Moneta:

The Mount Holyoke Literary Magazine

Fall 2014

2013-2014 Editorial Board:

Editor-in-Chief: Emma Ginader 15
Treasurer: Ashley Barnes 15
Poetry Editor: Frieda Yueng 17
Assistant Poetry Editor: Aria Pahari 17
Non-Fiction Editor: Patricia Kelly 18
Fiction Editor: Hattie McLean 16
Assistant Fiction Editor: Libby Kao 17
Photography and Art Editor: Sarah Burgert 15
Layout Editor: Kaitlin Boheim 18
Public Relations Representative: Mariza Mathea 17
General Editors: Mia Mazzaferro 16, Ofelia Garcia 17, Kimber-

ly Neil 17, Mariza Mathea 17, Kathryn Fitzpatrick 18, and Savannah Sevenzo 15.

Cover art:
Untitled by Reagan Brown
With special thanks to:
Cindy Meehan
The MHC English Department
Everyone who submitted their work

Table of Contents:
Lists Poem by Becca Frank...pg 1
Moonrise by Lizzie Whitaker...pg 2
Blue by Anna Berlin...pg 3-4
Another Sweet Farewell by Deirdre Brazenall...pg 5
Dance Series II by Julisa Campbell..pg 6
Picasso by Deirdre Brazenall..pg 7
Am I Bilingual? by Enryka Christopher...pg 8-13
Midnight Boom by Lizzie Whitaker...pg 14
run by Carrie Carter...pg 15
Johnny Damons Menstruation by Mia Mazzaferro..pg 16-17
98 Pounds of a whole lot of nothing by W...pg 18
Hand Drawing by Ionelee Brogna...pg 19
Soy by Maria Jose Correa ...pg 20-21
Dance Series III by Julisa Campbell...pg 22
Haunt by Mia Mazzaferro...pg 23
The Real Ocean by Savannah Marciezyk...pg 24-25
[Soliliqualms] by W...pg.26
Sunday Drive by Carrie Carter...pg.27
Untitled by Reagan Brown...pg.28

The Lists Poem

By Becca Frank

You and I are Good at making lists.

We like to load life up, sort it through, and compile full lists.
Lists of things to do, things accomplished,
things necessary and not.
Lists of the ways you wear your shirts
and how many socks I have,
of how long weve known each other
and how many days until you leave.
It makes us feel better, I think.
We can count down the days or
up the ways were alike
(our brothers, our sisters, our hands, our minds).
And we started with distance, not knowing each other,
but the lists stretched like budgets between us,
allowing more wiggle room, and were closer now.
Your list of what to spend time on overlaps with mine.
Were Good at making lists, you and I,
because we like to lay it all out,
like rugs on the grass or me on your bed.
And when were not together,
well just keep track of the miles were apart,
and the lists will expand and shrink,
bending two ends of a rope,
well come back and itll all be accounted for.

Moonrise by Lizzie Whitaker

Blue
By Anna Berlin

We met outside at a friends party. It was a warm sticky night. The
white lanterns in the garden gave off a golden glow. We sat in the corner on a bench together. We laughed a lot. I cant remember about
what now, but I do remember the soft goodnight kiss he gave me on my
cheek, as he reached around me to open my car door, how he looked at
me with his kind blue eyes.

A year later we moved in together. We went to Home Depot and
picked out colors to paint the walls. We painted while listening to Motown and after ate sandwiches on the dusty floor. Wed run together in
the mornings, keeping pace side by side. The sky would go from dark
blue to pink to yellow and lastly to a soft blue.

We were going to get married. We were going to have kids. We
were going to grow old together. We were going to be happy. It was unspoken but sat gently together between us. I could smell it in our cotton
blue sheets, hear it in our whispers, and see it in his glances.

One day I came home and hung my coat on the brass hook and put
my keys on the brown table. I had a thought as I stared at the blue walls.

We should repaint the hallway. I said.

I like it how it is.

Its boring. We should paint it yellow. Yellow is bright, and shiny,
and happy.

Well blue makes me happy.

The next morning I told him I didnt want to go for our usual run. I
went out and bought yellow sheets for the bed.

