Spring 2021
Our Spring 2021 issue features writing and visual art by Dana Levin, Spencer Reece, VB Borjen, Cheryl Sadowski, Issam Zineh, and more. Interviews with Ellen Davis and Joyelle McSweeney.
“Low Country Madonna” by Melissa Miller
Golden Poppy
by Dana Levin
Going outside to weed and catching a poppy opening—
the little paper cap enclosing it
starting to split—
You really could see it—bud unfurling—if you were
still enough, if you were close—
How uneasy I‘d been, in my dream, eyes closed
and someone’s fingers moving over them—
moving over them, someone said, because the feeler
was blind—and she needed to try on my skin.
My eyes snapped open—to find myself
the blind feeler, eyes milked over—a guiding
woman at each arm—so open and curious
as she learned by feeling—the contours
of my face—the blind-me the better me, the skin-me
reluctant, wary—
I bent closer: poppy curled tight inside a paper cap,
golden spiral, pushing out—
We would have to open
the way everything opened—by splitting apart
what held us in—
“Liminal Space?” by Sandra Hanert
French Women In New York
by Madhu H. Kaza
I saw Marguerite Duras on the bus this morning, the B68 in Brooklyn. At first the woman appeared as a passenger in the blue seat in front of me, I was the passenger in the blue seat behind her, but then she turned her head, and I could see that the passenger in the blue seat in front of me was Marguerite Duras. Marguerite? I wanted to say, but did not. Marguerite – did she have a nickname? She’s no Daisy, but what did her brother, what did her husband, Robert Antelme, what did her lovers or friends, if she had friends, call her? Marguerite looked somewhat Russian this morning, not French really, but maybe that had something to do with us being on the B68 in Brooklyn, rolling through the mist on Coney Island Avenue. We were not “rolling through the mist” though – that is an expression, one I am sorry for. But it was a foggy morning, and the humidity made me think of the Marguerite formed in Southeast Asia and not the Marguerite of Paris, France.
She looked like a photo I’d seen of her, with the same black glasses, but with fewer wrinkles. You look good Marguerite, I did not say. You look happy and healthy, Marguerite, I did not say, for when was Marguerite ever happy? Though I do believe she might have been, despite herself. What are you doing here, Marguerite, I did not ask – meaning on the B68 charging up Coney Island Avenue, and now on Prospect Park South, meaning in Brooklyn on a Saturday morning, with a gold sheen in her dark hair. I did not mean what are you doing here back on earth, because you can’t question the dead about these things.
The tiny French ladies I’ve encountered this last year – in spring Louise Bourgeois walked past me in a gallery (at the Agnes Varda show on the Upper East Side), and the very next day I ran into Agnes Varda on the Q train in Brooklyn. She asked me about my orange earrings, and we talked about color and God. Now in early fall, right here in central Brooklyn: Marguerite Donnadieu or Marguerite Duras. These women could be exchanged for each other, but they aren’t.
“Calm Storm” by Kim Daus-Edwards
Utah Shock Ether
by Colin Cheney
Outside in the malarial dusk, swallows hunted
the falling light in the cosmodrome towers
risen in the swamp. I sat on M.’s bed
crying, listening to you read to her. A room
becomes the world with elkhorn fern,
monstered & uneasy moon carrying her through.
I knew you’d both be ok when I was gone—
the rocket fuel I couldn’t contain plumed
under acres of raw umber lotus leaves broken
by their flowering. I had thought them holy,
& thus rare, but seeing this profusion left me
mute with anger. Her being in the world should
keep me alive as almagest, tarantula hawk
moth. As I turned out the light, M. asked me
to go back into the story & right the moon.
This is what a father does: rejig the quantum
,world-build so all this makes some sense—
gibbous then full then gibbous in a single night.
In the chair by her bed, I wanted her very gravity
to rewrite the bad, beautiful poem the world
had become in the sickness mind. How I said
it then inside the monster’s singing: my daughter
& I crawl into the picture book & watch the sea
carry the moon. Quondam earth, quondam—
let this part of you that’s her fix the song.
Let my daughter reach inside the mouths
of my mandolin feeling for song’s teeth.
Can you hear what I hear behind the A/C
waiting for her to sleep in the dark holding
the moon for her—we kith, we earthlings?