Poetry, CNF, and Graphic Essays.

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Les Kay

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Frostbite

All snowflakes look very much alike;
like little white dots.

-The Smithsonian

They walked from club to club,
arms chain-linked. By the third club,
stumbling, holding tight, as if the other
would vanish when grip slipped.

In the steaming cacophony of another
club, cheap vodka and vermouth
perfumed their sweat as they feigned
the familiarity of lovers.
Snowflake—
the word fell featherlike as if the other
were not just another white dot on the horizon
—so similar to so many others—as if they
had come close enough to bask in delicate
flaws: a thin scar above an eyebrow
left from a childhood game of chicken
with a brother, the dappled freckles,
summer’s seething sun edging currents
that raged through one’s eyes.
Names are
stones thrown into a confluence of rivers.
Martinis, our antifreeze, brace against the cold.


Les Kay is the author of The Bureau (Sundress, 2015) and Badass, which is forthcoming from Lucky Bastard Press in the fall of 2015. He holds a PhD with a focus on Creative Writing from the University of Cincinnati and an MFA from the University of Miami, where he was a James Michener Fellow. His poetry has appeared widely in journals such as PANK, South Dakota Review, Southern Humanities ReviewWhiskey Island, RomComPomSuperstition Review, and The White Review. He is also an Associate Editor for Stirring: A Literary Collection. He lives in Cincinnati, teaching writing, and caring for three very small dogs by steadfastly keeping them away from his current favorite sweet: generic chocolate covered raisins.

 … return to Issue 7.3 Table of Contents.

Susan Rich

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Press Play to hear Susan Rich read her poem “Not Monet’s Giverny”

Not Monet’s Giverny

In our snow globe of good-byes we leave
cities burning, arguments still on fire.

We do not touch but force ourselves

into pockets and gloves.
Winter stumbles on: questions

without answers.
Glass bridge of exits, cracked runway lights

flared blue and gold.

We travel through forlorn gates
the size of breadbaskets

do not stop for sweets or tea.

On the last day of this life
we will not live together

we steer north of Paris

to observe the descendants of lily pads,
abandoned in the gardens of Giverny.

Everything frozen.

Even now— decades on, the same
little remains.

Empty beds where the iris had lived;

white stones to an ashen sky.
And a man and a woman struck numb.

Susan Rich is the author of four collections of poetry, Cloud Pharmacy, The Alchemist’s Kitchen, named a finalist for the Foreword Prize and the Washington State Book Award, Cures Include Travel, and The Cartographer’s Tongue Poems of the World, winner of the PEN West Award. Her poems have appeared in: the Alaska Quarterly Review, The Gettysburg Review, New England Review, and World Literature Today. Susan co-edited The Strangest of Theatres: Poets Crossing Borders, a selection of essays on poets who travel published by McSweeney’s and the Poetry Foundation. She lives in Seattle, WA and on-line at http://www.susanrich.net

 … return to Issue 7.3 Table of Contents.

Ellie Francis Douglass

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Anthropomorphizing the Orchid

Lowering my nose to the waxy petals, I’m kissing you goodnight
in the hospital again. Your lips smelled faintly of sour milk,
those protein shakes.

I couldn’t hug you; you were delicate.

Our last night, I called the nurse every hour
to give you morphine. I tend the orchid too,
feel the thirsting moss around its roots.

Watering it, I’m raising the oxygen mask
to wet your tongue with a sponge. I wonder why
I thought it mattered that your mouth was dry
when, the hope was, you couldn’t feel anything.

Rotating the orchid in the sun, I remember hugging you,
already a gleaming sculpture, before the young man
in a pilot’s jacket took you away in a bag.

I breathed relief. Dead was better than diapers,
cups held up to your mouth, being turned in your bed,
your legs withered stems, knees bulbous.
Not to mention the pain.

“What’s the point,” you said, lip quaking, maybe two days before.
It wasn’t a question. I told you I understood.

But the orchid doesn’t know any better. It is not degraded
by dependence. Its thick leaves reach, a child asking
to be held.

