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THE BUSINESS OF BODIES by Gwendolyn Edward

THE BUSINESS OF BODIES
by Gwendolyn Edward

Late on the fourth of July my friends arrived home to find their house on fire, everything blackened and damp from firehoses, their two dogs and cat lost amid the scorched remnants of their home. Early the next day a mutual friend called me. We don’t know what to do, Anna told me over the phone, about the bodies.

She’d called me specifically because I’d worked in the veterinary industry for years. Everyone had heard the story about the time I had to decapitate a cat we feared might have rabies. She assumed, I think, that I’d be one who might know what to do. But I didn’t know what to do; I’d never dealt with a situation like this either. When I called the emergency vet I was told they would charge at least two-hundred dollars an animal for disposal: an impossible immediate expenditure for our community of still-struggling ex-college students.

I’ll go get them, I told her, and keep them until tomorrow, a Monday when the regular clinics would be open again and we could dispose of the bodies at a more reasonable price. No one else, wants to, you know… Anna said. What she meant was no one wanted to look at broken and burned bodies of the pets we knew. No one wanted to house those bodies either, dead pets in the garage. I asked if we knew anyone with a deep freezer. No one wanted to share their space for food with corpses either.

Years ago when I had to decapitate the cat I learned a bruising lesson about practicality and death. We needed to send the head to the veterinary school at Texas A&M for rabies testing; it seemed awfully inhumane to cut an animal’s head off, to wrap it in plastic and put it in a cooler, but that’s the way things are done.

The clinic I was working in was new and didn’t have all the equipment we needed. A scalpel, no matter how sharp, will most likely only cut through skin and muscle, not bone. I was sent to the grocery store for gloves, heavy yellow ones used for washing dishes, and I also bought a large cleaver. In the clinic, we hacked at the spinal column, and when the head finally came loose, I thought its neck looked like a Christmas ham, and afterwards was so sick with the imagery that I dry-heaved in the bathroom while the other employees packed the head for shipping. We wrapped its body in paper towels and plastic Kroger bags and put it in the top section of our refrigerator next to microwave meals; we didn’t have the money to buy a deep freezer either.

5 a.m. by Carla Drysdale

5 a.m.
by Carla Drysdale

Inside the dream you wander shoeless
in supermarket aisles. Loneliness

opens its stone lid, invites you in. Even as they fly
birds trust in landings. In the right

tilt of rays you can become the silver thread
pinned to the eave,

the spider’s wide swoop over
hayloft in honeyed light. Things

spiral inward and outward
at the same time — lines

drawn on your fingertips
before you were born

— the scrawl of maps survivors carry.

STORM by Paul Crenshaw

STORM
by Paul Crenshaw

My daughters had wandered too far ahead when the storm came up suddenly in the mountains so I ran through the rain to find them. Thunder rattled off the sides of the saddles and rolled down through the draws like the announcement of some end. The girls were tiny things then, no more than 5 and 8, and each sharp crack sounded loud as the last hour of the earth. I ran past clefts not deep enough to be called caves where crowds huddled out of the rain, and I must have looked wild as the wind still in the tops of the trees as I came out of the curtain and stood scanning the small knots safe beneath the dripping rock, then disappeared again into the downpour. The mountain stream had grown fierce as the uncertain future and wide as the world our children walk around in. The air stood stacked with ozone and if there is a greater fear for a father than the loss of a child it can only be the loss of two, so I kept going along the mud-slick trail, up the wet stones carved into steps, crossing the seething stream on footbridges no larger than Legos, higher and higher into the hills until finally finding them standing in the storm beneath an overhang where water fell on their heads clear as comfort. They stretched out their arms, mouths wide as mountains, their laughter loud even over the deluge.

WORKS ON LOVE by Michelle Doll

WORKS ON LOVE
by Michelle Doll

My work is about felt moments, both the visible ones as well as the ones that we aren't able to see. I spent many years creating work about feelings of disconnect and loss. When I'd leave the studio, those feelings and the difficult emotions surrounding them became amplified. As a result, today both my life and my work is focused on love and connection, what I see as the root of intimacy.

Such moments exist as I go through my day. I find I am constantly searching for evidence of connections between people. Living and working in New York serves as a constant source of inspiration as I can absorb intimate interactions on the streets. I’m attracted to the physical and metaphysical energy that exists between individuals who share intimacy, the touch between a couple, the closeness between a mother and child. By scrutinizing and studying these innermost human feelings, my paintings attempt to evoke these same intimate connections of the mind, body, and soul only now through the physical substance of paint.

Ten Years in Belgrade by Sara Alaica

TEN YEARS IN BELGRADE
by Sara Alaica

It had been ten years since I’d been to Belgrade and the first things I noticed were the billboards. The blasted-out skeletons of iron had been rebuilt, painted, and were skinned in colorful faces smiling down on the grey skyline. They seemed so oddly out of place, as if they had landed straight out from the sky.

I’d spent my childhood in the city, but I’d gone abroad and hadn’t been back since just after the war. The airport hadn’t reopened, so I had flown into Frankfurt, rented a car, then driven 120 mph in the slow lane of the Autobahn through the deep tunnels of the Viennese Alps. The highway linking Belgrade to Zagreb was empty, and the deep impressions of tank treads were still visible on the shoulder.

But now, ten years later, had been shown the ruins of Avala, the tower on the hill overlooking the city where I had gone as a child to see the tomb of the Unknown Soldier. It was just a wet tangle of cables and rubble all along the slope of the hill, as if someone had pushed it too hard and it had fallen, exhausted, on its side.

But now, ten years later, it had been rebuilt, more beautiful than before, and everywhere that had once been rubble was now so new that I couldn’t recognize the turn-off to my aunt’s house, and I almost missed it.

I was meeting my sestra there, who had agreed to take me through the city and show me what had changed. As we drove back across the Danube she pointed out a hotel down by the water. It was yellow and gold, framed by old oaks in the traditional style of old Europe. Do you know what that is? I looked at the exit that led down to it and marveled at the change. That’s where that old decrepit factory used to be.

TALENT SHOW by Nels Hanson

TALENT SHOW
by Nels Hanson

The boy lowered his orange papier-mâché beak and his feathers cut from newsprint fell over the cutout eyes. He raised both brown wings, acknowledging the scattered, light applause, then hopped off the stage on clawed feet, past a stunned-looking Mrs. Waverly, his fifth-grade teacher, who had emerged onto the boards.

“Peter,” she called, “Peter, come back!” as parents and grandparents began to murmur and Mrs. Waverly stepped toward the bunched curtain. Principal Harvey stood from his front-row seat and hurried up the three stairs to backstage.

Robert Hamilton turned to his wife, Helen, who stared straight ahead at the empty platform, at its proscenium arch hung with white and red holiday bells, flanked on either side by three silver leaping reindeer, who appeared to have slipped their harness to escape Santa’s stinging whip.

“My God,” a woman behind the Hamiltons announced. “What on God’s Green Earth was that?”

“I’m not surprised,” answered a low voice beside her. “It’s what you get, not letting the kids pray at school.”

“You knew about this?” Robert asked Helen.

Her gaze focused on the trail of silver tinsel fallen from the previous actor portraying a skipping spruce, decked with blinking lights and ornaments.

“I only helped with the costume.”

“‘Someone is dreaming me’? ‘He likes it white and still’?”

“He said it was a secret, not even Mrs. Waverly knew. But I think she did – ”

“His teacher put this on? Without our consent?”

Helen shook her head, lowering her voice:

TRICHOTILLOMANIA by Michelle Lin

TRICHOTILLOMANIA
by Michelle Lin

Here is a girl with a mirror. She is separating
her eyelashes with a safety pin. Her mother always said
that 1 out of 10 girls go blind looking at the moon,
and 1 out of 5, pierced by a needle. So, in the end,
how many girls lose their sight? I was never any good
at math. I don't understand how lines are infinite,
how hair inches forever from roots, always growing back,
never ending or starting. I once flipped stones in my yard
to find what lay beneath. Worms and roly pollies,
white in the rare sun. Pearly scales writhing their bodies
into perfect segments—line segments, just as bad as lines.
They make the needle that salutes, barely pricking the skin
of my eyelid, the handle of the mirror casting light
into my gaze. The cabinet shelves in the hallway
where my mother placed wedding photos just

A MIND OF WINTER by Dan Tessitore

A Mind of Winter

You knew before
you drew the shade

(before you shook
the dream of flying),

the silence saying
snow, saying

get up,
draw the shade,

see what you
know to be true.

