Brattle Street Review

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The Word

By Albina Lesi Detrow

The Body of Children,
caught on the lace of faith,
under the rubble,
Sun has no power, oxygen has been replaced,
Open wounds, blood on the sandals–
Ripped souls on mother’s hands,
And father’s faces slapped–departed,
Your mouth, filled with debri,
Your view, gray demolished, decomposed may be,
Your skin, forfeited, for the Body of the past,
Naked you wake up, you’re sacrificed, alive
Your sleep is under a constant berate,
Your dream is to be dead.
Amen.

A Window for Father’s Day

By Grace Jackson

Look, you said, letting slackened triceps laugh,
no muscle left. I wonder at it still—
the couches stacked away, your barely life
steadied that living room turned hospital.
Between syringe same drop and markered line
were minutes more than mortal. And behind
the flake of crystal brittle candle skin
was something sure, the how of laughter sound.
But when the hospice kit was trucked away,
how different. I shook the fitted sheet
and skin flakes pelleted to bone blind ground.
Only with bare arm weather nears that view—
the couches clear a frame for maple light,
your slack skin laughs, again I catch your mind.

Identity Crisis

By Kendra Hefner

My name is not Georgia, despite what this passport might have you believe. When they send you into witness protection, they give you a fake identity; it’s the one time in your life when having a fake ID is completely legal, but you don’t get to post about your wild underage adventures at the bar. Instead, you get to sit in a barely furnished apartment, which beats the shelter you lived in three weeks ago but still sucks compared to the comfortable condo you called home just a few months before that.


My name is not Lena, despite what this social security card might have you believe. Marrying into the Profaci family was supposed to be luxurious, particularly marrying the underboss. He had the kind of fortune that took the sting out of being disowned by your family. Everything started great, honestly. There was admiration, maybe even occasional hints at love, until Leo gave up a bit too much information after a fight with his wife. Combined with a sour relationship with the other wives and the sweet deal guaranteed by the feds, you wouldn’t turn them down. You couldn’t.


My name is not Destiny, despite what public record testimony might have you believe. You cried when Leo started to piece together that you were a rat. Before he figured it out, you moved into a women’s shelter, fearing he’d want to kill you. The issue with admiration over love: Leo was less likely to forgive and protect you for your mistakes, and you weren’t ready for a dirt nap. You were barely 20.


My name is not Rachel, despite what the new month-to-month lease might have you believe. Now, you sit alone in an apartment in rural Oregon, as far from Leo as the government could put you without leaving the mainland, repeating the fake life story they provided to protect you: “I’m from southern Minnesota or Florida or California or Maine, I moved here to go to school or for spring break or to see my family or to get out of the cold.”


You wouldn’t even believe your own government-fabricated story as you tell it to the mirror. You really were never cut out for acting. As you prepare to recite the story again, a knock comes through the door; expecting DoorDash, you throw the door open without looking. You notice his hands first. You knew those hands once; against your palms, in your hair, along your stomach, between your thighs. Those hands never knew Georgia, Lena, Destiny, or Rachel.


“Hi, Maria.”

Let Them Walk

By Steven Sax

It wasn’t what I expected. Nothing was as I expected. Anger, frustration, and conflict were valuable ingredients for a short story. But it wasn’t a short story. It was Harvard’s Commencement Day, 2024.


The wounds were still fresh. The acrimony, palpable. At one point, I worried if the incensed mob was on the verge of violence as they stormed the exits chanting “Let Them Walk” and holding signs and waving flags supporting Palestine, freedom of speech, and thirteen students who would not graduate from Harvard on a warm spring day in May 2024. I expected speeches and thought about the best way to hide a yawn, but that wasn’t necessary. No. I was unknowingly sitting in the middle of a cauldron, and a flame beneath it had been ignited.


The administration banned thirteen students from walking to accept their degrees the night before graduation. I didn’t know this until the “Let Them Walk” chant began. And I didn’t know if the punishment meted out was appropriate because I didn’t know details surrounding the reason for the banishment. Maybe they hurt someone, or perhaps it was an attempt to muzzle free speech, or any of a thousand scenarios in between. I didn’t know. I knew I would not be influenced by one side or the other without knowing the facts. I heard and saw the students’ side in their speeches and regalia accouterments. The administration was silent. The punishment had already been decided. The divisiveness, so prevalent in America, had infiltrated everything, even Harvard.


Mob mentality can be a dangerous thing. A three-word chant is an easy mantra to latch onto. Emotions ruled the moment. Hot tears choked speakers. What began as a small spark, a few people standing and walking out in protest, chanting “Let Them Walk,” quickly turned into a firestorm of what some estimated was a thousand students leaving in a loud mass exodus that drowned the speakers out and concerned other attendees because the chant was passionate, and the chant was loud. “Let Them Walk!”


Commencement Day began unsettled. I awoke at four in the morning, unable to sleep, thinking about the day and getting over the Charles to Cambridge from my overpriced graduation day Back Bay hotel. At 6:30 am, I Ubered over to the Museum of Natural History courtyard to break bread with my peers and organize for the innocuous parade over to the Coliseum for deposit into the transformed den at the base of the vaunted Widener Library steps that used to be Harvard Yard. There was a lot of sitting around and waiting. Rain was sporadically spitting on us. Songs were sung. I wondered if it was, ho, worth the trip, hum.


