The way she squints worries me, my mother tells the optometrist. In the dim room, sitting before the gentle doctor, being whispered to, One or Two? Three or Four? I learn a secret. My ability to see tiny things up close is superhuman. The doctor tells me so, not like she’s telling a child a complimentary fib, but like she’s embarrassed since it was the only word to use and it sounds silly.
After the house fire, the neighborhood boys searched the rubble. A chimney teetered. Cinders smoked. Parents said it wasn’t safe. Stay away. The boys didn’t listen. Treasures might be found. A young couple had lived there. Maybe a bra had survived the fire? Maybe a blackened spoon?
Only metal eyelets were found, shoes erased by flames, metal tarnished by heat so the eyelets looked like tiny ancient coins.
The boys hid them in a hole by a tree. Later, they remembered where. Later, they didn’t.
Before Trying
Your daddy took one look and said, “She’s beautiful—she looks just like me!” Funny, but no joke. He’d experienced mirrors, and mirror neurons, even if he’d never heard of the latter. It helps to have a handsome father because evolution makes babies look like their daddies so their daddies will know they belong to them and take care of their genes.
Danielle hated her feet. She hated that the knuckle at the base of each big toe bulged out like a Ping-Pong ball. She hated that if she pressed the pad of her finger against, say, her right foot, it would leave a little oblong mark for full seconds before blood seeped back in. They were always cold, too, but sweated continuously. This was the worst part. It was the reason she wore socks in her own home. Otherwise she’d leave moist negatives of her feet on every hard surface in the house.
Joe joined my gym when he started third grade so I pick him up after work and we bike over to Gifu Yokozeki Boxing Gym, companionable, Joe chatterboxing the whole way and throughout each session, Dada, Dada, his lungs propelling his eight-year-old voice, small, high, curious, into the ambient soundscape that includes whirring jumprope thwacks, heavy bag thuds, the quick rattling smack of the speed bag, the start and stop of the three minute timer, general shufflings and cracks and grunts, somebody yelling with every punch, somebody’s ragged panting breathing, my own. And because Yokozeki-san puts it on when Joe and I arrive there’s also the Beatles radio channel: Getting Better, I’m So Tired, Joe singing along to Strawberry Fields Forever.
When your father tells you he secured a flight for you and your husband and children, you don’t ask questions. You race home and fill up a suitcase with photos and heirlooms. You tell your three-year-old to grab a spoon and thank god that the baby is still fed by your breast. Your husband tells you to slow down so he can remember where he put the passports and you regret ever loving him. You wish you had more time to hug your mother and father. You wish your children would stop crying. Fraught but calm, you try to memorize the shadows on the wall cast by the afternoon sun, bougainvillea tapping lightly at the windows, a tender scent woven into the furniture and the textiles and all that you will leave behind.
A mother leaves her daughter in a highchair by the window, baking in direct sun. Eventually the child shrivels up into an old, brown decrepit woman. She expires quietly, motionless, in similar fashion.
“Rats,” sighs the mother.
Her child is unrecognizable. A dried-up peach pit in her hands.
"I'm too shy," I said.
Back then he said he could make anyone’s confidence bloom, especially mine, and I said that if he ever could really pull this off, this would be his best gag yet. I chalked the failure up to his lack of creativity, but then I remembered that I was part of the act.
Organized as a series of handwriting exercises, Empty Words offers a look inside a novelist’s mind as he attempts to improve himself by improving his handwriting. Originally published in 1996 in Spanish, it is Levrero’s first novel translated into English. Annie McDermott, who introduces English language readers to Levrero, has translated other works from Spanish and Portuguese, and her translations have appeared in many places, including Granta, the White Review, Asymptote, Two Lines, and World Literature Today.
I bought Long Litt Woon’s The Way Through the Woods: On Mushrooms and Mourning for the promise embedded in the premise. How would Woon make her way back into the world after the shocking, sudden death of the fifty-four-year-old husband with whom she had spent all her adult years? What do mushrooms have to do with recovering from such a loss? Does anybody ever actually recover?
