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The Wandering Albatross

January 23, 2025
Stella Kleinman

The strongest ocean current in the world is the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, coursing through the narrowest chokepoint around the White Continent. Average water flow is 4.77 billion cubic feet, over 600 times the volume of the Amazon River. With 40 foot waves and 50 mph winds, the Drake Passage from Argentina to Antarctica is a uniquely violent journey believed to have caused thousands of shipwrecks. I’m sitting by the window watching the world churn. The boat is pitching—skyrocketing up and plummeting down over wave after wave. If not for the gentle hum of the engine, I wouldn’t know we are moving forward. From the front observation deck, I can feel split seconds of weightlessness, where my throat becomes a vacuum and heart strands get caught between my teeth. Anyone with any sense is in their cabin, hiding from seasickness under ceilings, sheets, and eyelids. A smooth, dark silhouette fills the window, interrupting the vast expanse of otherwise empty sky. At first, I think it’s a spot in my vision– a hallucination from too many nights at sea. How could this stranger, this creature of solitude, find us here? Lifted by long, sleek wings, the massive bird glides across the air as if it’s a solid surface. With dark eyes narrowed ahead, it tilts back and forth on its axis to catch the harsh gusts. The sea falls to its knees at first brush with the bird’s wingtips, a kiss that stops at the lips, suspending itself in the air. Last night, Marten, an expedition leader and ornithologist, presented a PowerPoint about the wandering albatross. We sat on the floor like young children, watching him click through videos breaking down the bird’s flight patterns. The albatross flies in a unique style called dynamic soaring, which involves gracefully swooping through wave troughs on a cyclical path. Carving elegant lines through the sky, it can fly for a thousand miles without flapping its wings. Marten’s eyes glinted as he told us the birds spend the first five to six years of their lives without ever touching land. They can circumnavigate the globe in 46 days, sleeping with half their brain at a time. From behind the window, I watch the white-headed albatross swoop and fall and glide, tracing its flight path with my pointer finger. It is a being of wind and power, one of the elements rather than fauna. In one of my favorite poems, Samuel Coleridge’s lyrical ballad The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, a sailor shoots an innocent albatross for no apparent reason, cursing his voyage. The crew endures storms, spirits, and haunting mist as the dead bird hangs over the captain’s neck, a symbol of curse and punishment. The albatross’s mistreatment at human hands signifies the plight of the poet, violent acts against nature with catastrophic consequences, and individual sacrifice. Compulsory storytelling. The bird’s white head dips forward as it catches a gust and effortlessly outruns the ship along the air. My breath fogs up the window glass. Where are you going? Where have you been? What is it like to live surrounded by nothing but air and water, to fade into the horizon day after day? What do you miss? What can you call your own? The albatross answers with a glittering downward swoop. The first time I step on Antarctic land, I am so far away from home that my body is no longer my own. Blue ice crystals glow around my feet as far as I can see, hanging over themselves and creeping forward as time stands still. Every so often a chunk screeches and splashes into the churning ocean. Snowflakes bundle and roll, speckling the harsh slopes of jagged mountains. I picture a holy-handed giant taking a pocket knife to a block of obsidian, carving away sharp bits. Eating each slice of rock off the knife, one by one, then disappearing into the sky. I wade through water so clear and smooth I would try to mold it like clay if I didn’t know any better. I try to survey it all, but my gaze keeps snagging on rock piles and tumbling into snowbanks and slipping down the sides of icebergs into the silent ocean. I feel like I could melt into my feet, or catch a draft of wind and plummet upwards to the tips of the black mountains. I wonder if the sun still sets somewhere, if the streetlamps in my neighborhood still flicker, if the world is still spinning the same way, if I have ever been anywhere else, if I am