Lucinda Guard Crofton – Once Upon A Typewriter

/in

Lucinda Guard Crofton
Once Upon A Typewriter

Alexander Guard l. and Sam Guard Guard r., at home, photograph, 1963

When you look at the two of them, you see a sweet moment captured between father and son. She sees something entirely different. Outside the frame of the picture she waits impatiently, still wearing pyjamas like her brother and big sisters, but hers are the kind with footies that mean ‘Don’t forget to hold on to the banister!’, ‘No running!’, and ‘You’ll slip and fall again.’ She can’t wait to use her long-promised Christmas gift of a typewriter–just like Grandma’s. She can’t wait until that moment when she inserts the first sheet of paper into her shiny, cherry-red machine, rolls it up, and begins to form black words on the white page, one keystroke at a time.
       She bounces from one foot to the other in front of the ancient wood-burning fireplace hung with green and red stockings painstakingly sewn by her mother. Each one bears a name spelled out in capital letters. Happy reindeer, snowmen and snowflakes adorn the felt. Most of their goodies have been devoured leaving the stockings half-empty. Smoky peppermint, orange, and melting chocolate tickle her nose, making her hungry for the big Christmas brunch they will soon eat.
       In front of the living room windows stands a tree so tall it touches the high ceiling and bends over at the tippy top to fit the shimmering star. Underneath gobs of tinsel are homemade ornaments, paper chains, glass balls from the dime store, and blinking coloured lights. The girl thinks it is the most magnificent tree ever. You don’t see their old black cat in the photo because he’s wandered under the fir tree where he bats at a low hanging angel.
       Her middle sister is curled up on the window seat, nose buried in a brand-new book. Every now and again, she takes a break from reading to peer over the top of the pages and check on her family. The eldest sister’s nowhere to be seen. Perhaps, she’s upstairs in the room she doesn’t have to share with anyone, writing in a brand-new diary, before locking up her secrets with its tiny key, or maybe she’s happily cooking with their mother in the kitchen.
       Father and son’s new haircuts are stiff with Lucky Tiger ‘not for girls’ Cru-Butch Hair Wax. The little boy rips open the cellophane package and the smell of fresh ink draws the girl closer to the footstool. The father drops the spools into the round slots of the typewriter, then painstakingly feeds the black ribbon through the guides. She watches them try out the platen and make the carriage ding. She can’t believe how long it’s taking. Her father reads the manual aloud while her little brother points at the pictures. He’s just learning his letters, but she…she can already read. She reads the name on the plastic typewriter body–Tom Thumb, turning it into a sing-song while she continues her waiting.
       Over their heads, on the ceiling is a water stain shaped like a dragon from that time she was a mermaid swimming in the ocean until the bathtub overflowed. On the far side of the blue armchair a sheet of elegant white marble serves as an end table while hiding the hissing radiator. The DADDY stocking lies atop a stack of newspapers, between a cup of black, sugary coffee and a misshapen ceramic ashtray holding a smouldering cigarette. If you look underneath, you’d see the hole the girl made dotting the i in her name.
       When she’s certain she will bust if she has to wait one more second, she hears ‘Ask Mommy for typing paper.’ She tries hard not to wrinkle the onion skin pages while the ‘fix-it guys’ test each and every one of the gleaming white keys. Finally, she’s directed to ‘type slowly and carefully, or the keys will tangle.’
       She hunts and pecks out the words ONCE UPON A TIME. Her delight turns to dismay. Unlike Grandma’s off-limits Smith-Corona, which is ‘for grown-ups and is not a plaything’, HER TYPEWRITER IS A TOY–IT ONLY HAS CAPITAL LETTERS! How can she be an Author? Everyone knows Authors need all twenty-six letters in both upper and lowercase.
       If there was a photo from a year later, you’d see the father in his armchair reading the local newspaper. Outside the frame of the picture, she stands in her pyjamas bursting with pride. He’s reading her words aloud; words she wrote for the local paper’s annual contest. He announces her poem about SANTA is the first prize winner. In the excitement of the moment, she blurts out her secret–she wants to be an Author. He points out joy doesn’t rhyme with toys and reminds her the family already has a writer. The middle sister publishes a house newspaper and is the designated Author, the eldest sister is the Artist and the boy will be a repairman. Despite the girl’s aversion to blood, her father believes she’d make a fine nurse. Her shoulders slump as her father offers her a tender smile and pats her on the head like she’s a kitty cat.
       You cannot see her as she climbs the stairs past the overflowing bookshelves and enters her shared bedroom. She opens the typewriter case and sets a once beloved dolly with its hands on the keys. It will sit there until both the typewriter and doll are covered in dust and the ribbon dries up.
       If there was a recent holiday photo, you’d see the girl as an adult. Her eyes hold a trace of the child she once was. She’s dressed in a red sweater adorned with a green shimmering Christmas tree covered in blinking lights. She sits in front of a keyboard typing busily. After the picture is taken, she puts on her headset, slides over in front of the console, turns on the microphone and in a clear voice reads the news she has written. Over her head, a red and white ON AIR sign is lit up.    AQ

