Things Get Better
Winning Entry by Shay Rose
I'm sitting here, waiting for my PhD thesis to print.
What a thing of complete retrospection to be doing on a Monday night. I will never live up to the idea of Scientist, because the left side of my brain scratches and spins against the rules and regulations of an experiment. The creativity to create the technique, the meticulous thought of hypothesis--these are left unacknowledged in my acknowledgements section.
I sit and I wait for the printer to do its one job.
The stairs in this building are designed to look like DNA as they wind upwards.
The act of printing is going to be the only action in this...poem. Essay. Rant. Whistling into the wind.
At the end of a PhD, there is only endings. Oh, you know you're about to move to Seattle to work your dream job as a cancer researcher. You know you'll be close to friends and family again. You can smell the campfire that you'll build in late September, and the pine warm in the sun. You remember all this future yearning? Yet, there is the ending, ending, ending, thunderous in the background veins, pumping toward the end, surging towards the shoal, mixing all the metaphors.
Galway will be the end of me. And, I suppose, that as an American I will never be more Irish than experiencing the act of leaving Ireland, and of yearning for her shores months and years from now. The diaspora was real, and I am a continuation of it four generations after my grandparents. Great-great. How many years pass before you forget the name of your childhood? How many years before pints are not a drawback to my thesis, to this ponderous study period, when I researched a protein called ZC3H14?
The printer is still printing, and I am still yearning.
A monstera plant has been moved to the second floor. Beata, the building manager, loves plants, and now the whole building is bursting with greenery. She started planting after the lockdown, when she was brining life back to the empty hallways. There were whole days where she planted and repotted her cuttings. Spider plants, snake plants, fly traps placed cleverly near the Drosophila lab. Can you imaging making the world so much better, so consistently, and in the face of disapproval of the budget holders? I suspect my budget holders have never approved.
Five years in a lab, with the twirling learning of nucleic acids, and all I can say for certain is this: ZC3H14 is phosphorylated by ATM after DNA damage occurs. It is a substrate, in this substrate-driven world. The proteins, they pass messages like students in grade school, hand-to-hand, spreading word like gossip, saying hey! Something here is broken! The good ones ask to send aid, the bad, they propagate negativity, crowding the one who is laying in a puddle of her own tears.
I am afraid that clichés exist only to the young. I want the PhD to become so common that it can become cliché, yet I don't want my degree to become obsolete. How can everyone not want to learn, their whole life? How can that not be the goal?
The printer printed the first copy. I want three--one for each examiner, and one for me to reference when in my Viva.
I know well that my worst writing habit is a lack of action. I am a poet, but not a story teller. Have you made it this far? How much further are you willing to go? I am only thirty minutes into waiting for the printer, only thirty minutes into writing. How much random shit can I get onto the paper in the meantime? Isn't that the joy in life? Or is it the job? Have I made it five years into my PhD? Have I passed the hurdles enough to come to the next ones?
Oh. My sister wrote a short story that is better than any I have read. Think Jonathan Seagull, but in magical human terms rather than philosophical seagull. The story is called "Pushing the Boulder," and its about growing up pushing a rock, being proud to push the bigger rock when its your turn, learning to push a squared rather than rounded boulder, pushing it and becoming stronger the character's whole life, becoming burnt out when people expect you to do it and no longer offer praise. Of course its a metaphor, and on explanation the metaphor is obvious to me, printing out my PhD thesis. Stop pushing the boulder just because you can; find fulfilment in walking away from the boulder; don't be dependent on 'good jobs' from others caught up in the pain of their own lives. But, when reading this story, this clear meaning is somehow distilled and clear yet not directly allegorical. There's a better word--not directly preachy. It is an allegory, in the same way that Plato's Allegory of the Cave is allegory.
