Coffee Stains

by Patrick Solcher ‘26

Often, I feel like Schrodinger’s cat, dead in a box, save if someone checks I’m alive. And I cry, always set to the tune of moonlight, and cast my tears as reflected rays of the love and pain around me. I hear Vivaldi, his discarded drafts built in these droplets, so imagined and inspired but cast away in the ire that builds skyscrapers, slow and consistently delayed—the giants of my youth. My water does not break into rebirth, but rather a regulated release of the Hoover Dam, roarious in the moment but calm like a coffee stain. And my cup lays empty now, as I’ve given all I have to give, and I sit in silence as the Keurig drips full again my motivation.

Doodling

by Patrick Solcher ‘26

When Marianne first saw the monsters she drew on pink sticky notes move, 

she crumpled them and threw them in the bin. And when 

she discovered they could jump from page to page, 

darting forth onto the wallpaper, she fashioned circles 

and squares into prisons to prevent their escape. 

Then, gingerly wielding the Sharpie in her hand, 

she drew a new monster, simple and round 

with no legs or wings to move with, and watched it roll, 

back and forth like a baby cradling itself in a crib, as she cried, 

splashing tears onto the crushed paper of the injured monsters 

who had not yet escaped, digging through the waste bin 

to unravel injured limbs with the delicacy of an anthropologist. 

She apologized to each monster five or six times. 

Why had she so quickly chosen to fear her creations? 

Were they not well-intended for the world? She had trapped 

and killed them, fist after fist, until the world was hers again, 

the monsters kept to her youthful imagination and their lives 

a tease of what could have been but never was. 

The monsters cried out in agony.