The Literary Review articles from March 1998

The Literary Review archives from March 1998

Blankets.(poem)(Web Chapbook Issue: www.webdelsol.com/tlr/)
March 22, 1998... She phoned me and whispered, "My mother just died." I tried to feel something: Suffering? Empathy? Anguish? Remorse? My mother was lying on a bed, her head slightly elevated, thin body disappearing under mounds of blankets...

The siren.(poem)(Web Chapbook Issue: www.webdelsol.com/tlr/)
March 22, 1998... All truth is relative, my students claim. In class, restless, I pace, craving a smoke. My black-ashed lungs longing for suffocation, release, though it's my sister I dream about, teaching Ray Carver's Cathedral. The...

Theologies.(poem)(Web Chapbook Issue: www.webdelsol.com/tlr/)
March 22, 1998... It was confusing. The Christians worshipped a dead bleeding man slung from four nails. The Hindus revered stones, which, they claimed, possessed "the reverence of all life-energy." Nine, I wandered slam-bang Wham into the...

The roadkill artist.(poem)(Web Chapbook Issue: www.webdelsol.com/tlr/)
March 22, 1998... When she caressed that blue vase, I believed it was my skin. Shed stroked grotesquer things: toads, lizards, pungent with death. An anthropologist, no; biologist, no; breath succulent with gin. In the museum, when she touched...

The body as gravesite, surrounded by three cows.(poem)(Web Chapbook Issue: www.webdelsol.com/tlr/)
March 22, 1998... And if the Romantics taught us to view death as morbid, what can we unlearn? In this cemetery, the usual plethora of tiny white crosses, stones crumbling back decades until the mind can't orbit centuries mentioned as...

Ashes.(poem)(Web Chapbook Issue: www.webdelsol.com/tlr/)
March 22, 1998... Late in line, squeezing, I tore the side mirror off the car I'd stopped to wash. Winter's soot had followed soap and water through the service station drain, and I'd chanced slick white three miles up the...

The balm of Gilead.(poem)(Web Chapbook Issue: www.webdelsol.com/tlr/)
March 22, 1998... One summer I learned about The doctor who cured patients By long-distance, sending sickness To limbo through the power Of belief. Thousands, he saved, From far away, and those who Couldn't call sent writing...

The doors of hell.(poem)(Web Chapbook Issue: www.webdelsol.com/tlr/)
March 22, 1998... for the thirty-fifth year of the Centralia mine fire Tonight The hot spots are stars which drift far from where the earth once opened, allowing a boy to slide toward fire. The roots which saved him...

Baglady blues.(poem)(Web Chapbook Issue: www.webdelsol.com/tlr/)
March 22, 1998... Politely we push clumsy shoulders, purses, legs, shove umbrellas, rear ends, arms, briefcases, heads, bags into the cattle train, the last California 1 Express bus from the heart of our world-class Financial District to...

The Buddhist's window.(poem)(Web Chapbook Issue: www.webdelsol.com/tlr/)
March 22, 1998... I admire through a piece of cut purple glass the sun in its nimbus of glistening light: it will shadow nicely between the amethyst folds in the goddess's spreading skirt. My Buddhist client is telling me how death ...

The Zen of sex.(poem)(Web Chapbook Issue: www.webdelsol.com/tlr/)
March 22, 1998... Strolling through her prim mid-July garden we pause in what passes for afternoon shade beneath a peach tree. Koan after koan and finally I'm getting it, this new position she calls the still point in the turning wheel. ...

Rainbow.(poem)(Web Chapbook Issue: www.webdelsol.com/tlr/)
March 22, 1998... Lightbeams slip through a slit in clouds behind me, slither through the front of raindrops, bounce off the back, refracting into slick colors different wavelengths gelled at different angles, vibrating, blue ...

Lawrenceburg, Indiana.(poem)(Web Chapbook Issue: www.webdelsol.com/tlr/)
March 22, 1998... My dad stands in the dark at the bottom of the driveway, staring up through porchlight as if searching for home. He weaves a bit, negotiates a new path past the screen door and into bed. His frame scratches and groans ...

Sometimes he.(poem)(Web Chapbook Issue: www.webdelsol.com/tlr/)
March 22, 1998... Sometimes he hits you over the head with a tire jack, and sometimes he wields an axe or dangles clusters of bombs like ripe grapes, innocently gifting you with a bouquet of dusted roses. Sometimes he crawls in your...

Yes.(poem)(Web Chapbook Issue: www.webdelsol.com/tlr/)
March 22, 1998... Can art exist without war, conflict, tension? I've quizzed myself all afternoon, mind tossing turning tangled in a subtle puzzle postmodern "discourse," riddled to the core by its violent erasure's X stake driven twisted...

