Cover Iris Shih 2
Garden Party Adam T. Gardner
3
Untitled Diana Mellon
4
Second Love Carina del Valle Schorske
5
Boy with Bed Sheet Adam Eaker
6
July 22, 2005 Sharon Madanes
7
How to Speak to a Brazilian Whore Nicholas Chins
8
Direction is Irrelevant Rebecca Dinerstein Untitled Liana Moskovitz
10
Untitled Eunice Cho
Fall Two Thousand Six I Volume Eighteen I Number Two
Unmaking the Bed Emma Freeman 14
Untitled Nick Barton
19
At Home Mei-Lun Xue
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Dwelling Ill Ali Van
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April, 1998 Elizabeth Gumport
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Hagar Cycle Noah Dobin-Bernstein Self Portrait I Sharon Madanes
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Self Portrat II Sharon Madanes
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Monstrosities Sara Schneider
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Psyche ll All Van
30
Harbor Optics, Rockaways, 2006 Adda Birnir
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Secondi Brothers, Orange, 2006 Adda Birnir
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Untitled Rachel Rose
35
Dusk Jordan Jacks
Garden Party I Adam T. Gardner
dUFV2DI4J
hatap7 alvA
2 The garden party began like all the other parties: the tables were set outside, the men quietly left their jackets on the backs of chairs, the women carried around empty glasses. The garden party began like all the other parties. It took us time to realize things were changing. A storm came. We moved inside. We watched at the windows like children. As if by magic, a horse came into the garden. A brown horse came from behind the line of trees, came into the garden, moved to the tables. It overturned the tables with its nose, it lay on the ground, it made a noise that coupled with the rain. And inside, like children, the men held the women, the women felt as if all of this was a sign, the string quartet decided to play from memory. One, two, three. One, two, three.
UNTITLED
Diana Mellon
4 San Francisco's Sutro Baths were open to the public as a seaside attraction for many years. In 1966, a fire reduced the baths to the ruins that remain today. Here the sea is only a few steps shy of visible: follow this rough cut of road and we are never far from our own drowning. Further on, the glittery crust of brine beckons us beyond . the cliffs green lip. All night I swim through kelp gardens: anemones pulse and shiver in their brightness like human hearts on ice. When I wake and turn to you, your marine eyes illuminated, I cannot name it "nightmare." Remember Sutro Baths? Half-naked bathers balanced on the rocky rim between sea and simulated sea while walls and rafters flamed. A congregation of anemones seemed to suspend their stinging. For breakfast, one orange between us two. I push my thumb into the center, where the fleshy segments pucker like the mouth of an anemone. Almost oxygen's opposite, the sweet choke of fragrance, so that we each anticipate a gust of red off the waves, as though the water itself would burn.
5
IT
'he boy was wearing a bed sheet, looking down from the window. He thought if he didn't move all afternoon, he might acquire the dignity of certain Dutch paintings, still lives or views of some prosperous town. He wanted his love to resemble the movement from threshold to bed in a suite of well-appointed rooms, where the eye might settle on a majolica jar some woman had placed to catch the light.
I
Fi
the boy drowned, then he was comforted.
He drowned so he might be comforted-
1 recognize the logic in that. He had a lover, but the lover had murdered his father. The lover was a hero.
His lover had fallen asleep with a stomach ache. The boy stood looking down at the bridge for nearly an hour.
I thought this could be a scene from my life— the boy with uncut hair leaning over the pool, the hand reaching out from the pool to comfort him.
He wanted to be painted like this and never to change, to wax the fruit and fix the wine glass with glue. He was willing even for his heart to stop, if only to freeze forever the body in the bed, the light on the jar.
I 1
nt
an xp
write a letter to the lover— ation of the artistic personality.
For in the end, the two were discovered— the boy with his bed sheet, the lover lost in the woods. The jar shattered, spilling rocks and dark water. The lover chose to continue his journey, and the boy had no choice at all beneath the surface of the pool. When he stopped trying to breathe, he asked to be comforted.
"pC)
How to Speak to a Brazilian Whore I Nicholas Chirls
7 If you happen to pass the Lugar de Nenhuma Palavra, do not ask for Isabel. I spent time with her two weeks ago. I do not know what she said to her proxeneta, but it seemed as though she fought for me. As we climbed the stairs, unhurriedly to the bath. I thought I liked her more than the others. Not sexually, I thought of my wife. And I thought of my son, the way he speaks as though people understand him. I closed the cracked door behind us and when I turned, Isabel had shed her ripped garments. We dipped ourselves in lukewarm water, and I peeked at the dark black hairs quivering between her thighs. Normally, I would have been appalled. But the light was so dim, so miserable I felt almost forgiving. I swear she could see it in me too, and she tried to speak to me. I laughed kindly. So she tried again, and again and I couldn't stop fucking laughing—I mean thick, convulsing laughter. And then Isabel did the most peculiar thing she opened her mouth and let a piercing noise run screaming from her lips. I thought of covering my ears, but just then, another sound spewed wildly in the room. Only this time, it came from my mouth. This seemed to urge her on and her screech became louder, and then mine, and hers again and again, and mine. We continued like this for some time—then I left.
JULY 22, 2005
Sharon Madanes ••••,L
I le
8 It is because of his work at the store, most likely, that Petya associates time with bread. His father is shelving pumpernickel when he wakes up. Even in the morning, the store looks like something old. It seems to him to be the histogram of his independence—each empty shelf an open avenue before him. With a sale he is earning a personal space to fill, loaf upon roll, planting, he thinks, poppy seeds of himself in American soil. When Petya gets to school he has already been awake for hours. In class now his teacher asks him to write a story about a problem. About a person who has a problem, and how he solves it. Petya is astounded by the blank that comes. It is an easy unknowledge that looks up at him from his open palm. It should be quick to write a problem, he thinks, there are so many. A problem:
She is sick He has left We are bored There is work undone I am lonely They are dying
She is thinking He erases the pencil list and starts over with his name up top. Piotr Vassilyovich Gregoriov, it is his name and his father's name, all together, and big. It will not do, he knows. It is too much and it dances off the tongue with two left feet. He tilts the chair back. Call him Petya: The Subharmonic Thundergrowl of the West. This is his favorite kind of Friday—it is misty and warm and dark. Outside it is like nighttime even in the day. The streetlamps turn on early and he sees the light catch on tiny air beads. On the other side of the skyline, Manhattan Beach is spitting pebbles at the seagulls. The seagulls spit bits of sandy hotdog buns too big for them to chew. Across the street is Petya's father, Vassily, who watches the birds from behind the counter of his bread shop. Oleg comes in. He is wearing his autumn canvas hat.