still my mother’s daughter. If someone reached out and touched me right now, would their hand pass straight through me? I am stuck in time but nowhere in space, existing only elsewhere. I wonder if the wandering albatross leaves a piece of itself on every wind it catches, drawing lines around the globe. Ancient mythology refers to the albatross as the Prince of the Wave, a mystical spirit of lost sailors possessing healing powers and prophesizing divine fortune. By observing these birds, sailors adjusted their course to avoid harsh weather. To hurt an albatross, as demonstrated by Coleridge, was to unleash the wrath of the sea. When I was younger, I couldn’t fall asleep without first finding the North star out my window, or guessing where it was on cloudy nights. In a place where the sun does not set, what do you center your world around? What is it like to be as untethered and alone as the albatross, beak careening forward through empty space? On the seventh night, we leave the ship, hauling packs twice our size. Anthonie and Kai trek in heavy red coats, testing snow and whispering hastily in Dutch. Finally, they decide on a somewhat flat plot of snow as far as possible from seals and avalanche risks. They hand out shovels like goodie bags at a child’s birthday party, if candy and toys could protect from 20 mile per hour winds. Antarctic gusts are in the rare category of things you can only burrow under, never climb over or stand against. When it’s finally my turn with the shovel, I feel like I am digging my own grave. I lay down to mark the size hole I need, then hack into the snow. Fine powder scatters to the breeze every time the spade goes over my shoulder. I am cutting into the Earth’s southern crown, making room for myself in a place unlike anywhere I have ever been. Once I’ve dug a three-foot deep coffin, I gently arrange my two sleeping bags and tuck myself in facing the still-bright sky. Sharp gusts tumble over me, and I welcome the cool air as it buries itself in my lungs. As the temperature drops, snow crystals begin to freeze around me, molding an imprint of my body. In my mind, I am here to stay. I will crawl into this shoveled-out cove each night, watching the animals around me to know when it’s time to sleep. I will live off of mackerel icefish and Antarctic cod and melted snow. Each morning I will make it a little bit farther up the mountain and carve words into the rock, and then retreat. After a while, I will stop thinking about what I am writing. I could really do it. I lay on my back with my eyes open, breathing in the southern sky. A wispy cloud rolls down toward me, obscuring the mountaintop. Every so often, little gentoo penguins splash in and out of the water, always in groups—unlike the albatross, with its commanding wings and daunting spirit. For the first time since meeting it, I feel a dull ache for this mystical creature with no dwelling, this lonely flier. I pull my blankets tighter around me and sink into the earth’s embrace. I don’t know if I managed to sleep tonight, but I know I woke up. The crushing melody of Anthonie’s boots on the snow’s brittle surface invites me back to my mind. It’s four a.m., and we have a long passage to the next island. Once my eyes adjust to the light and I remember where and who I am, I grab a shovel from my neighbor and begin refilling my bedroom with snow. I pack it in and pat it gently, evening the surface so that there is no trace of my stay. I kneel silently atop my handiwork until my knees are soaked and it’s time to go. Back on the ship, I find my body in the same seat on the observation deck. The waves are gentler closer to the shore, and we are rolling side to side rather than pitching. I’m not sure how long I sit hugging my shins before I see it. Another albatross, beak open, dancing up and down along drafts. This time, I don’t question its solitary trajectory or spiritual meaning or how and why it can only chase or flee. I watch the polar breeze wrap itself around the bird’s wingtips and think about interlacing my fingers with my best friend. I watch the sea meet its feathered underbelly as it swoops downward and remember every time I fell asleep in the car as a child and my parents carried me to my bed, every leaf pile my brothers and I jumped into during the early Autumns of growing up, and every pendant a friend has fastened around my neck for me. I think of the way the spirit of the ocean protects the albatross, and let it glide out of my sight.