I think, because I asked earlier what the point is without continuous learning, I think that both my boulder and my fear is a life without learning. What if my PhD has been so specific that it has dug me deeper into the cave, rather than turning my head to my right? What if, when I see my friends, they're all in chains, and the call of the wild from behind me is calling in the clear light of day?
What do I want?
Do I want Knowledge, or do I want to be Kind?
Because, I think above all, I want to be kind, I want to be kind, I want to be kind. And I want my thesis to print, without becoming bogged in retrospection. And I want action to lift me forward into my life. And I want to be kind, not just to others (that's easy), but to myself, with my thoughts and my insecurities and my five-pound theses that I will soon put behind me in the past and not read again for ten years.
The printer has a red line developing on the bottom of every page.
The trees outside are swaying in a strong wind, and the clouds are fast.
I turn towards poetry, towards writing, towards teaching, towards learning guitar, as solace. People can't understand the draw to art from the scientist, but its only the past two hundred years that they've been separate--the word 'scientist' was coined in the 1800s in juxtaposition to the word 'artist.' Before that, scientists were called 'natural philosophers,' and they were all polymaths, studying art and anatomy, biology and poetry. Think Da Vinci. Sure, they were mostly white men who had servants and free-time, but they were never shoving themselves into a corner of thought. Its still called a doctor of philosophy, philosophiae doctor in Latin, and I'm sure we can imagine a world where the true sciences were the sciences of thought.
I gear away from action, towards the philosophy that my doctorate is truly in.
And still, the printer prints; the ink is warm and I can smell it where I sit.
What a thing of complete retrospection to be doing on a Monday night. I will never live up to the idea of Scientist, because the left side of my brain scratches and spins against the rules and regulations of an experiment. The creativity to create the technique, the meticulous thought of hypothesis--these are left unacknowledged in my acknowledgements section.
I sit and I wait for the printer to do its one job.
The stairs in this building are designed to look like DNA as they wind upwards.
The act of printing is going to be the only action in this...poem. Essay. Rant. Whistling into the wind.
At the end of a PhD, there is only endings. Oh, you know you're about to move to Seattle to work your dream job as a cancer researcher. You know you'll be close to friends and family again. You can smell the campfire that you'll build in late September, and the pine warm in the sun. You remember all this future yearning? Yet, there is the ending, ending, ending, thunderous in the background veins, pumping toward the end, surging towards the shoal, mixing all the metaphors.
Galway will be the end of me. And, I suppose, that as an American I will never be more Irish than experiencing the act of leaving Ireland, and of yearning for her shores months and years from now. The diaspora was real, and I am a continuation of it four generations after my grandparents. Great-great. How many years pass before you forget the name of your childhood? How many years before pints are not a drawback to my thesis, to this ponderous study period, when I researched a protein called ZC3H14?
The printer is still printing, and I am still yearning.
A monstera plant has been moved to the second floor. Beata, the building manager, loves plants, and now the whole building is bursting with greenery. She started planting after the lockdown, when she was brining life back to the empty hallways. There were whole days where she planted and repotted her cuttings. Spider plants, snake plants, fly traps placed cleverly near the Drosophila lab. Can you imaging making the world so much better, so consistently, and in the face of disapproval of the budget holders? I suspect my budget holders have never approved.
Five years in a lab, with the twirling learning of nucleic acids, and all I can say for certain is this: ZC3H14 is phosphorylated by ATM after DNA damage occurs. It is a substrate, in this substrate-driven world. The proteins, they pass messages like students in grade school, hand-to-hand, spreading word like gossip, saying hey! Something here is broken! The good ones ask to send aid, the bad, they propagate negativity, crowding the one who is laying in a puddle of her own tears.
I am afraid that clichés exist only to the young. I want the PhD to become so common that it can become cliché, yet I don't want my degree to become obsolete. How can everyone not want to learn, their whole life? How can that not be the goal?
The printer printed the first copy. I want three--one for each examiner, and one for me to reference when in my Viva.
