The Stinker
GABRIEL BROWNSTEIN
The bus doors opened and the kids tumbled out. Jesus, they were terrifying. Sunburned, and mosquito-bitten, all of them in camp T-shirts with signatures of friends and bunkmates, and older girls with signatures on their T-shirts bumping over the lines of their bra-straps.
Jesse Owens, Mr. Harris, and Me
NINA McCONIGLEY
This is how my mother tells it. Jesse Owens taught her to run. I am thirteen. I have just come back from track practice. I have no skill at anything athletic. But junior high for me has been a series of attempts to assimilate. That year in the yearbook, there isn’t a club I’m not in.
Good Boys
MEGAN FERNANDES
Once in a car, a good boy / shook me hard. If you like it / that way in bed, then why are you… / the tiny bruises on my arms / where his prints pressed into my pink/ sleeves rose to the surface like rattles. / Like requests. They thrived there / for a week until they settled /
History is Not Over: An Interview with Viet Thanh Nguyen
ALEXANDER BISLEY
This was exemplified in all these Hollywood Vietnam War movies... Watching these movies was one of the primary motivators to want to be a writer, because I wanted to be able to tell the stories of Vietnamese people that were very different than what were being shown in these films.
Rivendell
JULIA PIKE
Finally, it was finished: a hulking, rustic cube of gray-painted wood with huge windows all along the front. In daylight, the house looks haunted—a gray shack with empty dark eyes—but at night, when the yellow lamps are on in the living room and the chimney tosses sparks out into the night sky, the house beckons you in from the cold. The parents were all Tolkien fans, and so they called the house Rivendell: the last safe place for the elves.
Friday Reads: June 2017
We love any excuse to hear from our contributors! This month, our Issue 13 authors and poets tap into their literary communities as they recommend works by colleagues, friends, and Pulitzer Prize winners. United in their affection, the authors are nonetheless divided by their selections, as their choices shed light upon nowhereness, colonization, and Florida oranges.
- From The Baghdad Eucharist By SINAN ANTOON Translated by MAIA TABET 1 “You’re just living in the past, Uncle!” Maha burst out as she ran from the living room after our argument. Luay, her husband, was upset and he called out after her, his face flushed. “Hey, Maha, where are you going? Come back! Maha!” But she was already hurtling up…
- By JUAN CARLOS MARSET Translated by ILAN STAVANS Abrazable A Piedad Bonnett Irremplazable tú, voz tú vacía de mi vacío en ti inconsolable. Mi tú irremediable tu mí espejo de tu reflejo en mí. Nada clavada en tu silencio, callada voz del sueño desalmada entre mi cuerpo y el tuyo deshaciendo este recuerdo de mi abrazable tú, voz tú que…
- By ROBERT CORDING In your obituary I concluded, “Muriel lives on in…” and went on to name myself, my two brothers, and your eleven grandchildren. I may have been thinking of Pasternak who said something like our life in others is our immortality, or I may have just been looking for a way to make your life continue even as…
- By R. ZAMORA LINMARK Books burning 3:39 a.m. Chapter 6, Don Quixote. Touch-me-nots Wilting-in-progress. Aspire à la Ashbery Devote to the Impossible. Darling, did you dry- Clean my martini? Proceed with caution: Grief under repair. [Purchase Issue 13 here] R. Zamora Linmark’s new poetry collection is Pop Verite. He lives in Manila.