“[I]f you begin with an idea you’re usually beat before you start,” writes Robert Adams in Art Can Help, as he tries to imagine Edward Ranney photographing the Canyon del Muerto, and, so, here I begin, having been holding this slender silver volume in my hand all afternoon, interrupted only by the sound of a neighbor’s lawn mower and the smell of some ambient spray paint.
(A long sentence, a beginning.)
To Rocky, the city of Seoul is truly something to behold. Sprawling skyscrapers dare to kiss the sky, thousands of lights rival the sun at night, and millions of people bustle through at any given moment, while the Han River remains a calm force through it all. And it will soon be his to rule, just like his father, the leader of the city’s most notorious gang, Three Star Pa. However, despite Rocky being the sole heir and next in line to become the big boss, his father refuses to turn the gang over to him.
Max Havelaar is likely an unfamiliar title to most American readers, and the Netherlands in general is an often overlooked source of literature. But make no mistake: the world over holds Max Havelaar in high regard. I recently had the chance to talk to a born-and-raised Dutchman, and I asked him if the title rang any bells. "Of course," he told me. "It's a classic, everyone reads it." Think along the lines of Pride and Prejudice. In his short but poignant introduction to this edition of the novel, Indonesian author Pramoedya Ananta Toer makes the bold claim that Max Havelaar is one of the most important novels of all time. There's a reason this novel caught the attention of writers like Karl Marx and Thomas Mann, and there's a reason that when Freud drew up a list of ten great authors, Multatuli stood on top.
Liana Finck wants to be seen. In creating Passing for Human, a graphic memoir and her second full-length work, she constructs her life story as Leola, and in doing so fantastically reimagines her youth and early adulthood in a quest to be seen and heard—by peers, by readers, and by herself.
Many of the characters in J. David Stevens’s four-story collection I and You are Chinese immigrants; the author himself is not. In the book’s introduction, Stevens confides that he might never have written about these characters if not for the relationship with his wife Janet, whose ancestors left China in 1899 and later settled in Richmond, Virginia. Reflecting on the source material for his multi-generational narratives, Stevens, whose Mexico is Missing and Other Stories won the 2006 Ohio State University Prize in Short Fiction, admits an apprehension of the age: “[A] part of me still wonders if such stories cross a line, if appropriating segments of our shared history—or Janet’s history alone—is more rightly suited to intimate dialogue. I worry the art is too opportunistic.” This concern is real, and the author is right to acknowledge it. But his outsider’s rendition of the Chinese immigrant experience is respectfully nuanced, and while he does not share the same cultural background as his protagonists, he deeply values their stake in the larger human dilemma that fiction is taxed to solve.
I first encountered Chloe N. Clark through her prose, but even then, it was clear to me that she was a poet. Her work often feels multimodal in form, something that shines as a written text but that also seems eager to be performed aloud. Her debut collection Your Strange Fortune is no different, full of rich and devastating moments, each poem stretching with fresh life on the page or on the air. Some of these poems also function as works of visual art, such as “Flora and Fauna of the Outer Rings,” embodying their meaning in shape as well as word.
“I was born a knot like my mother and her mother before her,” Sarah Rose Etter’s debut novel begins, drawing readers into Cassie’s life story, The Book of X. “Picture three women with their torsos twisted like thick pieces of rope with a single hitch in the center.”
In her latest work, Green Target, Tina Barr prods at the simultaneously tumultuous and cooperative relationship between humanity and nature, writing from her cabin in Black Mountain, North Carolina. Barr blends the intimate details of personal existence with the macrocosmic scope of collective human experience, cleverly balancing comfort and misery. Barr’s poetry harmonizes the intersecting lives she details, whether they be animal, botanical, or human. All is seen and accounted for through her kaleidoscopic vision in which events, objects and people are constantly shape-shifting, bleeding into each other, losing their original form, becoming targets for Barr’s eye-opening observations.
