I feel the sequels don’t address that plot hole.

Normally I defend and champion clear, well written prose. But in this case, it just kept me from getting lost in the plot- or otherwise confused. I was forced to be present for every, single, word. If you’re looking for fantasy fulfillment, or even just a lesson in how good prose can fit a niche with some good marketing skills, this is the book to study. Check any second-hand bookshop; I go book-hunting pretty often and I’ve only ever noticed a handful of shelves without it there, reminding you of its existence. 50 Shades of Grey is an interesting, albeit rightfully critiqued relic of a not-so-distant past.

And I grabbed it for a dollar.

West10th 2019 Submissions Deadline Extended!

If you have not submitted yet, you haven’t missed your chance: As an end of semester celebration, West 10th has extended their submission deadline for poetry, prose, and art to December 20th!

Check out our submission guidelines here, or click the “Submit” tab on the navigation bar of this page.

If you have any questions, please feel free to email us at west10th.submissions@gmail.com

We look forward to reading your work!

La Nuit Blanche by Dawn Wendt

Paris’s all-night celebration of the arts, an event called La Nuit Blanche (an expression to say a sleepless night), is an all-night party filled to the brim with events, exhibitions, and a whole parade, with its own confusing and convial dynamic. La Nuit Blanche took place on the 5th of October. There was a parade going through the middle of Paris, most notably with floats weird enough to be remembered, such as the giant Bitmoji representations of Belgian artist Sylvie Fleury, the larger-than-life inflated serpent sailing over a crowd of drunk Parisians, fangs poised at the ready. A T-Rex, as well, just in case you were curious. The theme this year was “movement.” Key events included a float dedicated to swimsuit-clad men and women in the celebration of tattoos, a marathon course running through the museums, a trick mirror illusion of the Eiffel Tower falling onto its crane-necked viewers, karaoke at the opera, and biking on the péripherique, the highway that encompasses the city. There was an exposition on the animality of human beings, the sounds produced by bacteria, and futuristic questions posed by demonstrations on terrarian future should our carbon emissions progress the way they have been. I walked through all this commotion, amongst the crowd of Parisians who were becoming continuously drunker, wondering to myself the benefitters of all this. France celebrates its culture strongly, and makes it accessible to everyone, no matter what socioeconomic class, a boast that the US can’t always relate to. Museums are free for students and people who have registered as unemployed or bankrupt, there are opera tickets that go for €10, and even movie theatres have reduced rates. So perhaps this is one of the key reasons for why La Nuit Blanche New York never took off, but that’s a discussion for another time. It was interesting enough to me that so many Parisians take this all-night art opportunity to get drunk enough to be singing French pop songs on the metro. It was a very unifying moment, to be standing in the crowd of a silent rave, all bodies serving to projector a film on the provided white shirts. The streets are crowded with tourists and French alike, of all ages, all gazing in awe (or perhaps confusion) at the creations of artists. Events last from 7 P.M. to after the sun has risen again at 7 A.M. If you ever find yourself in Melbourne or Toronto around the beginning of October, these cities also boast a well-established La Nuit Bulanche themselves. An experience well-worth it, although, without the provided brochure, I admit I wouldn’t have understood nearly half the objectives of the exhibitions, at the fault of a certain vagueness that surrounded some exhibitions. Either way, it’s a look into a culture’s understanding of art that I wouldn’t have otherwise been acquainted with, and a sleepless night I’m fortunate to have had.

The 1$ Game: Memoirs of a Geisha

“The 1$ Game” is a series by one of West 10th’s Prose Editors, Victor Galov, published every other Friday. Victor buys any book that catches his attention — and costs a dollar or less. Some are Pulitzer winners or literary classics. Others are clearly neither. What do “The Fountainhead,” “The Prince,” and “50 Shades of Gray” have in common? You could find all three for just 1$. 



Today, I sing the praises of the 1997 bestseller, Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden.

Memoirs of a Geisha follows the true story Chiyo (later Sayuri), as she is forcibly dragged into the world of the Gion Prefecture of Kyoto, Japan. Serving as a Geisha in a small household, she navigates a complex world of internal politics with her rivals and sisters-in-training, as well as toeing around the delicate social position of a woman admired, lusted after, sometimes loved, and yet only sometimes acknowledged. Sayuri struggles, overcomes, falls, and stands back up, time and time again, just to survive in a world isolated far from her family.