•
-
UNTITLED
i
Unmaking the Bed I Emma Freeman
Eunice Cho
The season is in fruit. She may unseam a lemon without shame. An orange no vulnerable thing, not the small orange in an egg that glistens. She eats them both for breakfast and riots her plate with shed skin. The rind of a yolk's got no creases or folds. Segments of citrus undress on china. Awake and an orange hangs low in the sky: it splits and day breaks. She strips the bed raw and unpeels its sheets. A night spent in juicy seamed skin, pith is chalky, flannel-soft.
11 "Hello Mister Oleg," Vassily says,"We are having the good day at the beach." Meanwhile Petya counts the pencils. There is the one in Mr. Garber's large hands, the one on the chalk holder where the chalk should be, two pencils and two more to the two pencil-ed power, he thinks, would be sixteen. Sixteen exponential pencils. This is a kind of problem. Petya writes: A boy has a bag full of sixteen pencils, the father has only one stick. Now solve. Petya knows it is important to pay mind to these classes, because the family moved so that he might. He pays mind, now, respectfully — albeit disinterestedly at times. It had been decided by Petya's mother, in the midst of her son's adolescence, and carried out almost two years later. "He will go to school, away," she had said. She would delay her own flight, being a teacher herself, until the school year ended. Vassily and Petya were sent ahead to get a head start, with the understanding that she would follow. She did not. Now, in the new home of Vassily and Petya, there are photographs on all the walls—not just framed or arranged but all over. It is a black and white wallpapering, a thorough but dog-eared job. The grayscale clusters in turrets of tone, sprawling as the big new Brooklyn over the wall cracks, around the switch for the light. On the wall there is Odessa, the fields and scarves there, a woman, his wife, her hometown. Vassily thinks she is the woman of the house now, in her absence, perhaps more so now than when she slept beside him. Vassily will take his son back to Russia. He has decided this, now, with the same dutiful, urgent certainty as the decision that brought him here. When they are back, Vassily will start calling his son Piotr again...Piotr Vassilyovich when he is angry or maybe all of the time. This is one item on his list for the return. And he will reclaim his old life. He will reclaim his old wife. The thought of earning, again, those big
zz,
L4.
dear things makes him muddled, sick in his stomach as with old eggs or mention of untimely death. In her fling with freedom, neither father nor son would be particularly welcome, but they do not understand the situation at hand. Petya believes he has been deprived of a mother, but that he is enough, himself, to need no more mothering. Vassily believes he has been fooled, but that he is enough, himself, to fool her further. And we shall all be happily fools, Vassily believes. These two relocated Gregoriovs have a cat here, Septimos. He is named after the cat still in Russia, Septimos. Petya's mother had named her cat Septimos because he would purr in perfect musical sevenths, jumping from one note to another, just short of an octave up. This American Septimos purrs like a normal cat. The name doesn't suit him and recently Petya has taken to calling him Sasha. The cat now responds to that name more frequently. Septimos Sasha is black, too, and sometimes disappears against the tar of the road in the lowest photograph on the wall. This is a new house for Petya. Too much of childhood, early childhood, is unfamiliarity. He had not been old enough, when he lived there, to step back and inspect his circumstance. Now he lives in Brooklyn, and he likes the recyclable cardboard piles on a Sunday. There is a pile on every other corner everywhere, in every different district. At times he thinks it is the only thing that is everywhere, yesterday's trash. He likes the routine of it, and the way some people bother to separate green from blue bins and other people do not. It is one of the silly small choices he admires about America. The streets are all more or less the same width, he sees, broken across the river into an imitative grid. This grid, after Manhattan, is messy and softened by its sprawl. There is so much Brooklyn--much more ground, gray, more sun splotch than pedestrians find within other culture corners— and you can walk it all over. Almost every gate in Brooklyn has an unfastened latch. And the ones that are shut tight,
13 those are for the happy schizophrenic dogs, running round,
is thinking about art, they fancy, or foreign shorelines. He
coming and not going because the gate is shut tight.
is always noble and unaware. This is considered by many to be ideal. And so the traffic of the store falls into a distinct
Upon moving to Brooklyn, Petya's father opened a bread shop. Its awning offered a surface where they could
pattern: during school hours, when the homesick Vassily
write their name. Yet the whole enterprise now seems to
works, the store is musty. When Petya returns, it is a teeming
Vassily an unmerited chore—a consolation prize to replace
afternoon, all cash and flour mess.
another that he had in fact already won. They are married. There is a ring on both hands. Vassily does not understand
A young man comes in each day just after five, on his way home from an important, economic job. He thinks
why he is in Brooklyn, why he has a house on the ocean,
Petya has the skills to manage a larger business, later. He
why he is selling bread.
sees buying this daily bread as an investment in the future.
walks down the stairs of his high school. The diversity of the
In New York, still, it is misty and warm and dark. Petya
Petya respectfully appreciates but cannot seem to justify this sort of attention. Today the businessman opens a paperback
staircase astounds him. I am walking, he thinks, through the
Dostoevsky from his pocket and finds the quotation:"He
center of the earth. This is what it is like to be everywhere, he
was seldom playful, seldom even merry, but anyone could
thinks, every type and direction represented in one confined
see at once, at a glance, that this was not from any kind of
space. There is a Korean boy climbing; there is a pale, lanky
sullenness.., maybe for that very reason he was never afraid
boy with a premature beard walking down; there is a girl
of anyone..."
on the landing with blond pigtails: where is the overlap? he thinks. Another blond girl. TWo, he says softly, to himself, on
Petya leaves the counter to open his schoolbooks in the
the landing. Petya, alone and especially by contrast, is dark
back. The business slows again in his absence. When Vassily comes back from the bathroom the store is empty and he is
and "chiseled." That is what the older girls in his math class
happy to see the vacancy as a justification. He walks off with
call him, whispering from the seats behind. Petya is really
his credit card, leaving the counter entirely unattended, to
too young and disoriented to appreciate the whole of their
the computer upstairs. It is raining, it is hushed, the light in
compliment. Chiseled is stale bread. Chiseled is scraping the
the empty store is sweet and it is gray.
sesame seeds off and into a small countertop mountain. Chiseled, to Petya, is just all of these small, sharp things.
When it rains, Petya imagines California. There, he thinks, there is enough width and length for wandering.
