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home > issue #6 Issue 6 - Spring/Summer 2010 Contributors:
NONFICTION:
POETRY:
ART:
INTERVIEWS: When Photography Reflects The Everyday, A Conversation with Ali Smith
REVIEWS: Earth Room, The Broken Kilometer, untitled, 7000 Oaks, & Times Square; Five Works Maintained by the Dia Art Foundation by Alexxa Gotthardt Q and A with fashion designer Kara Sennett by Terra Becks Stephen Page reviews Women Up On Blocks by Mary Akers and Mortal by Ivy Alvarez (Re)Valuation; John Coltrane, Side Steps (Prestige), William Kapell, Kapell Rediscovered: The Australian Broadcasts (Sony), The Rolling Stones, Get Your Ya-Ya's Out: The Rolling Stones In Concert (40th Anniversary Edition), (ABKCO) by Colin Fleming Read "The Bureau" by Roxana Robinson >> Read "Economics" by Aryn Kyle >> Read "Blunder, Youth" by William Giraldi >> Read "In The Cornucopia Of Your Ear" by Emma Larson >> Read "Ashes To Guazapa" by Carolyn Forche >> Read "Last Call" by Alex Dimitrov >>
Fiction - Issue 6 "The Bureau" by Roxana Robinson My mother's bureau is now in its place in our bedroom. It looks beautiful there, the rich glow of its wood grain golden against the leafy wallpaper, but I can't bring myself to open it. It feels loaded with something. I leave it closed for a long time, the four deep drawers shut on their contents, whatever they are. I put all my own clothes in a little pine bureau in my closet. I don't put them in neatly, but messily and hastily, as though the whole situation is provisional. Finally I go to the bureau—it's now mine, I own it—and I open the top drawer. Immediately I'm hit by a dense unpleasant smell. It's the way Mother smelled when she was at that place. It's not the way she ever smelled during the rest of her life, which was fresh and clean, with some light flowery cologne-y scent. Her scarves, her sweaters, everything smelled of that. But this is something else, heavy and thick, not unwashed, but Other. Something unwanted. I don't know the source of it, but I can't stand smelling it. It feels dangerous. In the drawer are two square, shallow woven baskets, holding jewelry, odds and ends. In the rest of the space there are scarves and clothes.
Here are the things in her drawer: Two mysterious and oddly sinister pieces of white cardboard. Each has an eyehole cut out of it. The opening is rimmed with heavy layers of pale paint, put on messily around the edges. Two baskets full of costume jewelry: long gaudy plastic necklaces, and some of beads and knotted macrame, made by my sister. I have never seen my mother wear anything like this, except in the last years when she was living in that place, where other people dressed her. A pair of thick-lensed glasses, colorless plastic with big clumsy rims. They are completely alien. She never wore glasses except very rarely, for driving. But she hasn't driven in years, and she has never owned a pair of glasses that looked like these. A pile of worn and faded scarves, all giving off that dense awful smell. Three pairs of strange gloves, including one of kid leather, one of cotton. They look somehow medicinal, as though they are to be worn over something that was applied underneath them. Two cut-off gauntlets from the kid gloves. One cheap hair net, with wide knotted trellis-work openings. It's made of synthetic threads, and it's bright turquoise. My mother has had long hair all her life, and she's used nets and combs to keep it drawn back into her bun. I've never seen her wear anything like this. One velvet-lined jewelry box, empty. My mother never had much good jewelry. She still wears her engagement ring from my father's family, a diamond set in enamel. She had a pretty opal ring, but my sister told me she gave it to her. Someone—a family friend who was sort of in love with her—gave her a gold and emerald pin from Tiffany's, but she left it in the ladies room at Kennedy, years ago. One metal shoe horn. My mother had polio when she was three, and her feet have always given her trouble. When it finally became impossible for her to wear regular shoes she had special ones made, ones that accommodated her poor tight, clenched toes. The shoes were a trial to her, they were so heavy and clumsy, and ugly, but at least they were comfortable. As she grew stiffer and her joints more painful, it was hard for her even to get those on. One huge-toothed barrette, tortoise shell, with a spring-shut mechanism. It's enormous, with its bold fake coloring and its wide grasping teeth. It's completely inappropriate for her wispy graying hair. It was I who bought it for her. I was hoping to make it easier to pull her hair back to her small, diminishing bun. One small old-fashioned evening bag, probably from the nineteen-twenties. It's a soft silvery-lavender velvet pouch, with a silver clasp and a fine metal chain. The bottom is shredded completely through. As a receptacle it's entirely useless. A tray of belts, some fabric, some cheap leather, all of them old and worn. I don't recognize any of them, and how is it that she could have worn them for so many years without my ever seeing them? Get Issue 6 to continue reading >>
Fiction - Issue 6 "Economics" by Aryn Kyle
For the past two years, my sister had been sharing her apartment with Betty, a fellow economics major she'd met at the Mexican restaurant where they both worked as waitresses. The Mexican restaurant was owned by a German couple, but it was in the hip part of town and hired only very attractive girls to work as waitresses, so a lot of people ate there even though the service was slow and the food was shitty. My sister said that it had been love at first sight with her and Betty, that during the time they'd spent living and working together, they had grown closer than friends. Closer than sisters.