Ellie Francis Douglass is from Texas and recently graduated from the MFA program at Oregon State University. Another one of her elegies appears in the Missouri Review Online. Her favorite sweet is dark chocolate, hands down. Visit her at elliefrancisdouglass.com, email her at elliefdouglass@gmail.com, or follow her on twitter: @elliefdouglass.

 … return to Issue 7.3 Table of Contents.

Delia Rainey

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Bird of My Past

If I touch you but you do not wish to be touched,
I may feel ashamed. Bird of my past –
I imagine you with green feathers, cleaning them
with your beak like a toothpick or a personal dagger.
When the snake kills you, it turns into a story
or an oral tradition – the sweet myth, a bedtime song.
A snake kills its prey by strangling them.
It is also green and scalloped – both
the bird and the snake have red flags
on their body – the feathers
or the tongue slit down and tickling.
There are a lot of birds out right now.
Because it is very cold, they are leaving.
The snake was hungry, he is not anymore.
The bird of my past sits in his belly still breathing.
You can’t kill a bird, not really. Their bodies perish
but the next day, you see one flying –
you wonder if that is your bird. You convince
yourself that your bird has arrived.

This is the Last Poem

This is the last poem
I dreamed about
flowers picking up sand with the birds &
my hair becomes a body
my body in the desert,
a grief collector.
In the black dark,
the art is just a comment on itself.
& why aren’t we writing about ourselves?
The cactus appeared in my hand,
I couldn’t unsee it.
In my palm like where a prayer goes,
I lick the salt clean off.
The river passes on,
dreaming: “the art of losing’s
not too hard to master.” The stars
stick to the sky like thorns.
I will taste it for as long as I want.
Out goes the body once before,
vanishing into the perfect order:
desert girl, unresolved, lifting a match

Delia Rainey is a writer and musician based out of Columbia, Missouri and St. Louis. She studied English at The University of Missouri and has been published inBlacktop Passages, Cactus Heart, Lower Lip Zine, and the upcoming issue of Pleiades. Delia sells frozen sweets everyday at a local ice cream shop. You can follow her literary and artistic activities at deliarainey.tumblr.com.

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Kathleen McGookey

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I’d Like to Think Someone is Listening

Why else tell what it’s like in my house full of machines? I like being alone but my brain cannot sit still. Its doomsday shorthand leaves me teary in a gym full of jump-roping children, red and pink paper chains draped between basketball hoops. I try taking pictures of my daughter but she moves too fast. Her red glass heart bounces on her chest. I am looking for the door that opens on the shipwreck overtaken by hundreds of cormorants, all evil in their black bony clamor and stink. On my own deserted island, the sun shines weakly. Are you here, too?

Kathleen McGookey’s prose poems and translations have appeared in many journals and anthologies including Boston Review, Crazyhorse, Field, Ploughshares, and Willow Springs. She is the author of Whatever Shines, October Again, and Mended, and the translator of We’ll See, a book of prose poems by contemporary French poet Georges Godeau. Her book Stay is forthcoming from Press 53 in fall 2015; her book At the Zoo is forthcoming from White Pine Press in spring 2017. In 2014, she received a grant from the Sustainable Arts Foundation, which supports artists who are parents. Her favorite sweet is chocolate birthday cake. Her email address is kathleen.mcgookey@gmail.com.

 … return to Issue 7.3 Table of Contents.

Brenda Miller and Lee Gulyas

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Come Closer

A collaborative essay

So come closer, come into this. There are birds beating their wings beneath your breastplate gentle sparrows aching to sing….

