That need for a map—to marriage? To love? To sex? To life?—seems to have dominated the lives of my parents, who vied for their analyst’s attentions like children for that of a favorite babysitter.
(nonfiction)
Tag: Another Chicago Magazine
“If you want to be a writer, you get to be one forever. Sometimes that means big chunks of time where you are not building sentences because you’re living the experiences that you’re going to build the work out of. So drop the shame about it,” Megan Stielstra tells Barbara West.
(interview)
If my father wanted me to know about Armenia, why hadn’t he said, “Here, Peter, read this,” or “Son, did I ever tell you what happened to Armenia?”
(nonfiction)
Excerpt from “Complemento” by Rafael Guizado, translated from the Spanish (Colombia) by Gigi Guizado
My job is this: be what the others are not.
(drama)
Most of the lies were about my mother, but I only learned about the lies years later at my mother’s deathbed
(fiction)
“Can we go to your place?” I asked at the coffee shop after he said that Blue Nights was Didion’s magnum opus. I argued in favor of Magical Thinking but he said the most feverish hallucinations of grief shone through her later work.
(nonfiction)
After the woman / tells him how that first night really went. After months pass, / and this child is born. After this child’s first birthday, / first day of school, First Communion, first love, / first loss, first child, that child’s first introduction to Grandpa.
(nonfiction)
I watched the bag disappear around the corner. The wheels of the gurney creaked in the distance.
Are they always so handsome? I wanted to ask.
(fiction)
Her suffering fits right into the camera.
(fiction)
“Faces”
“In Contemplation of an ‘Ornamental’ Banana Tree on the Grounds of a Resort While Vacationing”
“Antoine’s Graft”
“A Quiet State After Some Period of Disturbance”
“Exalted or Worthy of Complete Devotion”
“I often wondered about the effect of living with no windows.”
(fiction)
“Firing Squad, Convergence, Jackson Pollock”
“Metronome Maple & Betye Saar”
“A Late Exam at the River Lethe”
“Palinode”
“Canto XXXIII”
“Canto XXXVI”
From up where we were, we hadn’t noticed the defeathered bird corpses littered down below…This friendly bird graveyard was never swept away, probably to teach us all a moral lesson. (TCTC translations/nonfiction)
You grow very sleepy. / Then, like a breached ship / on a darkening sea, / you slip out of sight.
Every day she must locate herself, / as her neighbors need not who can lean on a world of words. / Poetry is a land she must not enter / is she is to keep her abandonment complete. (Jewish poetry)
teach me to hold truth between my teeth / like a hard lump of Russian sugar, / suck in the sweetness of integrity / with every sip of strong black tea (Jewish poetry)
We ask for bread and are not / satisfied. We ask for stone / and sand runs through our fingers. (Jewish poetry)
That’s how it is with my kind: our own body betrays us / our own tongue turns us in to the authorities. (Jewish poetry)
1. In a commercial, a Chinese-American laundry owner promotes an “ancient Chinese secret” and his wife…
there is // rushing wind at my ears and feet / as the ceiling glides above me. (Jewish poetry)
yet sometimes a child’s song, key to something / that is not, surely not, nothing, as after Patroklos is speared. (Jewish poetry)
So why had she made such a fuss in the first place? Plus weren’t they both growing old? Surely, a dribble here or there shouldn’t seem such a big deal. (fiction)
Two white haired ladies / miles from Memphis. / Would apologies be offered / for words only one / remembers?
(Jewish poetry)
In the old language / we told the best stories of your life, / and for the first time in my life / I felt I really understood you.
(Jewish poetry)
Another Chicago Magazine 