Staff
Co-editors
Web Development
Copy
Public Relations
Layout
Art
megan wick
joshua cox
benjamin davis
connor/moss white
bram barnes
lili black
aya mahmoudi
piper scherr
kaya eisler
spenser lamphear
caine ryan
bram barnes
valeria mirando moreno
lucas pinarie
tatum huegel
kate clark
chloe jackson
caine ryan
roman di giulo
dear licensed qlifers (including those who cannot drive!),
we welcome you to our last issue of the year, and our last issue as co-editors-in-chief. we’ve both been on quarterlife’s staff for the entirety of our college careers–it’s time to bid farewell to our precious little lit mag and drive off into the sunset for a new adventure. we leave quarterlife in the most capable of hands, and we are entirely confident as we let next year’s staff take the wheel. we hope that the art that they will share with you takes you on the ride of a lifetime, and that you stop to think of quarterlife every once in a while–submit your work when you can, or simply lose yourself in the pages of an old issue when you need the escape. quarterlife will always be there for you, in your back pocket, as you travel the world in your trusty SUV, when the winding road brings you back home, or when you find yourself somewhere entirely new. consider us a friend and a travel companion, and a tether to your trusty whitman community as you go through life’s ups and downs.
so buckle up, pack your cooler with your designated assortment of backseat snacks, and peruse through the pages that outline just what is so wonderful, and often onerous, about a long trip in the car. we don’t need to say it, but we will: it’s not about the destination, it’s about the journey.
wish us luck on the journey of life. we’ll miss you all.
signing off,
megan & joshua
Table Of Contents
I've Never Been to Yellowstone
Aj Johnson
M/other
Chloe Williams
Birds fly past my window
Calen Romig
Untitled
Jackson Schroeder
Silver Thistle
Calen Romig
Oxbow II
Joshua Cox
Seattle Pinball Museum
Two & a Half Trips
H-O-T-T-O-G-O
Zoe Perkins
centerfold
Alexia Frederick
Road trip with a long-necked man
Anna McCready
Splat
Coco Leusner
Tones-Trip! A Testostertone Roadtrip Medley
Moss White
far to go
Megan Wick
Road Trippin'
Kapuananialohikalani Barnes
The Last Trip
Carmel Stephan
I've Never Been to Yellowstone
I kick the back of my dad’s headrest,
once, twice
before he tells me to
stop.
I kick it again.
mom’s in the gas station bathroom,
sick
“of us?”
my dad keeps his eyes on the road.
“probably.”
I keep kicking
until he turns around to
look at me.
“if mom and all of us were drowning,
who would you save?”
he looks away.
“your mom’s a good swimmer.”
Aj Johnson
that’s not good enough.
“but if she couldn’t swim.
you have to choose.”
my dad replies, as he always does,
“I can always have more kids.”
I peel a scab on my arm.
a mosquito bite that
I should’ve stopped picking at.
“do you love mom more than us?”
“of course.”
my sister flips through her book,
and my little brother starts to fuss
in his carseat;
I pinch him until he screams
and nobody stops me.
M/other
Chloe Williams
My grandmother schedules my driving lessons, and my first instructor was an old
woman with a rusted gum tin in her purse.
I think I was the most inexperienced beginning-driver she ever taught. I drove over curbs. My breaks would force us forward, and she would sit muttering about her chiropractor.
During the lesson, the woman turned to me. Her pupils were magnified by coke-bottle glass.
“What did your grandmother do to have her grandkids in her life? Mine don’t call.”
Driving Lesson Number One: Humans hide their pains with white teeth. We pray to politeness and sit wincing. Later, she asked me the question again.
“Their mother doesn’t like me, so we live separate lives.” We were flashing our teeth.
I learned driving lessons from this woman, having estranged from my mother eight months ago. There were stories of generational misalignment in her folded hands— of a daughter sneaking out. A mother worrying sick, dwindling at work, unable to pay the bills. Early mornings yelling. Glass breaking. Two people who signed up for a hundred years on this strange ground, and found each other.
“Sometimes things just don’t work out.”
Sometimes the bonds start burning. “How long can I hold on?”
My mom dreamed of road-tripping to Aruba. Will she teach their driving lessons?