And there it is,
the color of paper.

*

How many years
has the snow collected

the sun, returned
the sun as silver?

*

In the dream
you are young.

It is Christmas
Eve. You lie

beneath the tree,
gazing up

through lights,
ornaments,

TORNADO by Mark Brazaitis

TORNADO
by Mark Brazaitis

She appears in my dreams as a tornado. The settings vary. A dusty plain. The downtown of a major metropolis. My backyard. Although I never see her face, I know who she is. I feel the wind in my hair. I feel the danger and thrill of her nearness. I feel so close to death I know I am alive. And always when I wake up I am disturbed by how still the air is.

I’ve seen Alice Maravicious—Alice Marvelous is her nickname—do scratch spins, lay-back spins, Biellman spins—the figure-skating equivalent of tornados—at the end of Learn-to-Skate sessions, for which I signed up my daughter, having failed to interest her in bowling and basketball. Alice’s spins are designed to show the young skaters she instructs what they, too, could do one day. During the actual lessons, Alice and her assistants skate between four- and six- and eight-year-olds, preventing them—and sometimes failing to prevent them—from falling. Some of the children fall so often Alice allows them to use walkers like old people would. They shuffle around the ice like miniature residents of a retirement home.

At Learn to Skate, Alice doesn’t wear the sleek, glittering dress she used in competitions. (Photos of her on-ice triumphs, including a fourth-place finish in the U.S. nationals, decorate the lobby of the Sherman Ice Arena.) She wears a Russian overcoat, like Julie Christie in Dr. Zhivago. She could be in Red Square in winter. Often I imagine myself meeting her in a world apart from the heavy world I inhabit. She is twenty-five years old and I have more gray in my hair than black. I am old enough to be—I hate to consider the math and hope my calculations are off—her father. But in these worlds I envision, I am ageless.

MORE THAN A PAUSE by Nigar Alam

MORE THAN A PAUSE
by Niger Alam

It was spring in Minnesota, and the winter newborn babies were entering the outdoor world for the first time. There were many in the park behind the senior center that day. Mothers cooed as they bent over each other’s jogging strollers, their cropped yoga pants stretching over the mounds of their well-squatted buttocks.

Christine watch ed from one of the few benches facing the playground. She turned her head away from the taut mothers and inspected the babies instead, the curled up little beings in the strollers. They were shaped like commas, but she knew they were much more than mere pauses.

One was parked facing Christine. The single front wheel of the stroller was pushed against her bench, and the mother, facing the other way, leaned her back on the handle of the stroller and laughed with the group that huddled there. Her hair shone golden and strawberry, waving left to right, as she shook her head at the incredulity of some joke.

The infant was belted, physically restrained, but its mind was scheming, wielding its power from behind glassy blue eyes on an egg-white bed. Its stare was unsettling, but at least this infant was not Christine’s affliction. She was free of binding belts and babies. She smiled, lifted her face to the sky and reached her arms out on either side, palms flat on the bench.

BELLE FLEUR by Marie Manilla

BELLE FLEUR
by Marie Manilla

Belle Fleur was there on opening night thirty years ago. She doubts anyone remembers the skinny girl in the ill-fitting wig—a replacement for one of the hoochie coochie dancers who missed the train in Cincinnati.

“You can do it, Mavie,” her mother had said, already slipping her into the gypsy costume. “You’ve seen their act a thousand times.” Her parents were The Fire-Eating Royales. That night, Mavie adopted the stage name she’d been crafting her whole life, Belle Fleur, and posed with a dozen dancers while Mr. Waller mumbled his speech. Nobody booed, since he owned The Burlesque and paid for the acts that had arrived by train that afternoon. Belle and The Lovely Sisters and The Brothers Grimelda carried trunks two blocks to the theater. Mr. Peels, the chimpanzee wearing a suit, tipped his bowler hat to women and children as he’d been taught. Kids and drunks followed him all the way to the theater where the marquee read: “Suitable for the Entire Family!” The hoochie coochies would have to clean up their act.

Directly across the street was the hotel still under construction, but they likely wouldn’t have taken in the performers anyway. Not the right clientele, they’d been told in town after town. After setting up the stage and unpacking costumes in the basement dressing rooms, the thirty-odd performers settled in the boardinghouse run by Mama T, with a backyard, thankfully, for the dancing pony and jump-roping dogs, but not Mr. Peels, who refused to sleep outdoors.

Opening night, before the theater doors opened, the performers scattered like ants around the rococo-style house, caressing the orange drapes and seats, ogling the gold-rimmed balcony and gas wall sconces. The manager shooed them backstage when carriages arrived with the Waller family and other notables who lived in that stretch of stately homes Belle had walked by earlier with the knife thrower’s kids.

DOMICILE by Franklin K. R. Cline

DOMICILE
by Franklin K. R. Cline

My fellow Americans:
if you listen long enough
to anyone, you’ll hear something worth remembering. It’s

Monday. We are committed
to each other, we
share. We’re all in this together.

Place your faith in me, flakes
of sky streaming white and horizontal. The weather’s
wavy, worth mentioning.

I am energized and snowy
enough to speak for you, I am looking
out of a glass door that sneaks

in toe-biting cold. I haven’t
seen any flakes hit the ground but like a slow wham
snow keeps coming, becoming trustworthy.

Last Friday, before the snow, at his cherished watering hole,
Brandon steered his domicile, his body,
toward my booth; he spoke of piloting

what I think he thinks
of as a container down a road void
of street lights and there were stars, he said, he hadn’t seen

since he was a child. I like to see where I am going, so my thoughts
on that are at best conflicted. The snow’s
hightailing it, a million kamikazes pulsing sideways past

KEYS by Kevin Tosca

KEYS
by Kevin Tosca

The light was green but a woman was standing outside her car in the middle of the slow lane with her emergency blinkers on. She was surrounded by what looked like geese. Geese are everywhere in Minnesota. Geese aren’t interesting. Grace glanced left and saw too many vehicles hurtling towards her. She had to stop. After stopping, she realized what the animals really were, what this woman was doing with them.

Wild flapping of arms, shooing and yelling and exhorting, she was trying to get three wild turkeys to cross the road.

If this were a silent movie (and, stuck inside her car, it was), Grace would’ve said the woman communicated a fallen, flawed brand of earnestness, that her desperation was the trumped-up, righteous desperation of the undesperate. She looked like an enraged and foolish general.

Forced to wait, Grace focused on the birds. Having not seen wild turkeys since the winter she spent house-sitting for her uncle, Grace thought about her Maine winter and how she didn’t find the silence, solitude, or peace she thought she would have. Did they exist? She didn’t know, but she could still remember that flock and the magic when it appeared: fifteen big, plump, proud, beautiful birds that had tromped through snow and wood in search of the cracked corn Grace’s uncle had told her not to forget to scatter.

Grace watched them through a picture window. Some, after feeding, flew into the branches of the king pines where they perched like bleak-plumaged buddhas before moving on to wherever they moved on to. They were unspoiled, marvelous, natural. And they made Grace feel old, the wild turkeys did, though she was only twenty-seven at the time. More precisely, looking at beings that made the words “rare,” “endangered,” and “extinct” pop into her head, they made her feel that her youth was over, or that it should’ve been.

AND BLOOD ON THE TRACKS IN THE TAPE PLAYER by Roy Bentley

AND BLOOD ON THE TRACKS IN THE TAPE PLAYER
by Roy Bentley

Recall any moonlit part of an hour by a road’s edge:
the snow on the limbs of scrub pine, the silent falling
through night air beside miles of two-lane blacktop.