Then, student Shruthi Kumar, in her commencement speech, took a flame thrower and pointed it at Harvard’s administration. She called upon liberty, civil rights, and freedom of speech in an impassioned plea. “The students had spoken. The faculty had spoken. Harvard, do you hear us? HARVARD, DO YOU HEAR US?” The crowd erupted. It was moving. But I couldn’t let go of the irony of her speaking freely, publicly eviscerating the Harvard administration, while they sat behind her, stoically absorbing the flogging. But it was too late. The fire was out of control. After the next student, Robert Clinton, gave his equally eloquent speech, the undergraduate revolt began, and students rose from their seats, took out their signs and flags, and chanted, “Let Them Walk. Let Them Walk. Let Them Walk.” The protest quickly went viral, and at least hundreds, or maybe it was a thousand, angry graduates celebrated by peacefully, although vociferously, protesting their way out of Harvard Yard. I stayed in my seat.


They should have waited a few more minutes.


2021 Nobel Peace Prize recipient Maria Ressa gave an important speech.


Tom Hanks delivered the 2023 Commencement Address. I went back and watched it on YouTube. Hanks was funny, light, and engaging. The speech was equally adept at balancing big uncontroversial ideas, with not so subtly poking those hard at work to usurp democracy. It was just the right amount of humor and storytelling shaped by a prodigious and practiced Hollywood education. Veritas, he called for. But everything had changed in one short year. Maria Ressa had a much darker tale to tell.


Ressa was here on bail as she fought to stay out of jail in her Philippine homeland. Her alleged crime centered around exposing despots and corruption through journalism. She paid a dear price for this audacity. “You’re standing on the rubble of the world that was. Recognize it.” She railed against the unacknowledged danger of technology making conflicts, and the world, “faster, meaner, more polarized.” Ressa warned us, “The fascists are coming.” It was not a feel-good, the future is yours, go get ’em, sendoff.


You’re for free speech. I’m for free speech. We’re all for free speech. But what if someone is saying horrible things about you? Are you for their free speech? Or do you want to block them? What if you had the power to silence their voice and the hateful, disgusting, wrong things they said? Perhaps we’re all for the idea of free speech. But free speech is tricky because it is so binary. It locks us into an intransigent position of putting us in for ALL free speech ALL the time. And what if you are an ardent supporter of free speech, over there, across the street. Say whatever you want, over there. Just don’t say it here, in the Yard, on 5/23/24. Is Harvard a villain for asking? Will you publicly castigate Harvard for asking you to exercise your right of free speech someplace else for a little while? Can we all try a little harder to get along and not get sucked into the divisiveness that plagues our country? I don’t know. Of all the things I learned to graduate this was not one of them.


We left the Yard. The light rain turned into a savage, run-for-cover deluge. As I stood beneath a tent peering out into the wet, sloppy world, I wondered if the torrent was a symbolic baptismal cleansing, forgiving our past and starting fresh, or a foreboding warning of the storm to come.

And He Rests

By Ryan Vergara

From morning rise,
The son patters, shouts without warning,
Birthed in silver cradle, riotous child
Irrational, predictable, precocious,
In search of a fight,
An adventure,
A cliff and summit,
Inexhaustible spirit, fearing not plummet.
At vesper’s hour, he kneels for a moment
Supplicates for peace, words quickly spoken,
Then in a bunk
He hunkers
Hidden from moonlight.
Eyes closed, he apprehensively waits
For days end, and he rests.
In midnight robe, he rests.

Impatiently, he struggles onward
Without a compass to orient northward.
Companionless on winding, wavering trails,
The old faith, hope, dry and stale,
Holding to memory,
An idea,
A fancy and fate,
Human, buried beneath the weight.
From a folded page he pens a script,
His own destiny it contradicts,
Through a pane
Passing trains
Languish and whistle.
Comforted but year’s dissonant,
Snows roll forth and he rests.
Unassured, he rests.

Versed thoroughly in melody,
He sings loudly pealing harmony
Practiced voice from private corners
Displayed, history his to honor.
Dreams of home,
Pacifical,
A reason and rhyme,
His twilight for springtime.
Reticence the progenitor, now but ringing
In company of infallible hearting.
With word,
Silent surge,
The last peak in dawn.
Like kintsugi, form preserved –
A road untrod, and he rests.
At last, he rests.

Something is Wrong With Mama

By: Avery Hart

Something is wrong with mama
She looks different, sitting up there
She’s not supposed to be contained, all contained like that
She used to spill out everywhere
Her smile, her laughter, her quirks
All over the place.

Now the porcelain, fragile orb
Contains all that she is.
All that she was is gone… I think?
Or maybe it isn’t, maybe she’s here
right in my heart and the memories that haven’t yet
flitted away.

She wouldn’t like it up there, if she knew
She was never a fan of dust,
especially on the mantle.
Something is wrong with mama
And I still don’t know why