Why did you buy new sheets? He asked me.

Oh, no. We always had those sheets. I thought it would be nice to
change.

I liked the blue.

Well the yellow makes me happy.

I left the house quickly the next morning. I swear hed painted the

while Id been sleeping. They seemed so much more vibrant and loud
then the day before.

I came home for dinner. I hung my coat on the brass hook and put
my keys on the brown table. I imaged taking a giant eraser and running
it over the walls, or perhaps hitting them with an ax. I could rip the
walls apart until they didnt exist.

Im going to order Chinese for dinner.

Lets order Ethiopian. Its a new place. Its supposed to be really
good.

I like the Chinese place. Lets get Chinese.
I stared at him across the table. The food was tasteless. I noticed
his shirt was a pale cool blue, like his eyes, like the hallway in the next
room.
I dried the plates with a yellow towel; it felt satisfying to see the
plates go from dirty to clean. I let one of the plates slip through my
hands and crash and shatter.
He came in.

Are you okay?
No.

Are you hurt? Did the glass cut you?
No.

Whats the matter?

I really think we should paint the hallway yellow.

What, this again? Did you hit your head?

No. I just really hate that blue, like I hate Chinese food.

But I thought you like blue and Chinese food? He tugged at his
shirt.

I dont think I like it anymore.

We broke up on a cold winter night under the harsh fluorescent
lights in our kitchen. I watched the sky go from blue to yellow to pink
and then to black.

I left. I walked to my car and opened the door staring into the dark
black night. Tomorrow Id wake-up. The weather this morning said tomorrow would be overcast. I could see lots of color tomorrow, if I wanted, I wondered if there was a way to never see blue again.

Another Sweet Farewell

By Deirdre Brazenall

In the purse of night

I have found I am a pearl,
Or some other small, half-wanted object.
Content with the chance of being summoned
By a floundering, damp hand,
Choosing me to perform some duty.
With dusks periwinkle shawl dropped,
I am somehow not the jewel of the Kings ring anymore,
Wailing when forgotten to be worn.
Lassitude dissolves me back to sand.
Relieved at having given up on being clever, gracefulstrong.
My only desire now is to be good.
Cast iron shadows exile guilt.
The olive-oil stain of house light
Draws the red from everything.
Warm and missing, I sit.
Blood settled, crusades bedded.
At last, another sweet farewell.

Dance Series II by Julisa Campbell

Picasso

By Deirdre Brazenall

You could have swallowed the sea

And still lit your wick.
Born to burn.
You saw an olive ripen to regress
And drop,
Unsated
By the unfed lips of no one.

Am I Bilingual?

By Enryka Christopher

My little pointer finger followed the Japanese characters as I
slowly made out the sounds. The words came out painfully slow,
but as I contorted my mouth to meet the demands of my mothers
language, a sense of accomplishment dawned on me. I did not yet
know how to read English, but here I was, four years old and reading
Japanese. I looked up at my mother as I stumbled over the end of the
first sentence to see a wide grin brimming over her face. Yoku dekita! she said and clapped her hands. My father then walked into the
room, wondering what was going on. My mother explained to him
in her broken English that I had just read a sentence in Japanese all
on my own, and he asked if I could repeat the feat for him. I was silent. My mother restated his request in Japanese, and I remember an
overwhelming feeling of shame erupt within me. I shook my head,
dropped the childrens book, and ran into the other room. Aw, she
must be shy, my father said.

No, I wasnt shy. I didnt really understand why I couldnt read
the sentence to him at the time. I didnt totally even understand the
emotion I was feeling, but looking back on it years later, I feel the
distinct feeling of shame just as vividly as I did that day.

My father has never spoken Japanese, and although my mother
can both read and write English sufficiently, she has never been a
fluent speaker. Japanese was my first language, and as my father was
constantly working, English was not what I primarily spoke until I
learned it in kindergarten. I enjoyed knowing Japanese. It was like
a secret language between my mother and me. Whenever we went
grocery shopping at the local Martins I would sit in the childs seat
by the handlebar and listen to my mother gossip about the other
shoppers. I would feel special knowing that no one around us could
understand what she said. However, that feeling of being special
came at a price. I recognized that I was so unlike all the people I
came in contact with. While everyone else spoke English, my mother and I were the only ones who didnt. It was like we didnt belong.