Meanwhile, petulant Vassily is losing business. The
Between the walls of the back room, Petya aspires towards
customers he'd earned through the sheer accident of appear-
aimlessness. He has never been to California, but he knows
ing (there had not been a new bread shop on the block for
it is big. Petya imagines the rain covering the whole state
years) start to dwindle and disappear. His obvious indigna-
of California and understands that weather is all. It is the
tion makes them feel uncomfortable asking for anything at
biggest blanket, he thinks; it spans countries and years better
all. They return to the older shops, where it is easier.
even than the Beatles. He watches the water falling onto
Still Petya, in his sweet-fitting clothes and unparted
the ocean. Some water coming down, he sees, and so much
hair, woos the women of the neighborhood as unknowingly
floating face up. Petya closes his eyes and imagines lying on
as with the girls in the back of math class. His disinterested, ambiguous stare invites the most extravagant fantasies. He
tions meet.
his back, tilting over the crests, exactly where those direc-
8
UNTITLED
Nick Barton
15 In the backmost room, Vassily is buying the tickets.
for "Mother" in Russian flooding him—and whether-or-not
It is a small computer on a small table and the mouse is
is not the issue at hand. He sees in his mind the Gregoriov
mangy and smudged. He makes his purchase, and is sent an
Bread awning, outside and up: she has come, looking. She
electronic confirmation with his boarding passes. He feels
is something that does not fit in this Brooklyn, he thinks.
the technology float about his hair and ears in little l's and
Impossible! He hushes. When words return he thinks: Let
O's that he thinks he can almost see. Vassily thinks about this
her look for me; good. Petya abandons his thoughts and puts
inforniation. He thinks about the transaction request just
down a bialy. When he looks up again she is running, clumsy
put in. It is out, nowhere, in air, moving towards something
in heels, away from the mailbox and in the direction of traf-
or someone of uncertain location. It is information directed
fic. Petya is surprised that he feels no impulse to follow the
peculiarly far distances for lack of what could, what should,
woman running from him, still, he does.
be face-to-face. And then he imagines himself on the plane
It is an ordinary Thursday in Sheepshead Bay but now
back home, and it looks the same: directed and location-less.
everyone is running. Even the man who is standing still on
Like these l's and O's in his hair.
the curb is running backwards, flushing past with identical
Vassily is now behind a closed door and the store is
velocity to Petya's forward rush. All is moving at exactly his
sunlit, the lights off. Petya falls into a murky drowsiness.
pace—direction is irrelevant—mere speed and line. It is just
In the corner, Brazil is playing Portugal and the TV shines
chase, emotionless, purposeful. When Petya comes to the
sun glare. He sees from behind the counter the tiny running
end of the block he leaps down to the cross street as if off a
shoes and the spikes, moving, offensively, jumping. Every-
high ledge. He is shin-shocked like anticipating an extra step
one's hair is so long. Behind him the flour is buzzing against,
at the end of the stairs. Petya runs through the irritation.
into the eggs in large, slow turns. Nothing is entirely still,
In this determined movement he feels so old: older than his
not even, he thinks, the counter, which rumbles occasionally
mother, older than Brooklyn or leg pain...
from the turbulence under the street. Brazil has scored a
To the man at the kiosk, Petya is simple: a Russian boy
goal. Now there is the flour, the egg goop buzz and the roar
running through the streets. Or to another: a boy desperate
of empty crowd mouths on mute—this huge, imaginary yelp.
after something. But it is not desperation, Petya would tell
The channel switches to instant replay and from Petya's dis-
him,just duty. And even so, it is a duty deferred. The duty
tance the screen is all slow geometrics—the kicker kicking
of a boy, intentionally dismissed, he thinks, or forgotten, by
is a line up and a line out, curving the trajectory of a small
the woman now pressed between two grandmothers, falling
shooting sphere...the fists pumping look like Mr. Garber's:
down. Petya wants to stop, or does not know why he has
swollen, stuffed with bottles that look small again like
started. She had kept far away, he knows, and he should be
pencils amidst so many fingers. Petya follows the kicker's
too proud to regain proximity. If she does not need closeness
outward leg line, through the circle and the blurred mesh
to him, why did she come, why does he chase after—some-
of the goal, just off the screen, through the window and out
thing about mutuality. But she keeps on, and now he is so
onto Oriental Boulevard, where there is a woman beside the
close. She is thin and she can twist between the street crowds,
mailbox. It is his mother. There is a commercial break.
leaving him behind, bumping up. They are one window apart,
Petya does not take the moment to doubt his identification. It is not only maybe his mother—words and nicknames
now, where beef carcasses hang as potted plants. Petya sees his mother stop. They meet at the store of chocolate and nuts.
16 "Do not tell your father," she says, smiling horridly, her knees falling against each other. Petya forgets both languages in this moment. On this afternoon Petya learns that his mother is living with a musician in the Village. A young American named Ian had moved to Russia, after college, for language and piano practice. He started lessons with her—she had offered him the most attention for the least money. Petya and Vassily had just left the country. The house was all theirs. Now she lives in his mini-loft apartment on Prince Street. It was a spontaneous thing. She asks Petya where she can find a nail clipper. This has always been one of the only ways she cares for herself. Petya does not reply. She does not want to scratch piano
and goes easy as it always has. Even now, he thinks, she is present in this moment as if only by a glitch in serendipity, definitely due to disappear. And she does—he pushes her again and she flies away, kicking like a toddler in shallow water. She smiles with more youth, he thinks, than she ought to possess. Petya looks at the sea. It is so big, he sees, it fills the whole of his periphery. At home, Vassily feels exhilarated. He clicks the Delta link on the confirmation email and browses the selection of on-flight snacks. There is tomato juice, Terra® vegetable chips.. This indicates, he thinks, the merit of his decision. It will be a good flight. "Good!" he shouts. He slaps the wall, exuberantly; a challah toll falls off the shelf. Petya is up early the next morning for school and from sleep-
keys, he thinks. No more scratching, he thinks, she has clawed us to bits. He thinks: let her nails grow longer. It is as if she needs nothing to say,for herself, for himself.
lessness, anyway. From eight to eleven he has European History, Freshman Composition, Art. Then there is lunch. He meets his mother at the foot of the stairs. They start walking without eye
Petya and his mother walk. There is a children's playground at the start of Manhattan Beach. She sees the sign "Manhattan Beach" and the swing set and she is confused, entranced—she asks,"The swings, they are not still in the Brooklyn?" Petya explains how Manhattan Beach is not on Manhattan at all. "It is maybe named after the same man," he says. She turns to the
contact or talk. They walk down Chambers Street, unintentionally coordinated, his right leg extending parallel to hers. Petya does not know who or what exactly to forgive, or whether forgiveness is even what this is for. I do not know what she is, what she is
clarified swings, still there, rocking with scratchy creaks, rusting— they walk to them. She sits down. Petya would sit beside her but,somehow despite himself, he nrroves around back and puts his hands over her shoulder blades. He gives her a push, and she starts up."There is so much Brooklyn," he says."In the morning, there is brunch," he says,"it is between and both the breakfast and the lunch, it is so thick...and the morning is like nighttime, the street lamps are off and no one is talking. Everything there is fits into every place, like clowns...into a city of small cars," he says. She isn't listening. Petya's mother goes higher, looking, each time,over more of the Atlantic, the horizon deepening,deepening. The water dark and calm. She is calm. The total collection of impulses overwhelms Petya, caught under the tent of a salty dusk. How broad the space between her shoulders, and her body comes
here for, he thinks. There is a deli on the next corner and Petya walks in. He is hungry all the same. He orders a grilled cheese from the man with the spatula. All around there are little plastic buckets of gummy fruits and cheese. The man butters two slices of bread and presses them hard onto the griddle with a thin iron. A steady sizzle adds to the white noise of the afternoon. Left of the cash register there are big wicker baskets of bread. One has bagels, the other hard rolls. Petya's mother is lingering by the window,shuffling her feet. It looks like she is trying to remember a dance. The man takes up the bread from the grill and wraps it fast in tinfoil. He fishes for a marker in his apron to write the price and Petya looks again at his mother. She is standing close to the baskets now, looking still abstractly out the window.Then,in a very quick gesture, she extends one arm back,into the basket, and returns two large rolls into her shoulder bag.