99 Names of Exile begins in landscape. In the absence of the body of a deceased loved one, the book’s first poem “Invention of Country” searches for a buried “uniform/ in a chest camouflaged as a scarab, its wings latched.” The poem goes on to ruminate on memories and details the speaker wishes they could conjure in the face of death, but cannot. Perhaps inspired by this loss of detail and still searching for a path to grief and intimacy, the speaker explains “I don’t trust flat surfaces” and “I know the earth is round, and if we continue falling,/ the afternoon’s revolution never grows cold.”
If memoir is sculpture, where writers must strip away the unnecessary to find the shape of the story, then it is my memory that wields the knife. Memory chooses certain scenes and impressions. Memory snips and stores fragments and shadows. Memory does not follow the rules of chronology or of rational cause and effect. Memory puts any old thing next to another for its own reasons and may preserve for example, the dance of a courageous vole in perfect detail, while jettisoning a crucial conversation with a friend who is now gone. Try as I might to recall that moment with my friend, memory carved it away, leaving only shavings on the floor, which I crushed into ever smaller pieces as I paced back and forth, studying what I had left to work with.
Dear June,
One of my closest friends—I’ll call her Leah—keeps referring to me as Catholic, even though I have repeatedly told her that I am no such thing. My parents and three of my grandparents are Catholic and I was raised Catholic, even went to parochial school until I was eleven. But I haven’t gone to church since the first Sunday after I left for college, which was over fifteen years ago. I consider myself an agnostic and don’t belong to any religious institution.
It took a good two weeks to adjust to returning to Boston from Hawaii. Not because of the time change—that only took a few days. It was the shift in the color spectrum that threw me. In Hawaii, it was the vivid blue sky and the turquoise ocean, the yellow pineapples and the pink hotel, the white ginger leis and the red hula skirts. Here in New England, we’re eternally evergreen with gray blue skies and dark blue seas, we live in white houses and wear dark suits. New England is beautiful, yes, but in a much more somber, subdued way.
Dear June, When I was in my late twenties, I quit my job as a C.P.A. to write fiction. The plan was to spend a year or so banging out a brilliant literary novel, and then see what happened. In…
Dear June, Lately my mother keeps biting off more than she can chew, so I find that she is constantly inviting me to things, or accepting my invitations, and then begging off at the last minute. I have to say that, as far as I know, she never cancels because a better opportunity has come up....
Writers seek truth—truth that makes a reader’s hair stand up and speeds our hearts with recognition. But that kind of truth is elusive, both from the perspective of craft and brain science. I spent two decades unable to write an essential truth of my own life, one rooted in my childhood, during which I experienced several years of sexual abuse by my stepfather, beginning when I was four. Not surprisingly, this experience shaped the person I am—and, as a writer, I sensed the importance of weaving this early trauma into some kind of narrative. But my attempts to do so were consistently ineffective and inartistic. Dreadful, really.
Hunger was secret—hump
on the back, the something else,
the body insisting that it was present.
Child head and child arm. Teeth
like rows of letters written
on colored cards. An assemblage
of girl—put together like a first
sentence.
Cheryl HarperPASSAGES: An Installation in Progress I am one of those artists who thinks my work has to say something. I have nothing against paintings that bring together a disparate room décor or just make one feel good, but that’s…
No kissing, though we both know that we want to.
You show up at my house wearing the exact same
thing as on your Grindr profile. Pink hat,
cheap diamond earrings, and then, too, a familiar look
that steadily steams underneath my grandmother’s eyes.
It’s the multiplicity of place as body -- or how when you
close your eyes you can convince yourself that you’re
lying in a star-streaked field—that convinces me I love you.