—Anis Mojgani

“Feb * 1964”
Feb 1964
Let us start with the tree. Because where else can the eye go first than that young Ash—its smooth trunk, the branches thin as whips. And the girl, a sapling herself. Someone—her mother or the stylist at the beauty salon at Bullock’s Department store—has cut her bangs straight across on her forehead, the rest of her hair curving into a pageboy bob. Leaves throw shadows across her face, her skirt, the dry lawn—as if the branches sway in a strong breeze, out of control, not sure which direction to grow.
February: but the girl wears short sleeves and seems inordinately pleased with her suspenders, the buttons that hook on the waistband, the Peter Pan collar, the pleats that brush just above her knocked knees. The light is bright, dry. All the houses on this cul-de-sac are young, too, waiting for their landscaping to fill in.
1964: on the television she’s seen President Johnson trying to manage a jungle war from his offices in D.C., his face solemn and jowled, though her mother turns off the TV when young men in battle gear race across the screen. She has seen Peggy Fleming, so elegant in her pleated skirt, win the U.S. Figure Skating championship, and this girl has pretended, in secret, to be Peggy, twirling in her bedroom alone, or gliding with arms outstretched across the dry expanse of the back lawn.
The olive tree in the nook by the front door has not yet developed fruit, but it will, more olives than anyone can stand, messy in the way they fall with abandon. Just as this young sapling will grow to tower over the house, its trunk thick and cragged with age, leaves blanketing the ivy on the slope. The girl will never be as pleased with her clothes as she is on this day, when she and her tree are fresh and new. She can feel the sap running in the wood, a force that surges up. They are both growing; nothing can stop them now.

*

The tree reaches the girl, leans into her. Its leaves shadow across her face and her jumper. They are separate, and they are together, the young tree and its ropy, curving branches. The young girl and her cheeky smile. Her fleshy, hyperextended knees.
This particular shadow is cast by overhanging leaves intercepting rays of the sun. It is not a symbol, or prefiguration, even though the shadow is in the foreground. It is not the shadow of death, a spectre or a ghost, or even a spy lurking in the background, even though shadow and darkness are companions, and shadows always travel with light.
Shadow versus substance. Shadows obscure, conceal. Are fleeting and immaterial. But things change when shadow shifts from mere being into action, when shadow protects against attack, or screens from blame, or punishment, or wrong, or at the very least, shelters from the blazing sun.
There is no epic battle against evil or darkness here. Just a girl with her arm around a tree. Just a tree leaning against a girl. Both of them depending on the light.

*

Vote
 I Wish Ma Could Vote
When I was a daughter, my job was to close the curtain on the voting booth. Later, as I grew older, my mother let me switch the levers, and I can still remember the satisfying click as I cast each individual vote. We would finish, and open the curtain, then the poll worker would enter and reset the booth as we made our way to the exit, then most often, to the grocery store. I remember voting, or at least accompanying my mother as she voted, long before I was old enough to vote on my own. I guess you could say the cultural value of voting was instilled in me from a young age, an act which could be interpreted as buying in to national ideals, but in the 1970s, women in the United States had only been voting fifty years. As the women in my family demonstrated—my mother, grandmothers, and aunts—it may have been a civic duty, but it also folded into our days as easily as trips to the post office, the bank, as easily as cooking a family meal.
When my daughter was young, voting booths had changed from levers to paper ballots we punched with a metal stylus. Of course, I let my daughter punch each hole with her chubby hands, and when the ballot was complete, I would fold it over and hand it to her, so she could slip the rectangle of paper into the slot on the sealed, metal ballot box. The poll workers, older ladies, volunteers, made sure she received the red, white, and blue I Voted sticker. Then we made our way to the table of baked goods for sale in the foyer of the neighborhood Episcopal church.
My grandma Ruth always said she could never vote against a library bond, or a school levy, and I like to think of myself in the same light. Now Washington state has a vote-by-mail system, ensuring a paper trail—which neatly balances voter rights and limits wide-scale, institutional fraud—but I confess I miss the social aspect, the event of gathering as a community to have a voice, to shape the way we want to live. I miss the sweet, civic-minded volunteers, I miss the baked goods, and I miss the silly stickers. But most of all I miss seeing my neighbors brought together to witness the individual actively participating in our collective future, a reminder that we are responsible not only for ourselves.