••••
17 Perhaps it is a last straw on Petya's camel back. He inhales.
with me." Petya stands with his father. Petya thinks he would
The man behind the counter hands him the wrapped sandwich
not be surprised if the world outside the shop had crumbled to
and Petya turns back towards him with big blinking eyes. The
a pile of ash or crumbs. Inside the bread is still rising in heat.
man returns to slicing tomatoes and Petya keeps still. What is
Nothing has halted, but Petya feels safely isolated between the
there to do? He pays for the grilled cheese and a paper carton
countertops. After some time Vassily leaves the shop front and
of orange juice. His mother stands by the door, casually. Petya
goes upstairs. Petya stays to close up. He takes the last of the
has recently been studying appearances of virtue and vice in
rye out from the window display.
literature. He recognizes in his mother an abundance of astonishing vice. She walks him back to the school steps and then continues
When Petya gets home the living room lights are off. He hears an unusual rustling from the basement, and opens the door to the small set of stairs. He looks down. Vassily is there,
on towards the park without words. He is late for class and
his jeans rolled above his knees, franticly swatting at a foot of
does not bother to start with the questions. Petya walks slowly
water with a plastic garbage bag. There had been occasional
through the school halls. It is very bright, brighter than natural
flooding recently, connected somehow to the ocean tides. Sever-
light. He feels at once infantile and elderly. It is like being baby-
al boxes of photographs are moved to chair and tabletops, their
sat by a little girl, he realizes. Petya finds the door to his math
cardboard bottoms soggy. Petya feels today's flood like a pinch
class through the fog of his mind-mess. He sits near the girls
below the ribs. We are really melting now, he thinks, and goes
who admire him and throws himself down in the chair. They
to bed without dinner. Early.
love his irritation. They smile. Petya feels released. Disgusted
He meets his mother at the playground. It is a sunny new
by everything, he is rocketed into a deep disinterest. He leans
morning. Together they walk to the D train that will take them
back further and shakes out his hair. It is too much; the girls
into the city. The train is clean. From inside he watches one nar-
start doodling his name. Petya repeats the word DUMB to
row trail of white bricks crawl snakelike over the tunnel wall. It
himself rhythmically. And then the teacher starts talking, and it
is nice to sit beside his mother, he thinks, when the train rattles.
is monotone, and it's complicated and hard, and Petya lowers
He closes his eyes and lets the thick vibrations bounce him,
his guard. It is a moment in which another child might cry.
babylike on the lap of the seat. It is a nurturing, anonymous se-
Petya, instead, puts his pencil down. He stares fiercely into the
curity that should be shared, he thinks, with the woman beside
blackboard. Class drifts away to its end. As he leaves the class-
him. All the same he thinks, it is a mother I want to sit beside,
room, one girl touches his hand. Just for a moment. They are
and not necessarily this one. He is particularly aware of this:
passing through the fifth floor hallway of lockers and he turns
how this is only a position to fill, how maybe anyone would do.
her against one, pressing a bold kiss onto her face. He walks on
It is as if Brooklyn, or America, or the Atlantic Ocean is too big
wordlessly, as his mother had. The girl slides down the lockers
to allow for the individual.
and giggles wildly on the floor. Two more join her, giggling. Petya goes down the stairs and out of the building. Vassily is shelving loaves. When Petya comes in, he sees
They get off at the Lincoln Center station. It is a bright day and the asphalt is shining. At Lincoln Center there is the New York City Ballet, the Metropolitan Opera, Barnes & Noble,
the bread. He wants to eat it whole. Petya hears his mother's
Tower Records, hot dog stands and 011ie's Chinese Restaurant.
brassy voice in the dings of the cash register. His father pushes
They have never been to Lincoln Center before. Petya only
buttons, counting bills. "Petyoshka," he says,"come. Stand
knows that it is a place associated with art, and his mother
18 follows in good spirits. Petya is learning that this is his mother's adventure, a departure from the everyday. He considers the great seriousness of Brooklyn so far, how dislocated and second-hand—it is not at all like this in her eyes. It is wondrous. A pretty girl had come into the bread shop the night before, softly singing: I just happen to like apples and 1 am not afraid of snakes. Petya hums her song now,squinting at his mother before him. She catches the light, looking back at him over her shoulder, flipping her hair into a twist. She is very lovely. Petya
roll call. Vassily tells the woman that yes, he is home sick with a fever and thanks her and hangs up the phone. He twists a clump of dough into a bagel. In the corner, Brazil is playing Argentina. He lowers his eyebrows and waits. The readiness of the lie shocks him a little. He will come home, he thinks, I will not know where he has come from. Petya sees the entirety of things in this moment with his mother. He scans her bag like an x-ray and sees, throbbing, the bread and the photograph and the miscellaneous junk. All of his elements, displaced, relocated, collected and wrong. The sight of it sinks into him; it feels stuck at the bridge of his col-
allows these two things to live together in him, the disgust and the delight of her. They walk up Broadway, past Gracious Home and a 25-screen movie theater complex. 8x10". On the east side of the street men are selling framed photograph prints. They are mostly of celebrities and skylines. They
larbone. She is very beautiful in her yellow dress. The store is closing up for the day when Petya gets home to Brooklyn. He walks in the door empty-handed and with
are 8x10" or 5x7", small and cardboard. They are sorted in little labeled bins. She walks over and runs her finger across the top of the man's table. She looks at a picture of the Brooklyn Bridge with a moon, then Marilyn Monroe, John Lennon. Be-
idle eyes. "Petya," Vassily says,"are you well?""Yes," Petya says,"thank you." Vassily puts down a bagel from his hands. "Good," he says. There is a pause. Petya tells him nothing more. Vassily says,"Come." Petya stands with his father. He
hind those, in black and white, a little girl is kissing a little boy. There is a photograph of Lincoln Center, the block they stand
looks towards the window and sees Oriental Boulevard. There is no traffic on either side. He sees, next, a ticket envelope atop the TV. At home the photographs are down off the walls and
upon. In the photograph, it is a bright day. The man smiles at her — such a Russian nose and such a pretty yellow dress. He looks up at the scrolling text of the movie theater board. She takes the 5x7" print of Lincoln Center and drops it into her large shoulder bag. She flips her hair back and into another twist. When the man looks again towards his table she has closed the gap, rearranging the rectangles into a solid tableful. He smiles at her — such a Russian nose and such a pretty dress. She walks. Vassily, at home, receives a phone call from the school's attendance office. His son is absent from 3d period official
Vassily has packed his four pairs of pants. Petya says goodbye to Septimos Sasha and lets him out into the backyard. In the morning, Petya considers a new problem. A mother is waiting at the playground for her son; her son and husband are boarding a plane—now solve. Vassily asks for tomato juice. Petya chews chunked gum to ease the pressure in his ears. Vassily toasts himself to recovering a lost life. Petya leans back. So they fly away from all the everything, towards nothing, no one particular, very high and very fast.