David CallanTHE ANT LIEUTENANT TELLS ME OF HIS RETURN Black soil collapsing onto rock. Beetles with shining blue backs humming over the water chilled with rain. Pike angling in the chambers of the dank, waiting for the naked in the…
Suzanne Farrell SmithSUNDAY The small space for god in me aches, so I turn from the one-way mirror through which I’ve been watching my twin seventeen-month-old boys bawl. Golden Graham pulp has stiffened their fine hair into sticky strings. I’m…
I wait for a train that circles the city like bats. At night in Berlin you can imagine anything you want. Can a train circle a city like bats? Carriages here are full of inviting people I never talk to and bicycles that require a ticket to get on board. Everyone wears black so hard you don’t notice after a while that there are differing shades. Sometimes, I see a chair being carried on board by a passenger and I wonder where the chairs go, whether they rest at tables. I think about the people invited to sit, what kind of meals they eat together or whether their furniture is flee-market vintage or discarded by the side of a road. Inside pinch close buildings smeared in graffiti are people, and they are talking to one another in languages; I don’t know.
Sam and Viet stand in his small blue kitchen. Viet has stopped stirring his chard lentil soup while Sam tries to figure out what to do: Three nights a week on the mountain, leading small groups up Whitney, or sleeping out in Alabama Hills, climbing.
I’m doing ok, she says. It’s just I think I should find a room or something, short term.
Viet says, I see what you mean.
Renewing my one-year lease, don't you agree it's financially a waste?
Clear, cool morning. The two of you are the first ones at the park. Your year-old daughter craved the red swings. You craved quiet. This morning had so much potential quiet.
The reality is the racket of a power washer. Groundskeepers from Parks and Rec are cleaning the patio by the bathrooms. The air compressor hammers, staccato, like the sound of a strobe light if a strobe light made a sound. The blade of pressurized water hisses a loud tssssssssss, sustained as only a machine can sustain a thing.
I’ve decided to kill my son. This is not a new thought. It did not come to me overnight. I’ve nursed it for a long time like an actual thing, a child that was a seedling first and then a sprout, but the idea has taken hold.
Hot, back in the corner of the coat closet you find it, right where you knew it would be. Pull it out with both hands, it’s a lot heavier than you expected. Dad said never to touch it, but who knows when he’s coming back this time and what else are you supposed to do on a day like this? Show it to your sister, how it gleams in the light let in through the screen door. Stand it up, it comes up to her chin.
“Dad’s giant wrench. Can I hold it?”
Laugh at her. “It’s bigger than you are.”
“So are you, but I could still toss you.”
Tory Lord O’NeillTWELVE There he was, as always, on the eve of her birthday. She never expected him. Never dreamt of him, but there he was. As always, he was standing on the corner waiting for something—her perhaps—but she didn’t…
We sat three abreast in hard white pews. At our backs, an open door laid rectangles of sun on the salt-smoothed pine floor. It was an old Puritan church—Built in 1772, read a small plaque by the door. You could tell: the ceiling was crossed with bare beams, the floor was hard and cold. As a boy, I’d been brought to the church from time to time for a service, usually the wedding or funeral of a summer neighbor. I recalled the starkness of it, the chilly severity. Across the street, at the base of a hill that sloped down to the ocean, my mother’s ashes lay beneath a weathered stone.
Forty millennia, and more, originating worlds,
occasioning wines, wedges, plunder, and
( let’s guess, ) recovered and glassed, eyes around
taking in the cases, the cases seem too much,
the notes a reader takes, setting down the catalog,
seeing the slivers, flakes, flecks of stone,
imagining the sounds of stone already used to the inventing,
crying through the tools its need for preservation,
through the same rude calendars, imagine it, earlier,
ahead, as the snow begins another election cycle,
and a second round of it the wizard had not called for,
that delights to start, as an obscenity might, before
you notice where it’s going. But how, the first time
at the Diner, could we know, or say which desserts
would bring us back because they’d mattered, which
day-old paragraph or stanza might inspire, snow
Wild blackberry bramble all along the edge. Himalaya? Or Cutleaf? Or Pacific? Thimbleberry?