AQ44 – Between Hope & Despair

/in

Bryan R. Monte – AQ43 Summer 2025 Book Reviews

/in

Bryan R. Monte
AQ43 Summer 2025 Book Reviews

Bellezza, Dario. What Sex is Death?, Covino, Peter, translator, (The University of Wisconsin Press, 2025), 978-0-299-35034-5, 199 pages.
Kurman, Hollis. Unlikely Skylight, (Barrow Street Press, 2025), ISBN 978-1-962-13110-0, 76 pages.

For this reading period, I received two books which are related in origin due to their authors and publishers and also to me. To provide transparency, I’d like to indicate that I first met poet Hollis Kurman at Amsterdam Quarterly’s 2023 Yearbook launch party and reading held at the American Book Center in Amsterdam in January 2024. At the time, she asked me if I knew Peter Covino. I said I didn’t, so she gave me his email address as well as hers.
       Months drifted by before I actually contacted Kurman, but not Covino. (That wouldn’t happen for another year). This might have been because I was busy putting Amsterdam Quarterly’s (AQ39) spring 2024 issue online, which included an email interview with Timothy Liu, conducted the previous autumn. In what turned out to be a coincidence only possible in a three-volume, 19th century English novel. (yes, I am making a The Importance of Being Earnest reference here), we were all directly connected or by only one degree of separation, even though I wouldn’t realize this for several months. It turned out that Covino and his Barrow Street Press is not only the publisher of Liu’s most recent poetry book, Down and Out and Lowdown, Timothy Liu’s Bedside Bottom-Feeder Blues but also one of Kurman’s poems ‘Inventory’, in the very first issue of Covino’s Barrow Street Journal, a poem which also appears in her debut collection, Unlikely Skylight, also from Barrow Street.
       Unlikely Skylight is an unforgettable poetry collection about subjects such as family, fidelity, dementia, the Holocaust, war, the death of a sibling, parent, or partner, traumatic brain injury, migrants, and even birds and dance. Kurman’s poetry is richly descriptive, engaging, challenging, inspiring, and concerned with past and present and the personal and the historical. Its poems are set in places such as art museums, Amsterdam’s grey skies and canals, a Manhattan cocktail party, the seaside, hotel rooms, hospitals, clinics, and war zones in Ukraine, The Netherlands, Poland, Spain, the UK, and the US.
       Kurman’s collection derives its title from its use in the poem, ‘Waste’. Here ‘skylight’ is used thrice exclusively to describe a Rijksmuseum reception in its enclosed, glass-roofed atrium. The poem mentions how the light it lets in catches a grieving widow’s loss, described by the shadow space she carries, symbolised in the poem’s terminal stanza by the image of ‘The back of her dress, zipped not quite / to the top, missing a second set of hands / to consummate the pull or to take out the garbage.’
       As mentioned above, her poem’s take place in various international settings—from green parakeets escaped London Zoo terrorizing indigenous ones in ‘Screech’, to songbird-killing hawks and an unassertive artist at a cocktail party in New York City in ‘Unpopped’, and ‘Working the Room’, to her especially chilling portrayal of children experiencing PTSD in a war zone in ‘Ask Children’:

              They know boot crunch from tank whir, missile whistle from rocket whine.
              They can count seconds to boom and brazen light bursts, the broken nights.
              They can nod off to anthems, echoed tunnel cries, blast-bitten lullabies.