Too bad, my mother said. She was paying for two college tuitions, and she was not going to pay for two apartments and two cars as well. I was coming: Betty would have to go. Though Betty officially moved out, she still spent most of her time at our apartment, crying on our sofa and eating our cereal. Betty's boyfriend, my sister explained, was a real dick-hole, and Betty needed a lot of support. "I know it isn't your fault," Betty said the night I moved in. "It just really sucks that you're here."
When I wasn't in class, I spent most of my time in my room, waiting for my own boyfriend to call, which he did less and less, then not at all.
"You don't know how lucky you have it," my sister told me. "A lot of people would kill to live in Raingate."
The Raingate Village Apartment Complex was close to campus and had tennis courts and a swimming pool and a gym, which was really just one of the apartments with some hand weights and a couple of stationary bikes inside. The complex was filled with college students, people my sister knew from this class or that class or because they drank margaritas in the restaurant where she worked with Betty. Everyone had clear skin and suntans and smooth, muscular bodies they seemed to fill with nothing but Chinese food and cheap beer.
Betty's new apartment, she would have me know, was in Meadow Dwellings: a shitbox with no pool.
On the weekends, the residents of Raingate Village threw cookouts and parties by the pool, and my sister and Betty would pack beer into coolers, then stand in the doorway of my bedroom in their bikinis and flip-flops. "Come down," they
always said, and I would say that I might later, though we all knew I was lying.
Alone in the apartment, I watched my sister's TV and smoked her pot and ate the food I thought she would be least likely to miss—canned beans and frozen corn, instant oatmeal that I mixed with water and ate cold. In the evenings, I sat on the balcony and smoked cigarettes, watching people come and go on the sidewalk below, looking for someone I could imagine myself falling in love with. The boys were all narrow-hipped and broad- shouldered, wearing baseball hats and tee-shirts advertising sports teams and brands of beer. They referred to each other as dudes and motherfuckers and swaggered along the sidewalks, flexing their biceps for girls who looked like Betty and my sister, and bumping their fists together in a show of solidarity.
Sometimes I tried to picture myself kissing one of these boys or lying naked with one of them in bed, and then I would picture myself committing suicide.
Am I exaggerating?
I'm mostly exaggerating.