In another life my mom and I are wrinkled and holding hands on a park bench. She carried me in, and I will carry her out.
A reciprocal cradling.
A fragile love.
Birds fly past my window
Calen Romig
Birds fly past my window
On the interstate
And I pity their strong heartbeats
Through the trembling glass
Because they do not know what I have done
And they do not need to care
And yet they are still alive and fighting
When I was little
I thought I was a bird
A swallow, a hawk, a crane
I didn’t know there was a hierarchy
There, too
No one bothered to tell me
But I suppose that the
Dead crows hanging from
The shed, shot for sport,
Should have been my first clue
And open the window, for a moment
Reach a hand out
So that the birds might see me
And I pray
To someone
Or something
Other than another sort of deity
That didn’t abandon me
When I needed something to believe in
I pray that these birds
Make it home
In time for spring
Untitled
Jackson Schroeder
Earlier today, my buddy Liam- he’s from Boston- was telling us about a time he was doing a hundred miles per hour on the highway back home. He was like “I was doing a hunnid on da highway,” and I went “Hold on, Massachusetts is like, tiny. How can you even get up to a hundred without running into something? Aren’t you like, out of the state, by the time you hit 100 miles per hour?
Let’s say you’re parked at Boston Commons Park. And you wanna hit 100. You aim the car west, cause otherwise you’d drive into the ocean, and you floor it. You get to about 20 miles per hour, you’re moving through the city. Around 50, you’re in the suburbs. At 60, you’re in the woods. Then you get on I-90 and you’re going 90, but you can see Albany, New York. It’s right there. You can’t get up to 100 in Massachusetts.
The East Coast is just too dense. Like, imagine you’re in the car. On the East Coast. And there’s just shit everywhere. Tall buildings, cars, traffic *honk honk,* pedestrians, crosswalks, chicanes, curbs, stop signs, red lights, strollers! And you can’t go fast through any of it! It’s every God-loving red-blooded Bible-thumping home-owning empty bed truck-driving trailer-towing western American's worst nightmare! Not being able to speed through a community. I wanna get where I’m going, dag nabbit. I want a big open road, no speed limit, and a big old parking lot when I get there! I don’t even need there to be a “there,” I’ll just take a big ol’ parking lot! That’s America right there! A parking lot. A parking lot so big it replaces the business it was providing parking for.
Silver Thistle
Calen Romig
I used to hate the road.
Driving scared me,
I would come home each day
With knuckles as white
As Silver Thistle.
When you take the same road every day,
The only road,
You start to see
Daffodils growing by the ditch,
Vines trailing up a tree,
A cat on a crooked barn roof.
It’s the manifestation of Her,
Of Mother Earth.
Now, the time is orange, asphalt, skunk,
Pine, wood smoke, the river.
The breeze dancing on my fingers
Out the window, branches scraping off the paint.
Storm drains full of apple blossoms,
New buds of oak,
Just learning how to be soft green.
Lightning.
The lowing of cows.
Dogs shrieking,
A coyote, which screams back.
Thunder.
Summer nights bring
Laughter, twinkle lights
—blurred into shooting stars—
Folk music—Swallows—
Both musicians,
With the sweetest songs you’ve ever heard.
Winter drives bring
Bonfires,
Wind on winding hills,
That time I slid across the ice,
Reflections on the dew—both full of color, red—
The most beautiful sunsets you’ve ever seen.
And everything in between.
On the road.
And while I was distracted,
The thistle bloomed.
Oxbow II
Joshua Cox
Water,
this strange and Earth-covering swill,
this ubiquitous liquid created
from the very stuff of our universe –
The flow of water is just too strong.
So it happens that I become
separated from you; and
I become stagnant.
You remain the multitude, the populist, the everyone.
You remain this always changing, always renewing thing.
It happens that
I renew with you,
until it happens that you
finally break free of me.
I am the weakest chain link,
the kink in the garden hose,
the biggest resistor in the series.
It happens just like it's supposed to, that I finally still, and let you flow by.
It happens every time, for billions of years.
Evaporation, condensation, rain and drain.
I don't stay here forever. I get lifted up, moved around, dropped again;
the sky plays with me like a claw machine,
until the prize gets claimed again, thank billions of years.
The someone new is always you.
A new many, a new sphere of thought, a new charisma,
always you.