As indicated by the above, Kurman’s poetry is also politically aware. In ‘Ocean Road’ she describes an immigrant landscaper’s hope of a life he has built and wants to share with his sister, America’s political composition, (‘Omlet Nation’) its new order (‘State of the Union’) and its disasters (‘Body Counts’).
       Kurman also presents an inventory of bodily organ failures in her poem ‘Life Sentence’ in the style of a British murder mystery with a nod to the board game Clue/Cluedo as well: ‘The Brain / with the Candlestick / in the Conservatory // The Lung / with the Lead Pipe / in the Library.’ Her struggle recovering from a chronic brain injury is depicted in ‘Walking Wounded’, ‘Next Time’, and in ‘Shifting Gears’ especially:

              The accident has made of her your old bike, beloved &
                             only ride, gear shifts unsteady, occasional tension spoke

              requiring realignment, night lighting…

Kurman also broaches the subject of an ageing relative’s Alzheimer’s in ‘Vanishing Point’.
       Unlikely Skylight also demonstrates Kurman’s poetic range with concrete poems and poems whose lines spread out across the page, similar to William Carlos Williams’s variable foot. One concrete poem, shaped like a single wedge wing, is ‘Missing’, about loss more generally, grieving the loss of a loved one, as well as the vanishing of song birds. Another duo-winged-shaped poem is ‘Body Counts’ about the Covid pandemic. It is a visual memorial to those who died. Its two floating stanzas contrast shared national and international disastrous political events with the lasting, personal health effects of Covid:

              When this is over if       it ends       there will be no
                             where were you when …

              There will be
                                                                 how much living did you lose,

A third poem, ‘Still. Here.’, which has slender lines, is shaped vertically top to bottom like a dancer and is dedicated to Bill T. Jones.
       In addition, Kurman’s lines sometimes have surprising twists or turns, such as ‘Right This Way’, whose title sounds like a carnival barker’s greeting. It begins as a nature poem describing beetles joining together to form rafts to save themselves from water, then refers to a Willy Coyote/Road Runner cartoon, and ends with a shocking description of the perception of those about to be gassed in the Holocaust:

              Jews heading into Showers,

              holding hands, for that single
              shiny moment believing
              they’d come out
              clean.

       ‘Water for Demeter’ and ‘Agamemnon, in Ontario’ retell classical myths in contemporary settings. The latter was inspired by an egregious honour killing in Canada and a Greek myth. It interweaves the two violent stories, one from mythology and one from current events. It opens with: ‘No God warned you to cover your tracks / pull that car and its booty out of the cold canal.’ Kurman details the destruction wrought by Agamemnon and the war: ‘Ten of us set out. Only six returned,’ and she concludes ‘Not one of you will make it, now, to Niagara Falls, / to Heaven or Home, or to Troy. No Betrayal more than this.’ In addition, Unlikey Skylight’s Notes section provides a helpful historical and mythological information for some of Kurman’s poems. Overall, I think Unlikely Skylight is a very inspired debut poetry collection and I highly recommend it to AQ’s readers.
       The second book I’d like to mention is Dario Bellezza’s poetry collection, What Sex is Death?, poems selected and translated from the original Italian by Peter Covino, who was the winner of the prestigious 2025 Wisconsin Prize for Poetry and Translation. To those unfamiliar with Bellezza, this bilingual edition (Italian and English on facing pages) comes with a well-researched, 17-page introduction and an eight-page bibliographic appendix. What Sex Is Death’s? poems date from 1971 to 1996 and mark Bellezza’s development from a poet of outrage and scandal in the ’70s (he won the Viareggio prize for his second collection, Morte segreta (Second Death), to experimentation with poetic forms in the ’80s (including journaling, serial poems, and animistic references, (he was an especial cat lover), to a frank portrayal of living with AIDS in the ’90s. This book contains selections from the seven books published during Bellezza’ lifetime, plus one published posthumously.
       The book’s title poem, ‘Quale Sesso ha la Morte?’ (‘What Sex is Death?’) is the first and title poem of this first section taken from his 1971 collection, Inventtive en licenze (Invective and license). Its opening is mythic as well as frank.

              Con quale sesso mi verrai incontro?      With what sex will you meet me?
              Se Orfeo scalmanato non mi riguarda    if hotheaded Orpheus ignores me
              E Euridice era un troia infingarda?        And Eurydice was an idle streetwalker?

