This week, the Nass takes a break from our melancholy. Cliché-be-damned, we delight in what we can.
Kaleidoscope of an Ending
“My perception of time is distinctly geometric: I trace the progression of years in counterclockwise circles that thicken like layers of pencil. I wish I could distinguish between them.”
Everything will be okay: Full Design
Pick up a physical copy around campus, or view the full design here!
Letter from the Editor
Dear dearest, There’s a schoolyard question that goes something like: “Would you rather know how you are going to die, or when?” The question is perverse, with both options becoming increasingly tortuous the longer you think. It’s easy to pretend that the question is hypothetical, ignoring how inevitable knowledge of both often is. For […]
Thoughts from my time sitting on the window sill of a castle in the Czech countryside
Is it better to not understand than to be misunderstood?
Because We Were Girls Together
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons, I have measured out my life with coffee spoons; I know the voices dying with a dying fall Beneath the music from a farther room. So how should I presume? (from The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock) Because We Were Girls Together (a golden shovel) […]
No machine
In lieu of goodbye I send a tiny house in the mail, flimsy porcelain talisman a weak barricade. Like Joni I become cellophane, no personal defenses, the wrapper on a pack of cigarettes, the dirt on the road of your espresso cup — in sand in bone you will learn to drink it. I let […]
Liquidation
“That could be anyone, I think. The beach, the cliffs, the moon, just something with a voice that sounds like Margaret. The ocean could have picked up her accent and dissolved it, carried what I know as Margaret—black hair, sports bra, raspy voice—and released its latent sound into the cold wind, back to me. A lure.”
Où sont les fleurs?
Distributing flowers at food banks is more than a frivolous act.
houston texas
after a letter about a friend houston is warm and smooth and deep and dark and red. It is the feeling of holding a mug in two hands, of wrapping my hands around a lover’s lower rib cage and knowing this is […]
Falling Back
A Nass writer takes in the changing of the season.
To Be Black Here
In the first weeks of the academic year, many Black Princeton students noticed that what little presence they expected from their demographic was even lower than they had imagined. Those students looked around and asked each other… “Where are all the Black people at?!” Their observations were accurate. The Black student population decreased from […]
When blood is nipped and ways be foul
“She stood there, shuddering in place. She shook from the cold, from the fear, from the pain. She shook for what she had lost — something she knew could not be put back. For she now understood that Fear was not something lodged in her chest like shrapnel, but rather something that was taken away.”
wash your hands
“I missed the opportunity to stay. And you missed the opportunity to ask me to stay. I am now in a foreign land. You actually have become fashionable.”