My shift is slow, awkward, discrete. It leaves me right where I started. But
even slow changes are changes, and I don't mind them. I have billions of years.
Seattle Pinball Museum
Two & a Half Trips
H-O-T-T-O-G-O
Zoe Perkins
The trunk shut with a sharp click that rang out across the empty expanse atop the old parking garage like a death knell.
Silence hung in the air for a single, delicious moment before my companion broke it. “This is so exciting!” She cried, practically bouncing in place while she waited for me to finish fiddling with the trunk lock. “Can I be on aux? Pleeeease?”
I grunted vaguely in her direction as I made my way to the driver’s side door. She took that as permission, clapping her hands like a child receiving a particularly exciting birthday gift. Gracefully swinging herself into the passenger seat, she didn’t even bother to buckle her seat belt before extracting a hot pink cassette tape auxiliary adapter from… somewhere. As I slowly buckled myself in and checked the position of the mirrors, she began to whine, “Come on, come on, come on!”
Finally satisfied, I turned the car on, and she scrambled to set the pink contraption to rights. “I made a playlist just for this trip!” She exclaimed in her gratingly bubbly way, “I wanted to make sure everything was perfect.”
Pulling out of the parking space we’d just occupied, I half-listened to her dithering, navigating the old junker out of the garage and onto the open road. “I put everything on here, How I’d Kill, Bang Bang Bang Bang, Burial Ground. Like, everything. I wanted to set the mood, you know?” Her pause went on long enough that I figured she was looking for an actual response, so I grunted again. “Exactly, I mean…”
I tuned her out as the first song began to play. There wasn’t much traffic heading out into the desert at three in the morning, so I probably could have maintained adequate focus while listening, but I took great pleasure in ignoring my passenger.
Making distant note of each song as it came on. Dead To Me, Ain’t No Rest for the Wicked, and Kill of the Night passed by without much more fanfare than my partner’s pitchy sing-along. When the next song started with a cheerful countoff, however, she squealed loudly and cranked the volume up. Recognizing the song but confused as to how it fit the theme, I turned to her and silently raised an eyebrow. Unrepentant, she rolled her eyes and proclaimed, “If I’m making a road trip playlist, HOT TO GO! is going to be on it, no exceptions.” Smirking, I turned my eyes back to the road.
If muffled banging was suddenly coming from the trunk, we acted none the wiser, as the sound was surely drowned out by Chappell Roan’s excellent singing. Yes, I thought to myself, this will be a road trip to remember.
Centerfold
Alexia Frederick
There is a small vintage shop in Seattle. Tucked away behind wooden panes on a street I cannot and will not name. My sister and I sought cover from the burgeoning clouds, the constant cover of their impending letdown driving us up and down the sidewalks of the city streets. Fingers still salty from brushing them down the backs of anemone advertised as an animal made to be poked and prodded (what is the point of living if you are not touched?) by a child’s grubby fingers. My fingers—slender and bony, knuckles jutting out like I’m looking for a fight, maybe one day I’ll make good on my body’s promise. The backs of those hands brush down the outer lining of brown fur coats, I would be a different woman than I am now if I thought it would be justice to don one and act as if it fit me. I have never been able to keep my hands to myself, greeting every tangible thing as if we have a history that I seek to make, caressing shot glasses in swap marts even as a child, touch, I think is the answer to most questions. It would do me no good to have sticky fingers, I prefer to leave an impression on every bit of space I take up. But still—these hands reach out again, in this small vintage shop, gripping the plastic sheeting of Ms. July 2004, Playboy’s hottest flavor of the month. My month. It is an affront to the calendar perhaps, to try and stake claim on a month, but this one is mine. At least to me. And so, I make a deal. A bit of memorabilia, I claim to want it to be, a commemoration of my first jaunt in Seattle, a woman or two to take home with me, my sister taking hold of Ms. November 1996, her woman, her month. She decides we must choose women based on a birthday, and I am saddled with a rather underwhelming woman. Back then, the only thing I wanted to buy was sex appeal. And so, I also indulge myself with Ms. July 1986, posing provocatively with a riding crop. The rain has begun. Walking down the rickety wood staircase, it drips down onto her plastic sheeting, and, for a moment, she and I are both crying. We have both realized, sex, is not something women like me can buy. A few blocks down, a blue man sits on a blue bench and plays a blue tune.