              Addio scemenza mia trangugiata           Goodbye to my quickly gulped down
              In tutta fretta dentro una fratta,             stupidity among the thickets,

Despite English being rhyme poor compared to Italian, Covino is able to replicate some of the poem’s rhythm and rhymes, reproduce the guttural sound of a man swallowing semen, as well as preserve Bellezza’s contemporaneous reference to the mythic. It is this nexus of the ancient, mythic, and modern that is one of the hallmarks of Bellezza’s poetry. This is reinforced by the image of Rome’s Colosseum on the book’s cover and its repeated reference in his poems.
       Bellezza also pays tribute to the modern lights of Italian literature and film who influenced him. The second poem in his first collection is ‘To Elsa Morante’ a children’s author, poet, and novelist, whose novel, La Storia (History) was a literary sensation that was made into a film of the same title by Luigi Comencini in 1986, a year after her death. La Storia is about a Jewish woman living in Rome during and after the WWII. It thematically depicts history as one unending scandal and theatre of cruelty which leads to the death of both her sons and to the protagonist’s final breakdown into a state of catatonia. The first two lines of this poem about the rich and powerful begin with:

              I ragazzi drogati, guardie del corpo       The drug addicts, bodyguards
              sell’Assoluto, vanno per il mondo          of the Absolute, roam the earth.

       Later in this poem, Bellezza mentions also: ‘their graceful, fallacious way of lying’ and later ‘their puerile play / is vain chaos diabolical pride’ as prophetic as if they were written today and not in 1971.
       In addition, Covino demonstrates his skill by how he translates the first two lines of the next poem, ‘To Pier Paolo Passolini’, one of Bellezza’s other influences. Covino takes Bellezza’s first two lines:

              ‘M’aggiro fra ricatti e botte e licenzio / la mia anima mezza vuota e peccatrice’

which translates literally as:

              ‘I wander between blackmail and beatings / and I dismiss my soul half empty and sinful’

which Covino translates into something more poetic and compact, and by doing so, also creates more powerfully rhythmic alliterations:

              ‘I’m surrounded by blackmail and beatings / I dismiss my half-empty and sinful soul.’

       Unfortunately, I can’t go into an in-depth analysis of many more of Bellezza’s other poems in this book, but his subjects include: the cinema, gay sex, politics, prostitution, and of course, his cat obsession (Bellezza was a passionate cat rescuer, who took in many strays). However, I would like point out two more poems from his middle and the last collections published during Bellezza’s lifetime. In his poem ‘La Gattita’ (‘Catness’) in la Gatta from his book io (1983), midway in his poetic career, Bellezza imagines the:

              Dura legge sapere che niete             Harsh law to know nothing
              potra consolare il niete assoluto     will console the absolute void
              che ci divora lontano dal mare        that devours us far from the sea

       Incredibly just a few lines later after this dismal awareness, Bellezza weaves in a brief reference to the hopeful, revelatory, Biblical story of Jacob’s ladder, only to use it as a fleeting, straw man to an eternal non-existence:

              Pietre, pietre, sconnesse                 Stones, stones, severed
              da secoli non piu a venire               by centuries no longer to come
              ma venuti. Pietre                              but past. Stones
              dure, energiche maschili                 strong, energetic, man’s
              che mi coprirete                                that cover me
              non nel linciaggio finale                  not as a final lynching
              ma nel dolce sonno del niete          but in the sweet sleep of the void

       This nihilism continues through this collection, even in his last book L’avversario / The Adversary, published in 1994. In his poem ‘Gatti’ / ‘Cats’, Bellezza reflects upon these rescued companions, who he refers to as ‘prisoners of love’, because he keeps them ‘in two solitary damp rooms / where I lock you in when I leave / for my nights of sinister galas.’ In the next stanza he states: ‘I’m not Leopardi, after all / nor Cavafy. Who am I / then?’ and posits that ‘(“a poet = / “a buffoon”) / about whom / one could certainly object / since nothingness and everything / are exactly the same—’. Perhaps this personal assessment was too harsh. Covino’s translation of the poems Bellezza left behind certainly makes this seem so.    AQ

Hollis Kurman – Brood, Act IV, scene ii

/in

Hollis Kurman
Brood, Act IV, scene ii

 
                             When

Will their parts

             Stretch

Deepen

             Widen

Sprout

             Test

Tug

             Them

                             Away

From me

             Reassemble

Themselves

             and

                             Go?

Marcus Slingsby – Dyslexic Poetic Rhetoric

/in

Marcus Slingsby
Dyslexic Poetic Rhetoric

Silence reigned quietly.
Thoughts spelt phonetically.

Spellcheck helps immensely.
Thrillers read stallingly.

Literature later hungrily.
Classics eventually.

Then poetry.
This.