I would speak English to my father on his days off from work, but
Japanese words were spattered throughout my sentences. If he asked me
how my lunch tasted, I would reply, oishee. Even when he called my
name, I would answer with nani? Of course, he knew what all these
little words meant, but my communication with him, as well as the
world outside my home, was fragmented half in English and half in
something no one but my mother understood.

In kindergarten I realized how much of a problem this was. One
day the teacher laid out cards on a table with all of the childrens names
written on them. We were told to pick out the card that had our name
on it and bring it back to our desk. Of course some of the children
picked out the wrong name once or twice, but I was the last person left
standing at the table because I didnt recognize my name written in English. By this point, the rudimentary embarrassment I first felt toward
my bilingualism was developing into a complex shame of my identity.
How could I be living in America and not speak English like the other
kids? Was I even a real American if I spoke mostly Japanese? I was the
only Asian American in the back hills of my rural West Virginia town.
My language barrier prevented me from making friends at the local
preschool, but other factors played into why I did not fit in there as well.
The preschool teachers didnt understand why I wouldnt eat the food
they gave me. I didnt possess the verbal skills to explain to them that
I wanted rice and natto instead of chicken nuggets or mac and cheese.
They just labeled me a picky eater and told me I couldnt go to recess
until I had finished my meal. I didnt like watching the American cartoons they put on for us in the TV room because I couldnt understand
them; I missed my Anpanman and Doraemon anime shows from home.
My trouble with English was the foundation for all these other problems that contributed to my identity confusion.

Once I got into kindergarten and started actually learning the
ABCs, I picked up English fairly quickly. By the time I was in first grade,
I was forgetting my first language. After the reading incident with my
father, I stopped trying to learn to read with my mother. At the start of
second grade, my parents wanted to enroll me in a Japanese Saturday

school I refused. I didnt want this language to be a part of me anymore; I wanted to reject anything that wasnt American. I was now
eating mac and cheese for dinner, picked hot dogs over tofu, and abandoned Anpanman and Doraemon for Spongebob Squarepants.

As time went on I spoke less to my mother in Japanese and more
to my friends in English. The less Japanese I spoke the more American I felt. English was finally my primary language, and I didnt have
to feel shameful about not being able to articulate my thoughts in English. There was, though, a different feeling of shame that took over at
this time. It wasnt because of myself, but rather for my mother. I would
hear her struggle to communicate ideas with my father. She would try
to explain her feelings to him, but she had trouble remembering abstract terms. At restaurants I would always be the one who ordered her
meal for her while she would just point at the name of the dish in front
of the waitress. I wished her to be fluent, so I wouldnt have to experience the mythpe when her speech was littered with malapropisms.
One time we ran into a family friend who had his mother with him.
My mother asked if the woman was his father. She had switched the
meaning of mother and father, and even though she apologized for
her reasonable mistake, I was embarrassed for her. I wanted everything
about me to be American, including my mother.

This obsession with being American came out even more when
my father decided to move us to South Korea the summer after I finished third grade. He accepted a job there, and within two months we
had packed up the whole house into thirteen boxes ready to be shipped
overseas. Two days before we left, I marched around my empty West
Virginia ranch-style home waving an American flag, repeating my vehement refusals to live in another country.

At nine-years-old I finally felt like I belonged. I had made a ton
of friends with whom I could do American things, such as watch
Spongebob together or play with the blonde-haired, blue-eyed Barbie
dolls. We lived the American dream in a big house with two cars and
a white picket fence surrounding our five acres. My English had even
improved so much that I was placed in the advanced reading group

10

in class, not to mention I had won the best cursive handwriting title
out of the entire third grade. So, its not surprising that I was not one bit
thrilled about leaving America to adopt a whole new country and, worst
of all, a whole new language.