i
)
AT HOME
Mel-Lun Xue
*
:•*" „
April, 1998 I Elizabeth Gumport
21 After you left, having found the photographs, I quit my job at the library. I had been filing articles by Horace Greeley, and he said "Go west, young man," so I did. In the Rockies, the columbines bloomed white and purple along the interstate. I thought about stopping in Denver, but you know I don't have your number. Somewhere in Arizona, a man on the radio had made contact with the dead: Reports ofghosts in the Daisy Motel have been confirmed, he said. He had recorded the voices of two children crying and water running in a bathtub. Ghosts are those who will not allow themselves to remain wronged. By the time I got to the desert, ghosts were everywhere. I saw mountain lion tracks along the dry trail, but no mountain lions. I found the feathers of a blue heron on the floor of my car, and at night I dreamed of burning down our old house, while you stood in the bathtub, reading from a book of fairy tales. Es gibt keinen anderen Teufel, '
als den wir in unserem eigenen Herzen haben: There is no other devil than the one we have in our hearts.
DWELLING III
Ali Vdn
22
How dare you, old man, after planting me in your arid life enslaving me inside and out, transforming me to a vessel for your cursed and chosen seed, how dare you hand me this loaf of bread, this water, our son, and send us to drip our lives out on the sand. crossing comes without ceremony, SELF-PORTRAIT I
Sharon Madanes
tu
sh hands one-year-old Alexis over a short fence and follows, falling lightly into the first world. It's a day later that her extra load slows her, and the anxious guide leads the faster migrants away toward the mythic land of skyscrapers and paychecks.
Ii
H ar rries an oasis n er east and a boy, for whom a father's shadow once shielded the sun. Their sad steps shorten
s there. The book returns its paJists,leaving Hagar to please the masters of Paran and scrub vomit from the floors of Tucson.
to an eventual drag of four parallel scars
The real miracle is that we know her story at all. Hagars outnumber the angels, so many left forgotten, so many Ishmaels
pulled across the desert floor.
taking the taste of scalded milk to battle.
I
Th o oran morning pours yell over mother and child, their sweat waters the brush that flowers with bottles and jackets, a strange and sterile crop, monument to the desert's dangers: sun, black widow spider, rattlesnake and barbed wire.
Vth
o uch history is written e stretched skin of these dark bodies, but here and there bone shows through and ink bleeds. Then God remembers and cleans the stain. Hagar now turns from the dried wells of Ishmael's eyes and hears a voice she does not trust. d fade by an unknown road, exis oks lighter but weighs heavier on my shoulder and my heart. How long can he suck milk from my corpse if we are not found? Three teenagers come out of a car, all my age or younger, pale as angels as they pass the afternoon sun. Each carries a bottle, one delivers a rehearsed sentence in a broken accent: Somos amigos. No somos la migra. Estamos aqui para ayudarlos.
SELF-PORTRAIT II
Sharon Madanes
23
he morning of the funeral, when I remembered the way y mother's hand felt in my hand on the night before she died at age sixty-six in her dark bedroom with the lamplight spread low across her face, I decided to move in with Paul. Before she died, I lay for hours with my cheek against her sloping stomach and my palm over her hand, a warm lump, the skin fitting it like a baggy glove. It puckered around the knuckles, sliding easily away from the bone and folding over itself at the wrist. The skin was already grey and dead, but inside, I felt the warm, shy muscle breathe until two or three in the morning, when it shuddered once and then slackened. I thought that Paul would probably let me hold his hand. At the funeral, he said:"Whoever thought I'd outlive her?" I said: "Please, you're going to live for a very long time," and Paul dropped the subject, though he brought it up later, on the drive home. "I have two-hundred T-cells in every cubic millimeter of my blood," he said from the passenger seat, his eyes closed. "It's a miracle I stayed vertical during the service." I told him he should take the day off tomorrow, and then I told him I was moving in with him. He said:"You don't have to do that, Anne." But I did. He could use my help; besides, I didn't want to be alone in my mother's house, with the groaning hardwood floors and the sounds in the walls like ghosts. Her body that night, beneath my cheek and ear, made noises for long after her pulse faded. Her stomach, especially, creaked. I cupped a hand around her nose and lips to check for puffs of breath, but none came. From my position, I could see upward into her nostrils, the same sharp shapes as mine, and in them, I saw a hollowness that drove straight through the back of her head. The cancer had blackened the skin around her eyes and mouth, making her gaunt, and though the whole effect was dreadful, I didn't look away.