Love poem.(poem)(Web Chapbook Issue: www.webdelsol.com/tlr/)
March 22, 1998... I It wants to be dark, lavish and exact: carved wet slate bedded in an argument of peat. With the precision of a fetishist it fastens on detail: the thick veins in your throat, the crooked line of an...

Boy-actress.(poem)(Web Chapbook Issue: www.webdelsol.com/tlr/)
March 22, 1998... O that I serv'd that lady, And might not be delivered to the world. . . . --Twelfth Night, I.ii He lifts his chin above the ruff. It took an hour to pin it, crease by crease, to the damask, glossy and stiff ...

Jonah.(poem)(Web Chapbook Issue: www.webdelsol.com/tlr/)
March 22, 1998... I sank my teeth into the salt ground. There was no cry. Only later, when the city put on sackcloth and starved its cattle, I heard something -- a hiss of pity rising from the dry, ungathered grain. An assoiling...

For Lee Wuornos.(poem)(Web Chapbook Issue: www.webdelsol.com/tlr/)
March 22, 1998... I That chapped and battered white-trash face, bone-tired and bleak with hate -- raised on baked clay, pressed out of your sister's sharp bruised hips -- left the jurors cold. They needed melting,...

Atonement.(poem)(Web Chapbook Issue: www.webdelsol.com/tlr/)
March 22, 1998... For my father This boat's been soaking at the dock. It's galled with barnacles, their feather tongues tasting salt and ferment: bubbles of gulfweed, slivers of jelly strung with venomous threads. You used to call...

Pity.(poem)(Web Chapbook Issue: www.webdelsol.com/tlr/)
March 22, 1998... In the road, a mud-colored twiggy plastic giraffe, long as a child's finger, needs to be picked up: asphalt ground into hip and shoulder like third-degree burns, its head a tiny mouse head. Funny how pity...

Learning the language.(poem)(Web Chapbook Issue: www.webdelsol.com/tlr/)
March 22, 1998... Over sardines, quince jelly and black tea thick with cream and oil of bergamot, my father set his traps: we fell less often as we grew bigger, learning quick phrases to avert humiliation, jockeying with one...

Azucar.(poem)(Web Chapbook Issue: www.webdelsol.com/tlr/)
March 22, 1998... In the late 18th century, Spain, in an effort to build the Philippine economy, transformed rice fields into sugarcane plantations. In 1796, Nathaniel Bowditch, an American, brought back 400 tons of sugar to the U.S.,...

Discovery of skin.(poem)(Web Chapbook Issue: www.webdelsol.com/tlr/)
March 22, 1998... For F. Magellan, navigator, landed in the Philippines, beheaded, 1521 Pagsanjan Falls, a mythical natural attraction in Luzon, has become a major destination for pedophiles from western countries. 1/1521 Sailing with lamp-lit...

Cycles.(poem)(Web Chapbook Issue: www.webdelsol.com/tlr/)
March 22, 1998... Only her of whom I think: You I cannot see. --Rainer Maria Rilke i. Death: the night following Fireflies buzz over candlelight. A child counts them, then folds her fingers between her knees. Everything is so...

Procession.(poem)(Web Chapbook Issue: www.webdelsol.com/tlr/)
March 22, 1998... For Father Narciso Pico, human rights activist, 1949-1991 Negros Occidental, Philippines Air descends in spirals. On a street, a flock waits, not in their usual Sunday white but black, a long line, spiraling as well....

Singapore Sunday.(poem)(Web Chapbook Issue: www.webdelsol.com/tlr/)
March 22, 1998... In memoriam, Mrs. Flor Contemplacion, 1953-1995(*) We smooth the Church courtyard with a blanket of fried fish, salted eggs, rice flattened in Tupperware. No chopsticks, we say. Our mouths long for the feel of forks...

Indian summer.(poem)(Web Chapbook Issue: www.webdelsol.com/tlr/)
March 22, 1998... There are things measured in life by death. The village girl's slow dying taught me this-- how false summer renders dim-witted perceptions of nature's unpredicted ways as morning rises like a thin dark blue pencil...

Sunday drive.(poem)(Web Chapbook Issue: www.webdelsol.com/tlr/)
March 22, 1998... It has been fifty below all week. Behind my cabin a moose and her calf huddle in deep snow, moving little. I am glad for the small wood stove-- the neatly stacked cord of spruce outside. But not all things will...

The snow has no voice.(poem)(Web Chapbook Issue: www.webdelsol.com/tlr/)
March 22, 1998... after Sylvia Plath But I hear it on this speckled mountain miles from my cabin door. I hear its falling in a perturbation of light and watch the bare incoming storming up slopes of cloud-torn peaks in a cargo...