Even with a beautiful, timeless plot that displays the best, and worst of Japanese pre-war culture and traditions, full of interesting characters and incredible emotional beats that pound drumsticks into your heart, the strength of this novel is in it’s prose. Arthur Golden uses his bilingual understanding of Japanese to create a new energy, a unique style of writing I have not experienced anywhere else. People tumble down stairs like water spills down rocks, leaves fall and flash their colors in the sun like lightning bugs, the writing alone is worth studying. I stopped annotating the best lines four pages into the novel- I was marking two or three times a paragraph.

Memoirs of a Geisha is an excellent novel, with immaculate prose and amazing characters, story, and setting. The only flaw I could find in the novel was the romance subplot, which while tangential to the main story, lacked an interesting dynamic or flair to it. Memoirs of a Geisha is an absolute must read for fans of Japanese literature, culture, or language, and I highly recommend this book to anyone else.

And I grabbed it for a dollar.

The Origins of Gothic Literature - Frankenstein

“The Origins of Horror Literature” is a weekly series by West 10th’s Editor-in-Chief Travis Schuhardt during the month of October, explaining how the Gothic and Horror genres developed, offering recommendations on which classic Gothic tales and modern horror stories to check out, and discussing some horror-themed journals to submit your writing to during the Halloween season.

October 28th. Three days away from the big one. Our final foray into the history of the Gothic. There are an immense number of Gothic and Horror novels that we could have touched on with today’s installment, from Stoker to King, but I’d argue that no Gothic novel encapsulates the genre as well as the one written at The Villa Diodati during a dreary night in 1816. That’s right: today, we tackle the lasting effect and importance of the novel Frankenstein by Mary Shelley.

Let’s start with a little historical context because it’s actually really interesting, and if you’ve never heard the story, it’s a great conversation starter to share at parties or around the campfire. Some people you may have heard of — Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, John Polidori, and, of course, Mary Shelley — were spending some time at The Villa Diodati in Switzerland in the year 1816, getting up to whatever mischief they wanted. One night, while bored during a storm and reading Germanic Gothic stories, Lord Byron suggests that everyone write their own ghost stories and share them with the group.

As the story goes (though there are many and contradictory stories), Lord Byron wrote a few lines and then got bored, Percy Shelley was unable to complete his writings due to a drug induced hallucination that terrified him, John Polidori wrote “The Vampyre,” and Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein. Both “The Vampyre” and Frankenstein became sensational hits, though I would not be surprised if you’d only ever heard of the latter. Dracula came out some years later and seemingly obliterated any other vampire tales running around at the time.

So, now that we’ve talked about the when, let’s talk about the why. Why is Frankenstein so important? First of all, and simply, it’s a really good book. Having read it at least seven times now and having analyzed it in a variety of different classes, I can comfortably say that not only is it an enjoyable read, but its text is so rich with depth that you could read it a hundred times and still not have caught everything there is to catch. You get the sense in reading Frankenstein that there is always some mystery beneath the surface, something that you should explore, and something that you may never fully understand.

But why does that make it important? Well, to answer that we have to look at what Gothic literature, all Gothic literature, strives to do. A Gothic story is a journey into the unknown, the scary, the horrifying, the un-understandable; it is rich and tantalizing in its questions, but subtle and often confusing in its answers. It beckons you in and then springs the trap. The process of reading a Gothic story often mirrors its plot progression: you, the reader, start with a clear idea of the story’s purpose or intent, but as the character falls into mystery and mayhem, the idea becomes muddied. What is the true intent of The Monk as a novel? Are the solutions to The Mysteries of Udolpho really satisfying? Who is actually the protagonist of Frankenstein?

Frankenstein uses all of the tools at its disposal — multiple narrators, possibly unreliable narrators, concealment of information, passions superseding logic, the plausible unnatural — to craft a web of questions that are as unanswerable as they are interesting. It is not a novel that gives solutions or absolutions; rather, it declares itself a horrifying question and answers in an ambiguous, regretful negative.

Reading Recommendation: Please read Frankenstein, it’s so good. Here it is.

Frankenstein

Go to town. If the discussion above hasn’t piqued your interest, I’m not sure what will. It might be my favorite book of all time, and am aghast that most people, when they think of Frankenstein, think of the movies. I may be one of the only people who believe that the book is better, but it is.