*

My eye is drawn to the woman running in the opposite direction. Her white dress suit crinkles and billows; there is urgency and motion in every part of her body. Something is happening, and she needs to be there.
Perhaps she was one of those women watching from the street, going about her business, shopping for sensible shoes. Perhaps she heard the faint cadence of women’s voices raised in chant, or somehow felt the wordless commotion a group of women makes as they band together in a common purpose. Perhaps these women took to the streets in silent protest, their silence a statement in itself. In any case, she looked up from her handbag, gradually understood something new was afoot, felt the murmuration of women on the move.
And so she does it. She steps off the sidewalk. She makes the transition from bystander to participant. The air feels different when she does this: more charged, oxygenated. She has never run in her life, never moved at more than a brisk walk, but now her body picks up speed, her shoes alighting with steady ticks on the asphalt, her Sunday dress rustling around her legs. She can feel the turning of heads, the gazes of those still remaining on the periphery.
She catches the eye of a young girl holding a sign. She does not yet have a daughter—her children are all boys—but if she did, she’d want a daughter like this: pretty and sure of herself, willing to stand at the front of the line. She wants a daughter who can look ahead, her vision unimpeded, to see clearly where she needs to go. She wants a daughter who will be the kind of woman the future demands. She carries this idea of “daughter” with her as she runs toward the back of the line, as she finds her place among women, all of them shifting to give her room to march.

*

April * 1964
April 1964
You’ve got your sheet cake, decorated by hand; you’ve got birthday hats; you’ve got noisemakers; you’ve got party favors in little cups at each place. You’ve got your dress; your party dress, with its crisp waist belt, its smooth pleats, its ribbons of pale flowers. Your mother must have ironed it carefully at her station in the dining room. You must have twirled in that dress when you put it on. Your mother stood back to behold this daughter in her finery, then enlisted your help as she set the table just so.
She spent all week with you planning this party; everything is perfect. Brothers have been banished; the room has been transformed into a girl’s domain. Soon guests will arrive with carefully wrapped presents they’ll lay in a pile on the coffee table, each one eager for you to open them, to show off what they’ve brought. One girl has shown up early; perhaps it’s her birthday too. Both of you smile with real pleasure, your eyes alight, though you’re not sure what to do with your hands (this will be a theme later in your life, too: what to do with your hands, but for now you’ve found a way to hold them softly nestled within one another, holding on.)
And the balloons. My god, the balloons. They are nothing fancy: just dime store balloons in the expected shapes—ovals, teardrops—and the expected colors—violet, orange, red. But they hover above you in mid-air, no strings attached. It’s an illusion, I know: they are holding onto the wall by static electricity. I can picture how you did it, your mother showing you how to moisten and stretch the opening, press it just so to your lips. You watched her fingers with their beautifully polished nails splayed to each side, her lipsticked mouth pursed, and the balloon inflating with just a few good puffs, the end quickly tied in a knot.
She handed each one to you, and you rubbed it quickly against your dress until the hairs on your arm stood up, then touched it lightly to the wall where it held, bobbing a little as it found equilibrium. You did this over and over until your whole body felt charged. You stood on a chair to get the balloons artfully arranged, then stood down satisfied with what you’d done.
The photo captures you right before the mayhem ensues: before the other kids arrive to make a mess of everything. Before the cake is demolished, the napkins crumpled, the candles blown out to leave only sooty wicks. Before the balloons lose their gumption, their staying power, and fall off one by one, unnoticed, too tired to even pop. Before your mother cleans up everything into a big garbage bag she will set by the curb.
Before you grow out of your party dress and decide it’s a sin to eat cake. Before you discover helium balloons and their compulsion to lift without any help from you. Before you take acid, Quaaludes, Ecstasy: anything to feel that electric charge, the uplift away from the body. Before you cleave yourself over and over to boys. Before you come to understand a little the law of physics: what keeps things together, what drives them apart, what makes anything stick.