25 met Paul, the year I got divorced and moved in with ther, he gave me a job in a squat brick building that
much to lose, so I agreed to sample the drug," he explained. "And four years later—miraculously—I'm still alive." He
housed a museum of medical monstrosities. Inside, the place looked more like a library than a museum, its wood-paneled
held one hand up, flexing and unflexing his fingers as if to
walls covered with rows of tiny brass handles. They were not card catalogs, as I first thought; they were hundreds of little
when he gave the jar in his other hand a little shake, so that
prove it. I was spellbound, and I was not entirely surprised the specks that had settled along the bottom flew upward like snow in a snow-globe, and he said: "In this jar is a piece
drawer& each crypt containing a deformed, fossilized bone. My job was to catalog the collection and arrange the big ex-
of my hip."
hibits in glass cases. From my first day, I handled dozens of strange tumors and mangled tapeworms floating in jars. On
Two tall men parted in front of me, and Paul, who was
one shelf I set a heavy vat containing a man's foot swelled with elephantiasis, on another, a hairball from inside the stomach of a girl who compulsively chewed her hair. Paul ran tours on the half-hour. At the end of each one,
"Why?" I asked, when nobody else moved or spoke. nameless to me then, saw me and smiled. "Good question. The short answer is: I've had a series of surgeries. Everybody figured I'd die before they had a chance to study the long-term effects of the drug, but i'm still here, so they're still studying me. Every day, we learn
he held up a jar in which was suspended a lumpy chunk of something human. The first time I saw it, I was a visitor at the museum, not an employee. Paul loomed over the
more and more." He told us about the drug in the same steady tenor. A tiny blue tablet, it caused dense bone tissue
crowd, abnormally tall, his long blond hair pulled back in a ponytail. He held the jar up to the light so that everyone
to soften and eventually collapse. Paul pointed to his hip. "Underneath my jeans there's some heavy duty plastic," he
could see the little specks swimming around inside the fluid, and with the shadow of his arm across his face, his eyes
said. "They're putting it in bit by bit, as the bones become
disappeared into his sockets. The jar, which I later carried
undergoing the same process. Basically we record how long it takes the bones to collapse; then we replace them with
with two careful hands splayed wide, looked tiny and safe in Paul's fingers. He appraised his audience and said, his voice deep and clear: "Six years ago, I had unprotected sex and got infected with HIV." At the time, I was an admirer of unflinching attitudes and casual stoicism. In the crowd there were two women who whispered uncomfortably, but Paul paid them no mind. "I was in the emergency room with a 1-Cell count of 48," he said with a deliberate, practiced pause,"The doctors gave me two weeks to live." I stole a glance at my mother, who was standing very straight. Luckily, said Paul, the FDA had just approved a new drug. The only problem was it hadn't been tested for long-term side effects. "I figured I didn't have
too soft to support my weight. My knees too—they're
plastic." He paused."Questions?" In the audience, a fat man asked: "Couldn't you act preemptively—replace the hip or the knee before the tissue collapses?" "I could," said Paul,"But then we wouldn't learn anything. Every week when I go in for a checkup, we obtain data that helps us understand the drug. It's a question of mentality. Science needs volunteers." I thought of the box I had checked on my driver's license that would offer up my organs in the event of my sudden death. "I'm not a hero," said the man with AIDS, clutching the jar of his collapsed bone."I'm just looking for a reason to get up in the morning. More questions?"
26 My mother raised a tentative hand. She had recently been diagnosed with colon cancer. "Are you in pain?" she asked. "Always," said Paul. drive home, the sun was low and bright. I squinted e traffic lights. "That man was unnerving," my mother said, facing away from me."I don't understand why you would take me to that museum. We couldn't go to a gallery?" "I didn't realize it would be like that. I wouldn't have suggested it." "It was barbaric." "But you must have found it a little fascinating." "I could have lived without it." "I'm sorry," I said. But I went back the next week and applied for a job. "Listen," I told Paul,"I have a B.S. in biology, and I used to run a pharmacy. I'm looking for part-time work—something for the next few months." He said he remembered my face and scanned my résumé with interest. "What on Earth brings you here?" he asked. "It's complicated—it's sort of a transitional time in my life. I moved here to be with my mother." "To the museum?" "Oh! No, to the city." Paul laughed."We could actually use somebody to do the inventory, if you're interested," he said. "It's not much." I filled out paperwork on the spot. In the kitchen that night, my mother cooked dinner and
"I've missed your father for years," she said sharply. It was completely beside the point, and I knew, without a doubt, as I had always known, that she wanted a better life for me, a life with a husband. In another life, maybe, Paul could have been my husband. My first six months at the museum found us friends. I liked how he handled his illness in front of crowds, with his competent hands clasped neatly together, and I liked how he gave me a wink on my thirty-eighth birthday and said, "If you don't go down the street to get some wine, you're fired." I could picture us married, easily. He would not put the wine glasses in the dishwasher or leave the garage door open. He would not require the TV to fall asleep; he might even be romantic. I liked how, when he walked me to my car one night, he grabbed my hand, lifted it to his lips, and kissed the skin there. Without warning, warmth flowered in my belly and I grew silly, kissing his hand back. "Living each day like my last," he said and grinned, the yellow light from the streetlamp tripping over his jagged face. "Living each day like my last." Paul had been married too, I learned, almost a decade earlier. In the dead hours of the morning shift, we talked in the cellar while I moved boxes of distended stomachs and swollen gall bladders. "It's sort of funny," he said,"for years she was so convinced I was gay that when I got HIV, she wouldn't even let me explain the circumstances—took it as proof." "That doesn't sound very funny." "No, I guess not. She was right about one thing,
grilled me."Doing what?" she asked when I told her I got a
though—I do get passes from men all the time." He grinned.
job at the medical museum."Organizing that man's prescriptions? You don't have to work."
"What can I say?" "It's your hair," I said, and reached down to pat the
"I do have to work," I said.
limp blond mass. Paul was crouched by a low shelf and
"But the alimony?"
stiffened at the touch. For a moment, I dragged my fingers through the soft hair at his neck; then I removed my hand
"The alimony aside." I didn't mention the possibility of hospital bills; instead I said:"Be happy for me, Mom. I found an enclave of people interested in science. I've missed that for years."
abruptly and turned in the other direction. I moved aimlessly and quickly away, but Paul said my name, and then he was behind me, breathing audibly, and then I was worrying about
ti;
PSYCHE II
Ali Van
28 saliva. I tried to determine whether I had an open cut in my mouth, but it was useless. Turning to face him, I began to apologize, but he only put his hand on my arm and said, "We should bring this stuff upstairs." I nodded. e of my mother's good days, she said she was in the
"Will you be at home or at the hospital? Can I come by your house and help? "I'll be back and forth, I expect. My house—I don't know. I don't know if I want you to see my house, it's pretty dirty." He smiled again and wiped his forehead. "What's the address? I'll write it down." Paul gave it to me.
for company. I suggested we have Paul over for dinner, and she considered it. "Will he be clean?" she asked.