There is no equivalent to wanting someone that much.
If you think about it, the cop who stood in deep snow
to tap at the window was anything but rude, though

he did flashlight you. Turns out, it takes a uniform
to bring Original Sin into a space scented with sex.
And he did turn away as you wriggled into clothes.

In those days, the mat of beer cans was nothing.
And you got a warning and felt lucky to be young
in Ohio where the police knew your name, hers,

and followed in a cruiser to where you dropped her,
your Firebird or Ford Torino idling for a long kiss
in the driveway of a house with the porchlight on.

TO THE HAUGHTY VISUALIST by Teniola Tonade

TO THE HAUGHTY VISUALIST
by Teniola Tonade

Think terrorism, my appetizer word,
and watch the slide-show of interminable woes.
For balanced main course, I’d serve you poor
then sad, and oh—there’s got to be
a drink—think blood. Your plate is full
of images you love? Still, my steward’s training
says I must serve dessert. So, think Africa; and
I say: dream America. I guess I’ll pack my plates
away, and leave you, as all men must be,
alone to your purging now.

THE INSIGNIFICANT REMAINS by Robert Henway

THE INSIGNIFICANT REMAINS
by Robert Henway

I don’t know why I remember walking down the stairwell that day. It was a practical staircase and extremely boring, not the type that stays in your mind years after. Gray walls, with only the slight confetti of shredded posters to add any color, covered with words imploring us to check out various clubs or work opportunities. Some sign stubs were completely gone, leaving the remaining paper looking like a spent shotgun shell; others had hardly been touched, looking like a primed firework that was later discovered to be a dud. The students in their white and blue Polos, with matching khaki pants or plaid skirts, having only backpacks to supply a sense of individuality, came and went as they always did. That afternoon however, there was an obstacle in our path, a roadblock. This annoyed me greatly because I only had two minutes to get to my next class. Who was this outsider who did not realize the system? Who was this nonconformist who did not follow the protocol? It wasn’t until I was very close that I could see through the huddled bodies that it was a freshman on his hands and knees. He was dressed like us, but he wasn’t walking like us. I craned my neck to see his problem, what was causing him to inconvenience us so. Everywhere brilliantly bright green and yellow highlighters, vigilant red pens accompanied by the dull black and blue scribes of our time scattered and cascaded down the hard cold steps. A single glue stick bounded down, bouncing on each judgmental step. It was presumably not found again. All the while a set of pale frantic hands reached out, desperate to grab the remains. I wondered if his frenzy was because he needed the supplies to finish an assignment, or perhaps he was desperate not to lose any because his mother had bought them for him and they allayed his homesickness throughout the day. Most likely he just wanted to get out of everyone’s way as fast as he possibly could. The reason it was taking him so long was because coming out from the blue and white crowd were red Air Jordan’s, white and black Adidas, brown Sperry’s, and even soft gray Uggs, all kicking out, attempting to knock the supplies around. Unlike my predecessors, I did not give his supplies a kick with a grunt and a laugh, but I didn’t help him either. I continued on, slithering around the gray walls like a cold product on the descending factory belt, in this conformist institution we called school. We did not help people back then, for if we did, we would become them (God forbid).

TAXIDERMY FOR TROUBLED BOYS by Emily Anne Hopkins

TAXIDERMY FOR TROUBLE BOYS
by Emily Anne Hopkins

We have full run of the parlor. We chatter
amongst ourselves about the humidity, how
it pulls at our seams. We want to swoop down

for a peek through Norman’s peephole
while he is up the hill, switching in and out

for a peek through Norman’s peephole
while he is up the hill, switching in and out
of his floral dress and grey wig. But our plaques

are heavy under our talons. The light
from his windows— going on and off, on
and off— winks in our glass eyes.

We have all felt a knife between our feathers:
the girls at the bottom of the lake and us on our mounts,
heads cocked and beaks full of sawdust.

Norman says we are not like other beasts.
He means we are not like his mother, that in death
our mouths have not pulled back into a permanent,

SHADOWS by Eliza Callard

SHADOWS
by Eliza Callard

The “y” on my forehead from
the radiator. The early cooking accident
with the knife.

The shadow from the spark on
my hand when I was six.
It turned white and melted my skin.

The odd dent on my thigh from the time
I tried to impress a girl and fell
off a fence.

The teen wounds I made myself--
tiny white scissors scars;
the popped zits, faded to a soft brown.

And the big marks--the surgeries--
my belly a long road,
and the port pushing the skin of my left chest

like a short stack of quarters
hidden beneath,
like I may need them for the jukebox.

THE SECRET WORLD OF YAYO by Erin Victoria Bradley

THE SECRET WORLD OF YAYO
by Erin Victoria Bradley

Vanessa’s loneliness beckoned her to the white room, where the ceiling vanished into a mist so fine that it melted into six suns and the sediments were of pink marble with flecks of orange and white. So white. Not everyone could make it there. Only those pure-hearted lonely few who still believed in magic could ever find the door, the white hot keyhole, and they remained in life like the unicorns, all but extinct. She had found it in her fifteenth year, when she had looked into a mirror and for the first time understood what it meant for a smile to not touch the eyes. Her key was a metal spoon, stolen from the kitchen of her dreary first life, and a bag of white powder was the sacred artifact that opened her eyes to the magic.

She escaped the monotony of the real world by pushing on the golden frame of the door and budging her way inside. The warmth crawling up her cheeks was instant and alleviated the sorrow knotted in the pit of her belly like thorny vines. Visiting the white room was riding a horse, playing the game she couldn’t afford, making love, having everything she was not to have at once.

She did it for herself. Her parents didn’t warn her about the secret world stashed in the walls of the white room because she hid it like all the sweet things that she had to hide, and they boasted on their perfect daughter as though she were invisible among them. Going to church and listening to the preacher in his cold polished suit did nothing to convince Vanessa that she should not visit the white room, breathe the white air, and warm herself with white. She listened each Sunday, her roaming soul more apathetic to the starch in the preacher’s voice. Her eyes sagged with a lost grace, and her face blanched white as her sin. No one noticed her change. She was surrounded by the blind.

THUNDERSNOW by Larry Eby

THUNDERSNOW
by Larry Eby

A ribcage of snow with a beating heart, a west wind moving the cold front over us. The churches kept their candles burning. We stood outside licking at the air in our rain coats, rubber boots—our dogs trouncing in the blizzard. It began light and ended heavy. 4 inches, 6 inches, a foot by next morning. The days were overcast—thunder rattled a glass off a counter. We began to stay inside. Our lights hidden in the heaps of snow. We talked about death. Where could we bury anyone now? The electricity had gone out. 3 days. 4 days. A week. The whole town a field of white. The telephone lines seemed at ground level. We dug upwards, trying to reach some air. We were some type of animal, we realized it now. We saw it in our eyes. To kill or die.

TEET’ by Soyini Ayanna Forde

I am at the orthodontist, getting photos taken of my mouth to be placed inside my file by the new dental assistant. My mouth widens, a pink chasm. She smothers a soft gasp, stifles it in her throat, but I hear it anyway.

“You have no molars below,” she says. “How do you chew?”

I look at her, wary. “I don’t know,” I say, “I just do.”

“So, you’re Caribbean?” She asks me during another appointment, with a smile that is too excited to see me, that I know cannot be real. Her teeth are impeccable, clean, pretty. I am convinced I’m the kind of patient about whom serious briefings are held before any appointment. She will already know the inside of my mouth well, its secrets and its deficiencies.

I’m not interested in any ol’ talk. I want to recline in the chair and stare quietly at the big lights overhead. I want to find a way out of appointments and money and teeth fixing and anxiety. I want to know why the tooth fairy only services children. Or doesn’t grant wishes. Isn’t that what fairies are supposed to do? I also want to tell her that “Caribbean” is not a kind of ethnicity, but of course, I don’t.

“Yes.” I say.