*

The first Halloween party you ever attended was given by your friend Kevin, and you were excited he asked you to come early, you so loved being on the inside of things. In the know, so to speak. And when the other partygoers arrived, you already knew where everything was: the bathroom, the galvanized metal tub filled with water for bobbing for apples, the cookies and spooky Halloween treats. So when everyone was in the vacant lot next door playing after dark, and someone smelled a skunk, when Kevin asked you to go ask his mom for a flashlight, you felt special as he told everyone you weren’t scared of going to his house alone, you weren’t afraid of the dark—you were friends, he trusted you.
So you went out the side gate and around to the front door, because you knew it would be faster, but on the way you spied a man in a car parked against the curb, a man with a hat, and when he saw you see him, he slunk down into the driver’s seat and pulled his hat down over his face. You don’t remember if you stopped, or froze, and you probably kept moving, but it felt like you stopped, like time stopped and it was just you and the man, who shouldn’t be there. You knew that even at six. You knew because that tight feeling in your stomach as you and the man in the hat made eye contact, then he spoke into a walkie-talkie, and the next thing you know is that you rang the doorbell and told Mrs. Long everything, although you don’t remember what you said. All you remember is the sound of the car ignition starting up, and the squeal of the tires as the car fled, and the kids coming in through the patio door asking what was wrong. All you remember is huddling in the safety of the kitchen until your mom came to pick you up and take you home.
Later you would learn that the house on the other side of the vacant lot had been ransacked and vandalized, nothing taken or stolen, just drawers overturned, couch cushions slit, paint cans dumped on chairs and beds, walls, carpets, and toys. Every single thing ruined, the house inhabitable. What you learned was that sometimes bad things happen to people who go to your school, that maybe you should be afraid of the dark, and that you would always trust that feeling in your stomach. Even though you had no idea what it was or where it came from, like your mother told you, that feeling in your stomach was right, it was always right.

*

On Patrol
On Patrol
I don’t know how to write about a brick home, single-story with a sliding glass patio door, a dog in the backyard, grass worn away where the dog, a Great Dane, or invisible children, run back-and-forth, wearing a path along the chain-link fence. I don’t know how to write about a typical American home from the fifties, that burst of single-family dwellings popping up across the country. Promises of opportunity and harmony, a kind of Father Knows Best or Leave It To Beaver idyll—a father coming home from his day at the office to his housewife and 2.5 shiny kids.
The home in the photo is not my home, but is familiar, with minor differences: trade the chain-links for a tall wooden fence. Trade the Great Dane for a dachshund. Trade the tan dirt for red. Trade my invisible family for the family that exists outside the photograph’s frame and what do you have? Some version of a story, some version of the American Dream.

*

The dog’s on guard. She is a guard dog after all, the reason my father bought her in the first place. He’s probably the one taking the photo, standing in the far corner of the yard. Perhaps he’s trying to capture the entirety of the lawn: a map for the future, plotting where the Doughboy swimming pool will occupy space, or the basketball hoop for his son.
My mother is frightened to be at home alone with her two children, living in a suburb 3000 miles from her New York home. There are too many windows, too many entry points. Too much space and silence. Too many cracks that can be breached; not like in the busy borough of her childhood, so many neighbors and family members always in sight.
I’m two years old and watching this dog through the mesh screen. Maybe I’m touching the screen, feeling its rough texture, smelling the dust that accumulates despite my mother’s constant cleaning. It’s February, and winter light showers the new backyard, with its naked walnut tree and two lounge chairs that sit side by side, facing the house—as if the chairs also keep watch on the family.
The dog and the chairs—they’re alert for any movement. The dog’s snout is so large, so intricate: she can smell a threat from a mile away. She begins her steady patrol along the fence line, sniffing along the ground, running like a colt toward the center of the lawn. She’s only a puppy, a very large puppy, but knows her duty. I smell grilled cheese for lunch, the browned butter in the pan, hear my mother making her quiet racket. The dog makes one more round along the periphery while the chairs ache to be filled, waiting for someone, anyone, to settle down, to relax.