I know well that my worst writing habit is a lack of action. I am a poet, but not a story teller. Have you made it this far? How much further are you willing to go? I am only thirty minutes into waiting for the printer, only thirty minutes into writing. How much random shit can I get onto the paper in the meantime? Isn't that the joy in life? Or is it the job? Have I made it five years into my PhD? Have I passed the hurdles enough to come to the next ones?
Oh. My sister wrote a short story that is better than any I have read. Think Jonathan Seagull, but in magical human terms rather than philosophical seagull. The story is called "Pushing the Boulder," and its about growing up pushing a rock, being proud to push the bigger rock when its your turn, learning to push a squared rather than rounded boulder, pushing it and becoming stronger the character's whole life, becoming burnt out when people expect you to do it and no longer offer praise. Of course its a metaphor, and on explanation the metaphor is obvious to me, printing out my PhD thesis. Stop pushing the boulder just because you can; find fulfilment in walking away from the boulder; don't be dependent on 'good jobs' from others caught up in the pain of their own lives. But, when reading this story, this clear meaning is somehow distilled and clear yet not directly allegorical. There's a better word--not directly preachy. It is an allegory, in the same way that Plato's Allegory of the Cave is allegory.
I think, because I asked earlier what the point is without continuous learning, I think that both my boulder and my fear is a life without learning. What if my PhD has been so specific that it has dug me deeper into the cave, rather than turning my head to my right? What if, when I see my friends, they're all in chains, and the call of the wild from behind me is calling in the clear light of day?
What do I want?
Do I want Knowledge, or do I want to be Kind?
Because, I think above all, I want to be kind, I want to be kind, I want to be kind. And I want my thesis to print, without becoming bogged in retrospection. And I want action to lift me forward into my life. And I want to be kind, not just to others (that's easy), but to myself, with my thoughts and my insecurities and my five-pound theses that I will soon put behind me in the past and not read again for ten years.
The printer has a red line developing on the bottom of every page.
The trees outside are swaying in a strong wind, and the clouds are fast.
I turn towards poetry, towards writing, towards teaching, towards learning guitar, as solace. People can't understand the draw to art from the scientist, but its only the past two hundred years that they've been separate--the word 'scientist' was coined in the 1800s in juxtaposition to the word 'artist.' Before that, scientists were called 'natural philosophers,' and they were all polymaths, studying art and anatomy, biology and poetry. Think Da Vinci. Sure, they were mostly white men who had servants and free-time, but they were never shoving themselves into a corner of thought. Its still called a doctor of philosophy, philosophiae doctor in Latin, and I'm sure we can imagine a world where the true sciences were the sciences of thought.
I gear away from action, towards the philosophy that my doctorate is truly in.
And still, the printer prints; the ink is warm and I can smell it where I sit.
Featured Entry by Patsy's Poetry
Madman Immortal
"Things get better" Reverberating through my mind.
Echoes and rings of a false affirmation chiming from well wishing yet clueless parrots.
Swallow the pill, take a breath and understand.
"This year is my year" A fictitious mantra that fuels my engines, running on steam and a faltering will. With each coming day, a new terror, a new pain, a new agony to survive.
"The future is bright" A spurious fantasy to encourage my incessant trudge to move mountains. Ignoring the fallacy that the future will never be my present, the future remains as a slice of optimistic pie that will long go cold and rotten before I take a bite.
I take compliment at idealist proclamations and hopeful thoughts,
I'll never allow my life in another person's prayers go ignored or unnoticed.
I just envy an understanding of my realist values.
In my bedside drawer lies two notes, both final messages from my closests.
Through blood, sweat and far too many tears, I held them close.
Those letters are now just paper, a reminder that I could change fate and rebuild our destiny, to keep them safe.
I am the last of our trio to stay steadfast, to never falter.
How can I? The Cornerstone, the one who held our heads above the water as the devil tried to drown us like helpless puppies trapped in a binbag.