My parents enrolled me in a private Korean school. The only adults
who spoke English there were the English teacher and the nurse. The
headmaster, my tutor, and my parents all figured I would pick the language up fairly quickly. I lasted two months at Kyungbok Elementary
School before I told my parents I didnt want to go there anymore. I had
been coming home crying everyday, but they were always at work so
they never realized what was going on. They did know, however, that
I was visiting the nurse everyday, complaining about earaches. There
were about sixty students per class at the Korean school, which was typical for most schools in Seoul. The amount of noise that these sixty students made everyday during lunch, recess, and activities was deafening.
My father spoke with the headmaster and nurse on several occasions,
but they both told my father that I was sure to adapt sooner or later.
After I begged my parents to let me quit Korean school, I transferred to
a private American school. My parents had put me in the Korean school
because they wanted me to learn the language. So, once I transferred to
the American school, they insisted that I learn Korean from a tutor.

I had five different Korean tutors over the course of the two years
in which we lived in Seoul. Each one was the same drill; I would ride the
crowded subway to get to whichever district the tutor lived in, find their
apartment building through the maze of concrete skyscrapers rising out of
filthy, narrow streets, and take the elevator up to the 50th or 60th floor to
spend an hour learning nothing. None of them were successful in teaching
me the language.

In the beginning, a lot of it was my fault. I would purposely not do
the homework that the tutor assigned me. I felt like the less immersed I
was in this new culture, the more I could hold onto my old, American
roots. I would just sit in the tutors living room and give her a confused
look when she held up a card with a picture of a mountain on it.

11

I always shook my head no for these stupid cards, and she would flip
and the English pronunciation
the card over, revealing the character
san under it. Even after I started doing the homework assigned to me
(I had come around by the third or fourth tutor), I still was very slow at
picking up the language. I was trying to learn it to make my parents happy, but I was just not interested in accepting another new language.

We moved back to the States after two years, and it was a bit of a culture shock coming back to America. It didnt feel as if we were an American family moving back to our home country, rather it felt as if I was
once again a foreigner in an alien world. In her zeal to become fluent in
Korean, my mother had forgotten some of her English. My Japanese was
down to the bare minimum, I barely learned any Korean, and my English
wasnt up to par with the New York standard because of my shifting education.

I eventually got on track with my English, taking all the AP and
honors English courses my high school offered. I even decided to major in it once I got to college. I dont regret the effort I put into gaining as
much English knowledge as I could. However, now that I look back, I do
regret letting go of my Japanese. I still cant read or write in the language,
but I am what is called heritage fluent I cant have a political discussion in Japanese or understand abstract concepts, but I can certainly
converse with my mother about dinner plans or what she did during the
day. A few times I tried to relearn the characters I had once been able to
make out, but I would end up with the old feeling of losing my Americanness. I would get frustrated because my mother wouldnt be able to
explain the Japanese linguistic structures in English, and I would feel
both embarrassed and sad for her when she gave up because we couldnt
communicate efficiently.
Maybe if I had been able to embrace my Japanese roots by becoming
fluent in that language, I may have felt less of a need to hold onto being
American because there might have been a stronger sense of belonging
to my own mixed-ethnic background. By losing my first language in order to gain the one I deemed more appropriate for my environment, I
lost the opportunity to fully find where I belong.

12


People ask me if I speak Japanese, and I always hesitate before explaining the extent of my language proficiency. Although I still communicate with my mother in Japanese, I dont feel like I can connect to her
culture because knowing the language is such a big part of being Japanese. Everyone who is Japanese or has grown up in Japan speaks Japanese. On the other hand, Ive realized that speaking English fluently does
not make one completely American. Not only is America home to many
who dont speak English, it is also home to many cultures and races that
are seen as typically un-American Asians can be Asian-American,
but never just American. My experience with languages as I grew up
has contributed to making me stuck in a limbo of not being totally American nor totally Japanese.

13

Midnight Boom by Lizzie Whitaker

14

run

By Carrie Carter

I didnt really know what to tell them when they asked me how to fix
the mess. I mostly just told them to clean it up as they had tried to
do before. Keep cleaning keep cleaning keep your keepsakes under
your shirt so they dont get all wet because its about to rain. (Weve
known it was coming for sometime now and now its here.) The mess
is harder to see now but you have to keep cleaning. Keep cleaning
keep cleaning keep cleaning.