Most Recent

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A Table of Our Own

Lucy Kaplan
November 12, 2025

A Table of Our Own I arrange tea candles on the tablecloth, makeshift and patterned by stains that bleed into the florals. A relic of our parents’ generation, the textile is only thick enough to disguise the aged wood it envelopes when folded twice over itself. Tonight, it bares the weight of the six hours I spent cooking. We have first une salade niçoise served with lightly candied brussel sprouts. A crested hill of layered caprese follows, sliced baguette flowering its perimeter. Guests arrive in waves. Three are early and two are insultingly late, forgiven for the gossip they bring to the table. She told me he didn’t even wave when he saw her the morning after. Friends present gifts of crisp grapes, whimsical confections, bottles they pray aren’t too sweet. As we find our seats, I wonder: is this the dinner party of our parents’ generation or a reincarnation of our childhood birthday celebrations? It seems to me as if every young adult loves a dinner party. A gathering classy enough to warrant dressing with inspiration, but intimate enough to speak without reservation. Maybe it’s the breaking of bread, a practice reportedly powerful enough to have united the Democrats and the Federalists, the Wampanoag and the colonists. But just as those narratives are not simple truths, neither is the elation of our careful gatherings. Dining together can be as unpleasant as it is festive. Generations of meals have been the source of unassailable tension: reunions made unpalatable by parental bickering and younger brothers smacking their gravy-smeared lips. In attendance are the people we love—though perhaps do not always like. Our dinner parties, however, are distinct in their autonomy of choice. In childhood, parents managed the grunt work, pitching fairy-lit tents in the living room, ordering pizza to satiate the crowd. Now, we find ourselves left to our own devices. We create countless lists in the name of adulthood. Dinner 07.13 Invite list: Yeses, nos, maybe-sos. A back-up list if someone falls through; empty chairs thrill no one. Invitation draft: Dearest friends, you have been chosen. Dress appropriately. Menu: Parmesan crisped yams, miso butter gnocchi, flank steak. Made to impress. Shopping list: Chicory root, sardines, brie. The cheapest available. Setting the table, I think about generations past. Decades prior, someone else a few years older must have stood in this kitchen—a local career politician or an established dermatologist. He too was expecting visitors, but with not nearly as much anticipation. He knew the procedure by rote—when to serve the second course, when to slyly refill his neighbor’s wine glass. He could identify a false laugh and ease a lapse in conversation without skipping a beat. The guests were familiar, practiced in leaving their shoes at the front door. I can almost place my childhood self into the scene: sunken into the corner chair, across from the man in the ugly scarf. Last time I saw you, I could have fit you in my briefcase! Why do middle-aged academics delight in making middle-schoolers feel small? Our guests are poles apart, far closer in affect to the children our parents once invited to summer movie nights on our behalf. They stumble at the formalities. Someone might forego the formal dress code for a sloppy pair of basketball shorts; we will say nothing but stare as he meticulously covers his lap with a napkin. Dock one point. Someone else might bring a new boyfriend with no notice; we will feign placidity as he pulls an extra seat between a pair of best friends longing to catch up. Dock two points, maybe even three. But what we lack in finesse we make up for in forgiveness. Friendship is a delicate thing—we know some faux pas are best granted a silent pardon. Warm light washes down our nerves as the feast begins. Some go all-in, stacking their plates with mismatched goodies brought by unpracticed guests. (Was this supposed to be a potluck? No one quite got the story straight.) Others graze, arms extending clumsily across the table to pluck an olive, a “pardon my reach” carefully uttered. We take an unspoken pride in our maturity, remembering our pleases and thank-yous so far from the oversight of our elders. The night then goes one of two ways. The clinking of cutlery might crescendo at half-past nine. Replacing it will be an awkwardness which we bear with guilt. If the spark of enlightened conversation never catches fire, we are left with a table full of friends-turned-family-turned-strangers. We might have worn the badges we found in our parents’ closets with too much assurance. Cause of death: an indulgence of formality and poverty of wine. One can only pretend that they don’t want to talk about sex for so long. Tonight, however, we evade a tragedy of the commons. The now unlit candles go unnoticed, puttering out one after the other; as the tablecloth dims, our momentum only swells. Half of the crowd is debating the merits of Machiavelli, the other half the audacity of a kid we knew from high school. The catch is, it doesn’t really matter. Everyone is full and no one wants to leave. Someone reveals an expensively curated box of chocolates from a rumpled tote they had carefully hidden beneath the table. We pass it counterclockwise, excitedly snagging the sweet recommended by the person before. I bite down and my mouth bursts with nostalgia. A buttery shortbread, laced with silky caramel and enrobed in milk chocolate—a Twix bar by another name. I watch my friends bite into rebranded versions of their own childhood favorites: Snickers, Milky Way, Almond Joy. Are they too thinking about Halloweens past? How we zealously provoked territorial disputes over the mounds of sweets poured onto my living room floor. It feels no different than how we tonight bicker over who deserves the final drops from the bottle. Across the table sits the girl who watched me blow out purple candles on my eleventh birthday. She wore different glasses back then, thicker frames that obscured the brilliant eyes that now lock with mine. I watch her fingers toy with the stem of a glass as she chews her grown-up Kit Kat. To love her is to peer through a foggy window. If I squint, I can piece together the blurry outlines of our past: the pizza parties, the Halloween spats, the movie nights we spent wrapped in blankets on the porch. Then a new image clears—decades of future soirees coming into view. I am elated to see that the future unfolds not at our parents’ tables, but around a table of our own.