How dare I show a sign of weakness, How dare I write a third and final note.
Is it Grand Design? Am I an image of Atlas? To carry the world on my shoulders for the good of others? Sacrifice my life to never die?
If I had made a decision, If I had ran the path before them? Would the worst have come to pass?
I've been robbed. The final God-Given right to any living creature to decide when I've had enough.
To be burdened with the eternal knowledge that through my suffering, by me holding onto the thin threads of our reality, I can keep them safe.
And if that morning comes when I can take a breath and step back into my own self, I would do it all again, in half a heartbeat I'd pick up the Earth once more.
Because one day, things may get better.
"Things get better" Reverberating through my mind.
Echoes and rings of a false affirmation chiming from well wishing yet clueless parrots.
Swallow the pill, take a breath and understand.
"This year is my year" A fictitious mantra that fuels my engines, running on steam and a faltering will. With each coming day, a new terror, a new pain, a new agony to survive.
"The future is bright" A spurious fantasy to encourage my incessant trudge to move mountains. Ignoring the fallacy that the future will never be my present, the future remains as a slice of optimistic pie that will long go cold and rotten before I take a bite.
I take compliment at idealist proclamations and hopeful thoughts,
I'll never allow my life in another person's prayers go ignored or unnoticed.
I just envy an understanding of my realist values.
In my bedside drawer lies two notes, both final messages from my closests.
Through blood, sweat and far too many tears, I held them close.
Those letters are now just paper, a reminder that I could change fate and rebuild our destiny, to keep them safe.
I am the last of our trio to stay steadfast, to never falter.
How can I? The Cornerstone, the one who held our heads above the water as the devil tried to drown us like helpless puppies trapped in a binbag.
How dare I show a sign of weakness, How dare I write a third and final note.
Is it Grand Design? Am I an image of Atlas? To carry the world on my shoulders for the good of others? Sacrifice my life to never die?
If I had made a decision, If I had ran the path before them? Would the worst have come to pass?
I've been robbed. The final God-Given right to any living creature to decide when I've had enough.
To be burdened with the eternal knowledge that through my suffering, by me holding onto the thin threads of our reality, I can keep them safe.
And if that morning comes when I can take a breath and step back into my own self, I would do it all again, in half a heartbeat I'd pick up the Earth once more.
Because one day, things may get better.
Featured Entry by Helena Hershey
The brown envelopes pile up on the table like a giant deck of cards nobody wants to play with. You'll get in trouble, they say; it's better to know, they say. Yeah, Yeah, I say. The letters are not going anywhere, are they? I'll open them when I do. Will things get better if I open them?
I veer towards the kettle instead, the old, dependable, limescaled kettle. The tea stains on the last clean mug on the kitchen shelf mark the hours of worry and misery, but it's the last one now. The dishes in the sink are piled high, stacked precariously, and ignored for weeks, just like the damn brown envelopes. It will get better once they are washed and back on the shelf, won't it? That's what they say: clean house, clear mind. I've tried it.
The shuffling marks on the dirty linoleum floor created a path between the makeshift bed on the sofa, the front door and the kitchen, a deeply settled daily routine no floor cleaner can wipe away. At least I can follow the shiny and smooth trail of despair to a way out of here and hope without hope that things will get better.
I veer towards the kettle instead, the old, dependable, limescaled kettle. The tea stains on the last clean mug on the kitchen shelf mark the hours of worry and misery, but it's the last one now. The dishes in the sink are piled high, stacked precariously, and ignored for weeks, just like the damn brown envelopes. It will get better once they are washed and back on the shelf, won't it? That's what they say: clean house, clear mind. I've tried it.
The shuffling marks on the dirty linoleum floor created a path between the makeshift bed on the sofa, the front door and the kitchen, a deeply settled daily routine no floor cleaner can wipe away. At least I can follow the shiny and smooth trail of despair to a way out of here and hope without hope that things will get better.
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