Jane Thomas – Menomorphosis

/in

Jane Thomas
Menomorphosis

The alarms in my ears are constant but low, detection hampered by heat, all my windows open. And if my mind had not started to muddle, I may have connected the two into a security risk. But I didn’t. I was busy trying to remember the word for ice. That thing that stops things decomposing. Halts and holds things in state. Swims in drinks. Yes, ice.
       One summer Wednesday, I was nearly knocked off my bike by an electric car. He said he couldn’t see me. I couldn’t really hear him what with the ears. It kept happening, on zebras, pulling into parking spaces, catching the waiter’s eye. I tried wearing brighter colours, character specs, statement jewellery, blonder highlights, wearing high heels (until my bunions started playing up). I went back to my norms, and began being more vigilant, a little pushier, louder in restaurants.
       But my rhythms slowed, became deeper, intentional, interconnected, current. I stopped endeavouring, stopped fighting, started to enjoy my invisibility. Strolling into cricket clubs, betting shops, The Garrick, people don’t question the unseen.
       The nigredo of my old life; corporate job cage, daily shroud of non-iron, consumer clutter, dependencies, morphed into the new. Conversations were with quieter divinities; trees, water, spiders, stones. Well-storied beings shared their secrets. My striving for survival was over, gone was the rush, it was all here; shelter of the bluff, soothing of the flower essence, fungi feasts, cloud commune, and this very moment.    AQ

Anne Eyries – Metamorphosis

/in

Anne Eyries
Metamorphosis

The rash appeared overnight, fanning across his chest like a peacock tail. Bill wants to mention it at breakfast, but Kathy’s already on her phone and the boys are bickering as usual. A strange stillness settles on him and prickling steals round his back, the way Kathy’s fingers did before motherhood gave her a permanent headache. He scratches his throat. The puckers and pleats give him yet another reason to regret shaving his beard. It was Kathy’s idea but now he can’t remember why. His feet hurt so he kicks off his shoes, watches his toes flex and fork of their own accord.
       There’s a fly in the kitchen, buzzing over crumbs, refusing to land. Bill tenses, every pore awakening, anticipating. Someone on television is talking about climate change, forecasting more record temperatures, more water restrictions. Bill is tired of hearing about extremes and end-of-the-world deadlines. He’ll be forty next month, married half his life and what’s happening to him right now is a catastrophe in his own home.
       He unbuttons his shirt and stretches, testing the elasticity of his new skin, reflecting the kitchen in an iridescent splash. The boys look up, dazzled. He stares them down.
        ‘Dad’s doing something funny with his eyes.’
       Bill blinks and his sons scream. Kathy spins round and he waits, willing her to step closer, to stroke him with a soothing hand, to understand. Instead, she screams too, even before he flicks out his tongue. He swallows the fly first.     AQ