My mother came back from the bathroom and I could tell it had not been a success. Paul took one look at her and
When Paul showed up with his hair slicked back and
understood. He was very graceful about it, said he really had to be getting home. We thanked him for coming and I hugged him at the door; my mother's eyes, I'm sure, were
his shirt tucked in, he made a favorable impression. My mother was wearing a wig at this stage, and I straightened it for her in the kitchen while Paul pushed food around his plate and rubbed the long creases between his eyebrows. At the table, my mother talked of nothing but the food. When it became embarrassing, I asked Paul if, being a city veteran, he had any recommendations for my mother's weekly excursions. He maneuvered the conversation gracefully, suggesting a rare manuscripts library and telling us in detail about its basement, a forest of loose-leaf and binders. "That's very interesting," my mother said at intervals. "How is she doing?" Paul asked me when she left the table to use the bathroom. "I don't know," I said,"but I think the steak was a terrible idea. We'll be up all night hoping for a bowel movement." Paul laughed."A bowel movement? So clinical." I watched him smile and wipe his forehead. I noticed
combing his exposed skin for lesions. "That hair!" she said when I closed the door. "I don't know why he wears it like that. Still, I had a nice evening." "Good," I said. "Did the steak upset your stomach?" "What are you bringing that up for? I had a nice evening." We walked to the dining room and I stacked the dishes on top of each other while my mother stood framed in front of a painting of a bowl of pears. She held a bottle of barbeque sauce in her hand and she looked like she was trying to decide something. I said, reluctantly,"Mom, you look terrible. Just—please—were you able to go to the bathroom?" "Why are you asking me twice? It doesn't make me feel better to hear I look terrible." "I didn't mean it, come on." She walked into the kitchen with the barbeque sauce.
that along his hairline, fine beads of sweat had accumulated. "Are you alright?" I asked,"Is it hot in here?"
"Mom?" I called. She didn't answer, though she must have
Paul frowned. "It's fine. Do you have Tylenol?" I got up quickly to find some, and Paul swallowed the tablets without
once before, this attitude.
water. "Thanks," he said.
door and watched her standing at the fridge, the white light falling around her eye sockets and into the V of her sweater
My mother was still not back from the bathroom and I was about to say that I should go check on her, when Paul said,"My T-cell count is down again. Pain in the ass." "My god," I said,"I'm sorry" He shrugged. "I might be in and out of work this week."
heard me. I felt my stomach constrict. This had happened "Mom, please—did you notice any blood?" I went to the
where the skin was pale and loose. "No." "Are you sure?" "Christ, Anne."
29 I put the dishes down and went to the phone in the kitchen."How much? Do you remember what the color was like?" "That's disgusting. I don't know—red. More of it than last time, I think." She sat down at the kitchen table and put her chin on her palm, her elbow digging into a green vinyl
confessed to Paul that I was, in fact, afraid of being on he said: "I'm not even sure how to sympathize with that. You don't have to worry about it when you're the one dying." We were moving boxes in the basement and Paul lifted a large jar from its cardboard crypt, unearthing a
placemat. All her weight seemed to rest there, on the flat circle it made with the green mat, where the coarse elephant
mound of dust. I sneezed. "Gesundheit," he said and then added,"I'm sorry, though. About being alone."
skin folded over itself.
I nodded and we fell into silence. Paul stood and passed large boxes down to me, one-by-one; I pushed them into the
"Okay," I said, after a moment."I'm going to make a phone call." "Have them come here, I don't want to go to the
back of the bottom shelf. We got into a rhythm with it, he passing me the boxes with increasing efficiency, me thrusting
hospital again," "I don't know if they can do that."
them toward the back. I felt that I could predict the swivel of his hips as he grabbed the heavy crates from the top shelf
"I won't go there again." The phone on the other end of the line was ringing. "I can connect you to the emergency room," said the woman
and let gravity swing his arms toward me in a sweeping pen-
on the line. "Will you be able to drive your mother?" "Yes," I said, "but she doesn't want to leave home. Can we make an appointment with the doctor tomorrow, or do
"About before," Paul said when we had moved an entire wall of boxes, "I feel bad about how I responded."
dulum. I caught the boxes against my chest and bent down using my knees. It was relaxing, the unthinkingness.
"What?" "To what you said about being alone."
we need to take care of this tonight?" "It's hard for me to say without knowing her history, ma'am" said the woman. "But she's your mother—take her tonight." In the car, wearing her good scarf, my mother sat with her arms folded across her lap. "They won't keep me there overnight, will they?" I promised her we could leave whenever we wanted. "Listen," she said, her voice lowering an octave. "I do not want to die in a hospital." It was raining outside and I kept my eyes focused low on the road. At the edges of my vision, blurry hexagons of color crowded each other. I said: "This isn't a conversation we have to have right now." "Annie—" she started, and I felt very young. I waited, but she did not continue. We were silent for a long time. On the dark, oil-slicked road, the traffic lights reflected red, green and white. "I hope you won't be too lonely," she said.
"Don't worry about it." "Well, I'm sorry for how I said it." "Don't be." I smiled, but Paul frowned. He looked briefly toward the ceiling and I saw him hesitate. "I wouldn't leave you if I could help it," he said after a moment. Then he turned away from me to look into a shelf, and I couldn't see his face.
Te
e night it became clear my mother was going to die unless admitted herself back into the hospital, I tried to convince her that there were still more options."No more radia-
tion," she hissed,"No more chemo. I can't stand the nausea, I would rather be dead." She did not sound like herself. She was using words I had never heard her use, lying sprawled on the couch with her legs spread wide. While we discussed her options, she was coughing up black bile into a plastic bin
8 es
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32 we once used to wash delicates. "I want it over," she slurred at one point."You can't take me back there, you can't take me back or I will just die in the car." I could not physically move her past the garage door. She screamed,"If you carry me out that door I will bite you, so help me God!" Instead, I took her to bed. I fed her applesauce with a spoon. In a moment of clarity she looked down at herself and said,"I am such a mess. I make myself nauseous." "The nausea might be the applesauce," I said. "Your body is having trouble processing it, but you need to eat." "No it's not the applesauce," she said."You wouldn't
take it down; it only made him sad. We found things to do together in the evenings. We experimented with cooking and I even slept in his bed before he got too sick. "Not many people would do this for me," he said one night while we lay in the bed facing opposite directions."You know how all these years I've kept myself going by thinking of the studies—the studies of my hip and knees?" "Yes?" I prompted, turning toward him. "It was for the good of something bigger than me." "I know."
know. The applesauce! My scientist daughter says it's the ap-
"Right, but now," he rolled over to look at me,"I have someone in my life. It's just different—the reason to stay
plesauce!" She leaned over and spit up into the plastic bin.
motivated."
I wiped a clot of black gunk from her lips. "Don't do that!" she pulled back from me, her eyes wild,"Don't pretend this isn't revolting." "Lie down," I told her. "I'll stay with you." She lay down, but she lay shrunk into herself. "I wish Carl were here," she moaned."God I wish Carl were here." I didn't know what to say; I had never known my father.