Let me try again, what net?
We keep eating the fruit because the poison sweetens with age.
Another fuckin suicide.
Let me try again, I want a jar of fireflies stowed away in my chest
But the light resists secrecy, insists on the opposite of the private property
Sign on the gate we trespass on our walk to water. The light draws from out there
How time-tentacled arms tugged us towards tangled bramble. Slashed denim.
Blue t-shirt, ripped. Skin, torn. We ignore requests,
“What am I?” and “Do you not understand?” and “I have brought you here.” and “I offer my fruit so consider me in full…”
The patient is nervous. He should be. His renal allograft is new, he has an infection and his immune system is compromised. It’s a bad combination. But I’m going to be positive. I’ll emphasize that he is getting better, his white blood cell count is in decline, he seems to be eating and he isn’t coughing. I intend to be reassuring, cautiously optimistic. He’ll be looking for optimism.
I've decided it's pigeons, not squirrels or worse,
responsible for the ruckus—
pigeons and some kind of metal fencing,
chain link, jangling under what must be
a half dozen of them every morning doing
who knows what. Rabid copulation?
Numbing forgiveness-salve
slathered on eyes damned eyes,
to sit across from this man
praised for handling his bossy woman so well−
my she-ro, my sister. I see Tammy Wynette.
We’re slamming wine. We’re laughing.
I’m globbing it on thick. Blurring memory: his hands
robotic extensions groping me awake shudder
his stupid face his stupid easy chair−
When I woke to it that night, all I said was,
You need to go to bed.
I may have rubbed forgiveness on too soon.
Because of the D.C. sniper, I get my first cell phone. A Nokia with impossibly small buttons. When I look up, my parents’ smiles are even faker than the ones in family photos. I’m twelve. Old enough to know they want me to be able to call for help. Last year was 9/11. We live sixteen miles from the Pentagon, and the CIA is around the corner. Since 9/11 we hold our breaths when we drive past Langley. Everyone’s afraid that’s next. But we’re wrong. This year some guy is shooting kids for sport.
Graham OliverDEAR ZUCK, I THINK WE ARE GOING TO MAKE IT THROUGH THIS death of a pet coping with death of pet where to take pet body where to take pet corpse pet burial can i bury my pet in…
Panel 1: It's been quite a year. Last June I went under the knife. And got a new hip. 6.5 years ago dancing like a 20-something freak at my niece's wedding, my left hip snapped.
Panel 2: Yeah, I know, brilliant move. This led to bursitis, joint trauma, bone-on-bone, and physical therapy. Then guided steroid injections, to limping badly. Every step excruciating, and, finally, walking with a cane.
Panel 3: Doc said I would know when I was ready for hip replacement surgery. What? But I'm only 48.... March 2018, age 53, I knew. Complete physical breakdown.
Panel 4: Couldn't walk. Became immobile. Blew up round as a full balloon.
Panel 5: The night before surgery was a stunningly beautiful June evening. The last night with my old, crumbly, irregular, jagged hip joint. I was scared.
Panel 6: I saw this commercial: If you had hip surgery between 2009 and 2016 and it went BAD, call this number! Very reassuring. And I took a shower with weird special orange antibacterial soap... Remember! Don't get it in your eyes or genitals.
Panel 7: I needed to pack a bag. Looked at the moon. Can't sleep. Heart racing. Wake up 4:30. Hospital 5:30. Surgery 7:30.
Panel 8: Surgery is otherworldly, from the disinfection shower the night before to the mysterious phone call the day before surgery telling you when to show up to the hospital.
Panel 9: The reception desk was quiet. But once they wheeled me back to pre-op there was a buzz of professional gaiety.