Zia Felicetta: A Portrait

Luca Raffa
November 12, 2025

I parked in her empty driveway and approached the proud house with stubborn orange bricks. The black railing guiding me to the door ailed with rust, though the white paint on the house was fresh as the snow. It was dim, the sun obscured in this dull December sadness, and the icy lake winds caused the lampposts to shiver with doubt. I rang the little doorbell and peered around. The short bungalows huddled close together to keep warm from the snow. Darkness was beginning to blanket the neighborhood. Suddenly, a faint light flickered on from inside. I peeked through the doorframe glass with a smile and watched as a figure hurried towards me. The door opened. Zia Felicetta greeted me with a tender hug and the touch of her delicate cheeks on each of mine. Her demeanor was elusive, her faint smile always uncertain below her serious eyes––sad, dry eyes which caved into her head and cast shadows. The wrinkles on her cheeks and on her forehead revealed the scars of time, though her small diamond earrings restored some dormant youth still hiding within her. Black strands like needles freckled the white hay that crowned her head. Zia waddled towards the kitchen, and her plump body disappeared into the dark. A nativity scene of plastic figurines emerged in the corner. Zia had been a widow for over forty years and was the last and only surviving of five loving sisters and their husbands. Across the walls, these ghosts gawked at me, black and white, through the frames: Zia’s husband holding her tight in her wedding dress; her sisters––Carmella, Roquina, Peppinella, and Maria, my grandmother––through the years at her wedding, and at their weddings, and at their children’s weddings; her nephews and nieces who died as infants; the only surviving photograph of her mother Vittoria, the woman she watched die as an infant, wearing a dirt-caked shirt, a shoddy headscarf, and a faint smile; her father as a young man with a black coppola hat and a black mustache; and the same man with a bushy grey mustache and slicked back hair. Hovering higher on the walls were images of saints, Gesù, crucifixes, and a collection of memoriam cards she gathered over years from funerals. She even framed a photograph of Montoleone di Puglia, the town she left behind: a cluster of orange shingles, brown bricks, and white concrete sleeping on a hill and surrounded by green planes and wildflowers. Zia returned holding a ready plate of cookies wrapped in tinfoil, the wrinkly fat drooping from her arms from the weight of the plate. She invited me to sit at the table and offered me an espresso which I knew I could never refuse. She vanished again into the kitchen, and in the silence of her home I could hear the clanking as she fed the cafetera the espresso grinds and placed it on the stove. When she returned to the dining room table, she unwrapped the cold cookies. She enjoyed making food and freezing it for an infrequent visitor. She put a hard candy into her mouth that reeked of licorice, anise, and fennel and began to suck. The hot espresso breathed life into us and kindled conversation. She was simple, of little words, knowing only how to talk about her food, her family, her garden, or God. She had no preferences, few opinions. She paused a lot and would watch me. She was a patient woman, watching intently and listening as I sipped on my bitter espresso. When she began to speak, the movement of her firm jaw and soft lips came together in a symphony of schwas. Soon, it was time for me to depart and return Zia to her solitude. Her frail pleas asking me to stay surrendered to my guilty resoluteness, and she disappeared into the basement for one last parting gift. As I waited for her before the door, I glanced at the frames on the wall again. I started to wonder if Zia ever talked to these ghosts––after all, she was a spiritual woman. Zia emerged from the staircase and brought me more cookies in tinfoil and a panettone to remember her by. She embraced me and kissed each cheek, speaking to me I love you in her unsteady English. I said goodbye. She waited alone in the frame of the door. The cold followed her inside. I thought about how she might become a photograph someday, and my heart sank.