POKEWEED by Lynn Levin

Lynn Levin photo credit: Melina Meshako

POKEWEED
by Lynn Levin

In my deathwish days when I was young
I reaped the bitter from the field
and ate the poison pokeweed raw.
What did I know of boiling and washing
of throwing the bad soup out?
In my deathwish days, I never had enough
of wretchedness. A bird in the pokeberries
I drank the toxic wine and warbled
my bitter thoughts. Oh, I had lived a life
of deferment: of little I never had enough.
Then early one morning, sick of it all
I caught the wild perfume of the honeysuckle.
I heard the chorus of its delicate tongues.
I drew the stamens through the butter
and moon. I sucked the clear sweet drops.
I left my house. Dawn came up.

TWO DOORMEN by Alexia Underwood

TWO DOORMEN
by Alexia Underwood

When the junk collector paused to adjust the hitch to his donkey last week, scattering old papers and dusty bits of plumbing among the potholes, he told Abd el-Majid that snow was on the way.

Rami, the Sa’idi who sold fruit from a wooden cart at the corner of Saad Zaghloul street, denied that it could ever happen.

“It’s a conspiracy, like everything else,” he said.

But then, it did.

Abd el-Majid was standing in the doorway to the Noor Mosque, waiting for the landlady to let down her blue plastic basket from the balcony. As he scraped the coins from the bottom to fetch her the daily papers, he felt something wet slide onto his cheek.

Snow. Gray. Not white. Fragile, dandruff-like particles. The flakes flickered silently in and out of the flame tree branches overhead.

Abd el-Majid settled down on his haunches in the doorway. All around him, others were staring at the mercurial substance. Women ducked and laughed, adjusting their hijabs in wonder. Children and grown men stuck their tongues out, trying to catch an aging snowflake, but they were always a little too late.

TAKEAWAY by Donald Quist

TAKEAWAY
by Donald Quist

The glass surface of the round banquet table buzzed. Outside, antigovernment demonstrations jammed the streets of Bangkok. Plastic whistle blasts and the call and response of a hundred megaphones echoed through the humid capital. Sounds of contention burrowed upwards through levels of concrete. The protests hummed between Nahm’s ears.

Nahm sat with Jason’s family in a private dining room on the fourth floor of the Iron Wok Chef. The entrance to the secluded dining area featured a tall red archway ornamented by carvings of spiraling dragons. A wall of windows opened out to a small balcony. Behind a short karaoke stage decorated with blinking Christmas lights, panels of full-length mirrors attempted to give a greater sense of space. But the mirrors reflected the opposite wall and a mural of a foggy Lushan mountain range, trapping dinner guests between dark summits and stirring Nahm’s anxiety.

To calm herself, Nahm narrowed her concentration on specific parts of the meal. She tried to identify the various flavors in the shark fin soup. She attempted to calculate the cost of each ingredient passing between her lips. Nahm had developed habits likes this selling mango and sticky rice with her mother in front of the headquarters for Kaidee Inter Auto Parts Co., Ltd. During those long hours she would stare down at one of the cracks in the grimy sidewalk and count the number of expensive shoes that passed over, or she’d look up at the tangled thicket of telephone wires running above her head and imagine where each line finished and began.

Every year Jason had pleaded for Nahm to attend the family’s Chinese New Year’s dinner, and she always declined saying she didn’t want to go anywhere she wasn’t welcome. But tonight she had finally conceded, and Jason hoped to make the evening enjoyable if possible.

PINTO LOS FLORES PARA QUE NO MUEREN by Lena Popkin

Pinto los Flores Para Que No Mueren
For Frida Kahlo

Revolution coincides with your birthday. You open fire, unbound.
Born of discontent, la casa azul leaves you no hope
but you find yourself longing for its pain.
Frozen disfigured limbs still look for love,
and he wants to give it. You search desperately for passion,
but none could be found among wilted flowers.

Splintered metal, your broken body lies in a field of wildflowers.
Blood pools freely; finally a part of you no longer bound
by the confines of your skin. Screams echo around you and you smile, hearing only passion.
In thirty-five parts, they try to stitch together your dying hope,
empty promises hang like bloody limbs on the canvas, no more love
left in your paintbrushes. No more pain.

You drink dreams in shot glasses, thrown back quick, pills for your pain.
Immobilized like you: broken stems and tired petals. You are fascinated by flowers;
kaleidoscope of colors and temporary love.
Your bed becomes your confidant, that most intimate lover to whom you are bound.
Consolation comes in the strangest of forms. Drips of hope
storm your bloodstream with liquid passion.

MODALITIES by Robert Lietz

MODALITIES

In Giant Latitudes

Another retired year and scrappy light’s chronology,
with suppertimes the neighbors ask you in or ask
themselves to, where swings and slides and rim-strung nets
imply a peace made casually, speeding
a fox through his to do, an owl to hers, so that Mercy
may be the faces that remind,
or, inches away, a new year’s mandevilla, its post-wrapped
tendrils and scarlet repeating puckers
climbing, repositioning, as the light decides, and
as the faces, reabsorbed, might seem
to us dissolving, as indecisive, say, if misremembered
frequencies, assuming themselves,
as wasps fly in, and set up under eaves, endorsing
the receptive atmosphere, and
as distractions come, prolifically, like
small minds obsessing, in
giant latitudes.

THE DISABLED by Aimee LaBrie

THE DISABLED
by Aimee LaBrie

It is just past Thanksgiving, and they’ve already begun playing Christmas carols at the theme restaurant where Eleanor waits tables. The music streams from the speakers on the ceiling, like a curse from God, until her head feels stuffed with jingle bells and sleigh bells and holiday bells. She is so bloated with pre-Christmas spirit that she feels sick, as if she’s eaten an entire plate of Santa shaped cookies with an inch of frosting on the top. And yet somehow, the show must go on!

She has been living on her own in the Windy City for just under three months, lives in a shitty garden apartment with a leaky ceiling, and auditioned for zero plays. She can’t seem to find the time, what with all the old AMC movie watching she must do and the waitressing and homeless people to dodge and all.

Table two would like more ketchup in a white salad dressing cup, please. Table three would like several free refills of Diet Coke, some with a lemon and some with limes. Table five would like a new husband and in the meantime, will take her unhappiness out on Eleanor by sending back her calamari first as not warm enough and then saying the plate burned her fingers. Table 6 explodes with rowdy German tourists who will not tip and table seven is the angry wheelchair guy, a regular who purposefully juts his chair out in the middle of the aisle, making it difficult to maneuver around him, especially if you’re carrying a heavy tray of food filled with super fun holiday appetizers with sprigs of holly; as if he hopes to be doused by chili con carne. He also wants his food prepared in a very particular way and explains that if it’s not—if, for instance, the carrots interact with a peanut in any way—he will keel over and need an epi pen stuck in his neck which may spoil the lunch of the other patrons. However, he is also fiercely handsome with a square jaw and chiseled features of a 1940s movie actor of some kind.

ECOTONE STRETCH by Diego Reymondez

ECOTONE STRETCH
by Diego Reymondez

A border between ecosystems is called an ecotone. It is a space where separate ecologies enmesh in a fade in and a fade out, and microclimates mingle. Wind and fur and legs can alter or transfer energy there and like a yin and a yang traces of each thrive in the other.

My stroll home intuits scads of these.

An apple falls from the canopy, brushing leaves down its way. When it arrives with a final thud against the ground I’m roused from a sleep where I dreamt of a proper bed.

A sluice carved in stone carries spring water to slip and break on pebbles. Oxygen’s forced into the pond. Foam to the surface. Bubbles pop and humidity rises.

A car horn carries from a distance.

When woods are only stressed, even in a thousand places, the whole always seems to stand. A boar tore away bark. Mushrooms ate the dead wood behind it. Enter insects to eat the living wood beneath it all. Then returned boar to eat all and perform the miracle of wood into meat.

Electric humming swells from down the path.

Underfoot, kudzu grows out of horizons of soil. Roots through humus, dirt and rock.

What seems a clearing is a ribbon of clear cut forest. Utility poles of Bolivian wood rising from the absence. While beneath the cords birds chirrup and make their way swift from tree line to tree line and the hair on my skin lifts on the slight breeze blown between the two woods. It will all lead back to town.

MY FATHER’S ARMS by Betsy Campbell Stone

MY FATHER'S ARMS
by Betsy Campbell Stone

At home, we covered up. Mine was a house full of brothers.