Panel 10: The chipper drug nurse waived her giant syringe with a grin and assured me all would be fine. Then, like at a pit stop, enrobed docs swarmed me, cut me open, sawed out my gnarly old hip, and put a new part in.
Panel 11: I woke up. Swam out of the anesthesia on the verge of rebirth, like Lazarus crawling out of the dark tomb and back on the road.
Panel 12: Day one. Don't remember much. Fainted on the way to the bathroom. Alarm went out. 30 people rushed in to help.
Panel 13: First night. Slept on my back, not allowed to move. Legs in compression hose and wrapped in compression sleeves that palpitate your calves to keep them from clotting. Giant yellow foam-cheese wedge-like thing strapped between my legs.
Panel 14: Bathroom 5:00 am. Nauseous, clammy, sweaty, anesthesia mucking up the works.
Panel 15: June days, long and gorgeous, pass. Peering out from my swanky private room it looked like the lavender fields of Provence through my Oxycontin haze.
Panel 16: Day 3 Post-op. Friday, 3:00 pm I went home with all of my gear. Walker, compression hose...
Panel 17: ...grabber, raised toilet, Oxycontin, ice bags!
Panel 18: Hip replacement precautions: No twists! No bends! Don't cross legs! Knee can't be higher than hip or it might dislocated!
Panel 19: Day 4 Post op. Obsessed that I haven't pooped in 5 days. Monday morning, 6 days out, fixated on lack of poopage. Amazing, how it all comes down to poop. Tuesday morning, 7 days out, still not a sliver of poop in sight. No one tells you that Oxy equals constipation. Finally, late Tuesday... redemption, deliverances, joy. When the machinery works, it's a beautiful thing.
Panel 20: 8 days post-op. Feeling better; still sleeping on my back. Can't bend. Limited movement. Went outside for the first time in 5 days. One week and three days post-op. Sleeping better... exercises... more exercises... bridge... lift butt....
Panel 21: Weaning off pain meds. More exercises. The clam! Progress, progress, progress.
Panel 22: Walker, 3 weeks, roughly. Used a cane through the fall. Now, a year later, walking 10,000 steps a day. Humbled and grateful for each pain-free step.
A barn owl croons across these drunken hills and every song inebriates. The world stumbles, sinks in sleep at a magic spell, strewn, until the sun-god again snaps its burnished tendrils and wakes the earth with shine. Just as literature is language charged with meaning (Ezra Pound), rural is expanse charged with life.
Leaning like a chiaroscuro,
a man outside a bodega says,
You only get one mother.
I want my skin to be better.
Eileen Myles says:
That’s so gay, and I fantasize
about plant tattoos,
consider the best body
for a dandelion. Nothing
compares to pain.
I.
Every night, we listen
to his favorite songs.
The kind of music you
want to hear when your country
is at peace, but you’re told to dig
a grave in the desert sand
anyway. The kind of music
that might come from a parked
car whose window you are told
to shatter with the butt
of a black flashlight.
Kat SaundersMAGIC CICADAS In the summer of 2016, the cicadas returned. More accurately, a new brood of seventeen-year cicadas, conceived and hatched in 1999, during the previous cicada summer, emerged. Underground, they’d slept undisturbed through the new millennium, the September…
Children always follow the mother. That’s what my mother always used to say. And it was true for my sister Kelly and me. Every time our worlds fell apart, we would end up in our mother’s kitchen, washing the dishes and sitting at her pockmarked table until light returned to the world, sometimes just at its edges. Even after so many years, what my mother said was still true. How else could you explain why I visited my mother every day once she moved into a nursing home? How else could I explain why my oldest daughter, April, followed me there too, coming every day after her twelve-hour shift ended and refilling my mother’s cup with water and thickener so she wouldn’t choke? We took turns, the two of us, stirring the pureed food the underpaid dining staff delivered on pockmarked plates, adjusting my mother’s legs on the pillow we propped under them, and righting her head that, lately, seemed too heavy for her neck.