*

Come Closer
Come Closer
Sometimes we slumber in landscapes of mountains and valleys, rivulets of cotton and feather, bamboo-filtered sunlight shimmering across sheet, across skin. We seek solace in silence, through intersection of finger and clavicle, the brush of ankle and thigh. Sometimes we seek the other. Other times we seek oblivion, the place where waxwing and tree branch and contrail and breathing become indistinguishable, merge into one.
Last week a Homeland Security helicopter hovered outside the bathroom window while my husband was on the toilet. There’s nothing like eye contact with a pilot while you are on the shitter, he said. Once, in Los Angeles, I woke up, my body illuminated in the middle of the night, light sweeping back and forth over my body like in a dream. My husband said it was normal, the police were searching for someone. I could hear the chop of the rotors long after the helicopter was gone. Sometimes I can still see the light, even when I close my eyes.

*

Sometimes, we become like platters on a sill, patient enough to gather nothing but air. We are the open window, the rustle of bamboo leaves. We are the aftermath of love, a rumpled sigh. We do not speak of inconsequential things. All things now have consequence.
We have flat edges; we are not bowls. We are infinity pools. We contain nothing, everything slides right off. Our breastplates no longer armor, bristling our crests of arms.  They soften into nests. We disarm, dismantle. Rise and then fall. Come closer, whispers the wren in the underbrush. Come closer, chants the glacial tarn. Pink heather trembles among the rocks.
A sign: the wind moves more slowly next to the ground, and even a tiny pebble can create a protective windbreak. The alpine parsley gives a little wave; we follow where it tells us. We have no volition, no anyplace to be.
A child plays in a stream that can be crossed in one step; she skips though it anyway, to feel the lick of water along her calves. Making a dam?, we ask. She digs with a blunt stick, carries damp dirt drizzling between her fingers. It always washes away, she says, but happily she builds it again and again.  We stroll alone at 8,000 feet. Our feet do not touch the ground. We sing of meadows to the meadow. We braid our voices into thin air.

Brenda Miller has had a LOT of work published in places too numerous to count and is the co-author of Tell It Slant, a darn good book about writing Creative Nonfiction. I can’t even keep up with the Pushcart Awards and anthologies, but do know she has four books, and I love them all, for different reasons (like children.) Brenda fosters dogs, even though it makes her own dog, Abbe, a little jealous. She is a dream to work with, and to eat dinner and dessert with too. For the record, if forced to choose, her favorite dessert is Angel food cake with lemon curd. Yum.

Lee Gulyas is a world traveler who always knows the answer to any question that may arise in casual conversation, because her curiosity is insatiable. This comes in handy for her writing as well, since her work is chock full of smart, original, and unexpected connections between a wide variety of material, from physics to marine biology to Rwandan culture.  She also loves a good laugh, and her enthusiasm is infectious. Her work in both poetry and creative nonfiction is now being widely published, always to great acclaim from her readers. Her favorite dessert is all of them, but she prefers “the one in front of me.”

 … return to Issue 7.3 Table of Contents.

Band of Writers

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I was a writing community virgin when I came to the University of South Florida to get an MFA.

My past life wasn’t devoid of community — as a member of the military, friendships were practically thrust upon me. After spending months away from anyone who wasn’t wearing camo pants, I learned to forge relationships with whoever was around, even the guy who said “Hooah,” did a hundred push ups a day, and took it personally that I didn’t cheer for the Ohio State University.

Army friendships are strong, hence the countless movies featuring uniformed bromances. Even the title of the hit HBO miniseries Band of Brothers implies that military friendships are at the level of familial bonds.

I can’t think of any movies about writers getting along famously. A quick Google search for “writers+friends+best+friends+for+life+i+never+want+to+be+alone” brings up The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants. I’ve seen that quite a few times, and I don’t remember any of the characters writing a book. Maybe I missed something.

I was expected to form a community when I joined the Army and again when I entered the University of South Florida’s MFA program.

To me, community is about relationships. It’s about connecting as friends.

So, who are the better friends–writers or soldiers?

The military was about doing a job. It was a difficult job and bonds formed between members because we were going through the same challenges. I became friends with the men and women who complained about the same things I did. We were propelled toward friendship through commiseration.

