I slept the sleep of the deadonce. Once, could not be wokenin time to do what it wasI had to do.Did not hear the ring of. Did not hearthe rap of. Was called. Was shaken. Rosegroggy, stumblingdown the hall, my mother saying, Lookat who has finally graced us with her presence. … —from . . .
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Severalancient skulls unearthed in Ethiopiawith butchery marks around the eye sockets and occipital bones It’s called “pot polishing”— A sign that bones have been boiled for reasons of cookery——from “Cannibalism,” Volume 62, Issue 3 (Fall 2021) Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.When I was about eight years old, . . .
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(Afghan boy with US soldier, photo by J. Malcolm Garcia) Some names have been changed for privacy After Kabul fell to the Taliban, I knew I could do little for my friends and colleagues, Hamid, Faiz, and Aman. Various NGOs and veterans’ groups organized Dunkirk-like efforts online to extract Afghans, and their . . .
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(Cover design by Deste Roosa; cover art by Judith Wolfe, detail from Dans la Lumière de Glace 1, from the series Hommage à Charlotte Delbo, 2013.) A Review of Ghislaine Dunant, Charlotte Delbo: A Life Reclaimed, translation and introduction by Kathryn Lachman (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2021). The work . . .
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Outside my mother’s bedroom windowin the memory care unit, sparrowsand Carolina chickadees play hide-and-seekin holly bushes lit with winter’s red berries.—from “Stripes,” Volume 62, Issue 3 (Fall 2021) Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.The first poem I wrote was about standing by the pond at dawn watching a . . .
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Limericks for Oktoberfest Oktoberfest beckons anewWith festivities, hullabaloo.I’ll parse Märzens for youSo you’ll know what to doAt your bottle shop picking out brew. If you can’t fly to Munich, don’t worry—American brewers have scurriedTo release in due seasonThe beer lover’s reasonFor drinking outdoors before flurries. When it’s Autumn and weather behaves,Tis the . . .
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A Review of Gianfranco Calligarich’s Last Summer in the City, Transl. Howard Curtis; Foreword by André Aciman (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2021) Is there a more fertile experience for literary aspirants than to be poor in a great city? Every generation of young would-be novelists searches for their own version of the Lost . . .
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Aristotle imagined that red occured when “luminous transparency is covered by a thin burning smoke.” In California, in the Amazon, wherever forest fires spread, visions of a red future multiply. “With all the dust and smoke in the air, the world will begin to look different,” writes one reporter.—from “Fugitive Reds,” Volume . . .
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(Photo: A bus stop in San Juan, PR; CC BY-SA 4.0) On NPR the other day there was a story about sunny, hot, and sticky Los Angeles and the utter lack of shade trees in Watts and other Black and Latino neighborhoods in contrast to their profusion in nearby Beverly Hills and . . .
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Meanness is not the only way to access it. I grew adjacent to Christ: knew him purely by name and sight (limbs on the patibulum) The crossbar—the patibulum—is an incorrect representation.—from “A Humility Essay,” Volume 62, Issue 3 (Fall 2021) Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.My second-grade teacher . . .
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