A Few Impressions

Juliet Corwin
November 6, 2025

– CT, left wrist – I drove to Connecticut to get my first tattoo. The studio, smaller than its parking lot, was tucked away in a gray fold of Stamford. It had been a drizzly morning, and clouds sighed as I walked to the entrance. Timidly, I leaned against the door so it wouldn’t slam shut and scanned the space for a pair of eyes to meet mine. It was my first time inside a tattoo studio, and it showed. Two feet in front of me, a woman lay on her side in a shirt, underwear, and Doc Martens. She chatted with her artist, who hunched over a spread of ink covering the woman’s thigh. The walls were covered in overlapping sketches and prints. Sitting by the only other station in the room was a large man with a permanent frown and huge biceps. I gathered that he would be my artist, and moved toward him. His frown deepened when he saw me. He spoke in short sentences, his voice low and quiet. I showed him the tattoo I wanted and presented my wrist to draw on. Opting for a purple marker, he splashed the design onto my skin way too big. I asked if he could make it any smaller. His eyebrows lifted, but he rubbed away the first drawing and drew it again, a bit smaller. I looked at him pleadingly, too nervous to ask him to change it again. He took the hint and resized it once more. It was tiny, barely a quarter of an inch in height and width. I smiled, and his mouth flattened into a straight line. He prepped the ink and the tattoo gun, and didn’t wear gloves. It took about five minutes to ink the design using the thinnest needle he had. He wiped the excess ink and a few drops of blood from my skin, and I could see the little lines now adorning my wrist. It was perfect. He explained to me that he typically asked clients to pay upwards of $100, but for this he wouldn’t charge more than $40. I paid him $60 and thanked him again. He nodded and pressed one of his sketches into my hand. I had been admiring it while the needle dragged along my skin. It was full of color and soft lines, a warm swirl of tones. As I stepped out the door, I saw that the woman getting the leg tattoo was now eating takeout with her artist. I walked back to my car, watching the clouds inch lower. My wrist stung as I spun the steering wheel home. – MA, right ear – For one of my later tattoos, I filled out an online appointment form for a studio in my hometown in Western Massachusetts. I got matched with an artist named Ian. The space was big, with a lower level for tattoos and an upper level for piercings. There was a waiting area with high ceilings and tons of plants. Ian emerged from his studio and greeted me with a warmth I trusted. He was bald with a long, white beard and eyes that crinkled when he spoke. Ushering me into his studio, he told me to hop up on the table and rolled his chair over to join me. The design I had chosen was simple, and I wanted it to sit behind my ear. He used a disposable razor to shave the edge of my hairline. As the blade scraped at my scalp, we chatted about tattoos I’d gotten in the past. We sized down from the first print he had made, and then he carefully peeled a purple outline onto my skin. He handed me a small mirror that reflected into a big mirror on the wall so that I could see the placement. I told him I liked it. He instructed me to stretch one arm out past my head and rest my cheek on it, lying on my side. The tattoo took forty minutes to ink, and he spoke the whole time. He asked me about myself, about school, about the tattoo’s meaning. I tried to answer in a calm and steady voice despite the pulsating needle bouncing against my skull. Several times he praised my composure, saying that most clients who got tattooed behind their ears can’t sit very well. It wasn’t hard to understand why. When he was done, he told me to take my time getting up. I ignored his advice, pushing up fast and immediately regretting my choice. The sudden absence of vibration on my head left my vision blurry, and I felt lightheaded as I walked back to the waiting area to pay. The person at the register was bubbly and asked loudly if I loved my new ink. I did, and told them so, paid and tipped Ian. I walked out onto the streets of my childhood, my new ink still buzzing quietly. – MN, right hip – My favorite tattoo was inked in Minnesota. A cold Thursday night in December, I arrived at a brightly lit studio in Minneapolis. I was a few minutes early, and sat on a very hard bench in the waiting area. My artist was finishing up with another client, so I pored over the design I’d asked for again. The appointment didn’t start for another forty minutes. When my artist finally came over and said she was ready for me, she seemed annoyed. I showed her the design and she scowled at me, snatching up her iPad and scribbling. She asked me if I had drawn it myself, which I had. After some more silent drawing, she held the iPad toward me. She had taken my (admittedly unskilled) design and created a much better tattoo. Her lines were clean, the shape gentle. I thanked her, she sighed. I wanted the tattoo on my hip, but because of the weather I’d worn sweatpants over my shorts. She rolled her eyes as I took off my sweatpants, pointing out that I could keep one of the legs on if I wanted to. I took the suggestion. When we sized the tattoo, she gave me three options. I picked the middle one, and she placed the outline on my hip. I walked, half-sweatpantsed, to the mirror and watched how the design moved with me. I loved it. I got up onto the table, lying on my side as she instructed. She inked in silence, except for a frustrated question about whether I was holding my breath. I had been, without realizing it, and tried to slowly exhale without annoying her further. When it was finished, my new ink looked delicate and natural on my skin. It is still the best tattoo I have. I carefully pulled the leg of my sweatpants back on over the wrapped ink. As I walked back into the Minnesota snow, my hip pinched with each step.