Road trip with a long-necked man
Anna McCready
Splat!
Coco Leusner
Smack! Thunk! Tonk!
Bugs hit the windshield,
Meeting a quick and explosive demise
As they splatter guts over the glass.
Kssh! Swish! Fwoop!
Soapy suds spray the windshield,
And the wipers swipe at the bugs
As their corpses smear away.
Plunk! Bap! Thwap!
Bugs pile up on the windshield,
And splotches of gunk block my view
As the sun cooks their carcasses.
Krrt! Clunk! Eek!
The windshield wipers are stuck,
And more bugs burst on the glass
As the road ahead is obscured by goop.
Ugh! Ew! Blegh!
Bugs fly in my face and mouth,
Sticking to my forehead and cheeks
As I lean my head out the window.
Skrrt! Shwoop! Vrrm!
The car whips around as I floor it,
And as I drive away from the bug-ridden road,
I realize that road trips involve more bugs than I thought.
Tones-Trip!
A Testostertone
Roadtrip Medley
Moss White
Side A.
1. Fast Car - Tracy Chapman
2. I own a car - Ninja Sex Party
3. Baby Driver/Drive My Car - Simon and Garfunkel
& The Beatles
4. Movin’ Right Along - The Muppets
5. Life is a Highway/Route 66 - Rascal Flatts &
Chuck Berry
Side B.
1. 500 miles - The Proclaimers
2. I love it - Icona Pop (feat. Charli XCX)
3. Just What I Needed - The Cars
4. On the Road Again - Willlie Nelson
5. Speed Drive - Charli XCX
6. Smooth Criminal - Michael Jackson
Far To Go
Megan Wick
the first time i drove alone,
my mother tracked me on her
phone all the way
to whole foods and back.
looking in the tiny rear view camera,
celery and carrots in the passenger seat,
i backed up slowly to not mar
my mother’s minivan.
my hands held the steering wheel—
so tight they were both white and red—
as i merged on the highway.
afterwards, nothing could stop me.
i lapped the country like i was
in a race car and going for gold.
i kept hard-boiled eggs and
pb&js in a cooler in the
backseat, reaching for them
as i kept one hand on the wheel
and looked away from the road.
mostly, i slept on any land i could find—
a mechanic in arkansas offered his backyard as a spot.
i said no, and continued west.
i took my crappy sedan and thumped
down dirt roads in wyoming,
sleeping by the river and spitting out
mosquitoes.
i will continue to roam,
to put my back seats down
and curl up in the trunk in a
walmart parking lot.
i will ride off into the sunset
and look behind only to
reach for the cooler
Road Trippin'
Kapuananialohikalani Barnesor
The Last Trip
Carmel Stephan
From the chameleon pigment of our thick moon faces
To our hard, rounded body,
You and I are branches of the same cactus.
The last time we made the long trip together from one
desert to another,
We drove to the top of a dusty hill, sat in the wind and
looked down at the bleached roofs
Of your dry disparate destination.
You weren’t going to cry that day, but your sadness
was with us
So I thought it best to store my tears in the aquifer
deep in our body,
Because what help would’ve it been to you?
I left you the next day alone with him and in a new life.
You said you’d be back sometime in October.
That night I cried alone as I stared at our oasis
And my tears, angry and frustrated at being young missed
you so much.
Had I not run out of water
I would’ve cried a whole river just to find a way to reach
you.
You and I are a saguaro’s limbs,
And my throat is too dry for these marshy words
But I came back to our desert with a severed body,
And while bleeding crimson below the eclipsed moon,
I felt all too much the comfortless weight of still being
young but no longer being a child.
quarterlife would like to thank the Associated
Students of Whitman College (ASWC) for their
financial support, without which the production of
this magazine would not be possible.
Our utmost gratitude goes to the Whitman Print Shop
and to our advisor, Professor Gaurav Majumdar.
A special thanks to our staff artists who produce
wonderful art without credit to individual pieces.
All work featured in quarterlife magazine or on the
website is displayed by express permission of the author or
artist, who holds all relevant copyrights to her or his
work. Don’t steal their stuff.
Those who make all of this
possible
quarterlife