Get Issue 6 to continue reading >>
Nonfiction - Issue 6 "Blunder, Youth" by William Giraldi
In the summer of 1995 I enrolled in classes at Harvard Summer School, and for years after it remained the most vital experience of my life, entirely different from anything else I had ever known. Overnight I had become a citizen of the world, establishing friendships with students from Korea, China, Japan, Brazil, Germany, France, and that other alien land, California. Harvard Square on Friday and Saturday nights in June was a spectacle so stimulating I sometimes stared in awe: the musicians, the jugglers, the performance artists, the chess players, and the punk-rock vagabonds all huddled at the entrance of the Harvard T stop, smoking and dancing and looking like a carnival of happy devils. No place in my home state of New Jersey, or in South Carolina, where I had just spent a year, offered sights like this. The sidewalks were always crammed; I sat for long stretches watching the crowds float by, all those languages and skin tones. I talked with my new friends about books, their countries, their families, their ambitions. The cafes, bookstores, and weathered brick buildings emanated vibes
of importance, and that's what I needed at twenty years old: to feel important. Back in my dorm I tried to read the fiction of Sartre and Camus and continued to work on the young man's coming-of-age novel I had begun in Myrtle Beach. I had
been self-obsessed enough as a young man to view myself as weathered and wise, and what I felt grateful for here at Harvard was that it humbled me.
The self-obsessed melancholiac has the capacity to amaze himself, to feel a tremendous joy when the doldrums dip out of view, allowing him to see what is around him, as if for the first time. Serious sadness can feel like living in a
stained glass tube; the senses cannot be fully indulged; they are dulled, and so stimuli do not get through, nothing is right, everything skewed. But what I felt during those months at Harvard Summer School can be described only as bright
joy. I was close to tears on several occasions, overcome with excitement and compassion, certain that the mysterious sorrows of my past were extinct, and grateful for the newness of my life. Almost every day I fired off long, intoxicated letters to friends, all of them atrocities of grammar and sensibility.
The compassion was a surprise; I had never been in
such close contact with my peers from other countries, people
with stories and histories so different from my own. If I had
harbored compassion for others in the past, that compassion
was somehow local or limited; at least it felt that way in
comparison to the new compassion I had found. It did not
strike me as sentimental or trite that I felt so strongly for these
people, or that I recognized in them our common humanity.
My dorm room, meanwhile, had become a sexual United
Nations: a jokester German roommate with a fondness for
fine clothes; Korean girls giggling in their wine; a French
girl and Japanese girl singing to pop songs on the radio; a
blond Austrian girl who painted and reminded me of my
ex-girlfriend Monique; a Brazilian beauty who had become
my kissing partner; a Danish girl who wore sheer dresses
with no panties or bra, performed miracles with her mouth,
pronounced "Harvard" as "Howard"; and a reckless son of a
bitch from California named George. I felt in love with all of
them; I gave them my love freely, profusely, and not because
they wanted it or necessarily returned it, but because I had
no choice. Perhaps love means more to melancholiacs, to
those who have nearly drowned in emotional tar. I had been
led to believe by certain simpleton shrinks that those who
steadfastly seek love, or those who fall in love most easily,
were deprived of it while growing up. It makes sense: I had
not felt loved by my mother and so tried like hell to fill that
void left by her neglect. The women who cling tightly to
their boyfriends and lovers are trying to make up for all the
attention they did not receive from their fathers. But I never believed this; despite Occam's Razor, the law of parsimony, one
should be suspicious of simple explanations. What I have come
to understand is that I fell in love with certain women so easily
not because I was attempting to close a crevasse, but because I
had a great capacity to love, a capacity that was strengthened
and made eager by the awful memory of melancholy, yes, but
also one that was born of being loved.
Get Issue 6 to continue reading >>
Nonfiction - Issue 6 "In The Cornucopia Of Your Ear" by Emma Larson
When we moved east, my father handed us string-tied bundles billowing smoke and he said "Cleanse the house's spirits," and we two, my little sister and I, we danced barefoot all throughout the huge, cold, creaking place. In our flowered
leggings and striped sweaters, we spun into every wood-floored room, waving the dry grey leaves like Fourth of July sparklers.
Once, there was a blond-haired, green-eyed man in a
black leather jacket and I believed every word he said. Once, I
watched him buy bundles of sage from a tourist-trap trading
post in New Mexico and I held those burning leaves because I
believed every word he said. Because I believed he understood
them. I am older now. I would never burn sage on my own. And
I cannot shake my distrust of blond-haired, green-eyed men.