My writing community experience has been the opposite. Instead of being pulled together by events, my MFA cohort is drawn together by shared interests.

With my writing friends, ideas are exciting. Someone says that we should go to a graveyard for inspiration, and everyone hops aboard. Someone says she wants to write a short story in computer code, and everyone says to go for it. Someone says that we should join that cult downtown with the clown statue out front and the red splatters on the windows, and everyone says not to do it. But, they say it in a nice way that doesn’t make me feel bad for bringing it up.

As writers, we ignite each other.

My military and writing communities have been worlds apart. One was forged out of necessity, the other out of shared excitement. I have lasting friendships from both, but I have sparks at the University of South Florida.

They should make a movie about that. Call it MFA Cohort of Brothers and Sisters. Of the Traveling Pants.

Naomi Shihab Nye Reading

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It’s nearing six o’clock when the Marshall Center reading room is filling up with students, professors, fans, and friends of Naomi Shihab Nye. Every seat is occupied, so newcomers stand in the back, but they do so without complaint. Jay Hopler, resident poetry professor at the University of South Florida, approaches the mic. He begins to introduce Nye who beams naturally through an easy, open smile. Her honey-blonde hair sits in a lax, side-ponytail as she begins the address after hefty applause.

Nye advises that we all keep notebooks, for the small, continuous treats that come our way. Lines like “Will the owner of a bucket of stones with a candle in it please come to the security checkpoint,” are treats overheard in the airport, phrases that she can’t not write down. She goes on to tell us about William Stafford and his morning writing practice.

“He was a morning writer, he believed in horizontal writing. He would lay on the couch with his notebook above him, writing like that. He woke every morning around 4:30 AM. He would write the date to ground himself, and then move onto notes or fragments in a prose style, anything he may have encountered in the last 24 hours. Then he’d go into aphorisms, or “bigger thinking,” where he asked himself questions or posed statements. Then he’d play around with it all, and then he would go to his desk to work.  But every morning, this is what he did.”

As an avid writer and reader, I take copious notes, imagining that one day I will do the same, but knowing I probably won’t start tomorrow. Nye has a slight, homey rasp that fills the room as she tells of her 20th birthday and looking up Jack Kerouac’s number in the phone book. Twenty year old Naomi gives the number a ring, imagining his widow may answer as Kerouac had passed a few years prior. Naomi is a huge fan, his most ardent fan she assures us. The phone rings about twenty times, see, they didn’t have answering machines back then. She is drifting off in thought when the receiver picks up. She had heard Stella, Kerouac’s widow, was a hermit, so she is considerably surprised at the answer, shaken up, but she gains the courage to introduce herself.

“It’s my birthday, too,” she says. “I love his poems. His work has meant so much to me.”

“When can you come visit me?” Stella asks

“Next week is Spring Break! I could visit then?” an enthusiastic Naomi replies.

“Come on down,” Stella says.

And so she does. Naomi’s parents drive her down to Florida where she visits with Stella for two days. The two of them record tape after tape of his unpublished work while the cats crawl over them. This story has never left her.

At this point, the crowd is transported and we are all still in Stella’s house with Nye. She eases us out of the story by prompting us with a new thought. She tells us about the time she thought: you can do a whole book of poems about people you met briefly. This is what she did, and she proceeds to read us a poem called How to Get There.

As Nye reads, the crowd laughs because her poem is humorous, but more than that; it shows us how small interactions can lead to friendships, to more stories shared. She tells us about Transfer, the book of poems she wrote after her father’s death. She tells us that it’s strange, finding things out about a parent, discovering things you didn’t know they had, like a pen pal relationship with Eleanor Roosevelt. As Nye helped to collect her father’s things, she found a letter in his scrapbook, tucked away in his closet. It was a response from Eleanor Roosevelt. He had written her at twenty-five with a wife and baby in tow. He wrote her, questioning her about politics, about cultural inequality. In her response, Eleanor Roosevelt was honest in her not knowing, Nye says, honest in not having the answers to his questions about the Palestinian/Israeli conflict. Nye says that her father believed that codes of behavior that exist in other systems could translate into politics, too. As a boy, he had friends from every culture, every religion, and he talked about this until the last day of his life.