If you’d like some lighter, dark reading, I recommend:

"The Stories We Tell About Ghosts" by A. C. Wise

It’s a spooky little tale about children telling ghost stories, and playing the ghost equivalent of Pokemon GO, (I’m sorry in advance for this but:) Pokemon GhOst, if you will. It’s touching in a way that captures some of that childhood fascination with the occult, and I strongly recommend it as a Halloween night read.

Where to Submit: Rather than give you abbreviated deadlines, or spooky writing prompts so close to the end of the season, I wanted to take this last chance to say Submit to West 10th! The writing need not be spooky, just send us your best stories and poems!

And that wraps up our final historical, novel discussion for the Halloween season! I hope you enjoyed the series, and gained at least a little more historical context for the Gothic, how the genre has grown, and how Gothic and Horror stories function today. Be sure to follow us on Facebook and Twitter, and comment below if you have any thoughts to share on Frankenstein or any of the stories we’ve talked about! Stay spooky, and have a Happy Halloween!

Jia Tolentino at the Cosmos Book Club by Johanna Dong

2019 is truly the year of Jia Tolentino. Though many are already familiar with her work as a staff writer at The New Yorker, where she covers an impressive range of whatever topics catch her eye—recent book releases, Fyre Festival, the surreal Chinese performing arts group Shen Yun, TikTok—her first book Trick Mirror was released earlier this summer to near-universal acclaim. The essay collection is signature Jia: incisive, lyrical, funny as shit. It is mostly, as Tolentino described at a book club event I attended, “punishingly zeitgeist-y”—the bulk of its content is dedicated to contemporary phenomena such as social media’s facilitation of self-delusion, modern-day scammers, and the culture of eternally optimizing one’s body and life. 

The book’s full title is Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion, and in the introduction Tolentino explains, “These are the prisms through which I have come to know myself. In this book, I tried to undo their acts of refraction. I wanted to see the way I would see in a mirror. It’s possible I painted an elaborate mural instead.” Such a premise naturally makes for an excellent book club discussion, which I found out firsthand when attending the September gathering of Cosmos Book Club. A small organization by design, Cosmos caters specifically to self-identifying Asian women and nonbinary individuals, and meets every one or two months at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop space in Chelsea. 

The event with Jia Tolentino was my first time attending a Cosmos meeting, though I had heard of the book club previously, having worked as an editorial intern at the AAWW in 2018. The club meeting was small, capped at about thirty attendees, and we spent the first hour and a half discussing in small groups what we found interesting in Trick Mirror (the answer: just about everything). Tolentino herself joined us in person for a Q&A in the latter hour. As soon as she began to speak I was reminded of one of my favorite quotes from an article she wrote years ago for The Hairpin, in which she absolutely savaged the (at the time) popular song “Rude” by Magic!: 

“‘Rude’ is like a Dorito bag that got stuck on a spike of the crown of the Statue of Liberty: it’s a pop object with no content and only as much form as is necessary to deliver brief chemical gratification, which, through an unlikely ascension, becomes newly visible as a pure expression of tragedy, degradation, and American garbage.”

Tolentino’s humor was just as evident in person. “Someone the other day told me my personal brand was authenticity and I was like, ‘fuck me,’” she revealed while speaking on her essay about, well, authenticity, in an age wherein the Internet has become all-encompassing. 

What makes Tolentino’s takes on pop culture and political moments unique is her admittance of complicity in all of it. It was the point to which the Cosmos attendees and Tolentino herself kept returning: as a writer for a partially digital publication, as a millennial, as a woman, as an active participant in American culture, she does not exempt herself from criticism. 

When I went up to Tolentino after the discussion to ask her to sign my copy of Trick Mirror, I said, in reference to her New Yorker article about the surge of people asking celebrities online to do things like run them over with a truck, “Jia, I just wanted to say thank you for stepping on all our necks with this book.” She laughed, told me to watch the new movie Hustlers, and signed my book with “To Johanna — Step on my neck!”

The Origins of Gothic Literature - Horror and Romance

“The Origins of Horror Literature” is a weekly series by West 10th’s Editor-in-Chief Travis Schuhardt during the month of October, explaining how the Gothic and Horror genres developed, offering recommendations on which classic Gothic tales and modern horror stories to check out, and discussing some horror-themed journals to submit your writing to during the Halloween season.