In the moonlight from the window, he did not look sick at all. Under the sheets, I slid my leg across the bed until I found him; I ran my foot along his calf and held it there. Out of the side of my eyes, I watched his face turn toward the ceiling with an inscrutable expression, then, timidly, he brought his other leg toward mine. The toes were cold where they grazed my ankle, but I leaned toward the touch. We moved closer very slowly; Paul's eyes were closed, so I
"I'm here," I tried, softly. "But you haven't hugged me this whole time," she said,
closed mine too. For a while, only our legs were entwined,
her voice cracking. She sobbed once and I could hear a film
ton pants. I inched closer and put my hand on his forearm. We took turns tentatively moving our hands from hip to
of mucous pop in her throat."When are you going to hug me? I do love you, you know." I crawled beneath the white sheets and put my arms around her, resting my cheek against her distended stomach, which groaned. Under the covers I found her limp hand, sticky with sweat, and took it in mine. l's house was a mess, as he had said it would be. "I never decorated it," he told me,"I thought there wasn't much of a point." I hung up a Japanese print, but Paul asked me to
then I felt one of his hands settle on my hip, above my cot-
shoulder, shoulder to arm, arm to stomach. His warm palm along my lower belly stirred me. I pressed my leg between his legs. Our lips never touched. I never dipped my fingers below the elastic waistband of his shorts. I never even opened my eyes. l's body had risen in revolt by the time I drove him to the hospital three weeks later. It started only a week after the bed incident; he caught a cold, ran a fever, and couldn't
eat for the shaking. "I've only had hallucinations like this once before," he said in the car,"and it's not a good sign." I had not known he was hallucinating, and stepped harder on the gas pedal. "Shit," Paul said."We need to stop by the museum. I need to get my new insurance card—I left it in my surgery folder—kept forgetting it—stupid." "I'll come back for it later." "We're close, just run in, double park." I hung a left and double parked."What am I looking for?" "My desk, lower left-hand drawer, file folder labeled 'Surgery '05'—make sure the card doesn't slide out." I ran up the steps, nodded at Margaret at the front desk, and slowed down as I entered the museum. Weaving a path between the crowd near the human hairball. I could hear the tour guide say, "It's fascinating." The route to Paul's office was a maze, but the folder was easy enough to find. I took it and slid the card into my pocket. On the way out, as I shuffled quickly past the skeletons and the shrunken heads, the room seemed too colorful, the lights too bright. I felt vaguely sick. I seemed to notice items on exhibit I had never cataloged; maybe they were new: A pair of eyeballs warped with astigmatism, a puckered liver, a punctured lung, and behind glass, in a vacuum, a swollen human heart. was in a room with a blue balloon. "It was there when I got here," he said. He did not look good. His throat was thick and red and he had developed lesions. "It's alright," I said. "You're a pro at this. You'll make it through." "So will you," he said. "You're a pro, too." But I could not even stand the smell of the place, a faintly cheesy odor tinged with disinfectant. In the hallway, out of Paul's earshot, I asked a nurse: "Is there something you can do about the smell of that room? It must smell from
the person before it—the person with the balloon." The nurse stepped into the room."It doesn't smell any different in here than it smells down the hall," she said. Paul looked up. "I don't smell anything." The nurse patted my arm. "There," she said,"he doesn't smell anything." Paul was on drugs that made him fall asleep often; when he did, I wandered the hallways. I had no idea where I would go or what I would do next, after Paul died, which I knew he would. Nothing seemed like a good idea. I would quit the museum, but after that? "I am very alone," I told a catatonic man who was hooked up to an elaborate wheelchair that was sitting in the middle of the hallway. A male nurse came and wheeled him away. When he was lucid, Paul updated me on his treatments. He liked to learn and explain exactly what was being done to his body—was curious about the progress, like the hip and knee surgery. I listened but became flustered and impatient. One day I said I couldn't bear to hear it anymore. I thought I sounded like my mother. Paul nodded and then we didn't talk about it, but I felt strange almost every moment. Things that had not used to faze me suddenly did. The sight and smell of blood became intolerable. I could no longer look at Paul's lesions and I hated to watch the drip of the IV. The morning he died, we didn't say goodbye; there was no time, it was sudden. A nurse came, put her rubber hand on my shoulder and guided me away from the bed. As I watched her coax needles from Paul's veins, unhooking him from a tangle of tubes, I felt the pale stink of the room rise in me, a panic of being left behind, a nausea that turned my stomach and showed me the pink, wormy underbelly of fear, until I came to my senses and kept my eyes on the tubes, so as not to see the body.
UNTITLED
Rachel Rose
AIII•Imm.
Dusk I Jordan Jacks
35 Like a man coming in from a day's work, I hope my face walks into your mind at times, stopping to grow sunburned torso and hands in need of washing, blessed by dirt. I have kept the fields of my birth and yours at least partially for myself: I have in my will to be buried too under the oaks, surrounded by your wheat. I sold the house last summer. Young couple, polite questions, no children or harvest to speak of. I hope you will forgive me: It is a strange feeling, seeing yourself beyond life, the dead, the dying, the youth. With dusk coming on, we sat on the porch, listening to the evening. Loving you is like how they will feel in a summer— made light by archetype, by grave image, floating if only in imitation of the ghost they have placed beyond the fence.
MP%
Editors-in-Chief Dayo Olopade & Joanna Zdanys
The editors would like to thank Ruben Roman in the English
Publisher Erich Matthes
Department and Branford and J E Colleges.
Designer Iris Shih
The designer would like to thank George Guman at RIS.
Managing Editor Russell Brandom The winner of the Frances Bergen Prize for Poetry is Literary Editors Elizabeth Gumport & 'April 1998,' by Elizabeth Gumport. Alexandre Lessard-Pilon Senior Editors Annie Galvin & David Chernicoff
The winner of the Frances Bergen Prize for Fiction is
Art Editor Laura Adler
'Monstrosities,' by Sara Schneider.
Public Relations Manager Carina del Valle Schorske Poetry was judged by Caryl Philips. Events Coordinators Gordon Jenkins, Diana Mellon & Caroline Smith
Fiction was judged by Shameem Black.
Circulation and Distribution Tyler Theofilos & The text face is Life. Headings are set in Frutiger. Jordan Jacks Associate Publisher Tess Dearing
The contents of the Yale Literary Magazine are copyright
Associate Editors Tae-Yeoun Keum & S. Zelda Roland
2006. No portions of the contents may be reprinted without
Selections Alice Baumgartner, Nicky Bernstein,
permission. All rights reserved.
Russell Brandom, Carina del Valle Schorske, Library of Congress Catalogue number 7-19863-4 Tess Dearing, Rebecca Dinerstein, Annie Galvin, Adam T. Gardner, Elizabeth Gumport, Lauren Henry,
Subscriptions to the Yale Literary Magazine are available for
Jordan Jacks, Gordon Jenkins, Tae-Yeoun Keum,
$15 (for individuals) and $35 (for institutions).
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Contributions to The Lit are welcome and tax-deductible.
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