We moved east soon after the big earthquake hit. When
it struck, I was fast asleep, and in my dream I thought there were
two goblins rocking my bed. I woke up to the crash of my piggy
bank shattering on the floor and my books leaping from their
shelves. My mother raced in barefoot with her robe flying open,
and she grabbed me and carried me downstairs to the kitchen,
where we stood in the central doorway. A glass shard cut my
father's foot as he carried my sister from her bedroom, and we
huddled in the doorway, more shards scattered all around us.
The aftershocks were sometimes almost as bad, and they rolled
in for weeks after, without any warning.
Out in California there were mudslides too, and after the
early winter rains the earth of the palisades would overtake the
highway. Entire steep hillsides would slide their faces off, taking
houses and front yards with them. One night in California my
mother drew us all out onto the front porch to watch the smoke
from the fires off in Malibu—me, my father, and my half-brother
holding my baby sister. The sunset was so red I thought that the
sky was blazing. Later that week my mother brought me to the
farmer's market downtown, and as we walked from stand to
stand the wind blew a rain of ash over us.
California, where I first learned I would die, watching a
cartoon lion swallow his tuxedoed trainer whole.
When we moved east, the Mormons followed my father.
In the more than thirty years since he'd left his own father's house, mine had grown his hair long, resisted the draft, abused
almost every substance, and fathered a child out of wedlock. The
Mormons of his childhood were still hoping to reconvert him.
A year into our life along the Hudson, a white car appeared,
lurking on the edges of the street. For three days it lingered
there, parked at different points. One night, the men whose heads bobbed within came to our door.
My dad was out working late—he must have had some
sort of gig—and so my mother said, "No he isn't here, and I
don't think you should come back again." I remember the voices,
though I do not think I stood beside my mother, because I cannot
see the men distinctly in my memory. I only know, because I
know the rules, that the men were clean-shaven, crisp-shirted,
and that they wore straight black ties. They would have been
exceedingly polite. Still, the house was tense and shadowy for
days.
"It was my dad, he must have given them our new
address," my father said. At that point, I had no picture in my
mind of Grandpa Hal. I could not remember ever meeting him.
It would be another six years before I would see the man face-to-face—my only memory of him.
I met Grandpa Hal during the family trip to Salt Lake
City when I was thirteen. We did not go to see him. But we
were there, and that is where he lived, and so we had lunch at
his apartment—my father, my mother, my sister, my mother's
mother, and I.
He met us in the parking lot and there he was—taller
than I'd imagined, softer featured, white-haired and smiling,
hands in his pockets. This is the man, I remember thinking, this
is the one. We were all held together so close in the elevator, and
I stood beside him, this man, the father of my father. The stuff
of legend, I think now. In the apartment, there they were—him,
his wife, and my father's sister. I know the sister's story, too, because it is a piece of my father's, and back then I carried his
heartbreak within me wherever I went.
We were all peaceable and quiet. Everyone was fine.
Grandpa Hal and his blue-haired wife were stiffly inviting. Aunt
Lou-Ree carried out all the photo albums and all the food and
hugged everyone and tried desperately to make us all happy.
My father laughed and was charming in that scary way he has of
laughing and being charming, as if the truth were not what it is,
as if he were perfect and beautiful in all ways, and in all ways a
man full only of love.
There were no conversion attempts, no mention of
sinners or Latter Day Saints. But I never saw Grandpa Hal again.
I never heard from him. From that day I have only a few images
of the tall man and his blue-haired wife, and the photo album
full of cousins' faces that look like mine.
I can still see my Aunt Lou-Ree, her posture like the
stem of a wilted flower, bending at Hal's every word, and the
way she brightened with my father's presence. She would call
him sometimes, in the years after that visit, in her moments
of despair. He had escaped from Hal's world. She had stayed
behind.
Get Issue 6 to continue reading >>
Poetry - Issue 6 "Ashes To Guazapa" by Carolyn Forché
Get Issue 6 to read more poetry >>
Poetry - Issue 6 "Last Call" by Alex Dimitrov
at 190 Columbia Heights
If you know where in the past to look,
His breath floods my lungs
How fast, how sweet is the descent?
Tell me—I want to know exactly where you went.
Get Issue 6 to read more poetry >>
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