October 21st. With the big day only ten away, I think it’s fitting we take a look at something a little more horrifying; that is, the origins of the horror genre itself. So, what’s the difference between the Horror and the Gothic? Well, that’s an interesting question. 

When the Gothic was still in its earliest forms, there were (very generally-speaking) two different styles of Gothic. On the one hand, you had novels that avoided the supernatural, and simply used the Gothic stylings — large castles, ghost stories, dread — as a means to heighten tension in the story; these novels were often grounded in a strict, conservative morality. On the other hand, you had what might be considered complete debauchery: demons, ghouls, religious desecration, sex, perversions, witches, monsters, and so on. To the former, Ann Radcliffe’s novel The Mysteries of Udolpho is likely the most famous example, to the latter, Matthew Lewis’s The Monk.

The Mysteries of Udolpho follows a young girl named Emily St. Aubert, who lives in France in the 16th century (though the entire novel reads as though she were living in the 18th century, pay it no mind), in a small cabin with her parents. In true Gothic fashion, both of her parents die, and she is forced to go live with her aunt in the big city, and while there becomes very close and involved with a boy named Valancourt, whom she’d met previously. Emily’s aunt eventually marries a man named Montoni, who, after the marriage, takes them both to his castle at Udolpho. Although there are rumors of ghosts and ghouls running around the castle, there are no ghosts, and the only supernatural horror comes from Emily’s imagination. This type of Gothic novel helped to inform the then-developing Romance genre.

The Monk is a lot messier with a lot more characters, and would be very difficult to summarize in passing. Basically, a monk is perverted by a demon, disguised as a young girl, disguised as a young boy in the Church, and, after he is convinced to sleep with her, decides that he wants to sleep with another young girl, and so develops a magical, demon-aided strategy to put her to sleep and steal her from her home in order to have his way with her. If that sounds both needlessly complex and disgusting, that’s because it is, and, mind you, I’ve left out the multiple subplots. What this book did do, however, was establish a discourse around the explicitly supernatural elements of Gothic literature, as it used almost every single supernatural Gothic trope that had appeared up to 1796, the year it was written. From this raunchy, immoral, supernatural heap of story, the Horror genre was born.

If you’d care to read either, here are links:

The Mysteries of Udolpho

The Monk

Both are quite long, but both are far more enjoyable reads than The Castle of Otranto, and are legitimately engaging if you’ve the time to sit down and read them.

Reading Recommendation: For this week, I recommend a short little story called Fail-Safe by Philip Fracassi. It’s oddly touching, sad, and creepy all in one, and though a little longer than last week’s story, it is definitely still worth the read. This one is a little more on the sci-fi/fantasy side of the horror genre, but uses it to full effect.

Places to Submit: If you’re still in the mood to get some horror-writing done (and I certainly hope you are), here are some places looking for submissions that might get your creative juices flowing!

1. If you can’t get enough of apocalypses — be they zombie, nuclear, or environmental — this journal might be for you!

https://jpskewedthrone.dreamwidth.org/499730.html

The stories can be up to 7,500 words, and the deadline isn’t until December 31st, so even if you only draft it now, you’ll have tons of time to polish it before the deadline!

2. Submit to West 10th! Our submissions are still open! Click the “Submit” tab above to find out how. This doesn’t have to be a horror-themed story, just send your best! We’re open until mid-December.

Thank you for reading, be sure to subscribe and check back every week for stories, poems, reading recommendations, and places to submit your work! If you read any of the stories mentioned, comment down below your thoughts!

All historical information in this article comes from the NYU class “Gothic Literature.”

The Origins of Gothic Literature

“The Origins of Horror Literature” is a weekly series by West 10th’s Editor-in-Chief Travis Schuhardt during the month of October, explaining how the Gothic and Horror genres developed, offering recommendations on which classic Gothic tales and modern horror stories to check out, and discussing some horror-themed journals to submit your writing to during the Halloween season.

October 14th. Truly the midst of the Halloween season. And there’s no better way to get into the spirit of the season than a deep dive into the murky, terrifying territories of Gothic Literature and Horror Fiction. Each week, we will be exploring the surprising history of Gothic Literature, and recommending modern day horror stories to keep you up at night.