A closed bathroom door meant it was occupied. Occasionally I’d find the upstairs bathroom door ajar and push in, only to catch my father shaving. He always shaved nude. The long mirror over the two sinks was shrouded in steam except for the watery oval he cleared in front of his face. His bicep — round as Popeye’s — flexed as he swept the razor downward to reveal a stripe of skin. Like a drop of water that knows to leap off a griddle, I pulled the door shut.

Such squeamishness had disappeared by my father’s last year.

One afternoon, I heard a heavy thump while he was showering and ran into the bathroom. I opened the glass door to see him struggling like a beetle on its back.

“Are you hurt?” I asked.

“No, but I can’t get up.”

He’d fallen before, but on the thick carpet of his bedroom. I learned then that he didn’t have enough strength in his stomach muscles to roll over, much less to sit up. Fortunately, his leather belt made a good handle; I hauled up on it while he strained to get to his hands and knees. Then I coached him to reach forward and lean on a low chair before pivoting his bottom around to the seat. Those Popeye biceps were his salvation.

AMERICAN GRAMOPHONE by Carey McHugh reviewed by Clare Paniccia

Carey McHugh

AMERICAN GRAMOPHONE
by Carey McHugh
Augury Books, 72 pages

reviewed by Clare Paniccia

In approaching Carey McHugh’s American Gramophone, one might first consider this question: What is the song of America, or American culture? It’s easy to jump to the obvious conclusions—the United States has strongly defined itself through its velocity, whether in industry, technology, or commercial growth, and its music has become largely representative of these themes, with contemporary pop artists representing the almost-electric shine of the digital age, rock bands highlighting the working-class, and country groups crooning over the “loss” of an easy-going, slow-paced lifestyle.

Beneath these surface associations, however, McHugh challenges our initial question with a more stripped-down idea—what if America’s song isn’t something you can quickly flip to on a radio? What if America’s song is something that deviates completely from the mainstream—something pared to its most visceral form: an instrumental, organic, and natural tone? Think of the vibrating note of a fiddle, the deep strum of a guitar, and bare, haunting vocals. The sounds of folk and Americana that seem to eek out of valleys, creeks, and forgotten forests—quietly shivering their way into the undercurrent of the American everyday. These are the notes that wind from McHugh’s own gramophone, characterizing this dark collection with a taste of folklore and caution that asks the reader to step out of his or her American associations and return to the frontier’s beginning—the land at its most original, and its most severe.

CONSEQUENCES: Four Books in Translation, reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin

CONSEQUENCES: Four Books in Translation
reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin

WAR, SO MUCH WAR
by Mercè Rodoreda, translation by Maruxa Relaño and Martha Tennant
Open Letter, 185 pages

TRISTANO DIES
by Antonio Tabucchi, translation by Elizabeth Harris
Archipelago, 192 pages

THE THINGS WE DON’T DO
by Andrés Neuman, translation by Nick Caistor and Lorenza Garcia
Open Letter, 190 pages

A GENERAL THEORY OF OBLIVION
by José Eduardo Agualusa
Archipelago, 246 pages

Once in a while a writer speaks to me as if we are in a kind of private ecstatic embrace. That is the kind of reader I am: thirsty for intimacy, for communion. In dialogue, I answer back as best I can.

I spent much of last year with Traveler of the Century (FSG, 2012), Andrés Neuman’s lost and found allegory of the nineteenth century, bildungsroman of modernity, eyes tearing with fraternity. Here was the brother (older and wiser) of Lion and Leopard (The Head and The Hand Press), a novel I had published the year before.

Now Neuman has nudged me into a new conversation, about constructing narrative, in a series of conceptual stories and experimental situations collected in The Things We Don’t Do, in the English translation by Nick Caistor and Lorenza Garcia. Neuman whispers as he writes about writing, the place of the writer in the reader’s field of vision, and holds out a hand as he wanders through the borderland of experience, writerly self-awareness, and invention. “We have become such hybrid authors that any day now we’ll make a purist revolution” (a counter-revolution probably more accurately), he writes, one of a series of “dodecalogues” of interpretation and observation that follow the stories in the new collection.

As Neuman plays with form, Caistor and Garcia, his English translators, demonstrate extraordinary range and interpretive capacity, and they must: translation as a theme runs through his work—the heroes of Traveler of the Century fall in love translating poetry. Neuman’s stories in fact speak in various tongues at once. In “Piotr Czerny’s Last Poem,” a secret poet loses his entire oeuvre in a fire. The fire—both destructive force and fuel of imagination—saves him amateur embarrassment and provides an “electric shock” of inspiration. In “Embrace,” with a scent of Poe, Neuman observes the consequences of guilt after a mugging that leaves one friend injured and the other unharmed.

MASKS AND ICONS by R. Daniel Evans reviewed by Shinelle L. Espaillat

Masks and Icons

MASKS AND ICONS
by R. Daniel Evans
Blurb, 82 pages

reviewed by Shinelle Espaillat

In his fourth poetry collection, Masks and Icons, R. Daniel Evans examines the complexity of love and desire, and exposes the ways in which these emotions both intersect with and deviate from each other. Evans brings a microscope to the multiple small evidences of love in the world, using the lens of art to view the beauty and pain of interpersonal connection, inviting readers to look through the mask of the self and perceive the extraordinary.

Section I, “From The Land of Walt Whitman,” focuses on the intimacy and inner-life of a speaker’s relationships with individuals, beginning with a one-sided conversation with Whitman himself. The narrator sits on a beach, fairly melting with desire over a distant beauty to whom he never speaks, but whom he imagines as Whitman’s muse. He wonders how, with such an object of desire near him, Whitman “ever got any poems written,” noting, in this metaphysical moment, that desire is an obstacle to his own work. Sexual desire, then, is all-consuming, and the speaker suggests that poets instead mine the world at large for the rich possibilities of interaction, with the vibrancy of the natural world, with the music of the oppressed, and then to write poetry that speaks America.

CAT IS ART SPELLED WRONG reviewed by Justin Goodman

CAT IS ART SPELLED WRONG
edited by Caroline Casey, Chris Fischbach, and Sarah Schultz
Coffee House Press, 160 pages

Cat-is-art

Anonymous' Internet Rule 38: “one cat leads to another.” This rule is played out, true to form, within the universe it governs. I think of Douglas Davis’s classic “The World’s First Collaborative Sentence,” which (half Mobius Strip) perpetually leads, and (half Internet) begins with “cat purring softly”; or, in the same vein, the more contemporary “Drei Klavierstücke op. 11” by Cory Arcangel, composed of cat-on-piano videos molded into Arnold Schoenberg's twelve-tone music.

The Internet seems to have returned us to what Schoenberg’s contemporary, the painter Gustav Klimt, asked with his bijou palette and bourgeois nudes: when does something exit coincidence and enter art? As with Klimt's regal-looking prostitutes, we might ask, where is the line between artistic intention and the more accidental capturing of internal feeling? Now, amidst a flurry of cat media, editors Caroline Casey, Chris Fischbach, and Sarah Schultz have gathered the work of 14 authors to discern meaning in the paw swipes virtuosity. The work is gathered in the collaborative Cat Is Art Spelled Wrong.

STUMBLING OUT THE STABLE by Sean Pravica reviewed by KC Mead-Brewer

Stumbling out of the Stable

STUMBLING OUT THE STABLE
by Sean Pravica
Pelekinesis Press, 436 pages

reviewed by KC Mead-Brewer

In his short stories, Sean Pravica often prefers the magical real and the weird over realism. In his debut novel Stumbling Out the Stable, however, Pravica steps up to a more classic literary endeavor: to find (and not shy away from) meaning in the everyday. For Pravica’s characters in Stumbling, this “meaning” is found between the gods of order and chaos—not simply in their conflicts, but in the strange beauty of their creative harmony.