Bari Lynn Hein – Queen Mother

/in

Bari Lynn Hein
Queen Mother

While standing before a crowded mirror in a stadium restroom, applying a mauve shade of lipstick from a ‘retro’ collection, Renee Novak became her mother. She blinked and realized she not only resembled Candice—a fact that family members had pointed out to Renee her entire adult life—she was Candice. She had a sudden, intimate understanding of everything her mom was thinking and feeling.
       Of the many women who stood at the mirror now, washing their hands or primping, wearing fashions and hairstyles from the 1980s, she was the only one gaping at her reflection. The shock of seeing her mother for the first time in over two decades propelled a squiggle of mascara down her cheek.
       She dropped the lipstick into her purse, dabbed her cheek with a tissue, and adjusted the shoulder pads of the velour blouse that she now wore. Her fingernails, which had been bare when she’d arrived at the stadium, were covered in the pearlescent polish that her mother always used to wear. Though she had many questions for the woman who stared at her from the mirror, forefront on her mind was how Marc would react when she returned to her seat. Would he recognize her as his wife, or as the mother-in-law whom he’d never met but whose smiling face filled many pages of their family photo albums?
       Renee and Marc had come here to see a Queen tribute band. Queen figured prominently in her mother’s CD collection, and from time to time, Renee liked to pop one into the player in her car. The energetic songs made driving more enjoyable, but she couldn’t exactly call herself a Queen superfan. Candice, on the other hand, had loved their music. One of Renee’s earliest memories was of riding high in her mother’s arms as Candice danced across the living room to ‘We Will Rock’ You all the way through its segue into ‘We Are the Champions’. Renee used to wish the band would segue into a third song so the revelry wouldn’t have to come to an end.
       Now, as she reflected on this memory, she felt the weight of a giggling child in her arms. She watched in the mirror as her mother’s mauve lips formed a smile, then hurried out of the ladies room and made her way up the concrete steps to the mid-tier seats she and Marc had snagged for this event. At least tonight they were not in the nosebleed section, as they had been for the last two concerts they’d come here to see.
       Climbing the steps, she remembered her mother had once laughingly said, ‘It was inevitable I’d be a mother and that I would love Queen. My name literally means Queen Mother.’
       You always knew you wanted to be a mother, Renee told Candice now, silently. I’m not so sure that’s something I want. Or even if that’s something that I can want. Marc, on the other hand, was certain that he wanted to be a parent. He had implored Renee, just recently, that they try to conceive—‘before it’s too late,’ he had said.
       It’s not too late, her mother said, hearing her thoughts. I was in my thirties when you were born.
       Your early thirties.
       Renee had reached her row in the mid-tier section. Someone was sitting in Marc’s seat—a young woman she didn’t recognize at first.
        ‘It took you long enough,’ the young woman said. ‘They’re almost ready to begin.’ She pointed toward the stage.
        ‘Aunt Helen?’
       The much-younger version of Renee’s aunt laughed. ‘Aunt Helen? Wait, are you trying to tell me something?’ She grabbed her arm. ‘Candy, are you expecting?’
       ‘I don’t know.’ Maybe the Candice who now took a seat beside Helen was pregnant—with Renee. She put a hand on her belly but felt no movement. ‘I don’t know,’ she said again, in a whisper.
Through a cacophony of applause, Renee heard her mother’s voice, clear as if the two of them were alone in a quiet room. I’m not. You are.
       With a sharp intake of breath, Renee searched the stands for her husband. She didn’t really expect to find him here. If he existed in this world at all, he would be a baby, a toddler at most. What if she were never to see him again? The cheering crowd blurred through her tears.
       Band members straggled onto the stage. Brian May, John Deacon, and Roger Taylor picked up their instruments, and then Freddie Mercury strutted out to the microphone and launched more thunderous applause with, ‘Keep Yourself Alive.’
       This was not a Queen cover band. This was Queen.
       Helen grabbed Renee’s hand and pulled her to her feet. They danced and swayed and kept looking at each other—one celebrating a shared appreciation of the music, the other getting a glimpse of Helen, younger than Renee had ever known her. While Renee embraced the experience, a sense of dread climbed through her windpipe. What if, in fifteen years or so, she faced the same prolonged, painful death that Candice had endured? What if she left this world before her daughter had a chance to tell her how much she meant to her?
       I miss you so much, Renee told her mother, while the entire audience brought their hands together to the opening rhythm of ‘We Will Rock You’.
       I miss you too, her mother said.
        ‘I don’t know if I can do this.’
       She realized, when her aunt smiled over and asked her to repeat herself, that she had said this out loud.
       Helen was wearing a wide, V-shaped gold belt that Renee recognized as one that she’d worn on Halloween, when she was eleven or twelve. Her mother had given it to her, describing it as ‘vintage,’ telling her it was just what she needed to complete her costume.