15

Johnny Damons Menstruation

By Mia Mazzaferro

Kate tugged at her wool beard. Halloween is as good a day to
die as any...

She thought. Her brothers baseball pants sagged around her
knees, forcing her to waddle around the cramped bathroom. Shit.
She hissed as droplets of blood splattered the floor with each of her
penguin steps. Each nautical tile became a red and white two-tone
Jackson Pollock painting.

With two hands on her ten-year-old hips, Kate took a deep
breath and considered her short life. She contemplated, since she
was most certainly dying, what shed leave behind and to whom.
Well... now I have all this candy... She thought, I guess I will give
some to Derek, since I ruined his pants and all. They were ruined.
No amount of tide-to-go could undo the tsunami of crimson that
was now infused in the fibers of the heather cloth. Sam can have all
my Barbie dolls. Elise can have my books...

She pushed the bunched legs of her pants over her red converse sneakers. Kate kneeled and tried to clean up the floor, but only
smeared the blood into the pale tile grout and created an even bigger mess. My mom is going to kill me. She thought.

Just then Kate heard someone coming. Frantic, panicked, and
half-naked, Kate flushed wads of blood stained tissue paper down
the toilet. She threw her brothers pants into the tub. With it she
tossed her underpants, the ones with the puppy print; her favorite
despite the way the blue elastic band dug into her thickening hips
and left a ring she just now noticed. The toilet choked and refused to
swallow the swampy mess of blood and tissue, which swam like the
lost souls of beta fish Kate used to know.
Hey Johnny Damon, you got any almond joy in that pillow case for
dear old mom? Kates mom asked through the bathroom door. Kate
stood in front of the mirror looking into her own startled eyes. She
put two fingers to each side of her temples and began tapping her

16

her foot nervously before responding. Yeah mom, sure, just... just a
second.

Kate could hear her mother lean against the door. Honey is everything ok? Are you sick? Was she sick? Kate had no idea how to tell her
mom she was bleeding out and would likely be dead in moments. Yeah
mom... Im fine... Kate grabbed the Clorox bathroom cleaner and unscrewed the squirt bottle top. She poured the entirety of the bottles contents onto the bloodstained clothes in the bathtub.

Leaning over them to move the shower curtain, she became entangled in it and fell into the tub.

Kate?! Im coming in! Her mothers voice sounded clear through
the thick mahogany door. No, mom, Im fi- but it was too late. Her mom
opened the door and gasped, taking in every aspect of her destroyed
bathroom. The toilet was clogged, the shower curtain was ripped, there
was blood smeared and splattered all over the floor. The room looked
like it had been victim to some angst-inspired teenage prank, not unlike those associated with Halloween. Kate climbed out of the tub and
her mother looked bewildered. Kate began to cry, standing there in just
her Johnny Damon number 18 Red Sox baseball jersey, fake beard, and
sneakers. Her knees knocked and her thighs were streaked with blood.

Mom, Im dying. Kate spoke.

Her mom began to cry, smiling. Handing Kate a Playtex tampon she
said, Johnny Damon just became a woman.

17

98 Pounds of a whole lot of nothing

By W.

the date is 21st of may,

and I am doing nothing at 10:55
at night. I keep dreaming of no obligations and
alcohol,
and an air conditioned apartment
all to myself. I want a scape of iron monsters
pieced about this locationless oasis, which I can peek at through
curtains and
through the frames of
small windows. The world is your oyster,
my mother said to me
today. She does not understand
that I am already sipping on oyster juice,
savoring before I swallow the
whole thing. This is fine, said the mole;
well I say this is delectable. For I am
laughing with my cake in hand, but rather than stomachs bottom
the floor it will hit instead.
This is how my world began,
and this is how it all will end.
I am still a worthless sack of 98 pounds of not
good enough, and my emptiness could swallow
more than 9 million oysters.