The novel crackles with the nervous energy of this crossroads between order and chaos, between the dream of freedom and the fear of aimlessness, between the desire for something new and the temptation to remain safe in practical routine. It is at this crossroads that Pravica introduces us to his leading men, the debt-riddled college student-philosopher-photographer Seamus and Seamus’ best friend, Jamie. “What if taking neither path was the best decision?” wonders Seamus,

“The more as well as the less traveled were both born from the same split decision. What if movement was nipped in the bud? Was that not It, content already, seams tied shut, wounds healed, stasis realized?”

The fog was clearing. Seamus knew it.

A young man who aspires to become a photojournalist hitchhiker after graduation (though he already bums rides everywhere he goes), Seamus is still adjusting to the possibilities now opening before him, a world of sense and senselessness, normalcy and absurdity. Pravica gives us this world in still life:

FAT CITY by Leonard Gardner reviewed by Claire Rudy Foster

Fat City

FAT CITY
by Leonard Gardner
introduction by Denis Johnson
New York Review Books, 191 pages

reviewed by Claire Rudy Foster

We steal. Writers do. A good writer is a magpie, searching other people's sentences for something that glimmers. A good writer reads with a jeweler's loupe. Close reading, and the willingness to borrow shamelessly from other people's works, is what differentiates the casual writer from the serious writer. Very serious writers find other writers' reading lists, and read them. And then those writers' lists, their influences. And so on back. Read up the chain. Understanding what a writer reads, and how they read it, can give deep insight into the craft of storytelling. But getting inside means finding the book that matters most; the one that changed everything. Fat City by Leonard Gardner is one of these. It's cited as a major influence by writers like Denis Johnson and Joan Didion. Ever heard of it? Me neither.

Like its main characters—two perpetually out-of-luck boxers—Fat City is the best book you've never read. It resists hype in a way that's refreshing. In an age that lives for the reboot—J.K. Rowling's return to YA fiction, Harper Lee's lost manuscript, yet another volume of the Game of Thrones series—this slim, unpretentious novel comes from an era when fiction did not have to be flashy to be read and respected. The trim sentences create neat sketches of Stockton, California and the fly-by-nights who clutter its gyms, weekly hotels, lunchrooms, and dark bars.

Gardner's restraint is reminiscent of John Steinbeck, whose novels Cannery Row and Tortilla Flat dignified the shallow, unhappy lives of the vagrants of Monterey, California. Published in 1969, Fat City makes no allusion to its period in history. There's no mention of the massive social changes taking in America in the late 1960s. There's no talk of brotherhood and equality, either. Gardner's characters become equals when they enter the boxing ring; otherwise, they go aimlessly from tomato field to short-order station, passing time until they can get in shape for their next fight.

KIDS IN THE WIND by Brad Wethern reviewed by Rachael Tague

KIDS IN THE WIND
by Brad Wethern
Red Hen Press, 146 pages

reviewed by Rachael Tague

Randy Ray McKenzie received the nickname General Custer because Junior Malstrom always thought Randy was galloping Strawberry, the one-eyed horse, into disaster. And perhaps, on the day General Custer agreed to race the old horse against a junkyard Ford on a rarely used, viciously windy airstrip in the California seaport town of Fairhaven, he was indeed galloping into disaster – or at least over the edge of a sand dune.

The General moved to Fairhaven in the middle of second grade, which “is like playing 52 Pickup with all your people and things. When you try to collect them and put them back together, you can’t, because they are somebody else’s people now and somebody else’s things.” Fairhaven was different from the General’s grammar school back in Oregon where little John and Marnie “could kiss just like Hollywood stars at the end of a movie,” and Hugh Taylor did not get in trouble for yanking the new Egyptian student off his swing by the ankle. The Fairhaven school had nutrition and physical education instead of morning and afternoon recess, the first through third graders were all in the same classroom, and Lance, a boy from the “Jova Witness Church,” always left the room during the Pledge of Allegiance. According to author Brad Wethern, “The world of Fairhaven on the north spit of Humboldt Bay in the 1950’s is familiar to very few,” but by late elementary, the General was well acquainted with the peculiar town and its inhabitants.

A BLIND GUIDE TO STINKVILLE by Beth Vrabel reviewed by Mandy King

A BLIND GUIDE TO STINKVILLE
by Beth Vrabel
Sky Pony Press, an imprint of Skyhorse Publishing Inc., 288 pages

reviewed by Mandy King

A Blind Guide to Stinkville is a story told through the fuzzy eyes of 11-year-old Alice, whose albinism and near blindness give her the unique perspective to uncover hidden stories of the people in her new town. The genius of Vrabel’s approach is that the reader meets the other characters through nuances of feelings and impressions rather than stark physical descriptions. The book is not a page-turner plot-wise and there are no major catastrophes; instead the novel peers beneath the superficial to reveal important lessons about what it means to be a member of small town community.

Despite the fact that Alice has to use a magnifying glass to read a book a few inches from her face, she is the only person in the story who truly sees what is going on around her. Initially, Alice thinks her new hometown of Sinkville, aka “Stinkville,” is a horrible place dominated by the terrible smell emanating from the local paper-mill. It’s nothing like where she grew up in Seattle. It smells foul and everything is different.

THE DEVIL AND WINNIE FLYNN by Micol Ostow and David Ostow reviewed by Rachael Tague

THE DEVIL AND WINNIE FLYNN
by Micol Ostow
illustrated by David Ostow
Soho Teen, 326 pages

reviewed by Rachael Tague

I don’t like to be scared. I can’t stand that chill-in-the-air, breath-on-my-neck, sweat-in-my-palm terror that comes with horror stories. The last time I tried to read a scary book, I was twelve, and I flipped to the epilogue before I was halfway through to relieve the tension. That’s the only time I’ve ever read the end of a book without reading everything in between. But if I had the option to stop in the middle of The Devil and Winnie Flynn, I would have given up during the séance in the criminal ward of an abandoned insane asylum. As it was, I had to shut the book, take a breath, and reorient myself to reality before I could continue with this creepy tale.

Brother-Sister duo Micol and David Ostow (So Punk Rock (and Other Ways to Disappoint Your Mother)) team up for the second time to write and illustrate The Devil and Winnie Flynn, packing the pages with ghostly spirits, exorcisms, demons, psychics, and all manner of haunted locations, its characters seeking communion with the dead and the damned. Cleverly twisting the paranormal with mystery and pop culture, the Ostows invite their readers into Winnie Flynn’s haunted adventures.

When her mother commits suicide, Winnie Flynn meets her long-lost Aunt Maggie, “the creator, director, and producer of the Fantastic, Fearsome USTM series." Her life becomes “a family-tragedy-turned-last-minute internship in television—in reality television!—smack-dab dead center in America’s armpit.” Winnie relocates from Portland, Oregon to a shady motel in her late mother’s home state of New Jersey. From their headquarters in Asbury Park, the cast and crew are within driving distance of spirit-filled destinations like Overlook Insane Asylum, Ghost Boy Bridge, the Pine Barrens, and the Devils portal. Their goal: to hunt down the famed New Jersey Devil, a creature Winnie believes is a myth.

CALIGULAN by Ernest Hilbert reviewed by J.G. McClure

CALIGULAN
by Ernest Hilbert
Measure Press, 96 pages

reviewed by J.G. McClure

From his debut Sixty Sonnets to All of You On The Good Earth, Ernest Hilbert has made a name for himself as a dedicated formalist. His latest, Caligulan, is no exception: you’ll find no free verse here.

Hilbert is at his best when the content of the poems plays against the formal constraints. Take “Barnegat Light,” for instance:

The gull pulls bags from trash and drags them clear.
He’s big as a cat, a blur of snow and soot.
He pokes until debris spills down the pier.
He’s clumsy, and somehow he’s lost a foot.
Chewed off? A winter fishing line? Wedged in boards?
The stump’s a small sharp spear that stings the bird
If ground is touched. He soars to foggy scree,
Alights but flaps to halfway hang in air, spurred
By pain to perform endless pirouettes.