- By HOLLY BURDORFF I thought you were dead. On your Facebook wall, well-wishes and then nothing. The mitosis of what if: worries twirl and spiral and settle into clock-cogs which lock and jam. The metal creaks and smacks. Spins, orbits, pulses. My fingers catch, my nails bleed. I couldn’t pick you out of a lineup now. I hope you’ve found…
- By ELIZABETH SCANLON County Meath, Ireland, ca. 3200 BC At Newgrange, they carved spirals into the stone over and over, though surely a curved line is the most difficult and time-consuming thing to carve into stone, carving with another stone, into the long, dark nights that went on for ages, and underground, in the earth berm of its domed temple,…
- By HONOR MOORE To bind at last the loose miscellany a first love left and shattered. That summer in Florence alone she stepped into the Bargello, room of Donatello, of saints given shape. This time to speak not fear language but it was raining and from her attention the 4 o’clock instructor vanished. Thunder, a miniature…
- By JUDITH BAUMEL I found the Cyclops and his Galatea in their shop on Piano Provenanza. They’d been domestic for a while. I’d gone for his wildflowers and Ragabo pines. I’d gone for the wintry July breezes that dilute the sulfur of his neighborhood. I’d gone to see the roughened lava of his searching, the obsidian of his instant grief.…
- By NATHANIEL PERRY The dogwood makes a second skin of winter rain. The form’s the thing, the sky is saying as it drains our language of descriptors: crystalline? No, not glassy either, or prismatic or delicate or flashy (not showing off or making a beacon of the day’s small sun) or fragile, or mine, or ours. There are…
- By JONATHAN MOODY after Philip Larkin I feared these present years, the mid-thirties, when my receding hairline became backed up like rush-hour traffic on the Gulf Freeway, & my man-boobs swelled into Tig Ol’ Bitties. I wonder: can Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson explain the phenomenon of how scrotum sacs start succumbing to gravity? Each time I bend down, …
- By U. S. DHUGA No compunction, my physiotherapist Exits, kale juice in hand, the Raw Chemist With the swagger of a Neoptolemus Who will lie to me, to you, to all of us For the sake of winning what he mythifies As our battle. I watch him pause, flex his thighs, Draw a single, surreptitious Pall Mall…
- By WILLIAM BREWER Was an emperor of element within the mountain’s hull, chewing out the corridors of coal, crafting my labyrinth as demanded. My art: getting lost in the dark. Now I practice craving; it’s the only maze I haven’t built myself and can’t dismantle. I gave my body to the mountain whole. For my body, the…
- By MARC VINCENZ So—in they slot and plop in their perfectly burnished 180-calorie-sandwiched-glory: a delectable mélange well-clothed in filigrees of dietary fibers, sodium, zero trans fat and generously acidic to keep the heebie-jeebies at bay—(some, they say, reach as far as Antarctica in thermally-insulated triple-ply, deeply wrought plastics and other recently uncovered carbon derivatives—where winds are measured …
- By CORTNEY LAMAR CHARLESTON after Lewis Holt Those are traffic lights. They help stop people from driving into each other. That’s a crescent moon and star on top of that building. It means the people inside are part of The Nation. That’s a gas station. That’s a McDonald’s. That’s a Burger King. That’s a fried fish and chicken joint. This…
- By CORTNEY LAMAR CHARLESTON Hall of Famer Frank Thomas, from 1990 to 2005, hit 448 home runs over the fence for the White Sox with the notorious Robert Taylor Homes standing just beyond ballpark grounds across the Dan Ryan Expressway: the high-rises, bruises against the city-flag-blue sky, eyesores. When the last tower came down, I don’t remember the president, the mayor…
- By AMANDA VALDEZ Where do your shapes come from? This is a common question I encounter. I dislodge shapes stored in my body through the act of drawing. These shapes originate from a vast matrix of experiences. There are typically three categories of overt reference: art and archeological objects I seek out through research and travel; landscape; and direct physical experiences…
- By VIEVEE FRANCIS that they are not men, that they have not settled into their beards and remorse, their crow’s feet and givens. There is not yet an investment in houses settling onto their foundations, hair, or yesterday. The boy senses his time is precarious, growing shorter as he sprouts up, so he spends time believing, in everything, he climbs and…
- By VIEVEE FRANCIS Without the backdrop of leaves and scat, the possum playing possum, its mate the same. Without the tip of the road, its black pitch wound like a widow’s wail through the wet trees. Consider the undergrowth and what hides there. The brown bristle of the hedge. The singular call of a bird its beak red-tipped, its feathers black…
- By CASSIE PRUYN Beneath a chalk-white winter sky, her diamond studs gleam. We sit parked in the Clam Shack lot, halfway between her house and mine, in her mother’s luxury SUV. Her alibi this time: Christmas shopping for her mother on Newbury Street. She wears a black, full-length wool coat unbuttoned at the throat. I slip my hand under her blouse,…