Her father, coming from a Muslim family, was introduced to evangelical behavior when he moved the Kansas in his younger years. The people that he encountered claimed not to know the word “Muslim.” Instead, they referred to him as “Muscle Man,” on account of his slenderness and the term they apparently did not know. Nye conveys this story through her beaming, easy smile, and people laugh. There is no resentment here, but a fondness for the story. Stories like these inspired Nye to write poems that were titled after fragments found in his journal. Interestingly, she notes, she took on the voice of her father in these poems, something she hadn’t set out to do. As the audience, we laugh at this, too. Nye thanks us for laughing, for being a warm audience.

“This is why I like Florida!” she says through her beam we’re getting to know.

Something about her kind energy evokes a respect, quietness, and togetherness felt by the crowd through her poems. It’s the way she says “all” when she says “there are all kinds of poetry,” encouraging the crowd to write a poem to a friend on a postcard in honor of National Poetry Month. It’s the quotes she reads us, like Linklater’s when he says “I think it’s okay to be in your formative years for a very long time.” It’s the poem she closes with, Gate A4, which makes us feel like we are truly a collective being. It’s that small instances of kindness that can bridge the way for friendships and for the little discoveries, the connections of our humanity that she conveys.

from News to Blog

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Hey Sweet readers–

We’re starting a new endeavor here at Sweet. Our goals are fairly modest: a new post every week by a Sweet editor or affiliate, on something interesting or exciting in the literary community. The first post will be up very soon!

–Katie Riegel, Poetry Editor

Citizen by Claudia Rankine

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Dear Ms. Rankine,

I am reading Citizen amid a whirlwind of a road trip, travelling from Florida all the way up to Wyoming, and everything about this book is apropos to this cross-country trip. Citizen has been the song I’ve had on my mind, this issue of race and perception and silence. It aids in my decision-making processes, like not stopping for the night in small towns in Mississippi, Kentucky, and Alabama. It makes me ultra-sensitive when I enter a Waffle House off the beaten path or take an emergency restroom break at a desolate gas station in southern Illinois.

I am reading most of this book in an affluent town north of Chicago, on a treadmill in an affluent college’s recreation center, and it is dead quiet because no student is up yet on a Saturday at 8am. This quiet crushes me the way Citizen crushes me. It’s a quiet that reflects what the speaker of the poems/essays observes in the culture. It’s the quiet that is contained in the white spaces of the book. In the silence in conversation when a woman bemoans affirmative action. In the silences between the white self and black self or the historical self and the self-self (a very Buddhist construct, by the way). In the silence as the speaker watches tennis. In the silences when the speaker wants to voice her discontent but instead swallows it and sometimes flees. In the collective silence as we try to squash history or invoke rhetoric that insists this country should be devoid of color. In the silences that try to erase memory. As you state, Ms. Rankine: “Memory is a tough place.”

“Feel good. Feel better. Move forward. Let it go.”

And it is this mentality that shapes the country. It is perpetuated day in, day out, and it is this mentality that Citizen is talking back to. Which, in essence, is us. We who are part of this culture, part of this country. We who are silent ourselves.
James Baldwin: “Since we live in an age which silence is not only criminal but suicidal, I have been making as much noise as I can….”
The speaker in Citizen is us. She is me. An observer of culture. A scholar. One enacted upon and one who acts. Ms. Rankine, how you’ve cleaved different aspects of the self, giving us multiple examples of a crumbling culture, from various vantage points. You ask us to chew on these things. And we chew. We keep chewing.

Like me on this treadmill, in this affluent college, in this affluent town absent of color, except for the same Salvation Army bell ringer outside of the Jewel, who is black, who smiles and says Merry Christmas, wishing everyone, those who drop coins into his red bucket and those who do not, a safe holiday.

Thank you, Ms. Rankine, for voicing what needs to be voiced. Thank you for not keeping silent.
Ira Sukrungruang