ISSUES | fall 2009

Reviewed: Jennifer Chang, The History of Anonymity: Poems Frank Bidart, Watching the Spring Festival: Poems Marie Howe, The Kingdom of Ordinary Time: Poems Mary Ruefle, The Most of It Sean Hill, Blood Ties & Brown…    read more

Oh how tired I am. From writing 100 pages of dialogue & continuity in 4 days-rewritten as well-12 hours a day without stopping-all I feel is numbness and a buzzing. And I remember my Rosie, my Owner, and sigh, close eyes, dream a minute, kiss your knees, your thighs, while something in me murmurs mama, sweet one, sweet Rosie-and I feel a phantom of sweetness as if this moment too were a dream like last night.

I leaned into her, inhaled her wondrous scent and whispered, “I love you.” She said, “I love you too, Ronald.” I kissed her on the cheek. I kissed her again. Laura reciprocated. Our childish pecks devolved into slobbery smooches. So much kissing left me breathless. But I couldn’t stop.

The only thing I was certain about was that if unplugged, she should immediately be euthanized and not be subjected to starvation. To die by starvation is to exit life with a curse. Ironically, modern medicine has arrived at a place where its responsibility to life is sometimes through the door of death.

It becomes part of your memory, and there is this porousness between the narrator’s mind and the reader’s mind. At some point, it literally shares space, narrative space. To me, that’s the exciting thing, that somehow, out of nothing, I as a writer create a space into which you as the reader can step.

Featuring the poems: Fiat Lux Discipline Noli Me Tangere (featured as Poem of the Week, Jan. 5, 2010) American Pastoral   Noli Me Tangere We do not understand why they…    read more

Featuring the poems: Field of Flowers The Procession (featured as Poem of the Week, Nov. 3, 2009) The Gods The Galleon   The Procession Last night, in the smoke, the…    read more

Featuring the poems: J. Resists the Urge to Comment on Your Blog The Gathering Blues

“Should I be afraid?” Jan blurts out. She is not aware of having even framed the thought before the words speak themselves. But once they’re out of her mouth, they seem to hang in front of her, as big as a billboard. Even in her e-mails to Morton she has never expressed this question quite so bluntly before.

We emerged from the dense flora, came around a bend as the road grew smoother, swung downhill toward the Indian Ocean and saw this naked foreign man surfing the inside of a perfect right-hand point break. He was moving left to right in front of me, gliding down the face of a powerful, beautifully formed cylinder of water. He stood more upright on the yellow surfboard than I would have imagined possible, his stance surprisingly sturdy-looking in spite of, or perhaps because of, his nudity.

Globe wasn’t cold in winter, but there were months of less light and more darkness. In other years he’d played tennis, hiked in the mountains and increased his minutes on the stair-step machine, but that December and January he responded as if he were in a state of dormancy, like the fish in Queen Creek that lowered their body temperatures or the snakes that stayed in burrows for days at a time. He rarely went to the gym or the club. He watched television dramas and read English sea novels, and when Julia offered to host a party or they were invited somewhere, he begged off.

What had that smell been last night? . . . Sex, she thought. That’s what it had been. The smell of sex. Jean had taken the dog for a walk and had sex with a man. While Marc was in Japan, she was having an affair.

Cheever’s life suggests how often not just writers but most of us suffer from demons. Whether or not they are as dramatic as Cheever’s, they can be both commonplace and cumbersome in our lives. The modern word “demon” comes from a proto-European term for “god” or “celestial,” yet its different usages over time refer to a variety of hidden powers or forces, from the higher self of Greek philosophy to the destructive demons of medieval Christianity. For Freud, demons were impulses arising from repression. Modern philosophers use the term “Morton’s demon” to describe our surprisingly frequent tendency not to see what belies our currently held biases.