- By: BETHANY BALL From What to Do About the Solomons? Now it is just a question of what to do with Guy Gever. For extra money he works in the evenings to frighten the birds that eat the crops in the fields around the kibbutz. At night, he hunts the porcupines, the dorban, and sometimes the tiny kipod, the hedgehogs,…
- By MENACHEM KAISER The Eunuch In the courtyard were more of these men and women who—how should I describe them?—who still were. They didn’t do anything except exist. They sat, alone or in silent clusters. None would say yes to an interview. I circled the courtyard, asking. Most did not even say no. I approached two men playing checkers. They…
- By ZACK STRAIT There is a dark blue bible in the nightstand, a pitcher and torch stamped on the cover in gold. I rub this symbol with my thumb and I am comforted, knowing another man was in this room before me, just to place his light here. I take a seat on the bed, the verses rustling in my…
- By LAURA WINTHER GALAVIZ We were unemployed and without a place to go, but we got up in the morning and pressed things under the iron anyhow. Our parents turned us out of their houses, telling us to Go get some fresh air!, then locked the doors they refused to give us keys to. We piled up in the streets…
- By MARY JO SALTER It isn’t what he said in Casablanca and it isn’t strictly true. Nonetheless we’ll always have them, much as we have Paris. They’re in our baggage, or perhaps are baggage of the old-fashioned type, before the wheels, which we remember when we pack for Paris. Or don’t remember. Paris doesn’t know if you’re thinking of it.…
- By DAVID LEHMAN 1. Gather ye rosebuds come what may, Old time’s a frequent flyer, And many lovers that link today May soon be forced to retire. Let each of us have one, each of us be one Soul unlinking from its mate in the past To eat the golden apples of the sun. Youth fondly supposes it will last.…
- By ARDEN HENDRIE The paintings may be best known for what they are not. They were made on the heels of work now considered Matisse’s most groundbreaking, the paintings from the period between 1907 and 1917 when he engaged with the early perceptions of modernism. His trajectory through these years widened his ambitions and shows him becoming more cutthroat within them,…
- By MARY JO SALTER A June day under the Jungfrau. Near the railway that brought her here, an old woman sits on a bench. She isn’t facing the Jungfrau but the Hotel Belvedere which has, as its name implies, a beautiful view of the Jungfrau, a name for what she had been when she last saw it, maybe, on…
- By ZAK BRECKENRIDGE He calls me and says, “I got a good North Country story for ya.” Then after the story he says, “I don’t know, man. I just feel like it would be cool to write something about the people up here. They’re such fuckin’ characters.” Or he’ll say, “If we could just write something about Mom and Dad, you…
- By MAX ROSS 1. Among the snowy houses, a small woman in a white wool coat shoveled a path from the street to her front door. Meanwhile snow was falling, gathering slowly on the path being cleared, and on the small woman shoveling. Each of the woman’s movements was like the second half of an echo: It seemed as if…
- By BRUNA DANTAS LOBATO The plan was to take the bus to my father’s farm, to see him in person for a change. My mother said, Your father is too busy for you, and you don’t know his wife. But I went anyway. I wanted to be able to say that my father was unavailable, firsthand account. I packed only…
- By RACHEL PASTAN We are barreling north out of Salt Lake City, and David is talking about the clouds. “They don’t look like the clouds in the East,” he says. “They’re uniform, but fuzzy.” Out the window, the topaz sky shimmers over the mountains. The snowy peaks echo the color of the fuzzy western clouds, which stretch across the air like…
- By MENSAH DEMARY Disney, the warship, captured the Star Wars universe, firing off in quick succession two movies: The Force Awakens, which continues the picking-over of the Skywalker family bones, and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story—that is, a side quest between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope, which I paid sixty dollars to see, including four sets of…
- By JONATHAN MOODY ca. 2008 On Marvin Gaye’s birthday, the D.J. introduces “Sexual Healing” as the sole song responsible for why some of his listeners exist. If he & his wife were having trouble conceiving, he would’ve skipped over the cliché the way he skipped over the details of Marvin’s tragic death, the way elders can skip over real talk:…
- By MEGAN FERNANDES Once in a car, a good boy shook me hard. If you like it that way in bed, then why are you… the tiny bruises on my arms where his prints pressed into my pink sleeves rose to the surface like rattles. Like requests. They thrived there for a week until they settled into a wet blackness. A…
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