Two-Day Trip Home

Elaine Rand
November 6, 2025

There’s a new fence in the yard where the trellis once kissed the ground, a padlock on the gate in the alley left by an admirer or a forgetful biker. The front door of the house is newly painted navy blue, but the latch still sticks. An assortment of sunscreen bottles, displaced from the back porch, live in the garage alongside the dead dog’s bed, which has been inherited by my parents’ new one. Sunscreen spread on skin, bug spray interrupted by the sound of barking. I throw the puppy a ball, and she runs around the periphery of the yard, still chasing something invisible long after she has caught it in her mouth. Once, we pitched a tent here, but the pea popped up beneath my back. The tent’s been lost for a decade now. Dirt on the lawn chairs, dirt under fingernails, plastic sacks of mulch stacked tall. A smear of Indiana soil on the back steps to be powerwashed come next year. Inside the house, hairballs nestle in the gap between the refrigerator and the linoleum. The countertop is home to packets of tuna, a plastic Brita pitcher covered in hard water film, recalled pistachios yet to be thrown away. On the wall hangs the prim calendar, which still reads “March” in June. On the floor, WD-40 and Clorox wipes share real estate with cans of wet food and salmon dog treats for brain health. I can hear the nettles rattling outside. They’re strewn along the berm so the puppy can’t romp without getting her short legs caught. Through the window, there’s the redbud that sprouted where the garden patch used to be, more tenacious than the tomatoes. It towers over the ghosts of withered vines, the home-farming love fest brief and barely remembered. There is honor in an intact ear, one without the cartilage pierced—my mother said so long ago. But is there honor in an ear that burns? Both of mine turn bright when someone’s grandma asks me if I’m single. She showed my picture to her son. Lucky that breathing fire with a closed mouth leaves the tongue’s flames extinguished. I smile and deflect, teeth thick with ash. Tomorrow, I will drive away, “Wide Open Spaces” on the stereo. No flat land precipice to fall from anymore. The voices haven’t changed. No new timbres, no unexpected inflections, only the occasional quiet indignity. My shadow informs the conversations. Hello to the teenage neighbor I babysat when she was three and I was 12. Hello to my best friend’s brother, who has forgotten my name. Hello to the photo of great-aunts Elaine and Madeline on the mantle. Goodbye to the swimming pool by my elementary school; I used to leap into the water again and again. Goodbye to the cornfield, razed to build a strip mall, and the strip mall, minced and bulldozed to make room for a high rise. Goodbye to the uncertainty that once roiled inside me in the neighborhood where I used to live. I’ve juiced every drop I can from this place. When I take a sip, I taste only the dregs. Two days ago, I boiled soba noodles and cut hot peppers and cilantro for lunch, snapping carrots in half as men sprayed the dead trees outside with red paint and ran the chainsaw. Today, the radio on the porch plays a couple seconds ahead of the one in the living room, the sponsorship message echoing as it sings: “Committed to building a more just, verdant, and peaceful world.”

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