The tightly elegant form contrasts perfectly with the unsettling pain and violence of the scene described; one senses the formal control is the only thing between us and the chaotic world the bird inhabits. It’s hard not to read this as an ars poetica: the bird has lost a foot (ha!) and is now “spurred / by pain to perform endless pirouettes,” like the formal pirouettes of the sonnet. There’s the slight misstep of “if ground is touched”—a moment of awkward syntax in which the form seems to control the poet instead of the reverse—but in context, it’s forgivable: the image of the bird makes us understand why rigid form is of the utmost importance to this speaker. The poem’s ending brings the point home:

TALK by Linda Rosenkrantz reviewed by Rory McCluckie

TALK
by Linda Rosenkrantz
NYRB, 215 pages

reviewed by Rory McCluckie

Whatever else it might be, Talk is the bearer of a remarkably terse and comprehensive title. Has there ever been a work that so accurately summarizes its contents in so short a space? In four letters, Linda Rosenkrantz encapsulated the interior of her 1968 literary experiment immaculately; this is a book of talk. All 215 pages are repositories of speech, unadorned by scenic description or third-person agency. What's more, they're pages of genuine talk, not a word of it imagined or fabricated. Over the summer of 1965, Rosenkrantz decided to capture the conversation of friends on tape, a process that eventually lead to her picking out three personalities, and presenting their interactions in the form of a “novel in dialogue.” Stephen Koch's introduction fleshes out the context: “I had the tape recorder running all summer,” Rosenkrantz recalls,

even dragging the bulky monster to the beach. At first there were about twenty-five different characters and fifteen hundred pages of single-spaced transcript, which I took close to two years honing down to the three characters and two hundred fifty pages.

Quite the project, in other words. A little later in this same introduction, however, there's another phrase that ultimately proves more striking. As Koch introduces the conceptual basis of the book, he posits that the guiding vision behind the work was one of exploring how daily existence might function when presented as an act of creation, thus acting as a literary experiment the results of which were hard to foresee. The framework, he offers, within which Talk should be viewed is crystallized into the following question: “Why not see if life really imitates art?”

INK AND ASHES by Valynne E. Maetani reviewed by Leticia Urieta

INK AND ASHES
by Valynne E. Maetani
Tu Books, 380 pages

reviewed by Leticia Urieta

Valynne E. Maetani’s debut novel, Ink and Ashes, begins with the narrator Claire’s eerie statement: “I stared at my pink walls, wishing away the smell of death. I imagined the wispy smoke snaking its way through the narrow spaces around my closed door, the tendrils prying at tucked away memories.” This observation cements her voice as protagonist, a mixture of sensitivity, uncertainty, and fierceness. As the smell of incense wafts up to her room – part of a ritual to honor her father since his passing ten years ago – she struggles to reconcile memories of her father with what she later discovers about him. And it’s this powerful voice that leads us through a heart-pounding narrative journey, exploring the nebulous nature of memory and trauma.

At seventeen, Claire deals with the typical issues of a teenage girl: homework, relationships with boys, and overprotective parents. Still, her life is colored by the loss of her father. Looking back through his old journal, Claire discovers a mysterious letter from her father addressed to her stepdad George, whom she believed her father had never met before. Suddenly, the stable life she thought she knew is thrown into doubt. Claire must reconcile the memories and ideas of her father with a new and haunting legacy.

From the moment of her discovery, Claire embarks on a mission to learn more about her father’s past, his suspicious cause of death, and whether he was the upstanding man she believed him to be. Meanwhile, her locker is broken into at school and Claire’s anxiety rises as she notices a black SUV following her around. On top of these worries, Claire is forced to come to terms with her feelings for her best friend Forrest. He is always on hand to comfort and defend her, keeping Claire from retreating into herself when her thoughts get jumbled or anxiety takes over.

PUNK ELEGIES by Allan MacDonell and DADDY Madison Young reviewed by Johnny Payne

PUNK ELEGIES
by Allan MacDonell
Rare Bird Books, 306 pages

DADDY
Madison Young
Rare Bird Books, 323 pages

reviewed by Johnny Payne

“Let my heart tell you what prompted me to do wrong for no purpose, and why it was only mischief that made me do it.” Thus spoke Saint Augustine of Hippo, and with those words, invented the confessional memoir and spawned the talk show in which the recounting of misdeeds leads—it is hoped—to self-reflection, repentance and salvation. When you put the peccadillos in print, it is difficult to escape this literary paradigm, for, as with Augustine’s sins (and our own), the more you struggle, the more surely redemption will drag you toward a hopeful destiny, like the mighty Mississippi at flood tide, and you borne aloft on your own self-damning words.

Two such memoirs have just been issued from Rare Bird Books. The first, Punk Elegies, is the sometimes desultory, occasionally comical, and moderately self-aware account of Allan MacDonell’s drugged and drunken misbehavior as a skilled yet dubious reporter of punk music for Slash magazine in Los Angeles, present at what is dubbed the birth of stateside punk, via a band called The Screamers. He has given himself his toughest assignment ever in this memoir, because it’s all been done before: promiscuous sex, alcoholic stupors, watching friends overdose into comas. After sixteen centuries, the genre has grown a little tired. And what do you do when you weren’t really that close to the main action, nor played a prominent role? What if you were a journalistic hanger on, and not even of the sweetly naïve Almost Famous variety? What if you were an annoying lout?

Slyly, MacDonell turns these facts to his advantage. He neither preens nor tries to win us over too insistently. He accepts his insignificant place among the night crawlers, and acknowledges that his quintessential brush with fame is when a teenage Joan Jett, wearing a wife beater, shoulders him in the midst of an alcohol-fueled, bickering fight with three “heavyset girls who wear a lot of makeup.” Dispassionate as the Living Jesus, Joan takes a knife from Allan’s hand and dispenses this wisdom: “You’d be a pretty cool guy if you didn’t drink so much.”

WAVELAND: One Woman’s Story of Freedom Summer by Simone Zelitch reviewed by Claire Rudy Foster

WAVELAND: One Woman's Story of Freedom Summer
by Simone Zelitch
The Head & The Hand Press
221 pages

reviewed by Claire Rudy Foster

Any discussion of race is going to include a good story. Identity is organic; it's not semiotic, raised like softened noodles from a theoretical alphabet soup. Race is about how we relate to ourselves, to others, and how our stories mix together. Is it an educated, white woman's privilege to say that? Maybe. I can't see outside of myself, though I can admit my limitations. I wouldn't presume to take on another person's story, as that dishonors their experience.

This dilemma—the quandary of the white liberal who genuinely wants to work for racial equality—is the piercing thread that runs through Simone Zelitch's fourth novel, Waveland. Set in 1964 and the decade that follows, Waveland brings the Freedom Summer to life. Young people from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) worked to register African-American voters in Mississippi. They set up Freedom Schools in church basements and back rooms and offered classes in civics and basic skills. They were beaten, arrested, and disappeared. The mixed group, SNCC, was real—not imagined—and when Zelitch starts blurring the lines of history with fiction, things get a little crazy.

Waveland uses the past to challenge the future in ways that are both thrilling and uncomfortable to read. An idealistic, prickly Northern student, Beth Fine, leaves her university in a powder-blue Corvair to give her energy to the Freedom School movement that's cropping up in Melody, Mississippi. Her attraction isn't just the group's radical call for integration. Ron Beauchamp, one of the movement's leaders, hooks her in with a kiss. Does this sound like soft-soap?

It's not. Racism is not dead, and in the early 1960s it was alive and murderous. “Your brother or sister could be dead tomorrow,” Ron says to himself, “shot through the neck or burned in the basement of a church.” Interracial relationships were an invitation to violence; people who mixed were under threat, always, from “good” white people who wanted to regulate the status quo.

KILLING AUNTIE by Andrzej Bursa reviewed by Jacqueline Kharouf

KILLING AUNTIE
by Andrzej Bursa
translated by Wiesiek Powaga
New Vessel Press, 107 pages

reviewed by Jacqueline Kharouf

Andrzej Bursa was born in Krakow on March 21, 1932, seven years before the German invasion of Poland. He died of congenital heart failure at age twenty-five on November 15, 1957, just after Poland began to overthrow its totalitarian system of Communist rule. Bursa lived in a time that shifted dramatically from extreme suppression to extreme expression, misinformation and propaganda to jazz and poetry. His literary career began on the heels of the post-war period of Polish literature noted for an emphasis on “Socialist Realism,” but was cut short at the emergence of an era of national sovereignty that prompted an explosion of avant-garde art, performance, literature, and music.