18

Hand Drawing by Ionelee Brogna

19

Soy

By Maria Jose Correa

Spanish:
No soy luz, soy sol.
No soy noche, soy luna.
No soy abajo, soy el sur.
No soy semilla, soy cosecha.
No soy miseria, soy prosperidad.
No soy sin historia, soy cultura.
No soy agua, soy ocanos, mares y ros.
No soy humedad, soy trpicos.
No soy palabra, soy muchas lenguas.
No soy color, soy muchas razas.
No soy religion, soy lo que creo.
No soy mujer, soy amazona.
No soy ruinas antiguas, soy civilizacin.
No soy conquista. Soy LATINOAMRICA.

20

English:
I am not light, I am sun.
I am not night, I am moon.
I am not down there, I am south.
I am not seed, I am harvest.
I am not misery, I am prosperity.
I am not without history, I am culture.
I am not water, I m oceans, seas, and rivers.
I am not humidity, I am tropics.
I am not word, I am many languages.
I am not color, I am many races.
I am not religion, I am what I believe.
I am not woman, I am an amazon.
I am not ancient ruins, I am civilization.
I am not conquest, I am Latin America.

21

Dance Series III by Julisa Campbell

22

Haunt

By Mia Mazzaferro

You could roam all the earth and never find
anything that feels as good, as the act of coming home.
I rose with tired feet for this occasion,
and now I alone rebel against it.
A skinny dog strains to choke
on a feather or a bone.
The streets are swept until they moan.
Bare branches mope under weight of heavy snow,
this is the barren terrain from which Ive grown.
Theres no place that feels as strange, as a home you used to know.

23

The Real Ocean

By Savannah Marciezyk

I come from a place where people flock in the summer to bask
in the sun and frolic for a week or twoa month if theyre lucky
only to leave again by September 1st. They come and overwhelm
us all, shock us with their concentration only to depart in droves,
satisfied with the ocean and feeling content with themselves for exposing their children to something other than concrete and school
books.

While most would call this the ideal time to enjoy the beach,
really I prefer it in the dead of January, when the beach is as barren
and cold as the bald face of the full moon, the one that rises out of
the stone grey ocean, ominous. While in the sticky-sweet months of
July and August the water rises to about sixty-four degrees and becomes just bearable enough to wade into and wait until your body
goes numb, the winter sea has an allure that seems to disappear
under the hot glare of the sun. Only under the watchful eye of the
storm clouds does the ocean seem like magic.

When I was little, the magic was in the tidal flats. The water
sucked back, and like a lady lifting up her skirt, a whole set of wonders were waiting for those who knew what they were looking for.

Scallop shells were the easiest, but always a crowd favorite considering their many color configurations. Oyster shells were more
of a treasure, especially those that came with their counterparts still
attached. Hermit crabs, fiddler crabs, razor clams. Moon snails with
their fleshy bodies that bloomed out in the palm of your hand if you
held them just right. And, oh, the mermaid purses, little black bags
filled with mermaid secrets to those of us with imaginations. One
could walk for miles on these flats and never feel alone or distant, as
the comforting arm of the shore was never out of sight, gently cupping the bay.

I still remember the first day I swam in the real ocean, though,
the place with the magic. The visitors to my hometown dont know

24

know what this means, the real ocean, they askisnt it all the ocean?
The answer is yes and no, because to any who knows, the Atlantic is a
raging wall of power and beauty unmatched by the gently flowing waters
of the bay and as such, is deserving of a name like the real ocean.

I got a call early one morning from a friend who lived in the next
neighborhood over and was invited for a day at the beach. My mother packed me a peanut butter and jelly sandwich while I changed into
my bathing suit and braided up my long, sandy-colored hair, so that the
wind wouldnt knot it for me. I was warned about sunblock and pushed
out the door.

What I remember most vividly about that day is the steep hill down
to the beach. Where the bay is easy to access, the real ocean requires a
flight of wooden stairs that are regularly swept away in the winter: Rickety, with holes between the boards and no backs, I hated that kind of
stair case. The smell, of coldness and what I could only call whales, was
pungent.

I remember the rushing exhilaration, and also the terror, of being
swept up into the churning of the swell and dumped unceremoniously onto the shore. The sea had no use for me; I was inconsequential, I
learned, in the face of the real, roaring ocean.