        ‘Is that my belt?’ she said now.
       Helen laughed. ‘You told me I could borrow it.’
       To her mother, she said, I don’t know if I have the same maternal instinct that you had. I don’t know if I can do this.Again, she felt the weight of a child in her arms. Again, she saw the walls and furnishings of her childhood living room sail past her.
       I know you can.
       Everyone in the audience was singing along to ‘We Are the Champions’ so Renee joined them. Candice joined them. They sang as one.
       I’m married now, Renee told her mother, when the song had ended and ‘Killer Queen’ had gotten the audience fired up all over again.
       I know.
       How much of the future did Candice know? She’d died at the turn of the twenty-first century, before so many life-altering events had been added to the history books, before Renee had reached adulthood, started a career, fallen in love, married her best friend.
       I’m afraid I’ll never see him again. Renee felt dizzy at the prospect of being unable to return to a life that she’d come to cherish, a life that she’d probably taken for granted.
       Helen leaned over and shouted, ‘Are you OK?’ Everyone was dancing to ‘Killer Queen’ except Renee.
        ‘Fine. Why?’
        ‘You look pale.’
        ‘Just feeling a bit—lightheaded.’
        ‘Maybe you really are pregnant,’ Helen said. ‘Let’s pick up a test on the way home.’
       My test will come up negative, Candice told Renee. But yours won’t.
       Renee felt as if she was going to tumble over the back of the seat in front of her. She grabbed onto it for support. ‘I’ll be fine,’ she said. ‘Maybe I should just go and splash some cold water on my face.’
        ‘I’m coming with you then.’
       Renee hated to take her aunt away from this once-in-a-lifetime concert that had preceded her own lifetime, but Helen was already pulling her toward the concrete steps, as nurturing now as she would be later in life.
        ‘If you’re going to splash cold water on your face, make sure you moisturize right away,’ her mother said, as they descended the steps. ‘Hope you brought some.’
       I did. I remember you told me that, a long time ago. I remember everything you taught me. I remember— Even in silence, it was hard to get the words out. You’re with me, at some random moment, every day.
       Whereas the ladies’ room had been crowded just before the concert, now Candice and Helen had the entire mirror to themselves. Renee studied their side-by-side reflections for a moment, two women with blown-out hair who looked to be no older than their mid-twenties. ‘Cold water,’ Helen reminded her. ‘Start splashing.’
       Renee held her hands beneath the faucet for a moment before bringing cool water to her face. When she looked up, Helen was still standing beside her, but now her hair was pulled back in a low ponytail, exposing white, wiry hairs at her temples. When Helen smiled, fine lines fanned out from the corners of her eyes. ‘Well, fancy meeting you here,’ she said.
        ‘Aunt Helen,’ Renee said.
        ‘I didn’t know you’d be here. We could’ve bought seats together.’
       Renee tried to rein in her relief at seeing her own reflection in the mirror. ‘Yeah, it’s—a great—concert, so far.’
        ‘It is, isn’t it? Almost as good as the real deal. I try to see this group whenever they’re in town.’ Aunt Helen gave Renee’s arm a squeeze. ‘I know I say this all the time, but you remind me so much of your mother.’
        ‘You guys came here together to see Queen, back in the Eighties. Didn’t you?’
        ‘How’d you know?’
        ‘My mom told me.’ She reached into her purse for a tube of moisturizer, squeezed some onto her palm and applied it to her cheeks. She did look pale. Maybe it was the lighting in here. She picked up the ‘retro’ shade of lipstick, then changed her mind and dropped it back in alongside the moisturizer. She noticed her nails were bare.
        ‘That was a blast, seeing Queen with your mother,’ Helen said. Her eyes were rimmed in red.
        ‘She told me—that—that night meant a lot to her too. She talked about you a lot, about the fun times you had together.’
        ‘That’s sweet.’ Aunt Helen smiled. ‘It’s been too long, kiddo. You should bring that handsome husband of yours by. I’ll cook dinner for you and we can reminisce. Maybe next weekend?’
        ‘We’d love to. I’ll call you.’
       Helen squeezed Renee’s hands. ‘I guess I’ll get back to my friends,’ she said. “It was so nice running into you.”
        ‘So nice running into you too.’ She held onto her aunt’s hands for a moment longer, studied the soft fingers that were shaped like Candice’s, like her own.
       When she stepped out to the concession area a moment later, she found Marc waiting for her, his brows furrowed, holding a can of ginger ale. ‘Feeling better?’ he said.
       She nodded, unable to open her mouth for a moment.
        ‘Your aunt is here,’ he said.
        ‘I know. She and my mom were big fans of Queen.’
       He held out the can. ‘I bought this for you. Thought it might make you feel a little better.’
        ‘I’m fine now,’ she said.
        ‘Maybe, it’s, you know.’ He grinned. ‘I don’t want to jinx us or anything.’
        ‘Maybe,’ she said. She held the cool can against her cheek and snuggled against her husband, while a pretty decent cover of ‘You’re My Best Friend’ floated over to them from the stage.    AQ