The hunter.(poem)(Web Chapbook Issue: www.webdelsol.com/tlr/)
March 22, 1998... This evening I walk across tundra, its long silence unrolling towards me, plunging in the wind. In the distance, whiter than bone-dust, a bear listens to the shape of wind and snow, smells the far scent of an ivory-toothed...

Late September on the Russian River.(poem)(Web Chapbook Issue: www.webdelsol.com/tlr/)
March 22, 1998... The trees turn, suddenly, as dawn rolls up what night unwound-- their slender necks like tundra swans in shallow ponds. There is no comforting chill in the gray air, only a screed of birds scrawled on a...

Easter Sunday.(poem)(Web Chapbook Issue: www.webdelsol.com/tlr/)
March 22, 1998... 1927. It is Easter Sunday. A young Indian girl sits impatient on a narrow spruce pew inside a white-frame church. In faded black cassock the gaunt priest's sermon echoes off gilded ikons of Mary and Jesus ...

Evening at Fielding Lake.(poem)(Web Chapbook Issue: www.webdelsol.com/tlr/)
March 22, 1998... This evening at Fielding Lake a raven sits in thick-branched spruce while rain clouds move below a full moon turning the water black.

Rice.(poem)(Web Chapbook Issue: www.webdelsol.com/tlr/)
March 22, 1998... And this is hunger: beans & rice beans & rice. A pang for a meal. You're broke. Sweet butter on challah. In the eighties, you had money, everybody did until the stock market crash when the lucky got...

Memory I.(poem)(Web Chapbook Issue: www.webdelsol.com/tlr/)
March 22, 1998... To say that my father came from a village and by his own cunning and hard work got out would be dull. You have heard that story before, a story of the modern age. What happened is that at university, he became completely...

Days in Punjab, 1960-1967.(poem)(Web Chapbook Issue: www.webdelsol.com/tlr/)
March 22, 1998... The sanseviera plants were vicious and hardy along the bricks in front. And when relatives visited, my mother-in-law's tongue was quick to the point. In the dining room, lotus floated in a bowl; and when they wilted, we...

Two cities.(poem)(Web Chapbook Issue: www.webdelsol.com/tlr/)
March 22, 1998... That 4 a.m. I lay back on the living room couch, seeing as it was still night. At 5 a.m. Elle's light in Unit B upstairs came on, and she sailed down the wooden steps and drove off to bake bread ...

Indian jugglers 1820 by James Green.(poem)(Web Chapbook Issue: www.webdelsol.com/tlr/)
March 22, 1998... Jungles, fakeers, dancing-girls, prickly heat, Shawls, idols, durbars, brandy-pawny; Rupees, clever jugglers, dust storms, slipper'd feet, Rainy Season, and mulligatawny. -- G. F. Atkinson, Curry and Rice We were a...

Western-trained doctor in the other world.(poem)(Web Chapbook Issue: www.webdelsol.com/tlr/)
March 22, 1998... He bolted out of bed full of ideas and impatience. Bathed and groomed he snapped at his chauffeur. At the Clinic he hammered at his desk and out came surgical implements he designed, patents pending if there were time to...

Chanel lipstick.(poem)(Web Chapbook Issue: www.webdelsol.com/tlr/)
March 22, 1998... Daddy always cautioned me how many rupees it took to get a dollar; and when I bought my first Chanel lipstick, it was as if I might have bought a cow in India. It was always like that--what I could have had...

Poverty.(fiction)(excerpt)(Web Chapbook Issue: www.webdelsol.com/tlr/)
March 22, 1998... Synopsis of Chapter 1 of Poverty, a Novel in Progress After a broken engagement and several weeks in a psychiatric hospital, Mark Copeland has come to Littleton, Vermont, to work as a paralegal in the law office of his cousin-in-law, Arlon...

A coiled pot.(short story)(Web Chapbook Issue: www.webdelsol.com/tlr/)
March 22, 1998... If you're content to sit there in the quarter light that panes onto the crisply-ironed dresser linen, picking apart the badly-sewn seam of your family's day, ripping with the clever little claw, or your teeth even, with bits of unraveling thread...

Dinner at Charlie's.(short story)(Web Chapbook Issue: www.webdelsol.com/tlr/)
March 22, 1998... This wouldn't have happened except for John. For him, and his bass boat, and the trouble he'd fallen into with his wife. You see, John got himself transferred to Florida not long before I moved there: he had a job with the Forest Service; his...

The checkpoint.(short story)(Web Chapbook Issue: www.webdelsol.com/tlr/)
March 22, 1998... In only a short time, the Syrians dispersed the Druze and Shia factions and took control of Beirut. A few days after this relative peace had been imposed, some jeeps and a truck pulled into the lot at the top of Nayla's road, and soldiers...