25

[Soliliqualms]

By W.

Grass grows at an obscenely fast pace compared to
the blooming of roses in our garden. Often you
ponder and wander around the garden, following trimmed
leaves, smelling tulips and later with me taking
hibiscus tea and oreos on the landing. It is summer, and then it
is winter, but you are always walking illuminated in circles
towards the middle of this garden. But somehow I always call you
back from an end you notice but for which you
never realize youve been committing
the means. You come back mumbling about how
the roses arent blooming because you dont see (and
I dont tell) that they open up behind you/so that after tea
you go off thinking again about everything and nothing/
walking where the grass is hard which once you pass is then
soft/talking and frowning over the flowers like God/ circling
still as a side-note to the ticking of a greater means to an end,
as if it even matters.

26

Sunday Drive

By Carrie Carter

the mountains (and the
lack thereof ) made
us feel all
sappy, but fear pushed
us through, page by
page.

27

28

Untitled by Reagan Brown

Contributors notes:

Anna Berlin 15: She is an Art Studio major and English minor. She has a ridiculously awesome dog named Bailey and is from the Garden State.
Deirdre Brazenall 16: She is an English major. She lived in Edinburgh, Scotland
until the age of 12 when she moved to Northampton, MA with my mother
and sisters. She have loved to read and write poetry since she was a child.
Brazenall am a Francis Perkins Scholar and a graduate of Holyoke Community College.
Reagan Brown 17: She is pursuing an Art History major and a minor in Art
Studio. She is from New York City and is somewhat named after President
Ronald Reagan, which is funny since my sisters name is Hillary.
Julisa Campbell 15: She is a Studio Art major and Film Studies minor. Her work
primarily focuses on capturing the innate energy, power and physicality
of women dancers. In her free time, she enjoys watching foreign films and
creating mixed media art.
Carrie Carter 16: She is an English major/Educational Studies minor. She enjoys writing poems about food, swimming in lakes, and advocating for the
oxford comma.
Enryka Christopher 15: She is a double major in English and Psychology. I spent
time living in South Korea, Japan, Scotland, and several states in the US.
My passions include traveling, reading, staying active, and learning about
new and interesting topics. Theres so many excellent writers that I cant
pick a favorite, but some of my favorite books include Chaucers The Canterbury Tales, Wildes The Picture of Dorian Grey, and Dostoevskys Crime and
Punishment.
Maria Jose Correa 17: She is pursuing a Spanish with Education major, a Latin
American studies minor, and a Five College Certificate in Latin American
Studies. Hailing from Argentina, where she was a Lieutenant in the Argentinean Coast Guard where she graduated in the first female class ever in the
history. Correa is in love with Brazilian Portuguese as a Language, even in
her first semester, she find this language more fascinating than Spanish.
Savannah Marciezyk 16: She is an English major with a concentration in Creative Writing. She wrote my first poem when she was eight years old about
her cat. In the Spring, she will studying at the University of Kent in Canterbury, England.

Editorial Board:

Emma Ginader 15: She is an English and Politics double major. She has lately been enjoying the poetry of Tracey Smith and Alison Hawthorne Deming. Her poetry has appeared in Verbosity and The Louisville Review and her
non-fiction in The Columbus Dispatch and The Scranton Times-Tribune.

Hattie McLean 16: She is an English major. Currently, her favorite writer is

Jeffrey Eugenides. She also loves the poets Seamus Heaney and Kay Ryan,
and the art critic Peter Schjeldahl. She is also Vice President of the org.

Sarah Burgert 15: Their favorite artist is Georgia OKeeffe.

Mia Mazzaferro 16: Mia is a double English and Gender Studies major at

Mount Holyoke. She is currently rereading The Complete Love Poems of May
Swenson. She is sometimes late because she stops to pet dogs she meets.
Next semester, she will be an Assistant Fiction Editor.

Becca Frank 16: She was the Assistant Fiction Editor last semester and will

return next semester after studying in France for a semester. She is pursuing English major with a minor in Psychology. She joined Mohoetry to become a part of a creative network of people.