Bursa’s only novel, Killing Auntie, was not published during his lifetime. The novel takes place over the course of a week, during which a young man named Jurek whacks his aunt in the head with a hammer and then attempts to rid himself of her corpse, a more difficult task than he imagines. While it doesn’t ever do anything, or say anything, everything Jurek does is in reaction to the corpse. This is the black humor of the story, which could also be a foil to the atmosphere of 1950s Poland, a time that fluctuated from the enforcement of Soviet sponsored police terror, censorship, and economic strife to the reversal (or decrease) of such policies.

Even without knowing the novel’s political context, Killing Auntie may be understood and appreciated for its stark and unapologetic approach to the (frankly) absurd trajectory of adulthood. Jurek, orphaned, disaffected, and now living on his own, longs for real purpose: “Today for the first time I realized I had no purpose. I went out without a reason. These purposeless, lonely walks were murderous. I knew that.” Jurek’s story is not dark for the sake of darkness (although killing your aunt in cold blood is pretty dark), but to subvert the idea that we all grow up to make families, buy groceries, and pay bills because these are aspirations for a lifetime of happiness. Jurek does not kill his aunt because he hates her. He kills her to have a purpose.

DIORAMA by Rocío Cerón reviewed by Johnny Payne

DIORAMA
by Rocío Cerón
Phoneme Press, 145 pages

reviewed by Johnny Payne

Cerón’s creation can best be described thus: she summons words. Like iron filings to a magnet, they come into an order that feels inevitable.

Pulsar body, delicate hibiscus flowers or mangrove
Palm: residual beauty of misery/

In this penchant for naming, her exquisite and casual catalogues could pass as still life. But her poetry, technical yet drenched in sensation, scientific yet opulent in the manner of natural history, is propulsive, as she pushes herself, and us, to the far limit of the mind’s ken. In “Sonata Mandala to the Penumbra Bird,” echo seems to precede sound:

Hyperboreal smell: wild mist of civet musk.

Body’s simple landscape, dermal aura, death.

Scent of tea and points of star.

Affect falls dense, and what might feel like lacunae or mere white space in the work of another poet, figures as sensation. Feeling crowds and suffuses each gap. It is not so much a matter of a reader making logical leaps (though they can be made) as it is of following the quick pulses that run through the lines. Politics figure as oblique, yet Cerón is quite capable of brief, cutting critiques of the history and politics of America:

FAR COUNTRY: STORIES FROM ABROAD AND OTHER PLACES, essays by Timothy Kenny reviewed by Beth Johnston

FAR COUNTRY: STORIES FROM ABROAD AND OTHER PLACES, essays
by Timothy Kenny
Bottom Dog Press, 144 pages

reviewed by Beth Johnston

In the preface to Timothy Kenny’s new essay collection, Far Country: Stories from Abroad and Other Places, Kenny links his stories to the new journalism of the 1960s, the work of “Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, and Joan Didion.” Yet although Kenny positions himself as Didion, personal and revealing, he more often echoes New Yorker journalist John McPhee. His essays hold back, shield the author’s character, and confess little. The best of them capitalize on Kenny’s strengths: carefully observed detail, compelling stories, and flair for sentence. But only a few of them require Kenny to risk baring himself and his responses to distant places.

Kenny is a former USA Today journalist and a journalism professor who has worked abroad since 1989. He’s seen a lot: Belfast during the Troubles, Berlin right before the wall fell, Sarajevo during the siege, and Kabul as Afghanistan is rebuilt. He’s interviewed Vaclav Havel in Prague and fought off feral dogs in Kosovo. His character feels like the movie version of a Western journalist abroadhe’s Mel Gibson in The Year of Living Dangerously or Stephen Dillane in Welcome to Sarajevo. Kenny himself might resist the comparison, since, he notes, he “was neither a war correspondent nor a traditional foreign-based journalist . . . [but] a reporter fortunate enough to travel overseas frequently.” Still, Kenny is true to journalistic type: he’s jaded enough not to be shocked by what he sees, pragmatic enough to resist heroism, and reluctant to indulge in unbridled idealism.

SUPPLICATION: Selected Poems by John Wieners reviewed by J.G. McClure

SUPPLICATION: Selected Poems
by John Wieners
Wave Books, 216 pages

reviewed by J.G. McClure

I’ll admit upfront that, prior to receiving Supplication, Selected Poems of John Wieners, I knew very little about Wieners or his work. Biographically, I knew he was a Beat Poet and member of the San Francisco Renaissance. The only poem I knew was the titular poem of this selected, “Supplication”:

O poetry, visit this house often,
imbue my life with success,
leave me not alone,
give me a wife and home.

Take this curse off
of early death and drugs,
make me a friend among peers,
lend me love, and timeliness.

Return me to the men who teach
and above all, cure the
hurts of wanting the impossible
through this suspended vacuum.

This is Wieners at his best. The first stanza shows his trademark gifts: a willingness to use an elevated rhetoric that risks—and resists—sentimentality, and a powerful longing for what cannot be. How is poetry to provide success, companionship, marriage, a home? Wieners knows as well as the rest of us that it doesn’t work that way.

In the second stanza, we see Wieners wrestling with another of the primary concerns in his work – “early death and drugs.” Remember that we’re in the ’50s and ’60s, the peak of a glamorous bohemian drug culture. Sometimes Wieners indulges himself in fantasies of this life – but he’s at his best in moments like this, when he explores the painful realities of the drugs that he uses and that have killed his friends. And again, we see that longing: poetry won’t give him love or timeliness—at best, it will “lend” them.

HEDERA HELIX by Claire Rudy Foster

HEDERA HELIX
by Claire Rudy Foster

That morning there was an email from Paul. Gemma clicked on it without thinking. Her coffee mug steamed at her elbow, too hot to drink. She forced her eyes to focus on the tiny electronic letters. Legal issues, he wrote. Looks like it's back to jail, do not pass go. I'll try to be out by summer break so we can meet again in the usual place. She had to read it twice, slowly. Then she slammed the laptop shut , as though extinguishing a flame.

Pouring her coffee into the travel thermos, she took care to rest the lips of the cups together. That way, even her shivering hands couldn't spill—no messes, her kitchen spotless, not a beer can in sight, the garbage can empty and lined with a fresh plastic bag. A place where no roach dared to tread.

Don't nobody know my troubles with God, she sang along with Moby on the radio. Traffic was light going into the city, but she tailgated the red Civic in front of her anyway. The maples and pines that shouldered together on both sides of the highway were close and dark, the ivy obscuring their trunks so they seemed like a dense wall of green. As Gemma's Volvo rounded the final bend, and she saw the tunnel that opened to the city, the sky began to lighten in the west. A handful of leaves floated over the road for a moment, showing their yellow bellies.

“You won't need those,” Allie told Gemma in the locker room. “She's doped.”

CANNED HAPPINESS by Sharon Kurtzman

CANNED HAPPINESS
by Sharon Kurtzman

Pancakes smiled at me. A mouth fashioned from whipped cream, edges melting into a golden face like a worn starlet’s lipstick. JT’s handiwork, the line cook known for his deep-U grins.

I delivered the plate to a girl in pigtails. Pancake International was a favored breakfast spot for families whose kids played weekend hockey at the Garner Iceplex.

A rapid-fire order from table five and my pencil skidded across the pad, but that whipped cream smile stuck. I blamed Mama.

“Make your own happy, Lorelai.” Mama’s phone edict last week was meant to drown out complaints about customers, anemic paychecks, and hours that didn’t qualify for health insurance.

“Easy for you to say.”

“Not easy for me at all.”

“Sorry, Mama.”

“Quit your moaning. I raised you to be stronger than that.”

Headed to the kitchen, chestnut hair escaped mismatched barrettes. My whole life was mismatched: plates, socks, sheets, where I’d started and how I’d ended up.

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