Many people believe the Gothic genre began and ended with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and this is simply not the case. The first tale that truly sparked an interest in the Gothic — and defined a lot of what we consider Gothic today — was written by a man named Horace Walpole and was called The Castle of Otranto.

Before we talk about the story, however, you need a little context. Horace Walpole was born in the early 18th century, and, if you were to go to London around that time, you would see very few medieval-looking castles, and those you would see would have fallen into disuse and disrepair. Buildings constructed in the Medieval Era were windowless and uncomfortable, cold and dank; if you were a member of the nobility in the 18th century, very reasonably you would want to live somewhere warmer, more comfortable. Many members of the nobility, were they to own a castle from their ancestors, would even tear them down for parts to build other residences.

Horace Walpole did not own a castle. One day, however, he decided that he wanted one. Thus, he began constructing his own castle. He called it Strawberry Hill House, and built it in the medieval style, but differed slightly in that he included stained-glass windows that you might see in churches. This style laid the foundation for a Gothic revival in the architecture of London.

But what does this have to do with literature? Well, whilst living in Strawberry Hill House, Horace Walpole, as the story goes, had a nightmare about a floating suit of armor that took place in the house that he lived, a Gothic-styled Castle. So, when he went to write down his dream and turn it into a novel, he wrote a story that took place in a castle that involved ghosts haunting suits of armor, as well as other supernatural elements. These elements came to define the Gothic genre of literature, all the way to today’s modern Gothic, informing even series like Scooby-Doo.

The spooky terrors that come to mind when we all think of Halloween night — the ghosts, the ghouls, the castles, the monsters — all sprouted from the nightmare of one man, living in his fake castle in the 18th century.


If you’d like to check out The Castle of Otranto, you can find the entire book online at this link:

The Castle of Otranto

I, personally, would not recommend the read, as it can be a bit slow and confusing, but it is there if you’d like to see the origins of the Gothic genre.

Reading Recommendation: As for stories I would recommend to get you in the Halloween mood, Brian Evenson’s short story No Matter Which Way We Turned is a spooky, quick, two-page read that’s great to share around a campfire or even in your room by candlelight if you’re looking for a scare, or to be just a little unsettled. If you read it, let us know what you think!

Places to Submit: Don’t think we’d leave you out to dry with no places to submit. Check out these places to submit your Halloween-themed or horror writings!

1. If you’re interested in writing Folktales, or have a great local horror story from back home, try here:

https://www.nosetouchpress.com/call/

The requirements are 4,000-8,000 words and submissions open November 1st and run until January, so you have all of Halloween season (and beyond) to inspire you.

2. If you’re already sitting on a horror story or some dark fiction that just needs a little touch up, then I’d recommend submitting to LampLight:

https://lamplightmagazine.com/submissions/

Up to 7,000 words; submissions open on October 15th and close December 15th. This publication does publish reprints, meaning if you already have a horror story posted somewhere, say a blog of sorts, you can still submit here as well!

3. You can submit your poems, short stories, and artwork to us starting today! Click the submit tab to find out how. This is not a horror or Halloween themed submission; just send us your best! We’re open until mid-December. Hope to see your work there!

Thank you for reading, be sure to subscribe and check back every week for stories, poems, reading recommendations, and places to submit your work!

All historical information in this article comes from the NYU class “Gothic Literature.”

Call for Submissions!

West 10th is now accepting submissions of poetry, prose, and art for its 2019-2020 edition, coming out this spring! The deadline for submissions is December 13th, 2019.

Check out our submission guidelines here, or click the “Submit” tab on the navigation bar of this page.

If you have any questions, please feel free to email us at west10th.submissions@gmail.com

Last Call to Join the West 10th 2019-2020 E-Board!

Applications have briefly reopened for the 2019-2020 Editorial Board!

We are seeking to fill positions on the poetry, prose, art, web, and copyediting boards. Please direct all questions and completed applications to west10th.submissions@gmail.com. Applications are due by 11:59 pm on Saturday, August 10th.

Please download and complete the application below:

West 10th E-Board Application 2019-2020

*Note: please do not apply to the board if you are graduating in December 2019. This is a full-year commitment.

Join the West 10th 2019-2020 E-Board!