Kiera Faber – The Gathering

/in

Kiera Faber
The Gathering

The artist writes: ‘Light illuminates fragrant clay dust hovering in the air of my mother’s ceramic studio: This crystallized memory encompassing magic and exploration spawned my love for materiality and imparting the marker’s mark by creating work by hand: To touch is to be alive. My Jacquard tapestries are created on looms that weave from digital files, metamorphosing pixels into physically woven threads. They exemplify tactility by weaving surreal depictions of my original drawings, analogue photographs, and hybrid combinations; fusing the known with the unknown and confounding what is real or imagined. Connected in blue, my textiles venerate a colour rarely found in nature. Through blue’s scarcity, it becomes a mystical other: Offering a divergent way of seeing and being in the world; realizing the impossible.’

Kiera Faber, The Gathering, front, Jacquard tapestry, 27 x 42 inches, 2025

Kiera Faber, The Gathering, back, Jacquard tapestry, 27 x 42 inches, 2025

Terry E. Hill – Unpacking Ovid

/in

Terry E. Hill
Unpacking Ovid

The story turns on an ageing, ordinary couple who alone among the Phrygians gave welcome to strangers and who, upon seeing the bowls of their modest meal self-replenish, then took fright at their divine guests and flurried about to sacrifice their only goose as well. Gently the unveiled gods soothed the ruffled bird, and gently they granted the couple’s request. Companions we are and would like to remain until our hour is come, said the faithful mates. And so it was. The hour arrived on an ordinary day, when in the midst of their usual routines they turned, said farewell, and drew their last breath together. Ovid sang of the spreading branches of the trees they became, so one can readily imagine a gracious post-mortal mingling of limbs and leaves. ‘Two neighb’ring trees with garlands on their boughs’, said Dryden.
       This has long been my favourite of the fabled transformations, not as dazzling as some but tapping nonetheless into some archaic yearning. Now part of a fortunate couple in our eighth decade, it occurs to me to look more closely and unpack, as they say, its congruities.
       Starting with the flood. To their credit, Baucis and Philemon lamented their community’s devastation even as they themselves were spared. Ovid didn’t dwell on the drowned blacksmith, nor the midwife, barefoot boys, girls with scraggly hair, village simpleton, the thief, the blind crone, or the goat stranded on rooftop until the rooftop was no more. The gods in their sport, of course, never give much mind to fine distinctions of justice. Here all but the pious two are wicked and doomed by clear-cut categorical logic. But in ordinary reality, few of us inhabit moral extremes. A moment’s reflection on duty to neighbour or duty to stranger at the door will assign most of us to a vast and amorphous middling category, including the aforenamed couple in our eighth decade, of unexceptional virtue, fortunate only because of fickle streams in human history, subject to little more than the dancing dust particles of Lucretius, Brownian motion, mere jitters of fate.
       Should we begrudge any such couple their happiness? How does one make sense of a good marriage amidst catastrophe, be it ancient or contemporary?
       Context matters, for virtue is not a constant across millennia, and this flood of the past is not necessarily prologue. In Ovid’s telling, the world is put right, the waters calmed, the cottage and two trees landscaped and comely, the rolling Anatolian countryside again home to peasants and their goats. The merit of capricious gods over the likes of planetary forces is their willingness to relinquish their whims, to restore and regenerate. The contemporary story of ocean rise, catastrophic weather and fire will have no such tidy resolution, and our lamentations will insist on more than brief mention. And yet within that grand ineluctable narrative are numberless micro-stories that are open-ended, their outcomes contingent, and we are actors in those tangled contingencies. Even those of us with blemished piety are graced with opportunities to tend the temples of our planet and mitigate the pain of its creatures.
       Finally, back to what Ovid didn’t know about those trees with spreading limbs and garlands. Possessed of a more modern botanical bent, I’m inclined toward the marvel that lies below those branches, in roots that lace together through aquiferous earth, passing nutrients in a deep knowledge network. Even the gods, rambling about a garden more immense and older than they, were unaware of this subterranean exuberance. Another lacuna in Ovid’s understanding was how Baucis and Philemon managed to achieve their equanimity. His own first two marriages ended in divorce, so he could not have been describing them when he wrote, ‘Command was none, where equal Love was paid…both commanded, both obey’d.’ His story still delights me with bowls of homely dishes transforming into feasts and wine jars filling with vintage on their own, but the less-magical wonder preceded the meal, realized day in day out by Baucis and Philemon across those faithful decades together. That couples can finesse that at all is marvel aplenty. We can give Ovid credit for affirming a marriage ideal beyond his reach, but we could also add that such couples’ achievement relies upon a shared ecosystem that manages to mature amid uncertainties and darkness, a shared psychic ecosystem whose roots gravitate downward, become relational, and draw resources from this underworld into the aboveground world of routines, mutual tasks and affections. Such sustained transformation doesn’t need a miraculous meal or big arboreal finale to be wondrous.
       Justice is illusory, of course, when subject to the whims of gods or jitters of fate, but we can choose not to begrudge Ovid for the rounded satisfaction of his story and the delight of those intertwined limbs. And yes, I’m glad that Jupiter spared the goose.    AQ