Applications are now open for the 2019-2020 Editorial Board!

We are seeking to fill positions on the poetry, prose, art, web, and copyediting boards.

Please direct all questions and completed applications to west10th.submissions@gmail.com. Applications are due by 11:59 pm on Friday, May 24.

Please download and complete the application below:

West 10th E-Board Application 2019-2020

*Note: please do not apply to the board if you are graduating in December 2019. This is a full-year commitment.

19 Safaris, by Jake Goldstein

today i am sure that
everyone looks like
salvador dali
but when the professor
asks “if anyone feels like
salvador dali”
no one raises their hand.
considering that, I realize:

i have stood on enough corners and
sniffed enough happiness
(my sinuses are always clogged)
and had enough nights of
careless jaywalking to
think long and hard enough
to decide there’s not much
to be done about it.
even then,

i have meditated, three times, i think,
thrown my phone out the window
and grown wings as I jumped out to catch
it (now they’re just two large scars;
they look like rorschach tests).
that brought me understanding.
and so I have now:

bought every item on amazon
shoplifted your birthday present
shared drugs (with my hands
tied behind my back;
bobbing for apples)
smiled at myself in the mirror
for an hour making small
adjustments to my lips
remembering that i
once named my
baby teeth
and then they all fell out.
that’s
what made me realize that

for 19 safaris i have had
a platonic relationship
with the moon;
now I wonder if i
should make it
my goal to change that,
falling asleep to the
sounds of the hardwood
couple yelling sonnet 18
in perfect iambic pentameter.

In the Park, by Henry Trinder

She was holding a stick and knew dogs like sticks so she brought it to the dog and tried pushing it inside its mouth, and the dog just sort of sat there as the stick moved against its gums and pushed against its cheek, and the children behind her laughed and were laughing still when they said look at her look at her, as if she was the funniest thing they had ever seen in their short short lives, and then one laughing boys looked at his finger and looked at the dog and looked at his finger and stuck it inside his mouth to see what it would feel like, must feel like, and no one was laughing anymore because someone’s mom was saying something and the child who was holding the stick was skipping happily on the sidewalk, the dog was running after a ball, and no one was laughing because there was nothing to laugh about anymore and it looks like it might rain at any moment.

untitled (in dedication to Nadejda M.), by Simona

Vacation morning number eight, good morning
Black sea waves in languor kissing

Vacation morning number eight, good mourning
I am alive and prancing at the beach
With hidden exaltation in each guilty gulp of glitter air
Waves are making love, a grace of life in reach
I am sun and salt and sand and lying on my back

Lunch back at the hotel with
Mom sobbing and all those stupid old waitresses around
Tears in the creases of her face as she eats her meal
I put my fork down and weep as well, I have found
That it’s the prosaic that beats me swiftly down

We get back home, have to get
Our nicest black dresses out
Some heathen on the bus to church stared at
Us, the Christian juggernaut
My mom and her cross and me with my pout
I still dislike the yellow phallic candles
They whimper in heat, drip and burn my hand
(swollen incantations swallow us)
As we say goodbye to the gentlest pagan goddess in the land
I touch the dead and sip the wine and stand

In A Summer, by Natalie

You let the record needle
fall and so the matilija
poppies bloom everywhere they look
like giant fried eggs and
I walk past the Blue
Motel and feel like I
am about to do something
really awful it is true
I am and I remember
you, nose and lip bleeding
from a dog bite and
I remember your father, palm
filled with a Van Morrison cd.
You play one song on
stereo then switch to the
Powerball radio stream and I
get my eyes dilated and
the optometrist shows me what
my retina looks like and
says “the more colorful the
retina the worse the eyesight”
“what colors can the retina
be?” “orange and red and black
and yellow” “and so it
makes you sad to see
a beautiful retina?” “yes” and
we spoon Cholula into tortilla
soup and you say “I
can play Satisfaction on my
dad’s guitar” and then pull
randomly at strings and I
know that I am being
selfish but that is just
how it is and our
clothes are so heavy by
now and my knees go
yellow and blue and the
police shine flashlights into your
black car and I am
very calm because I do
not care what they do
to me or us now.

First Response, by Eva

the streets are walked empty tonight,
room made for cold noises to roam.

outside, an ambulance tilts its horn
like so much static: a white noise

slighted into yellow. indoors, we spill into electricity
like all the lights flooding in,

a whirlpool of tightened strings. mouth shut like torn rubber. hands seeping into rooms with no more soft

to give way. the boots down the hallway and dirt spell protection,
so I tell them my name in the way tearing

off rose petals sounds like a freeing. the first step after invasion is healing. the password is the year and a weather

of cold. in the stretchers we’ll fall back into becoming,
and remember how in reconstruction,

we stitched needles into empty pieces.

Call for Submissions!

Hooray! West 10th is now accepting submissions of poetry, prose, and art for its 2018-2019 edition, coming out this spring!

Check out our submission guidelines here.

Sweetland, by Brittany

In seconds it was colossal. She could do nothing but stare in horror and fatal curiosity. Like a possessed body it whipped and cracked and stretched farther over her garden, clumps of leaves forming a stupendous shadow that enveloped sunlight entirely. Its branches flailed and threw soil that dripped with a dark red substance, uprooted vines heaving as they clung to its branches like threatened by a great fear of heights. The sycamore tree was relentless, tearing its limbs from the dirt and unearthing fat centipedes and the blackest of worms and snapping insects that soared through the air and slapped the fence with such force that it compelled its wooden beams to their sides, the carcasses of beetles and spiders splayed like abstract. The bark of the plant peeled back in a sickly manner and high above and between the foliage exposed a grey, skin-like membrane that throbbed within the trunk, a heaving creature expanding outward until it stopped and the birds hummed and screeched as their nests flitted down towards the ungodly mess of dirt, blood, and flowers and it was silent for a moment.

A great whistle rustled from above and shattered the air as the thing shot its roots down like stems of some overgrown vermin, as if to snatch the young girl’s body and shoot her off far into the sky. Instead its fat veins plowed into the garden before her, groaning and churning under the soil until it had conceived a gargantuan curvature of entwined roots. There stood before her a brooding entryway, for which between muddy walls laid a bizarre road. Impossibly far beyond the dark, a neon sign twinkled: SWEETLAND.

E-Board Application Deadline Extended

Surprise! Due to the high volume of applications and interest, we are extending the deadline to apply to our e-board to Saturday, May 26, 2018, 11:59pm.Email west10th.submissions@gmail.com with your application.

Search History #6: Google Translate: Goodbye

“…everything proceeds from losing our place.” - Leslie Jamison, The Empathy ExamsWhat I have next is unsearchable.What I mean is that I cannot google what I need, now.The internet, I think, is primarily a place to ask questions and hope to have them answered. At least search engines are. It strikes me as sort of strange that the things worth searching for the most are the things that you can’t really find on Google. You can’t know where to go once you’ve graduated and your world shifts again. You can’t know love by Googling it. The limits of asking only go so far.Last year my boyfriend, a philosophy major, spent a lot of time wondering, talking, and thinking about the question “What if we’re in a simulation?” It’s a question worth wondering about, I think, but he came down to this:Consciousness can’t be simulated because it isn’t only intelligence. Yeah, okay, you might be able to simulate a brain and thinking, and then maybe you could simulate a nervous system and a motor system. But what we know is not just a function of having a brain, but also of having a body. You’d have to program a body with a nervous system and all the senses that are not only as fine-honed as ours, but are as exactly as limited as ours. You can be as intelligent as you want, but how do you explain why something should feel sad about something, or that gut feeling in your stomach, and what that means? It may well be that it’s all the result of neurons in the brain firing, but it just doesn’t feel possible that you could put that into computer code.Before I started at NYU, I could’ve never asked Google “What will college be like for me?”,or “How much will I change in the next four years,”or “How many times will I cry in public” (though if I did, it would’ve said, “A lot”)or “What is it like to be a copy editor, to get your writing published, to read your work in front of other people, to write a column, all for the first time.”Going forward, maybe I will Google “How to fake my own death to get out of student debt,”or “Doctors in NYC that take my strangely Ohio-specific insurance,” now that I won’t have NYU’s health center,or “What to use as a public bathroom when I go on long walks through the city and can no longer get into NYU buildings,”or “Remote Italian towns that will pay you to live there,” when I’m done with grad school and done with New York.Either way, I will search, and I will make meaning out of what I search for, and I will write about it.